life
- Took a one-day trip to Montreal and back on the company jet for a dinner meeting
- Ran a half-marathon in 2:07:25
- Got runner’s knee and had to avoid running for two weeks
- Traveled to St. Louis for the FAA’s National Software and Airborne Electronic Hardware Conference and took the family along
- Went on from St. Louis to Nashville and helped Andy Osenga build a space ship
- While in Nashville, got to hang out with the estimable Geof Morris, Mike Terry, and Josh Stockment
- Also while in Nashville, went on a quick jaunt with Geof down to Huntsville, AL to meet Stephen and Misty Granade, who were even more awesome than I expected them to be.
- After meeting Stephen, caught up on all 9 existing episodes of his quite hilarious podcast Disasterpiece Theatre.
- Developed and rolled out a new website project
- Got a new 27" iMac
- Started piano lessons for my oldest daughter
- Ten years ago we had been married less than a year, two kids moving across the country to an unfamiliar city and state. Now we’re both into our thirties, have three kids of our own, and Iowa feels a lot like home.
- In ten years we’ve been from an old rental farmhouse in the country that leaked heat like a sieve in the winter, to unintentionally renting a house in town from the most notorious landlord in Cedar Rapids, to owning our own place, to starting to wonder when/if we’ll outgrow our own place and have to look for something else.
- In ten years we’ve gone from being young newcomers at a church to being in and out of leadership, to then dreaming up and leading a church plant, and then finally being led away from the church plant to participate in a different church.
- In ten years we’ve gone from knowing no one here to having made a lot of friends. Then it’s just sad to see them go. We were sad to see the Majerle’s move to Minnesota five years ago, though we were glad we could buy their house. :-) This summer, particularly, feels like the end of an era, with the Garner’s moving to Indiana and the Finley’s moving to Texas. I guess now we have new places to visit on vacations.
- In ten years Becky’s job description has changed from “CAD drafter at a stone quarry” to “wood shop worker” to “mom of one” to “mom of two” to “mom of three”. I’m pretty sure she likes her current job description best.
- In ten years my job description has been more consistent, changing only from “software engineer” to “software team lead” to “software certification specialist”. I’m hoping to make the certification thing a long-term gig. Hopefully this fall it’ll all come together.
- In ten years I’ve gone from being a smooth-cheeked youngster with plastered-down hair to slightly-less-plastered-down hair to a beard and shaved head. I’ve had this look going for three years now, and think I’ll be keeping it for a while. Sooner or later I won’t have to shave the head as much.
- In ten years Becky is still the beautiful woman who took my arm and came to Iowa sight-unseen. She’s still kicking butt on the softball field every summer, growing yummy stuff in the garden, keeping our household running smoothly, and making our home a place I always want to come home to, and never want to leave.
- We’ll want to sleep in tomorrow morning, but won’t really get to, since the girls pretty much are up at 7:00 regardless of what day it is.
- We’ll rent another DVD or two from the store and catch up on a bit of our movie watching. Maybe Wall-E or Hancock.
- We’ll hit CiCi’s for cheap-o pizza.
- We won’t get to church, given that we’re all feeling icky.
- We’ll visit the library sometime… probably Saturday.
- We’ll watch some college football… most definitely the Florida/Alabama game.
- I won’t post anything more interesting than this to the blog.
Last night I convinced myself...
Last night I convinced myself that I wanted to hit the gym this morning. I packed my bag so I could just go from the gym to work, and then psyched myself up for making sure I got up with my alarm.
Trouble is, I psyched myself up so much that then I slept restlessly all night because I was afraid I was going to miss my alarm. *sigh*
Well, at least I’m up with my alarm and headed for the gym. I’ll be paying for this about 8:00 tonight when I can’t keep my eyes open…
My brain is full, part 2
Yesterday’s post wandered a bit in talking about the relevance of God’s Word even as it is found in the daily readings and prayers of the church. When I started writing I was aiming for an appreciation of the BCP daily prayers and how they have ministered to me even in just the bit I have used them privately. Where I wandered, though, was to the observation that “my brain is full; it is my soul that needs fed”, and I’d like to work through that thought a little bit more today.
