Here’s the other thing I’ve learned, which is something everyone used to know, something I knew even while manning the hamburger grill: food is love. To cook for yourself, rather than merely feed yourself, is to show yourself love, especially important when there us a sudden and marked lack of others willing to do that. To cook for others is not only a form of caring, it’s a form of connection. The transformation of raw ingredients into cuisine is often called alchemy, but the true alchemy is what happens to you, the people you cook for, and the relationship between all of you.
Peter Sagal, The Incomplete Book of Running, p. 93-4.
This is so right. Today I spent the morning cooking jambalaya for one of the companies for which I chaplain. I love these ladies and gents and I am thankful for the privilege of being their chaplain. Cooking for them this morning was a way of displaying that love. This past Saturday was the Haycreek Christmas party and Pam and I attended for the 3rd year. At the party they gave me a shirt that says “I’m Just Here For the Jambalaya” because I typically make jambalaya for them a once or twice a year. Naturally, I wore the shirt today when I cooked for them.
This is why I encourage Tapestry to regularly cook for each other and others. We have two opportunities coming up soon. Thursday, January 31st we are doing the meal for the Place of Peace meal and Sunday, February 3rd we will watch the Super Bowl and potluck it together. I hope you take advantage of these opportunities to share the love.
I know I often say this in church but setup and tear down are my favorite part of Tapestry’s worship gatherings. I really believe everyone should come be a part of setup. Seriously if you are interested I get there each Sunday at 8:30 a.m. and you are more than welcome to join us. Your help would be nice and appreciated but your presence will be the real gift. If you aren’t a part of Tapestry you should help with setup at your church, I would bet it probably has the same fun vibe. The best things seem to happen during setup.
For example, Conor H has developed a habit of dabbing. We aren’t really a dabbing church. We aren’t cool . So Conor dabbing is funny. Still Conor dabbing wouldn’t really be that great except that one Sunday Eric decided to dab also. Eric may be the only person on earth that looks more ridiculous dabbing than I would. Eric blocked Conor and me in and then dabbed as a celebration. I laughed so hard that I cried.
So when I saw the sticker of Jesus dabbing I knew I had to get it and sneak it onto Eric’s car (with Natalie’s permission of course because I’m not a vandal). It only took me two weeks to get the opportunity (the bozo kept driving the wrong car). Sunday I was able to get it on there. The bummer of the situation is that he found the sticker after 36 hours. After he didn’t initially notice it when he had to walk right past the rear of his car, I was hoping for a week or two. The great thing is that when he saw the sticker he initially thought he was looking at someone else’s car.
Which brings me to a quote from the book I just finished. I finished reading Margaret Atwood’s “Cat’s Eye” recently. I am not sure how I feel about it yet. At first I thought it was rather boring because it was about mundane life but now I kind of find it stuck in my head. I think I may eventually read it again, which for me is the sign of a good book. The quote that has been sticking with me is from the protagonist’s brother Stephen. He describes the atom by saying it is …
“A lot of empty space,” Stephen says. “It’s hardly there at all. It’s just a few specks held in place by forces. At the subatomic level, you can’t even say that matter exists. You can only say that it has a tendency to exist.”
Here is my poor attempt at drawing this.
Even in my very far from scale drawing you can see that it is basically made up of emptiness. If we focus on the specks of matter we miss the majority of the atom. I feel like we often do that with life. We focus on the few “shinny” moments and events and long for more of them while not realizing that the majority of our lives are the mundane and we make no attempt to enjoy the mundane.
Let’s just look at my 2018. Here are the “shinny” (none ordinary) moments of my year.
I spent a week in France with my family (admittedly there were many unusual moments this week)
One child graduated from grad school
I helped my mom move up to Wisconsin
I floored our soon to be Library (formerly Living Room – but I hate that room name) – this was big to us
I watched a touring company version of Fiddler on the Roof with Pam and my mom.
I’m sure there are other non ordinary moments that happened during my 2018 but most of the time was spent in ordinary moments.
eating at Taco Januitas with Noah,
walking around Adam’s new home town and having him describe what he likes about it,
debriefing my day with Pam,
eating the Thursday night meal with my mom,
driving Clive around town,
walking around our block and talking with our neighbors,
reading at the end of the day before I go to sleep,
waking up inn the middle of the night because one of the stupid cats flick their tail onto my face and realizing how wonderfully cold the house is (we let the temp drop to 62 at night) and how warm our blankets are,
grabbing coffee with various people throughout the week and hearing about their life,
setting up church each week and making fun of and being made fun of by my friends there,
fishing, hunting, and walking/running/riding through the woods,
randomly seeing bald eagles fly around our community
etc., etc.
