Category: personal

as i have mentioned before i’m going to the simple way in philadelphia for a week in october – something i am very excited about. to add to the adventure of the trip i thought i would travel to philly by greyhound bus. i haven’t taken a commercial passenger bus on a long trip since i was a kid and i thought it would be fun to take one. i knew it would take a good bit longer than an airplane or train (36 six hour each way). still i assumed that i would meet a ton of people on the trip and it would surly produce some excellent stories. pam wasn’t very keen on the idea but she loves me and loves my adventures so i was pretty sure i could convince her to give in.

the problem occurred when i actually looked at making a reservation. to travel from baton rouge to philadelphia via greyhound bus actually costs more than it would cost for me to fly to philadelphia and rent a car or take a taxi to the simply way. it was going to cost $270 to travel by bus versus $215 to travel by air. i was amazed. how can greyhound survive when it actually costs more to travel in a less comfortable manner? this is where my cheap side kicks in. i simply can’t justify to myself paying more to travel by bus.

i guess greyhound is making allot of money off delivering packages.

yesterday i commented on it raining and me desiring for it to continue. well i received my wish and then some. it’s been cloudy since yesterday afternoon and this morning during our 9:30 a.m. worship service/sunday school hour it cut lose. it began to storm and continued to storm throughout the hour. in fact, it rained so hard that it knocked down a large limb from one of the oak trees in the church parking lot right on top of two cars. thankfully nobody was in the cars.

when the second worship/sunday school hour ended and people were transferring to the next worhip/sunday school hour it was still raining hard. of course, nobody had brought an umbrella because the weather men & women had been saying it was going to rain for a week. so everyone who came into our 11 a.m. sunday school class was soaked. it was quite a site and made for a good bit of laughter. i like laughter.

it’s finally raining here in baton rouge, louisiana and it’s about time. i need some heat relief. it’s been in the mid-to-high 90’s all week. hopefully the rain will last for a few days and keep cloud cover over my fair city. it would be nice to have a few days of my air conditioner not running constantly.

SIDE NOTE – did you know that the non-electric version of air conditioning was developed in persia thousands of years ago? you can read about it here.

back in january pam and i “adopted” two lsu students from india. we have sam and bajji over to the house every so often and go and do things with them every now and then. they’re allot of fun and we both love learning about india from them. last night they wanted to cook an authentic indian meal for us. they came over to the house and made chicken curry, some type of flat bread, eggs scrambled, and a few other snacks. even though our kids didn’t think much of the meal pam and i thought it was amazing.

sunday sam and bajji are setting up a cricket game to teach me how to play. i’ve always wanted to play but simply can’t figure out the rules. i’ve read the bbc’s description of the rules and it still doesn’t make any sense to me. sam and bajji say that you have to play to understand the game and thus they’re going to teach me sunday afternoon. i can’t wait.

this dilbert strip basically describes how i feel about the majority of facts quoted by most speakers.

my church is going through some rough times right now. the whole thing started out with a legitimate disagreement on how the school and church should work together. one group of people had one view and another group held another view which our pastor holds. personally, i don’t have a problem with members of the church disagreeing with each other. actually i usually think that dialogue over disagreements is a good thing – it helps us to figure out what to do and how to do it.

the problem with this disagreement is that it became personal very quickly. we now have people who are willing to do whatever is necessary for their side to “win.” anonymous emails and letters are being mailed to church members, rumors are being spread about my pastor’s family, the newspaper and television stations have been called, and various other dumb things are now going on. it’s all very stupid. just the sort of things that members of CHRIST’s bride should be involved in. right?

my pastor and his family are the ones being hurt now. he is a genuine servant (unfortuneately a rarity in the world of pastors) and a very honest, transparent, open guy. i love him and can’t stand seeing him hurt. i really don’t think the original disagreement has anything to do with what people are doing to him now. i believe that now it’s all about hurting him and winning. it’s all pretty evil.