Certainly my personal quirks and characteristics help cause this condition: I read a lot. My mind never seems to let go of details and trivia. (Let’s put it this way: I was the kid who at the age of 9 or 10 was reading through encyclopedias in the morning when I’d wake up early.) I do a lot of synthesizing, by which I mean that I’m not so good at creatively staking out my own position, but that I can listen to two or three other positions, evaluate them, and then pull together the pieces into a unified whole that makes sense to me. I also don’t re-read much, because my brain says “yeah, been there, read that”, and it becomes hard to slow down and concentrate on something for a second time.
As a teenager and into my twenties my voracious book appetite combined with the wealth of good books on theological subjects served me well. I read a lot, learned a lot. My bookshelves are still filled with Lewis, Piper, Keller, Wright, Chesterton, and Spurgeon. I read through a lot of Schaeffer. I had a hard time finding the patience to appreciate some of the older theologians; how can you use so many words to say seemingly the same thing over and over? I could sit and talk theology with my church leaders, and before long that desire and aptitude, combined with the ability to apply it in practical ways, drew me into church leadership myself. (Somewhere along the way we had three kids, I over-committed to almost everything, burned out, and changed churches. But that’s another story.)
Our current evangelical culture, and especially the neo-Reformed subculture within it (wherein I find currently myself) seem to highly favor this intellectual, bookish approach. Pastors like John Piper pen profusely. Pastor Mark Driscoll established his own publishing line of theological literature. Tim Keller seems to crank out a book a year (at least). It’s as if you’re not anybody until you’ve published a book. But with very few exceptions, these books don’t seem to really say anything new; the publisher is just pushing an update or a rehash with new cover art and the current big-name pastor as the author.
Now that I’m in my mid-30’s, things seem to have changed in my reading appetite. I can think of only three or four books I’ve read in the past 5 years that have really made me just stop and go “wow, what did I just read?”. Now, maybe I’m just failing to choose the right books. (In that case, I’m open for recommendations, so please leave me a comment or send me an email, FB message, or tweet with your ideas.)
But maybe I’m at a plateau where more head knowledge is not the answer. And this is where I file my desire (expressed yesterday) for the daily corporate practice of Scripture, prayer, and worship. Even that is undoubtedly not the magic answer. Maybe the struggling pursuit of the seemingly elusive daily “quiet time” is a more practical answer. But that, by itself, seems to private and insulated to me. I need community to go with it. Not community for study purposes; I just want to be with people who, like me, have that need in their soul to pray, worship, confess, and hear the Word on a regular basis. If you know where to find it, please let me know.
On parenthood and life
Tech blogger Jeff Atwood took a detour from his usual nerd programming yesterday to address a nearly universal topic: parenthood. He expresses something about the joys of parenting in a way I completely understood and couldn’t have said half as well:
When I am holding Henry and I tickle him, I can feel him laughing all the way to his toes. And I realize, my God, I had forgotten, I had completely forgotten how unbelievably, inexplicably wonderful it is that any of us exist at all. Here I am with this tiny, warm body so close to me, breathing so fast he can barely catch up, sharing his newfound joy of simply being alive with me. The sublime joy of this moment, and all the other milestones – the first smile, the first laugh, the first “dada” or “mama”, the first kiss, the first time you hold hands. The highs are so incredibly high that you’ll get vertigo and wonder if you can ever reach that feeling again. But you peak ever higher and higher, with dizzying regularity. Being a new parent is both terrifying and exhilarating, a constant rollercoaster of extreme highs and lows.
Jeff’s oldest is only 2 1/2, so I won’t spoil it for him, but it doesn’t stop at age 4. The delight of parenting and seeing your kids learn those new things and experience life in new ways is still a joy when they’re 5 or 6 or 7. Even through the lows it is an amazing experience.
