Last night we had a neighborhood potluck dinner, organized by our next-door neighbors. It was a bit chilly outside, but fun to go to something like this where you only have to walk five houses down to get there.

I like the idea of community in the neighborhood. I’m not very good at it, though. Mostly, I’m just not so good at being sociable. Let me clarify. It’s easy for me to be sociable around folks I already know, and it’s easy for me to carry on a conversation with people who are driving the conversation, but stick me with somebody as quiet as I am, and it gets uncomfortable pretty quickly. I’m still learning how to ask the right questions, stuff like that. But over all, it went OK last night. The folks are friendly.

My other observation about the neighborhood folks, though: they’re old. With the exception of our next-door neighbors, who are in their mid-40’s, everybody else there was retired. Many of them long-retired. One of them was telling me that he was recovering from a stroke, and then about his son (or was it a nephew?) that was also recovering from a stroke. “He was really young, too…” the guy told me; “only 60!” I felt very young right about then.

After about 90 minutes and far too much food, everybody wandered off back to their own homes. Laura held my hand and walked all the way back home by herself. She was pretty tired when she got back. But I’m sure it won’t be long until she’s running the whole way ahead of me. Now that makes me feel old.

Peggy Noonan writes a somber column today. An excerpt:

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it’s a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with “right track” and “wrong track” but missing the number of people who think the answer to “How are things going in America?” is “Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.”

I’m not talking about “Plamegate.” As I write no indictments have come up. I’m not talking about “Miers.” I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there’s no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we’re leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma’s house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding–the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn’t think so.

But this recounting doesn’t quite get me to what I mean. I mean I believe there’s a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.

She uses the rest of the column to note that the “elites” who ought to be leading us out of this have instead made “a separate peace” and, rather than lead, have resigned themselves to doing what they want to do and just letting the thing derail.

It’s worth reading the piece just for its thought-provoking capacity. But then step back, take a deep breath, and give thanks for a Heavenly Father who is soveriegn over all these events.

Peggy Noonan writes a somber column today. An excerpt:

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it’s a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with “right track” and “wrong track” but missing the number of people who think the answer to “How are things going in America?” is “Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.”

I’m not talking about “Plamegate.” As I write no indictments have come up. I’m not talking about “Miers.” I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there’s no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we’re leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma’s house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding–the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn’t think so.

But this recounting doesn’t quite get me to what I mean. I mean I believe there’s a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.

She uses the rest of the column to note that the “elites” who ought to be leading us out of this have instead made “a separate peace” and, rather than lead, have resigned themselves to doing what they want to do and just letting the thing derail.

It’s worth reading the piece just for its thought-provoking capacity. But then step back, take a deep breath, and give thanks for a Heavenly Father who is soveriegn over all these events.

Peggy Noonan writes a somber column today. An excerpt:

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it’s a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with “right track” and “wrong track” but missing the number of people who think the answer to “How are things going in America?” is “Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.”

I’m not talking about “Plamegate.” As I write no indictments have come up. I’m not talking about “Miers.” I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there’s no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we’re leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma’s house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding–the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn’t think so.

But this recounting doesn’t quite get me to what I mean. I mean I believe there’s a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.

She uses the rest of the column to note that the “elites” who ought to be leading us out of this have instead made “a separate peace” and, rather than lead, have resigned themselves to doing what they want to do and just letting the thing derail.

It’s worth reading the piece just for its thought-provoking capacity. But then step back, take a deep breath, and give thanks for a Heavenly Father who is soveriegn over all these events.

A fun little bit of calculaton based on the number of links you have in Technorati and the price that AOL paid for Weblogs, Inc.

You can find out about yours here.

Last week Becky and I were able to leave Laura with my folks and take a couple days of vacation up to Door County, Wisconsin. We’d never been there before, but had heard that the scenery was terrific. We weren’t disappointed. We knew it was going to be dicey as to whether the leaves would still be on the trees at that date, (hey, we’re cheap, we didn’t want to pay peak-season rates for the hotel) but we figured it was worth a try.

Simply put, the scenery was magnificent. We drove down more little roads that were covered by archways of red and gold than I can recall to count. The weather was beautiful, even on the last day when it was raining. We had a very refreshing time, relaxing and taking in all the little towns: Egg Harbor, Fish Creek, Sister Bay, Bailey’s Harbor, and some little places whose names have slipped my mind by now.

Friday night we ate at a restaurant that had live jazz all evening. Saturday morning we had pecan rolls at a bakery/restaurant that were “hailed as the best pecan rolls in Wisconsin”. They weren’t kidding. Door County has no chain restaurants or hotels any place north of Sturgeon Bay. It was refreshing to be able to choose between a bunch of unique cafes, restaurants, and supper clubs, rather than asking myself “so is it Subway, McDonalds, or Applebees tonight?”.

Two establishments particularly caught my eye on the trip; sadly, I only got a picture of one of them: The Pudgy Seagull Restaurant. (I’ll post the picture ASAP.) The other was for somebody’s “Ho-Made” bakery items. For that special personal touch in baking… OK, I won’t go there.

