it's Monday...

…and I haven’t posted since last Wednesday, which means I’m a real slacker. I fall into this basic pattern of blogging where I show up on Monday, realize I’m a slacker, then because I have nothing more thoughtful to post, post a weekend update. Yawn. But since I’ve already fooled you into reading this far, here was my weekend:

Friday night Becky and I went and saw King Kong at the cheap theater. It was worth seeing on the big screen. It was pretty over-the-top; Peter Jackson would get you squirming, and then when you thought it should be about done, he’d make you squirm for another 10 seconds. The plot/story was OK, but pretty basic. The one part I really liked was the way the shots at the top of the Empire State Building were done; they had me fearing the heights even though I was safe in my seat. Well done that.

Saturday morning I headed over to Mount Vernon to accompany a young man from church who was trying out for a voice scholarship at Cornell College. It was fun to be on a college campus again, and even more fun to be on one that had good music facilities. If I were on campuses too often, I could definitely get bit by the college bug again and think about studying up enough that I could go back and teach. Sounds fun, but I think it’s unlikely.

Played a church league basketball game on Saturday and then headed home. Took Becky and Laura out for dinner and did a little shopping. Oh, and Becky’s mom headed home Saturday morning. It was great to have her visit, she was a big help to Becky, and she and Laura had soooo much fun.

Sunday led worship as usual at both services. We were without practice this week, which left us a little bit rough, but it turned out OK. That was about it for Sunday. Stayed home, just a lazy afternoon.

Now we’re to Monday and another week. It’s not too exciting so far. If it gets exciting, I’ll be sure to post about it.

it's snowing!

And it’s about time. We haven’t had any snow since December 16th… that’s a full two months. But this morning it started about 6 AM, we even had some thunder and lightning! Becky measured 2 inches of snow by 8:30, and there’s more to come. Woohoo! A chance to use the new snowblower, and it’ll look like winter again! I just wasn’t ready for spring yet in February.

Now if Mr. Murphy has anything to say, Becky will go into labor this afternoon and we’ll have to skate our way down to the hospital through all the snow and ice… or maybe the kiddo can just wait another week or so. (Her due date is March 1, which is less than two weeks away…)

Fear, Complexity, Environmental Management in the 21st Century

Fear, Complexity, Environmental Management in the 21st Century

This is a must-read article by Michael Crichton. His basic premise: we can make statistics say about anything, and so the trend is that the media and other organizations will try to build a big fear of a crisis. In reality, the environmental cycles are fairly normal. His conclusion:

Is this really the end of the world? Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods?

No, we simply live on an active planet. Earthquakes are continuous, a million and a half of them every year, or three every minute. A Richter 5 quake every six hours, a major quake every 3 weeks. A quake as destructive as the one in Pakistan every 8 months. It’s nothing new, it’s right on schedule.

At any moment there are 1,500 electrical storms on the planet. A tornado touches down every six hours. We have ninety hurricanes a year, or one every four days. Again, right on schedule. Violent, disruptive, chaotic activity is a constant feature of our globe.

Is this the end of the world? No: this is the world.

It’s time we knew it.

Loose ends

Just to tie up a few loose ends from previous posts:

  1. The evening at the coffeehouse went well. I ended up doing a little more instrumental and a little less vocal than I had originally planned, since the place was so full and noisy during the first hour that any attempt at capturing their attention for a vocal would’ve been a disaster. Still, I got to sing some, got to play a bunch, and even got some tips! Good times.

  2. Geof hasn’t posted the answer on his blog yet, but he declares (and I agree with him) that the answer to the evil brain teaser is that yes, the airplane will fly, since the engines are pushing against the air, and the air is unaffected by the conveyor belt. So kudos to Aaron, who almost immediately came to the right answer.

Well that’s about all the news from the home front for today. Becky’s mom is here to spend the week, we’ve been having fun with her, and also we’re enjoying having a babysitter for the week! :-) We went and saw The Producers at the theatre on Saturday (good old cheesy Mel Brooks - gotta love it!) and we’ll probably go out again either tomorrow or Thursday, kind of a last-chance date before the baby is born. Officially there’s about 2 more weeks left… I guess we’ll take it a day at a time.