Yesterday afternoon we sat down on the couch with the girls to tell them that their Pops had passed away. Laura, at 7, immediately broke into sobs and cried for a good 5 minutes. And then she was OK. No more words. I wonder how she’s internalizing it, and if we’ll end up talking more about it later. She’s so much like me, it’s scary. But little Addie, only 5, didn’t have tears. She started to think about the news, and to talk through it. “So,” she said, “mom’s dad passed away.” Pause. “I’m glad I still have a dad and mom. I’d be sad if my dad passed away.” Then we talked about how Pops is so much happier and healthier now that he’s in heaven with Jesus, and about how we will see him again someday.
After that we spent a beautiful fall night in the backyard with burgers on the grill, cold beer (for me, not them), a fire in the firepit, marshmallows roasted, and friends who came by with ice cream. Then it was inside for pajamas, hugs and kisses, prayers, books, and bed. And quickly they slept, fresh to wake again as I was leaving for work this morning at some ungodly hour.
Some day future, God willing, my daughters and their families will sit out under the sky and raise a glass in memory of me. My prayer is that, when that time comes, they will be just as thankful and blessed as I was last night. God’s goodness continues from generation to generation.
Trying Someplace New
Went to The Flying Wienie for lunch today; my first time ever at this local Cedar Rapids institution. It was amazingly tasty. It won’t be another 12 years before I go back.
A long-delayed update
So, that blogging every day thing didn’t last long, did it? A little bit of work craziness and life busyness and all of a sudden it’s been six weeks. So what’s been going on? Since I last posted, I:
So yeah. I’m still struggling with how to best pull together the content that I share every day via Google Reader, Google+, and Twitter. I’d like to be able to centralize it here… but I haven’t managed to work that into my process yet. I’ll keep trying.
I suppose there was a time I thought staying up all night was cool...
…but right now isn’t it. After getting, by Becky’s measurement, 11 inches of rain in the past 48 hours, our basement once again began taking on water. Looks like I should’ve bumped that sump pump higher up the priority list. Once again I am thankful for neighbors on both sides who are willing to loan out their Shop Vacs. I am happy this year to have one shop vac that has a garden hose attachment so I don’t have to carry it out to dump it.
It’s currently 1:45 on Friday morning or so, and the Shop Vacs have been running continuously since around 4:20 Thursday afternoon. The water is slowing down some now, I’m only having to go down and do some sopping up of puddles about every thirty minutes. The rest of the time I can just sit here and listen to the shop vacs run. You are never so ready for silence as you are after listening to three shop vacs run continuously for nine hours. Except for maybe after ten or eleven hours. :-)
So far I’ve listened to a couple of podcasts, watched two episodes of Arrested Development on Hulu, started a book, and annoyed anyone who was on Twitter to listen to my posts. If the water gets down to where I only need to check on it every hour, I’m going to try to take some naps. Until then I guess I’ll just hang out and drink another Diet Pepsi. I had already planned to take Friday off of work; I didn’t plan to spend it this way, though. There’ll be plenty of cleanup to do tomorrow.
There are no chapter titles
I think it really hit me when I saw the dirt bike. I hadn’t seen that dirt bike in years, but I remembered the story behind it. It had been bought cheap, fixed up in a garage, and when finally complete, was brought to a party at a friends' house in the country. The owner rode it first, then handed the helmet to my wife. She proceeded to take it on a loop of the property, then lost control and ended up riding the thing directly into the corner of a limestone barn. Becky recovered within a couple of weeks from her spill, but when I saw the dirt bike sitting out waiting to be loaded into a moving trunk on Monday afternoon, I realized it had set for the last seven years with a bent rim waiting to be repaired.