So it was a great weekend. It was no fun to wake up this morning and realize it was Monday and that meant I had to go back to work…. but it was at least nice to be well-rested while doing it.

I wrestled in an earlier post with issues of time and busyness. I’m still wrestling with it. I think I’m making progress this time… maybe. Becky and I have talked about things quite a lot. She’s supportive (no suprise there) of my desires to get the schedule cleaned off and getting my time priorities changed, and she’ll help keep reminding me so that I don’t just forget about it after a while and drift back to the same old way of doing things.

My “ideal situation” right now is still what I mentioned before: I’d like to just dump everything church-related for a while and see how my schedule settles out. Then I could slowly put it back together the right way, and see how much time I have to do church-related things.

Let me reiterate here that I’m not trying to get out of church responsibilities; I just need to act on what I’ve recognized: that the church can make do without me for a while, but my family can’t.

I don’t think my “ideal situation” is going to happen – it’s just not fair to everybody at church. I think there’d be too many hard feelings and misunderstandings to make it comfortable to continue attending if I just totally dropped my responsibilities there. So I need to find a tolerable compromise. One has suggested itself here recently that just might work.

1. Turn all my responsibilities for video and sound over to someone else. I don’t know why I even had them in the first place, other than that they loosely relate to the music aspect of the Sunday service. We need to find somebody else to be responsible for making sure the overheads with song lyrics are ready, and that someone is available to run them. It’s a stress that I don’t need on Sunday morning. My fear is that we won’t be able to find someone with a level of responsibility high enough to actually ensure that it gets done correctly.
2. Drop my elder apprenticing role for now. While my gifting and desire is still to be an elder and to participate in church leadership, I’m appreciating more and more the counsel my dad gave me this summer: that while there is no real age restriction on eldership, there is a “season of life” where your time is needed elsewhere. Family responsibilities have to come first.
3. Spread out the worship team leadership load. Right now I’m responsible for planning the service every week, then leading the practice and then both Sunday morning services. Every week. We have two teams of musicians/singers, but only one leader. I’ve taken maybe 3 weeks off in the past year. That’s just not enough. What I’d like to do is find someone willing to take leadership of one of the two worship teams. That way I’d only be responsible for planning and leading every-other week. I think that would be do-able.

I’ve put these plans of abdication on hold for a week or two since I promised my pastor (who is also a good friend and has really been my mentor for the past several years) that I wouldn’t make a decision without discussing it with him again, and he’s on a well-deserved vacation to Florida until the end of this week. We discussed it on the phone back before he left; he expressed his desire to talk it over so he could give me some “objective” advice. I laughed out loud. I hope I didn’t offend him. Good advice he will have in abundance. Objective? Not for a minute. He has a stake in this as well; if I dropped everything musically at the church it would have a big impact on Sunday worship services. I know it sounds conceited, but, sadly, it’s true.

What I need to hear him say is this: “I don’t want you to leave things totally. I think there are ways you can reduce your responsibilities without dropping everything. But, if you think it’s what God is calling you to do, then I will support you on that.” I think I will hear it, but I haven’t heard it yet.

I will be continuing to pray for God’s leading in this area. I need wisdom. And Lord, if You want to just send a couple good worship leaders to Noelridge, that would be fine with me, too.

I’ve not written anything about the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court yet. I think it’s mostly because I’m not sure where my opinion is on this nomination.

Ms. Miers, on a personal level, sounds like a terrific woman who I would be happy to know, would be happy to have teach my children in Sunday School, etc. It sounds like she’s a pretty decent lawyer and a great human being. It sounds like she is genuinely an evangelical Christian, which tells me quite a bit about her beliefs…. but not much of anything about her views of the Constitution. As David Frum notes on National Review Online today: (emphasis in original)

Anthony Kennedy is personally pro-life too. That has not stopped him from reaffirming the Roe v. Wade. [sic]

The much-embattled, sometime controversial, but unquestionably brilliant Judge Robert Bork weighs in on OpinionJournal this morning, and he gives a devastating critique of both Miers and President Bush. An excerpt:

With a single stroke–the nomination of Harriet Miers–the president has damaged the prospects for reform of a left-leaning and imperialistic Supreme Court, taken the heart out of a rising generation of constitutional scholars, and widened the fissures within the conservative movement. That’s not a bad day’s work–for liberals.

There is, to say the least, a heavy presumption that Ms. Miers, though undoubtedly possessed of many sterling qualities, is not qualified to be on the Supreme Court. It is not just that she has no known experience with constitutional law and no known opinions on judicial philosophy. It is worse than that. As president of the Texas Bar Association, she wrote columns for the association’s journal. David Brooks of the New York Times examined those columns. He reports, with supporting examples, that the quality of her thought and writing demonstrates absolutely no “ability to write clearly and argue incisively.”

Yikes.

I am beginning to think that we will see an odd sight at the confirmation hearings – a bunch of Democrats who will support her confirmation, because they know that they could have done a lot worse – and then Republicans who will oppose her nomination because she doesn’t have any record of judicial philosophy to stand on.