These are the nothing moments and they make up most of my day. They are glorious. Recently I talked someone who told me how sad she was because her past few weekends had been boring, she had done nothing. We started detailing out what she had done over the past year. It was pretty significant with quite a few “shinny” moments, but she thought it was nothing before we wrote it out. She felt like everyone else had so many significant moments until she saw her’s on paper. She judged what she knew about her days by what she didn’t know about other people’s days. I described my list of moments from 2018 and we estimated that this very generously equaled 12 days of big moments. 12 out of 365, and she agreed I had lived a pretty excited year (after all, I could say “well during my trip to France this year …).
Most of our days are made of the nothing moments. We need to enjoy them because they make up most of the shape of our lives. If we regret them then we regret the majority of our days. Right now I am enjoying the sounds of good music at Zest Bakery and Coffee (they consistently put on good music) and the wonderful taste of their coffee and a peanut butter cream bar, while I hear the muted conversations of friends. Life is wonderful.
One of the things that I love about Corporate Chaplains of America, the company through which I chaplain, is that they know that there is a lot of burnout among chaplains and therefore they give/force us to take a good amount of vacation. I have 4 work weeks worth of vacation, which is amazingly generous. I have to take off one week each quarter, otherwise I get a bit of a talking to.
This past week was the last chance I had to take my last week of vacation for 2018. So I stayed home and got some work done. In fact, I’m not evening preaching tomorrow (Conor H is and you should come to Tapestry and hear/support him) so I didn’t even have to work on a message this week). Here’s what I accomplished this week.
Bookcases
In our attempt to continue shaping our home into what we want it to be we are adding built in bookcases to our Library (I am trying to stop calling it the Living Room because I hate the term – it derives from our fear of death, our Living Rooms used to be called Parlors until the funeral industry developed and began referring to their rooms as funeral parlors, because the home parlor was where the body was displayed, and so we picked a name that was the exact opposite of the name for the room where we displayed our dead loved ones. ARGH. Fear of death dominates so much of what is done, so we won’t have a Living Room, but a Library). We’ve had quite a few books in storage that we want to put out and it is our firm belief that you can never have too many books in a room. Therefore, we are building bookcases from floor to ceiling. This is phase one. Once they are painted and books are displayed we will consider phase 2, which will involve building cases up to the ceiling that incline with it. That’s a project for later.
Guitars
A while back Adam was going to sell the first guitar that was actually his, an Epiphone Les Paul Special II, and I decided why not buy it from him and upgrade it. An Epiphone Les Paul Special II is not a great guitar. They are cheap models meant for people who want something decent enough to learn on, but don’t want to spend a ton of money on a guitar yet. Sill often they have a good neck and body, which this one did, therefore, with a little work they can often become very decent little guitars. I basically followed this blog post and did the same basic thing to mine.
It sounds pretty good now. I knew this had worked out pretty well when the luthier who put the tuners in said “This thing plays like butter. You’ve got yourself a pretty good little guitar there now.”
Since I did all this to Adam’s old guitar, and I realized that I enjoyed it, I decided to do the same things to my old Squier Stratocaster. Again this isn’t an expensive guitar but with the right setup it can sound pretty decent. I already had non-stock pickups in it (Dimarzio Virtual Vintage pickups) but I never changed the wiring, switch, and pots in it. So this time I shielded the body cavities with copper tape, put in new premium wiring, 5-way switch, and pots, replaced the pickgaurd with something slightly more fun, and replaced the string saddles. I like the D’Addario auto-trim tuners so much that I am going to put them on the Squier too eventually. That will probably be next month.
BTW I liked the look of one bold sticker on the LP Special and now need o decide if I want to put one bold sticker on the Strat too. If you have a suggestion for a good looking, and possibly fun, sticker for the Strat I would love to hear it.
All it all it was a pretty successful week off. I love time off.
Being intelligent — being good with numbers, or being well educated, or even winning a Nobel Prize— is not a shortcut to global factual knowledge. Experts are experts only within their field.
