The Age of the Unthinkable

I just finished Joshua Cooper Ramo's book The Age of the Unthinakble. It's a book that probably confirms for people that I am a 'geek'. Ramo examines everything from the recent financial meltdown, military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the (initial) surprise success of the Wii, details interviews with both Israeli and Hizb'allah leaders, reveals how most Silicon Valley venture capitialits missed out on Google (and why one in particular didn't), and a host of other topics all meant to demonstrate how the world is fundamentally changing and what we can do with it.

For the purposes of the church, though, came this interesting thought. Ramo cites a discussion with Roberto Unger, a Brazilian politician, who believes that our current approach to the world has been reduced to the passing of checks through the mail- a danger that means our generosity is often wasted and always isolates us from a world that we need to feel and not simply see or touch at a distance (244). For the past couple of years at Hillcrest, we've discussed the danger of simply outsourcing our care for the world. We can write checks to places like The Community Outreach, the Furniture Mission, or even World Vision, but a check is simply a transaction that outsources the burden of care. While not everyone can work for these places, or even work in the places where these places operate, we all can take steps to do something so that our care isn't a simple outsourced transaction.

Biblical Inerrancy

Is a children's bible supposed to be without error?

We were reading a story from Riley's bible the other day about Jesus healing on the Sabbath. It opened the story by mentioning the fifth commandment of doing no work on the Sabbath. I read it and stopped and said "that's not right". Riley said, "what, we can do work on the sabbath?" (I'm kidding). I grabbed my bible- one without error, I presume- to make sure I was right. And yep, the sabbath commandment is #4- not #5. So Children's bibles are probably exempt from the inerrant argument, as Riley did remember another time he found a mistake in his bible that we had to look up as well.

Sloppy Joes

We had sloppy joes this past Wednesday at church for the meal before our Wednesday Night Service. It truly was a group effort to pull of what I thought would be a rather easy meal. I had gotten a recipe from Karen and started work on it Tuesday afternoon but was missing two ingredients. Wednesday morning I picked up the ingredients and turned the roaster on. As I thought about the sloppy joes, I had two thoughts: first, I know the kids like them extra sloppy, and second, since I'm not exactly a cook but more of a recipe follower, I had better have a couple people taste them to see if they are ok. So I enlisted

• my administrative assistant to tell me if they tasted ok. She tasted them, and said they were ok, but were missing something. She added some things and made them better
• my wife, who stopped by while running errands. She thought they were good to go, but only after my administrative assistant had added some other things.
• Pastor Ben, who took a sample, and said they were good, but wondered if I Had enough (I was beginning to question that myself).
• the kitchen crew came later in the afternoon, and decided we needed to add more meat, and they even added some onion!

Who knew so much went into sloppy joes? And in the end, my kids didn't eat them. Oh well, this week's chicken enchiladas ought to be better because I didn't have any hand in them . . .

Kids say . . .

Recent comments from my kids:

Convo #1
Riley: Dad, can I join the Cub Scouts?
Me: Probably not.
Riley: Why not?
Me: Why do you want to join the cub scouts?
Riley: Because you can get badges (is that all it takes? no wonder tats are so cool).
Me (later in the conversation): what was the best part about your day?
Riley: When they told us about cub scouts (of course it was, but you're still not joining scouts).

Convo #2
I came home this past Sunday afternoon from a meeting and found Chraley doing something he shouldn't. I asked him to stop. Charley looked at me and said, "you, go back to work".

Convo#3
Me: Kinsley, can you go downstairs and let Pepper out?
Kinsley: Sorry, dad, but I actually can't do that right now.
Me: When did you learn the word 'actually'?

I'm a failure as a parent . . . !

Seth Godin on Non-Profits

Godin has a tough post on non-profits here. I suppose you could put "church" every time he writes "non-profit" and finish reading with the same humbled feeling I had.

Backpacks

Wednesday Night 30+ Hillcresters kicked off the first night of packing 2000+ backpacks for the Food Bank's weekend food ministry to under-resourced elementary and middle school students. It was a fun night!

R.I.P Summer and Brett Favre

This past Labor Day we had a fire to roast smores and bid adieu to summer. R and W have fond memories of their campfires out at the lake with nana and papa, but this fire was my personal favorite as the kids shared their favorite things about summer and in addition to saying farewell to summer, we also laid to rest our fondness of Brett Favre as a Packer icon.