Ahmaud Arbery

I’ve been attempting to write down some thoughts concerning Ahmaud Arbery. Try as I might I can’t.

All I know is that when I go for a run I never need to worry about people driving up and holding me at gunpoint. Pam never needs to worry that I might not come home from a run because I have been shot. Both of our boys are around Ahmaud’s age and they both run. Neither Pam nor I need to warn them that there are people out there who will view them as a threat just for who they are.

The reason for this is the color of my skin. The color of my boys’ skin. I have no idea what I would tell my boys to keep them safe if they were young black men. I hurt for my friends of color. I want to support them. I hope they feel that I do.

I believe God will hold us accountable for supporting the systems that support such hatred. May He have mercy on us. May we begin to view people as He views people and live that view out.

Quoting Yourself

I know a surprising number of people who quote themselves. This isn’t really a large number of people (OK it is 3) because most people don’t quote themselves, but in my opinion it is still a surprisingly large number (do you know more than 3 people that do this?). Plenty of people say things like “well, you know I always say …” or “I like to call you this …”, but I am not talking about that kind of statement. Nope, these are normal people who full quote themselves as words of wisdom in posts they make on social media. Seriously creating those graphic images for quotes that they made themselves or lists their own words in sections of their favorite quotes (Facebook has this under the “Details” portion of your “About” section).

George Bernard Shaw used to do this. For example, he said:

“I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.”

But he was famous and you can get away with such stuff when you are famous. See it didn’t feel odd for me to quote George Bernard Shaw, but if I had quoted myself that probably would have felt different.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with quoting yourself. Just seems weird to me that all of the people I know who do this are ex-pastors. I’m not sure what this means, if anything. Probably nothing.

A Smoke with Dad?

I just walked into Ruby’s Coffee Roasters to finish up the sermon for tomorrow and I am at a standstill because I am desperately trying to figure out what the barista at the counter just said to his customer. To me it sounded like he said

“I’m taking a Nazi out for a smoke with my dad.”

I know he didn’t say that but I can’t figure out what he actually said.

I’ll go back to working on the message now.

If You Are A Financial Planner You Should Know This

Today I talked with an individual who was selling himself as a personal financial planner and as a part of his spiel he regularly referenced the national debt and what it would probably mean for future tax rates. Unfortunately, everytime he referenced the national debt he actually said national deficit. Maybe I’m expecting too much but I feel like you should know the difference between the debt and deficit and use the terms correctly if you are a financial planner and encouraging people to make certain investments based on the future tax rates possiblle due to our increasing debt.

National Deficit – how much we spend each year as a nation over our income (taxes, tariffs, etc). The opposite is a surplus, where we have more income than we spend.

National Debt – the total we have borrowed over all the year’s deficits (less the year’s with surpluses).

Projected 2018 National Deficit – Around 800 billion

Current National Debt – Around 21 trillion.

Terrell Family Discussion Comparing Snowpocalypse & Other Weather Emergencies

Me: You know everywhere we have ever lived has had weather emergencies but I believe I lam most comfortable the snow emergencies in Wisconsin.

Adam: Why?

Me: Well, you probably don’t remember hiding in the basement and singing songs during Tornado Warnings in Missouri?

Adam: Nope

Me: Those were very scary. You probably remember hurricanes and preparing for them.

Adam: Yep

Pamela: I wasn’t usually scared of them except for the night before Katrina.

Me: Yeah I began to think “what if we should have left” then? Realistically the weather emergencies at other places contained the possibility of large scale death totals and destruction. A huge snow storm is still dangerous but basically we just stay inside, and shovel the driveway every so often.

Pamela: The biggest danger of this storm to me is that I will gain 10 lbs.

SIDE NOTES – we have been eating A LOT of carbs. 🙂

Hello world!

This was WordPress’s start up blog post that I am now using to say that I am trying to reestablish my blog on my own server. My blog was over on the Tapestry’s sever but we had a problem with that server (i.e. it crashed) and I had to reinstall everything for the church. I had been wanting to set up my own url again and decided this was the time. Only problem is that I am having a hard time migrating all of my blog over to the new site. The SQL database backup wants to send everyone back to sptapestry.org.

Because I love the movie “The Outlaw Josey Wales”

I have installed, uploaded the backup, experienced the problem, erased everything, and started back from scratch three times. I have even tried importing a modified sql export file into my old blog over on wordpress.com. No dice. It has been very frustrating. But I will endeavor to persevere.

I think I have figured out another work around that I am going to try next. I am going to establish a temporary blog on the church server for the purpose of importing my backup sql database into it. I think this might work since the problem with sql database backup file is that it leads my blog to point back to sptapestry.org in an endless loop where i can see the content but can’t reach the blog admin page and thus can’t add anything new to the blog. We’ll see what happens.

You’ll know if this works by the fact that this post is still here and the post below it will no longer be from 2009 (which is the case right now). Of course, noone knows that my blog is here now, so you probably won’t know if this works or not till I start re-posting my blog posts in various places (i.e. Facebook & Twitter).