I see this quite often. Someone is an expert at one thing and then tends to think he/she is knowledgeable about most every subject. Just because you are very talented in one thing doesn’t necessarily mean that you are talented in other things. You may be a great welder, business owner, pharmacist, guitar player, or pastor but that knowledge and skill doesn’t necessarily transfer to other fields. The problem is that experts often aren’t very used to or good at admitting what they don’t know. It takes a great deal of humility to do so.
In my field of pastoring/chaplaining I hear some people speak with force on subjects that they are completely ignorant concerning. For example, I have heard pastors who have undergraduate Bible school degrees and Masters in Divinity and haven’t had a job outside of the church since whatever their high school job was speak with force concerning business matters and expect others to believe what they say just because they are pastors. I’m not saying they are wrong when they speak, rather it is belief that others should listen to you because you are a pastor that I am writing against. Just because you have knowledge in one field doesn’t mean that you have any in another. Another example is I have heard people who were hugely successful in one field interpret scripture in some amazingly weird manners and expect people to listen to them. I remember talking with a Medical Doctor and him proudly tell me about the “very interesting” insight he had taught the previous week in Sunday School. When I heard it I kept thinking to myself “how was this guy able to make it into medical school?” Obviously though this guy had been smart enough to make it into and pass medical school, that just didn’t make him an expert in biblical interpretation. Being an expert in one field doesn’t make you an expert, or even marginally proficient, in all fields.
The second quote is from Michael Pollan “A Place of My Own.” I read this book because Adam recommend that I do so and I love the fact that I can trust my kids recommendations. They both have wonderful taste in books, music, and movies. This is a long quote but I really like it. Pollan wrote:
As it was, the architects fretted over what the owners would do to their works of art which, most of them agreed, would never again be as perfect as the day before move-in day. … Modernists often designed their interiors not so much for particular individuals as for Man; they regarded the addition of clients’ stuff as a subtraction from a creation they thought of as wholly their own. This is one legacy of modernism that we have yet to overcome: our stuff and, in turn, our selves still very often have trouble gaining a comfortable foothold in a modern interior. …
Certainly when I think about spaces that I remember as having a strong sense of place, it isn’t the ‘architecture’ that I picture—the geometrical arrangements of wood and stone and glass—but such things as watching the world go by from the front porch of the general shop in town, or the scuffle of 10,000 shoes making their way to work beneath Grand Central Station’s soaring vault. The ‘design’ of these places and the recurring events that give them their qualities—the spaces and the times—have grown together in such a way that it is impossible to bring one to mind without the other.
Conor took this photo yesterday while we were signing and was nice enough to share it with me.
We had “threads” over to the house yesterday for our annual “don’t meet at Washington Sunday”. Our little church becomes even smaller during the holidays, so instead of everyone traveling being a detriment we turn it into a positive. We meet in a different home or two and potluck together to increase our fellowship. Yesterday we were supposed to be at a different home but they were dealing with the flu and therefore our home became the backup home. Two of the threads starting asking me what the stories were behind various things in our house. For example, why do we have a photo of a quizzical looking goat prominently on our living room wall. Pam has done an amazing job of making our home look nice and inviting, but even more important she has done an amazing job of making sure that our home tells you who we are. I believe that if you broke into our home (I don’t recommend this because we have a vicious basset hound who will maul you) you would quickly get an idea of who we are, who the important people are in our lives, and what values are important to us. Our home will never be in an architectural magazine or rate as great interior design among Instagram influencers, but it does achieve what I believe is the most important function of a home after keeping your safe and sound from the weather – it conveys who we are.
Winston Churchill once said:
We shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us.
I believe that this shaping of us is also true regarding whether the design of our homes speak of who we are or not. If i walk into your home and it is beautifully designed but it tells me nothing of who you are, well that probably tells me a great deal about who you are. If our homes don’t speak of who we are, then they have probably shaped us into people about which there is nothing of value to speak.
The goat on our living room wall.
Anyhow, I hope 2018 was a wonderful year for you and 2019 will be just as great. May God’s grace and peace rest upon us all in 2019.
I mentioned today during our church gathering about how much Clive loves car rides. I thought I would share a very short video to give you an idea of how much Clive loves car rides. This is just me asking Clive if he would like to go for a ride. I bet you didn’t know that basset hounds could get air when they wanted to. 😁
I didn’t video Clive riding today because Winter rides mean riding in Fred the Minivan and there isn’t anything really interesting about those rides. Here’s a video from when I was testing to see what the a GoPro video in Buddy the Mustang would look like. This dog loves cars rides.