You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational. Cultural Creative 81% Postmodernist 69% Fundamentalist 56% Idealist 50% Romanticist 38% Existentialist 31% Modernist 19% Materialist 6% What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com

it’s rather funny to me that i “tend to shy away from organized religion.” either i have a odd way of “shying away from organized religion” or i’m simply so shy that i can’t yet express my shyness concerning organized religion.

i did something right today (which is not always true). most anytime we are doing something around the student center (setting up for something, adding something, changing something, etc.) i try to get kids involved in doing it. we painted our little cafe and there were five kids and one adult doing it. we tore the carpet up from the student center and there were teens involved. it’s not that we want the kids as free labor (though that’s nice), or that we want them to have ownership of the ministry by being a part of making it happen (though we do). nope, we get kids involved in doing things because good conversations seem to happen when we do physical work with teens. so today i wanted to get a few kids involved in helping us put our new light bar up in our student center. because of the physical nature of the work we were going to be doing i decided to call guys to help us (stupid sexist pig that i am). unfortunately the guys i called last night didn’t work out and thus it looked like it would merely be me and alan working on the light bar.

that was true until lunch. at lunch julie and laura came by to say “hi.” besides saying hello they asked the fateful question “what are y’all doing today?” when i went on to describe what we were doing they asked to see my diagram of it and then started asking questions about it. after seeing the diagram i asked if they wanted to see what we had done thus far. julie went ballistic. turns out she wants to be a aeronautical engineer and is fascinated by fabricating things (i’ve known her for four years and this was new to me because she usually the one of the people we turn to for photography and creative work). we went over to the student center and i showed them the work we had done thus far. then i asked if they would like to help. they stayed for the next two hours helping with the man/woman-lift, placing bolts on the supports, and then drilling holes in the bar itself. it was great. in the end they even signed their names on the top of the bar as a physical marker of their involvement in the project.

who would have known they would have been so fascinated by a man/woman-lift? i didn’t and thus the only thing i did right in this was actually asking if they wanted to help when they showed up of their own volition.

i usually try to avoid posting the same entries on this blog and my other blog but something happened today that makes me laugh just thinking about it. so i decided to post it here also. here goes.

my youngest son, noah, had a “caddyshack” moment earlier today. his second grade class at parkview went swimming at the bocage racquet club today. the day was fun for a little while but then something happened. pam was talking with another mom at the event and suddenly noticed that a lifeguard was reaching with a long pole into the swimming pool and all the kids were forming a very wide circle around whatever the lifeguard was trying to capture with the pole. it would appear that one of the kids had really decided to “drop the kids off at the pool.” oh yes someone had “dropped a load” right in the middle of the bocage racquet club’s swimming pool. the employees chased out all the kids who had actually stayed in the pool and then super-shocked the pool. i sure hope someone shouted “DOODY!” when they found it.

i would have paid money for it to have merely been a baby ruth candy bar and for the pool guy to reach over and take a bite of it.

i love “hand me downs.” i know some youth ministers complain about getting the “big church’s” left overs because they feel like it belittles or degrades their ministry but that’s not me. nope i love getting older stuff for free. today i received four ellipsoidal lights to replace four of our par64 cans. we use 9 par64 cans to illuminate our stage (and circle when we worship “in the round” – which is pretty frequent). these had been “hand me downs” from “big church” about two years ago. they have worked decent and their price was perfect – free. today i got the 4 ellipsoidal lights that our music minister had just lying around. the lights are in perfect condition they had merely been replaced because our church auditorium “needed” newer better lighting fixtures. the ellipsoidal lights are much more focusable than par cans and thus more controllable. putting these in means i have the opportunity to place better lighting and and use the older lights to illuminate “worship stations” in the back (now we have to improvise lighting for those stations).

all this for the greatest price ever – free. i would much rather use budget money for ministry and i don’t consider lights ministry.

the diagram above is my cat scratch from my journal of what we are going to do.

SIDE NOTE – the last hour of “24” is on right now. woo hoo!