My preference would be that she either withdraw her name or that the President withdraw her name from the proceedings. They can find her another job; some have suggested a nice Federal appeals court position where she can get some judicial experience. Then let’s get a nominee with real conservative, originalist credentials… and then let’s have a confirmation battle.

And the coal trucks come a-runnin’
With their bellies full of coal
And their big wheels a-hummin’
Down this road that lies open like the soul of a woman
Who hid the spies who were lookin’
For the land of the milk and the honey

And this road she is a woman
She was made from a rib
Cut from the sides of these mountains
Oh these great sleeping Adams
Who are lonely even here in paradise
Lonely for somebody to kiss them

and I’ll sing my song, and I’ll sing my song
In the land of my sojourn

And the lady in the harbor
She still holds her torch out
To those huddled masses who are
Yearning for a freedom that still eludes them
The immigrant’s children see their brightest dreams shattered

Here on the New Jersey shoreline in the
Greed and the glitter of those high-tech casinos
But some mendicants wander off into a cathedral
And they stoop in the silence
And there their prayers are still whispered

And I’ll sing their song, and I’ll sing their song
In the land of my sojourn

Nobody tells you when you get born here
How much you’ll come to love it
And how you’ll never belong here
So I call you my country
And I’ll be lonely for my home
And I wish that I could take you there with me

And down the brown brick spine of some dirty blind alley
All those drain pipes are drippin’ out the last Sons Of Thunder
While off in the distance the smoke stacks
Were belching back this city’s best answer

And the countryside was pocked
With all of those mail pouch posters
Thrown up on the rotting sideboards of
These rundown stables like the one that Christ was born in
When the old world started dying
And the new world started coming on

And I’ll sing His song, and I’ll sing His song
In the land of my sojourn

“The Land of My Sojourn”
Rich Mullins
(c) 1993 – Edward Grant, Inc., 1993 – Kid Brothers of St. Frank Publishing

I was prompted by Kari’s piece the other day to revisit Rich Mullins’ A Liturgy, A Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band. I have long counted this as one of my favorite albums, but it tends to be one of my forgotten favorites; I don’t listen to it for a while, and then when I turn it on again, I wonder why I ever forgot about it.

I can’t pick a favorite song of of this album, but the song I quoted here is one of the best. Rich nails the feelings that I have about the land where I live with these lines:

Nobody tells you when you get born here
How much you’ll come to love it
And how you’ll never belong here
So I call you my country
And I’ll be lonely for my home
And I wish that I could take you there with me

Not much else to say about it… but if you haven’t listened to this album for a while, get it back out. You won’t be disappointed.

And the coal trucks come a-runnin’
With their bellies full of coal
And their big wheels a-hummin’
Down this road that lies open like the soul of a woman
Who hid the spies who were lookin’
For the land of the milk and the honey

And this road she is a woman
She was made from a rib
Cut from the sides of these mountains
Oh these great sleeping Adams
Who are lonely even here in paradise
Lonely for somebody to kiss them

and I’ll sing my song, and I’ll sing my song
In the land of my sojourn

And the lady in the harbor
She still holds her torch out
To those huddled masses who are
Yearning for a freedom that still eludes them
The immigrant’s children see their brightest dreams shattered

Here on the New Jersey shoreline in the
Greed and the glitter of those high-tech casinos
But some mendicants wander off into a cathedral
And they stoop in the silence
And there their prayers are still whispered

And I’ll sing their song, and I’ll sing their song
In the land of my sojourn

Nobody tells you when you get born here
How much you’ll come to love it
And how you’ll never belong here
So I call you my country
And I’ll be lonely for my home
And I wish that I could take you there with me

And down the brown brick spine of some dirty blind alley
All those drain pipes are drippin’ out the last Sons Of Thunder
While off in the distance the smoke stacks
Were belching back this city’s best answer

And the countryside was pocked
With all of those mail pouch posters
Thrown up on the rotting sideboards of
These rundown stables like the one that Christ was born in
When the old world started dying
And the new world started coming on

And I’ll sing His song, and I’ll sing His song
In the land of my sojourn

“The Land of My Sojourn”
Rich Mullins
(c) 1993 – Edward Grant, Inc., 1993 – Kid Brothers of St. Frank Publishing

I was prompted by Kari’s piece the other day to revisit Rich Mullins’ A Liturgy, A Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band. I have long counted this as one of my favorite albums, but it tends to be one of my forgotten favorites; I don’t listen to it for a while, and then when I turn it on again, I wonder why I ever forgot about it.

I can’t pick a favorite song of of this album, but the song I quoted here is one of the best. Rich nails the feelings that I have about the land where I live with these lines:

Nobody tells you when you get born here
How much you’ll come to love it
And how you’ll never belong here
So I call you my country
And I’ll be lonely for my home
And I wish that I could take you there with me

Not much else to say about it… but if you haven’t listened to this album for a while, get it back out. You won’t be disappointed.