Chris​Hubbs​.com

• Weekend update: K15 took 3rd place overall in the toughest division at the regional Academic Decathalon competition. Waiting to hear whether her team scored well enough in total to make the state competition.
• Helped serve the Eucharist for the first time at our new church yesterday. Managed to not drop the bowl when offering wine for intinction.
• January we get almost no snow, and now the first week of February we have two snowstorms forecast? Bleh.
• Got a turntable for Christmas and find myself enjoying it so far. Not so much about sound quality as about a different listening experience. You can’t just push a button and skip a track! 20 minutes of listening straight through.
• Also in church news: got elected to the Vestry last week. Hopefully I can be useful.
• Before the vestry election, the pastor’s message was “if you’re getting worn out, raise your hand and say you need a break. Don’t wear yourself out.” Pretty sure I’ve never heard that message at any other church I’ve served at.
• I’ve become the guy who’s shopping for vintage sports coats online. 100% camel hair blazer? Let’s see if you’ll give me a deal…
• Yesterday after church we had a dessert auction to benefit our companion diocese in Eswatini. We bought… too many desserts. Many of them are in the process of being given away to friends, neighbors, and co-workers.
• I’m keeping the Tres Leches cake for myself.

Hang in there, friends.

• First day of school today for our two oldest kids… both at college so we won’t get chalkboard pics this year.
• Back to a full work week; the summer grind seems to set in here in late August. I think our European friends have the right idea, just taking most of August for vacation.
• A friend pinged yesterday to note it had been a year since a retreat we attended. That got me reflecting. It’s been quite a year.
• Turns out some combination of time, therapy, improved habits, loving family, and patience can produce good results, even in the midst of sadness and chaos.
• How am I old enough to have two kids in college?!?
• I’ve been umpiring rec league softball again this year and tonight is the end of our tournament. Forecast heat index: 115F. Oof.
• Once we get past Labor Day, life speeds up… a lot of business travel this fall.
• Related to a couple of these bullets: time to shop for a new suit. Think this time I’m gonna invest a little bit and not just buy whatever I can find cheapest off the rack at Kohl’s.
• I keep thinking that if my life gets too slow once the kids are out of the house, I could get certified and start umpiring high school softball. Feels like one of those things that you would have to jump into with both feet and make a fairly exclusive hobby during the summer.
• Picked a book up off the shelf for book club yesterday and had forgotten just how good that book is. Time for a re-read, maybe. I don’t re-read too often.
• If I stop and think a moment, I kinda wonder what things will look like a year from now when I look back on the (currently upcoming) year. Life is wild.

I’m visiting the UK for work this week - my first visit ever. A few thoughts:

• Having a public transit system that seems to work: awesome. I landed at London Heathrow, took a subway, a bus, and a regional train and four hours later had arrived in York, some 200 miles away.
• For my Iowa friends, this would be like flying into Chicago O’Hare and being able to get to Cedar Rapids via public transit. Nifty.
• In-room electric teakettle: delightful, and quick. Why don’t we have them in the US? Oh, because the UK wall voltage is 240v and in the US they would work much more slowly.
• York is a lovely place so far.
• Antique shop here has the same ugly glass display cases that our antique shops in the US have.
• “Antiques” here include tags that say things like ‘Roman, probably 400 BC’.
• Felt like the authentic British experience last night when I spent my dinner in a pub next to three guys at the bar who were enjoying after-work pints and arguing about football.
• Assuming my arranged cab shows up in 30 minutes, now I have to go actually do some work.

More later.

I’m feeling particularly crusty today. In the spirit of efficiency, I expect I can write a bunch of bullets here such that everyone can find something that they disagree with.

On politics:

• Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to subvert our legitimate election results are traitorous, and the Republican politicians unwilling to call him out on it are spineless opportunists who aren’t worthy to be described as leaders.
• The Democratic Party’s insistence on making “any abortion, any time” table stakes for being a Democratic candidate is holding the party back from majority rule for the next 50 years.
• The Trump administration’s failure to govern with any priorities other than “what’s best for Trump” makes it the worst presidential administration in the history of the Republic.
• If the Democrats want to claim any sort of moral high ground, they’re going to have to get their own house in order. It’s time to stop trotting out Bill Clinton, even if he is a southern Democrat who gives a good speech.

