Crazy week

I’m still reeling a bit from the whole deal at Virginia Tech.  It was a tense time since 1) I know someone who goes there and 2) I just got out of school.  Talking to my co-workers, the thing that a couple people brought up and shared was that we all knew kids in school who were a bit like that.  Loners,  weird, different.  It is so hard to blame anyone when this guy was just so far out there.  One of my other buddies at work was saying that if you don’t fit in or adjust well,  it would be pretty easy to start living in an imaginary world.  I don’t know if anyone else was thinking this, but when I heard about the shootings,  all I could picture was the shooting taking place at my school. 

 On a different note,  since I have had the privelidge to teach at our small church a bit,  I have started to  think about what a pastor’s job is.  One of my co-workers has been ordained by an online church so he can officiate his sister’s wedding.  Whenever I am preparing a teaching,  I keep thinking that I need to do something to get the audience’s attention and keep it. I think God speaks through the pastor, but also through their delivery and style.  I want to try to defend this point:

A pastor should entertain the audience.

Hey hold on!  Let’s look at the word entertain Mr. I-am-so-smart.  Now I think a message should be presented in an agreeable fashion and divert the audience from their normal lives.  We go to church to divert our attention to God and from our daily duties.  The audience should receive the message and critically think about it.  Now I can’t in good conscience say that is am using the word entertain in the same way for each point, but I think I can get some of you to agree with me that in some respects, the Pastor should entertain the congregation, and in fact, the congregation should entertain the Pastor (and his/her message). 

I am going to be writing two messages on Phillipians Chapters 3 and 4. 

One thing you know about my teachings,  they always are weird.

I actually was thinking about a sermon last Sunday entitled:  How the Buffalo Wild Wings (and More!)  Sauce chart should be like your life.  The point was going to be that we need a variety in our spiritual lives.  We don’t want to be waging spiritual war everyday, nor do we want to be sitting alone quietly in God’s rest our whole lives.  A little bit of both and some Carribean Jerk Boneless wings on Thursday’s is what we truly need.

Fast Cars and Loose women

More like, slow cars and loose gaskets!

 So my car leaks coolant.  GM developed this rockin’ sweet new coolant called Dexcool back in the day.  The name,  awesome.  The performance,  poor.  I think in a head-to-head study, human urine outperformed this coolant (source needed).

In related news:

The kids on my Little League team are getting some wrong ideas about what I do in my spare time.  I was trying to convince some of the older guys on the team to hit the ball to the opposite field (a la Tony Gwynn).  I told one of the guys, try to hit it up the middle or the opposite way.  Of course, since I am such a good instructor, he rifled the next tennis ball (thank God!)  straight into my neck.  So here I am walking around practice for the rest of the night with a hickey-type tennis ball burn on my neck.  If this is what hickeys feel like, who wants one?  Not this guy!  Yipes.

I think my delivery gets lost a bit when I have to type my reactions instead of speaking them.

It took me roughly one week to beat Guitar Hero II on the hard level.  I equate this feat to running the Chicago marathon in under 4 hours…. simple.

We are about to get 5+ inches of sleety snow and it is April 11th.  My excuse for not doing my taxes until today was that it was too cold out to be tax time.  Yeah…. that’s it.  You thought I was lazy didn’t you?  Whatever,  I need a nap.

Happy Resurrection Day!

ok, so I think the new cool thing to do nowadays is to not call it Easter, because that is a pagan holiday.  So Resurrection Day it is.  I heard this from three different groups of people today.   The holiday formerly known as Easter was really awesome out here in Michigan.  I went to a play put on by a local church about the Passion of Christ.  I guess the most important thing I took away was this; Jesus gave up his life for us.  If you read the Bible,  you will see that when Jesus was crucified with two others,  he was the first one to die.  When they came around to break the men’s legs so they would die immediately from suffocation and such,  Jesus was already dead.  The pastor’s point was this, no man killed Jesus.  Rather he gave up his life freely.  I thought that was an awesome message and I found a lot of parts of Scripture that I was not familiar with over the weekend.  

During a silent prayer retreat at church, I managed to get locked out of my room.  No big deal except my personal journal was sitting on the floor open and exposed.  God bless the facilities guy!

Our new tradition has been that whenever there is a UFC event,  a buddy of mine and I go to Buffalo Wild Wings (and more!) to watch the fight, have a beer and eat some grease.  Usually other people come to chat and such but we come for the fights.  Two words of caution!  First, the staff at BW3’s is usually very creepy, maybe more so on the lunch shift.  Second,  the increase in the level of heat between the medium chicken wings and the spicy garlic is not trivial!  I enjoy the medium wings with beer.  I saw that there was a flavor “Spicy Garlic” two levels higher,  but still like 7 levels below flamin’ hot.  When I get the spicy garlic and eat three pretty quick hilariousness ensued.  Picture the South Park bit with Brian Boitano eating the chicken wings that are too spicy!  First time in my life I couldn’t finish some wings.  Ok so I probably couldn’t finish some wings earlier in my life, but you can understand what must be wrong with food for me not to eat it. Enough said.

Also,  Matt Sera won the welterweight title from Georges St. Pierre in a predicted upset by me!  I yelled so very loud that singing at church this morning was fun.

 Also my last warning, don’t store your milk in the door of your fridge!  I had some donuts with a buddy after church today and when I went for a big gulp of milk (expires 4/10/07)  it tasted (no fooling here) more spicy than my aforementioned chicken wings.  I can’t decide what is a better band name to capitalize on this occasion, sour milk or spicy milk.  I am leaning towards Spicy Milk as is it more unusual and we could play Latin American music.

On the Road Again

I have been doing a lot of driving as of late, and I find that I feel closest to God while I’m in my car.  I imagine that it is probably because I have no one to talk to and have nothing to do but think.  It makes sense to me that I feel close to God in my car though.  I believe that we are all going somewhere,  and driving seems like a metaphor of life.

 Little League starts tomorrow.  This is an adventure in itself.  I think my major goal is to do whatever is best for the boys, which may mean simply shutting my mouth.  When I was twelve, I sure as heaven didn’t want some hot shot punk telling me to turn my hips more.  I’m probably not even cool to them anymore.  They probably don’t use the word cool anymore. 

I’m going to be moving into a house with some buddies from work and church.  I think it will be a good chance to encourage one another and build each other up.  I’ve been trying to read more as of late too.

Spring is here!