On one hand you could say “come on, a bent rim, that’s an easy fix, why has it taken so long to fix it?”, and you’d be right. But having been friends with the owners of that bike for the past ten years, I know the stories of how life has intervened. Her chronic illness. His serious infection that cost him the vision in one eye. (No small thing for a pilot!) The business start-up. Later, the provision of a flying job. (Can you believe they let a one-eyed pilot fly 747s? I can.) The births of two delightful children. The struggles and joys of families, friends, church. I can very well understand why that dirt bike still has a bent rim. (On a side note: I wonder what projects I have sitting in the garage that still need completed…)
Monday afternoon I helped load the contents of these friends' house into a long moving van. Assuming all went well yesterday, they drove the eight hours and arrived in Indiana where they are moving to be closer to family. With his gone-17-days-at-a-time work schedule, it makes sense for them, but we still hate to see them go.
Life has chapters, but there are no chapter titles. We can only turn the pages and see where this next chapter takes us. I look forward to an upcoming chapter that sees us visiting those friends in Indiana, and I have only one request for them: once you get the bike fixed, let somebody other than my wife ride it first.
10 years
Last Sunday we visited Noelridge Park Church for the morning service so Laura could participate in the AWANA recognition Sunday. (She’s been a regular there in Cubbies even though we’ve not been attending Noelridge for the past 18 months.) As we got ready to go Sunday morning, I noted to Becky that it was nearly ten years, to the day, since the first time we visited Noelridge, immediately after we moved to Iowa.
That was then…
Ten years. Nearly a third of our lives to this point. In one sense I look back and say “wow, time flies”; but in another sense I look back and remember all that we have lived through in those ten years, and it does, indeed, seem like a long time.
I can only imagine the changes I’ll have to reflect on if I’m still writing on this blog or something like it ten years from now… teenaged kids, middle age… I can wait. But if the next ten years are as rich and full and wonderful as the past ten have been… I will (continue to) be a man most richly blessed.
This is now…
Who says you have to spend a lot?
Back in college, Dr. Batts suggested a cheap date: a trip to Walmart. His rationale? First, go through the food side of the store and eat the free samples, then, go back to the electronics department and watch whatever movie is playing on the TVs.
Well, 10 years ago I guess they still did have food samples and movies on the TVs at Walmart; now the samples are gone and the TVs run perpetual advertising. But last night we still managed a pretty fantastic cheap date.
Dinner for two + dessert + tip at a nice Italian restaurant: $1 after gift card. Mario Kart on the Wii at Best Buy: free. Mocha and Decaf Sumatra at Brewed Awakenings: free thanks to a credit on my account.
Three hours out with Becky on a beautiful March evening: priceless.
(Of course, a couple more experiences with Mario Kart on a Wii will pretty much convince me that we need to buy one… which has the potential make the total financial impact of the evening a little bit more expensive.)
Adventures with Hot Water, or, Providential Timing Once Again
Last night after Wednesday night church, as we were just about to settle down for the night, Becky called out to me from downstairs. It wasn’t her usual voice, asking me for something - this was her oh-no-this-is-trouble voice. “Chris I need you downstairs.” When I got downstairs, I got part two of the announcement. “We’ve got water all over the floor.” Now, the words “water on the floor” bring back instant connotations of the flood last summer. Fortunately, though, what we found wasn’t anything near so troubling. Which is not to say that we were very happy about it, since there were puddles of warm water all around the floor near the water heater.
I pulled out a flashlight and confirmed my suspicions: the water heater had developed a leak and was dripping the last of its contents out onto the floor. I turned off the water and gas feeds to the heater and Becky got out the towels. (One nice side-benefit of the flood: we now have a large supply of towels that are good for nothing but wiping up the floor.) We wiped up the remaining mess and then, rather than settling down to watch a little bit of TV, pulled out the computer to do some online water heater research. My posts to Twitter and Facebook evoked sympathy, advice, and at least one offer to help with an install. But having neither the time nor really the know-how to do the install, I decided to head for Lowe’s this morning, based on their proximity to our place and a good recommendation from a friend.