If you ever read my blog very much you should know that thanks to the wonderful naming talents of Natalie G the people who make up Tapestry are affectionately known as “threads” (also I would like to add that if you read my blog very often you should probably find better reading material-😜). I am often reminded of how much I love my “thread” friends and tonight was another reminder for two reasons.
Just “threads” doing what “threads” do,
First, I have a tendency to volunteer for us to serve at bad times. For example, serving the Place of Peace meal for 70ish people the Thursday after Christmas when everyone is gone. I was told that not many people who be able to help because of the holidays. In fact, I only had one “thread” family sign up to help. No big deal the church budget would just cover the meal. So I bought I lot of stuff and hoped that a few people would show up to help serve. Well we had a great turn out and a ton of food. Pam actually heard one of the “PoP”s (what I am now calling regulars at the Place of Peace meal) say “we’ve never had this many desserts before”. I’m not really surprised that the “threads” pull through, you guys always do.
Second, the Strongs have a few agatized wood bowls. The first time I saw one I asked about it and told them how Pam and I were given one when we were newlyweds. For the longest time it was my popcorn bowl and I loved it. You may say “you can’t love a bowl” but you would be wrong. I had a deep and meaningful relationship with this bowl. You see popcorn is very important to me and therefore my popcorn bowl is very important also. I presently have a wonderful enamelware popcorn bowl that Pam gave me one year for my birthday or Christmas. It is great a great bowl and I love it, but your first popcorn bowl is always special. My first great popcorn bowl was an agatized wood bowl and when it broke I wanted another. Though I didn’t know that it was called agatized wood. Which is why when it broke I had no idea how to find another. I searched for bowls made out of sawdust and glue, which is what I thought agatized wood was, but I never found anything. Then I saw the Strong’s bowl. I asked them how they got it and discovered that her dad and mom buy them whenever they see them. Low and behold they brought me one tonight. It is wonderful. Thank you Strongs. Y’all are wonderful.
I have a lot of good friends all over the world, but right now I am specifically writing about three here in Wisconsin. Natalie & Eric Glaze and Andy Lickel. At Tapestry this morning Eric and Natalie walked in an gave me a nicely wrapped gift and said I could go ahead and open it up. I wasn’t expecting a gift from them but whatever it was I knew that I would be thankful. When I opened it I discovered the “antler” mount in the photo above. I laughed to the point that I actually cried.
Those are the nubs from the 1 1/2 year old buck I shot this year. I shot it thinking I was shooting a decent size doe. Instead I shot a buck that should have had a rack but genetically had nubs. It is actually the first buck I have ever shot – I’ve only been deer hunting a few years and I typically shoot does and fawns, because as I have written many times before I am quite possibly the world’s worst deer hunter.. Thanks to Natalie, Eric, and Andy (who I was told had input into this “gift”) this “rack” is now hanging in my study.
Now I need to determine how to best pay my friends back for this gift.
My morning text message conversation with Eric G concerning music at Tapestry’s worship gathering tomorrow morning. One day my time will come and y’all will learn that I may well be the greatest freestyle rapper of our time.
There’s some blipped out language in the video but I’m posting it because I think this payback is completely hilarious. This NASA engineer built a package to track, video, glitter bomb, and fart bomb people who stole the package from his and a friend’s houses. The thieve’s reaction to the engineered instant karma is wonderful.
One of the things that I enjoy is consuming media that is mentioned in various nonfiction books that I read. I have read and watched quite a few books and movies that were referenced to make a point in a work of non-fiction. I read “Sophie’s Choice” (a book that is on my “I’m Really Glad I Read This But It Was So Disturbing That I Will Never Read It Again” list – there aren’t many books on this list but it does exist) because of it being referenced in Daniel Migliore’s book “The Power of God and the Gods of Power“.
Recently I finished “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America“, a book that I would encourage you to read. It referenced Andy Griffith‘s first movie “A Face in the Crowd“. I had never heard of the movie and it sounded so very different from the wholesome image that Griffith was known for, so I wanted to watch it. Tonight Pam and watch it and it was remarkable. It was so different from what I was expecting from a film made in 1957. It was also amazing how current its themes seemed.
“White Trash” also mentioned the early 70s documentary series “An American Family“. I’ll be tracking this down through our library and watching it soon.
So let me recap:
Watch “A Face in the Crowd”
Read “White Trash”
and while you are at it I would recommend reading Migliore’s “The Power of God and the Gods of Power”