An evil brain teaser

Geof posted this over on the Rumor Forum and it’s been so much fun I thought I’d share it with everybody. (Geof promises his solution tomorrow.)

Question:

An aircraft is on a runway. This runway is outfitted with a conveyor belt that has the capability to exactly match the speed of the aircraft landing gear’s wheels. Can the plane take off? Why or why not?

coffeehouse time

Tomorrow night I’m providing two hours of musical entertainment at my favorite coffeeshop. I’ll admit to being a little bit nervous, but I imagine it’ll turn out OK. I’m planning on doing about half instrumental stuff and half vocal stuff.

If any of you are in the Cedar Rapids area and want to come, here’s the details:

Brewed Awakenings Coffeehouse 1271 1st Ave SE, Cedar Rapids Friday February 10 8:00 - 10:00 PM

Should be a good time!

10 mistakes conservatives make in art and entertainment

Erik Lokkesmoe has a good article on Townhall.com where he lists 10 mistakes conservatives make in art and entertainment. It’s worthwhile reading and thinking it over. Some excerpts:

Mistake #1: We try to improve art and entertainment from the top-down and the outside-in. For example, when well-meaning people, flush with cash but bankrupt on talent, attempt to “show Hollywood” by creating films that go around proven creative methods, the result is always the same: direct to video, a waste of time and money. Enduring change, meanwhile, comes from the bottom-up (working your way up from the mailroom) and the inside-out (working within the creative industries).

Mistake #2: We don’t quite understand common grace – the idea that the good, the true, and the beautiful can be found in the most “unlikely” of places (Broadway) and people (liberal artists). Without a strong belief in common grace, we will either get angry at the culture or withdraw from it entirely.

Mistake #7: We use the arts to save souls and sway elections. True artists enter their work with a sense of mystery, wonderment, always uncertain what may finally appear on the canvas or film or pages. Children’s author Madeleine L’Engle speaks of her surprise when a certain character appeared unexpectedly in the plot of the novel she was writing. She says, “I cannot imagine the book without [the character], and I know that it is a much better book because of him. But where he came from I cannot say. He was a sheer gift of grace.” A sermon can be artful, and Lord knows campaign ads could use some imagination. Mixing art and agenda, however, is propaganda, whether it comes from the left or the right. If you want to send a message, Samuel Goldwyn rightly said, call Western Union.

Mistake #10: We like safe art. Soggy may be a better term. Easy to digest. Nothing that causes heartburn. Do we really want art that never challenges our convictions, wrestles with our beliefs, or questions our faith? Let’s not forget: beauty is hardly safe, truth is never tame, goodness is anything but trite. Author Franky Schaeffer said it best : “The arts ask hard questions. Art incinerates polyester/velvet dreams of inner healing and cheap grace. Art hurts, slaps, and defines. Art is interested in truth: in bad words spoken by bad people, in good words spoken by good people, in sin and goodness, in life, sex, birth, color, texture, death, love, hate, nature, man, religion, music, God, fire, water, and air. Art tears down, builds up, and redefines. Art is uncomfortable” Finally, and most profoundly, he writes: “Good art (which, among other things, means truth-telling art) is good in itself, even when it is about bad things.”

You should really read the whole thing.

reasonable theological concern, or overly picky?

I was thinking through some songs that we haven’t sung for a while in church, and this issue came to mind, so I thought I’d share it here. One of my main criterion when selecting songs for the church to sing (and I plan the music for almost every week) is that they be theologically sound. This manages to disqualify a substantive number of modern praise songs, and a surprising number of older hymns from our hymnal. I might go so far as to say that this is my primary criterion. Certainly there are others; singability is right up there. But theological correctness has got to be at the top of the list.

So we come to today’s topic: the old chorus “Create In Me A Clean Heart”. The text is pretty much straight from Psalm 51:

Create in me a clean heart oh God,
And renew a right spirit within me.
Create in me a clean heart oh God,
And renew a right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from Thy presence oh Lord,
And take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.
Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation,
And renew a right spirit within me.