On the evangelical church:

• I won’t claim to be an evangelical any more, but I’m clearly still working through a bunch of stuff.
• The evangelical church’s focus on patriarchy (dressed up as “complementary gender roles”) has deprived the church of more than half its voice.
• The church’s continued trouble with tolerating and covering up sexual abuse would be significantly lessened if women were afforded the same church leadership roles as men.
• The huge emphasis on the LGBTQ discussion within the evangelical church is the result of fundamentalist leaders desperately clinging to the same magisterial authority of Scripture interpretation that the Reformation protested against 500 years ago. Once the commoners realize the Holy Spirit enables them to understand the Scripture on their own and they’re not automatically going to hell if they disagree with the church’s teaching, the power is broken.
• 8 months of not attending worship services (thanks, pandemic) has made it clear how important being able to attend worship services is.

On moral issues:

• Most “pro-life” people don’t really, at a core level, believe that an early-term abortion is the same, morally, as killing an infant after birth. If they really did, they would take stronger action.
• Nobody wants to get a late-term abortion. The ones that tragically may be needed are worked out in painful circumstances that won’t benefit from laws that would force jumping through a lot of hoops.
• Everyone should want the number of abortions to go down. This would happen with better access to contraceptives, better sex education, and better support for pregnant women and young parents.
• LGBTQ people deserve the same rights, protections, and affirmations as anyone else. Including in the church. Yes, I’ve read all the verses and heard all the arguments. But I’ve met LGBTQ brothers and sisters who clearly love Jesus and have the Holy Spirit working in their lives. And then I go to Peter’s words in Acts 11 after preaching to the Gentiles.

As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit’. If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?

Acts 11:15-17, NRSV

The arguments can be complicated. As Robert Capon says in Between Noon and Three, if God is a bastard, we’re all in trouble. So in the end, I’m going to rely on the hope that God is loving and gracious and he can sort it out.

Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me.

• Since I started working from home 8 weeks ago, my morning routine has changed. No more gym, reading and writing in the morning instead.
• Also, Wordpress is impressed with my 10-day posting streak. It’s easy to write about music. But a lazy bullet points post will get me to 11.
• (Insert Spinal Tap reference here.)
• Saturday mornings have become cinnamon roll mornings. It’s not helping my waistline but it’s a nice way to celebrate the weekend.
• The siding guys are done with our house. It looks great and I’m enthused that I will not need to paint the outside of the house again.
• I’m thankful that we have local coffee roasters still doing their thing because Walmart-brand coffee isn’t the greatest.
• I’m kinda gonna miss the siding guys, though, since the noise and bustle of them working made it not feel so creepily quiet every day.
• I bought a Bibliotheca Bible boxed set when they did the kickstarter several years ago. It seemed like a cool idea but I ended up not being a fan of the translation they used and they quickly just started collecting dust on my shelf.
• This week somebody on Facebook wanted to buy them. They are like new other than the New Testament volume which has some minor notes I put in the first 5 chapters of Matthew. Oddly enough that person preferred to buy an incomplete set rather than buy a NT volume with a few notes in it.
• Going to the post office to mail these books will be the first time I’ve gone anywhere all week.
• These bullet points aren’t as random as they should be. It feels like a lazy way to do a partial narrative without any through line. What the heck, it’s 2020, we all deserve some slack.

Hey, it’s Friday.

• The weather is really too nice to be sitting in the office all day today. I might have to do something about that.
• My oldest daughter is in the College for Kids program at Coe College this week and next. One of the classes she’s taking is Web Design, and I had a proud nerd dad moment when she told me she was ahead of the rest of the class because she already knew some HTML.
• It’s amazing how a shower, shave, some weights at the gym, and it being FRIDAY helps a guy’s general outlook.
• Reading through Matthew in my reading plan the past couple weeks and I have started highlighting every place that Jesus heals someone. I have green highlights now on almost every page. Setting things right, indeed.
• The back-and-forth the past few days over Eugene Peterson’s comments regarding homosexuality and gay marriage have been enlightening and saddening. I feel mostly like the big evangelical machine took advantage of an old saint who deserves better treatment. Ugh.
• How is it mid-July already?
• My friend Lyz wrote this piece a couple years ago about her sisters and a major car accident. It’s a beautiful piece of writing.
• It’s been a fairly quiet summer event-wise, but in September Becky and I have tickets for concerts two weekends in a row: U2 in St. Louis, and Andrew Peterson’s Rich Mullins tribute concert in Nashville. Now to figure out what we’re doing with the kids.
• I’m leading worship this weekend, but apparently I haven’t thought much about it yet because the worship leader disaster dreams haven’t started yet. Probably tonight.
• There’s a lot of pain in this world. Be kind.