Robert's Blog

i love public radio. i listen to it all the time. saturday while driving back from a camp planning meeting i was able to listen to a couple of interesting interviews, 1) richard dawkins talking about how he believes religion is useless, and 2) alistar mcgrath (who is one of my favorite writers) talking about how faith is the greatest. this post is not about how i think dawkins is wrong (which i do) but rather concerning one statement that dawkins made. when asked about sin dawkins said that he felt like the only “sins” CHRISTians every talked about where private sins, which he believes do not effect society. he said that churches never discussed societal or public evil that effects everyone. this is what i would like to talk about, is dawkins right? do we only talk about private sins and never public sins? what sins do churches confront and what sins do churches usually ignore?

ok, i know it’s not much of a list but i have camp stuff that i am working on right now. all i really wanted to do was get this down somewhere. so what do you think? what evils are confronted and what evils are ignored within the modern evangelical church? what about within the modern liberal church? within the fundamentalist church?

[AC] advent conspiracy from jon jollins on Vimeo.

this is amazing. it’s advent conspiracy and pam and i are talking about doing it. i also believe i’m going to talk to tapestry about being a part of it. basically the idea is that the birth of CHRIST was a revolutionary event. therefore, our celebration of that revolutionary event should some how be revolutionary and counter cultural in it’s manner. advent conspiracy suggests we do this by:

1. worshipping more
2. spending less
3. giving more
4. loving all

those are just the bullet points. the website does a great job of explaining it all.

this cute little guy made his appearance in our house last night. we know this because oreo, our cat, was chasing him around all night. i caught him this morning and i released him at jack’s park. pam freaked out.

of course, he’s only cute if he is the only little guy in our house. which, of course, he is. there are no other little rodents in our house. except for adam and noah that is.

noah caught his first wisconsin fish this evening. the plover veteran’s memorial pond is two miles from our home we found out that there are a decent number of little largemouth bass in it. adam almost caught a monster cat.

perhaps the best street name ever.

i finally got the chance to do a little bit of wisconsin trout fishing. i didn’t have much time today but i wanted to spend a little of that time on the tomorrow river, thankfully the tomorrow is only about 15 minutes away from our home. so i went there and spent a little time looking over the river (which is gorgeous) and immediately saw a few small brookies. i love brookies. i know they aren’t ever really big but they are very pretty little fish who really pop a dry fly. therefore, i was pretty excited when i saw them. i tied on an elks hair caddis and cast to the nearest brookie. BAM. he popped it. he wasn’t very big, about 8 inches, but he was still my first wisconsin trout and that was exciting. oh brookies are so much fun. i started wading up the creek and ran into a school of HUGE brookies. huge for a brook trout is anything over a pound and several of these fish where probably pushing two pounds. i tried casting a few different nymphs to them. after a few trial and error casts (they were in a very tight spot) and several false raises, one of the large brookies rose to the nymph i was fishing with. i was ready for a huge fight. it was going to be great. so i quickly lifted my rod to set the hook and my leader broke off. snap. the fish and my leader, the only one i had with me, were out of my life. it wasn’t very exciting after all.

still, it was fun and i now know where they are.

SIDE NOTE – on a lark i decided to search for fly fishing and wisconsin fishing podcasts. i found quite a few that i went ahead and subscribed too. my favorite thus far is the fly fishing rabbi. he talks about fly fishing and faith. ironically enough he picked up fly fishing after watching a river runs through it. i say “ironically” because it was reading the book that inspired me to learn how to fly fish. i really liked the first of the rabbi’s podcasts that i have listened to. he is right on target when he describes fly fishing as a spiritual moment. for me it’s not so much a way that i connect to GOD through fly fishing, as it is that the concentration and focusing skills that are a part of fly fishing also relate well to the spiritual nature of our existence. learning how to perceive fish in a stream has truly helped me learn how to perceive the works of GOD.

my run for the day

distance – 9.0 miles
time – 1:39:56
pace – 11:07/mile
weather – 70º

after nearly 17 years keebler has passed away. keebs was the first addition to the terrell household and therefore thought pam and i a little of what to expect when we had human additions. he was also the first cat i ever liked, let alone loved (the jury is still out on oreo). he’s been sick for awhile and he finally just reached the point that it was simply too much for him. i never thought that i would miss a cat but i will miss keebs (of course, i think part of that is because he had much of the personality of a dog). pam has expressed her thoughts on this much better than i ever could. you should probably read her thoughts.