I had a one-hour window this morning to leave work, purchase the water heater and arrange for install, and get back to work before my meeting started. It was a quick trip to Lowe’s, and I found that at 8:00 in the morning there are plenty of employees there and ready to help. I selected my heater of choice, ponied up for installation and the city permit, and headed back to work. The woman at Lowe’s figured there was no way we’d get it installed today, hopefully tomorrow, otherwise it’d be Monday. I offered a quick prayer for an installer with some free time and headed back to work. Thirty minutes later I got the phone call back from the installer. Would I be available today at 11:00? So providential timing number one: we were able to get the heater installed the same morning.
It’s a nice water heater, too - high efficiency, 50-gallon, eligible for a rebate from the gas company, 12-year warranty, etc. And, so far as I can tell, it heats water nicely. (My shower tonight was quite pleasant.) Oh, so on to providential timing number two: our income tax refund got deposited to our bank account yesterday. It’s not how we’d planned to use the money, but it is sure a blessing to have it there for the need.
Thus concludes this chapter of the Mundane Adventures of Chris in Iowa. Tune in this weekend to find out about Chris’s first time on the Stonebridge worship team. Good night.
Everybody's Working for the Weekend
Yes, we have a weekend coming up. Unfortunately, we’ll be heading into the weekend with a house full of sickies - Becky, both girls, and I are all fighting colds, coughs, and sore throats. Ick. So, here’s my list of guesses of things we’ll do this weekend.
There’s my profound list for Friday. I’ll check back in on Monday to see what kind of score I get.
They are soon gone, and we fly away
It always seems to be the bitter, cold, rainy days. Yesterday morning I took my familiar perch behind the piano at Noelridge as an aging group of family and friends gathered to remember the life of a dear lady who passed away last week. Save for a few grandchildren present, at age 31 I was easily the youngest person in the room, and my position at the piano gave me forty minutes' opportunity to study the faces of those assembled.
It was a wrinkled and care-worn group gathered yesterday; five pews filled with family grieving a loss forseen for some time now during battles with cancer, a dozen more pews of friends, each remembering happier times. Fairlene was remembered as a “feisty” woman whose love for family and desire to serve could be seen in the faces of her sons as they sang “Amazing Grace”, and in the pulpit that she and her husband hand-crafted for the church sanctuary. Her death was in many ways a sorrow - as deaths always are - but in many ways a relief; Fairlene is now free from her pain and suffering and is rejoicing in the presence of God.
As I looked around the room I saw faces that reminded me of other similar gatherings. There in the back was Dave, who sat in the same front row grieving a wife lost to cancer seven years ago. A row nearer sat Wanda, remembering her husband who has been with the Lord for several years now. Each one came in quietly, shared the sorrow and memories, sang the hymns of trust and assurance, and then bundled up to face the bitter wind at the grave site.
My schedule forced me to make an exit at this point, but I knew how the day would continue. Soon they would return to the church for the lunch awaiting them in the basement fellowship hall, and as the sandwiches, salads, jellos, and desserts were eaten the quietness of grief would slowly be replaced by the happier babble of life, the telling of stories, the shrieking of small children, the laughter at the memory of times past. And this, too, is life. Weeping may last for the night, but joy comes in the morning.
This morning the sky was clear as the sun came up, and it gave a hint of hope to the cold air. Fairlene’s hopes were fulfilled on Thursday night as she left us to be with her Savior. In the words of the psalmist that were read yesterday: “The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.” We can though, like Fairlene, have hope in the God who has been our dwelling place in all generations.
Christmas shopping complete in record time
Usually I’m the guy who is out shopping on December 23rd, if not December 24th, to finish up all my Christmas shopping. But not this year! Thanks to the wonders of amazon.com and other online retailers, my Christmas shopping has been complete for almost a week now. OK, ignore that one thing I need to pick up for my sister… but yeah, everything is bought and in the care of US Mail or UPS, making its way to my house in time to be wrapped and transported to Wisconsin for Christmas.
I should really be careful with this - now I’ve set my performance bar pretty high for next year! :-)