My theological nit is with the fifth and sixth lines. When David penned these words some 1500 years before Christ, the threat of having the Holy Spirit taken from him was quite a real one; he had seen a similar thing happen to Saul when Saul rebelled against God. At that time the Holy Spirit didn’t indwell all those who believed in God, but God specifically directed the Spirit to rest on certain people at certain times. But now we’re after Pentecost, and so those that believe are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit remains as a seal of our salvation. We’re not in danger of having God take it away.

So on to my theological question. While I love the submissive attitude of the first part of this chorus, I have real questions about singing those two lines, because I think they represent a fear or concern that we shouldn’t have. Is this an appropriate distinction to make? Or am I being overly picky? Your thoughts are appreciated.

home again, home again...

I got back last night about 10:30 from another quick trip to Wichita, this time for DER Orientation. I can now officially function as a DER Candidate, which is, essentially… well, nothing from an official standpoint. I just get to review lots of stuff with the hope that as I learn and become more proficient, I can be appointed a full DER. It’ll likely be at least a year.

One upside to the trip was the time to do some reading. I should do full BookJournal posts on each of these, but I’ll summarize here now just to summarize. (Helpful, no?)

On the way down, I finished reading Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead. Brilliant. Maybe even better than Ender’s Game. That man knows how to write. (More on that later.)

After that, I finished up N.T. Wright’s What St. Paul Really Said. I thought it was also brilliant. His interpretation of Paul’s themes of justification, the righteousness of God, and the Gospel make a lot of sense. I went back and read through Romans after finishing Wright, and there were several places where lightbulbs went on. I’ll have to ponder this some more. One thing that bothers me a bit is his conclusion (and I’m putting it very roughly here) that Christ’s being Lord will result in the Church working to establish His kingdom here on earth. As I understand it, this is a pretty typical amillenial Reformed view of the end times, and I guess I just can’t get my dispensational brain around it. If any of my readers could suggest some good reading in that area, I’d be grateful.

The reading list isn’t done yet, folks. After N. T. Wright, I headed back for some fiction. So I read The Bourne Legacy, which is a new novel by Eric Lustbader written around Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne character. It was a pretty good book. The writing style was more like a contemporary spy thriller and much less like Ludlum, which was weird. But otherwise the story was good and appropriately muddled. Finished that book as we were pulling up to the terminal in Chicago on the way home.

Then I went back to non-fiction. Some time ago, Keith had recommended Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card as an excellent volume on how to write fiction. He was right, it is excellent. I’ve always had fleeting thoughts of doing some writing, but never really applied myself to it. (Who has the time?) But if I ever were to start, this book would become a primary text for me in helping develop good characters and plots. Card has good insights into what makes fiction work, and he expresses them fairly simply and with some good examples.

Now I’m back home and trying to catch up from missing a day and a half of work. Good times.

ain't it just like Mediacom...

It’s not unusual, in my experience, to receive calendars as gifts around Christmas-time from companies you do business with. We always get a desk calendar from our insurance agent which fits nicely on the desk downstairs. We receive a pretty one with Bible verses and inspirational sayings from a missions agency that we support. We got one from the Christian radio station this year that had pictures taken by listeners. Kinda cool. I’m sure we got a couple of others as well, I know we gave a Norman Rockwell one away to my Dad.

This year we also got one from our cable provider, Mediacom. It was rather audaciously titled “12 months of You”, but it appeared to be more like 12 months of them. There were a few coupons inside for free pay-per-view movies (which we never watch), and then the artwork for each month featured one of their cable channels. Color me less than excited.

But that wasn’t the best part. You see, most gift calendars come in late November or early December. Mediacom’s came on January 27th. January 27th! Apparently their 12 months of me is really only about 11 months… Unbelievable.

The Mediacom calendar is sitting in the recycle bin on my curb this morning, waiting to be picked up by the garbage man. Good riddance.