I need a musician...

…any musician. One of the downsides of being the music leader at a small church is that it’s hard to find a replacement when you’re going to be gone. I have a couple people who are on the usual list to back me up… one guitarist and one pianist. Usually at least one of them will be available. Well, I’m out of town this weekend for my sister’s graduation. The guitarist is also out of town this weekend. The pianist is watching 4 of her grandkids all weekend and doesn’t have the time she needs to practice. Our bass player who might be able to fill in on guitar in a pinch is also out of town. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do… they may be singing a capella on Sunday.

There’s one other possibility that someone mentioned - a recent attender who is rumored to be a piano teacher. However, I’ve never talked to her about playing for a service, and I’m not sure of her skill level, (or even if she’s actually a piano teacher). So, I’m fairly uncomfortable making a phone call that will go something like this: “Hi, I’m Chris from Noelridge, remember me? I know you haven’t been to church in a couple weeks, but I heard a rumor you might be a piano teacher and so I’m wondering if you’d like to play the piano for church this week and by the way practice is tomorrow night…” Not a real good option in my book. Well, it’ll work out somehow. I will get out of town this weekend.

a busy month...

Well that personality thing was kinda boring, wasn’t it? You, reader, deserve a real, human-written post, and I am now here to give it to you.

My day was brightened this morning when I realized that, after this week, I will only have 5 more days of work for the month of May. Vacation is a glorious thing. :-) This weekend I’m taking one day off to go to Wisconsin for my sister’s high school graduation. I’ll come back on Monday and work Tuesday through Friday (May 17-20) and then I’m taking the next week off. Four of us from church are going to the Moody Pastor’s Conference in Chicago. (No, it’s not for moody pastors - it’s for pastors, and it’s at Moody. :-))

Now, my readers of a Reformed theological persuasion might be wincing at this mention of a non-Reformed institute and conference, but I am much looking forward to it; the conference opens with a message from Ravi Zacharias, and is bookended with a closing message from Tony Evans. I am sure that the middle presentations will be excellent as well. So, that runs Monday evening through Thursday evening. Then it’s back home for Memorial Day weekend. Whew!

Sometime in there, I’ll try to get the new projector installed, too… I’m ordering it today.

Well that’s the fun news and calendar update from Chris’ s life. I hope you enjoyed it. :-)

making music, family style

OK, I’m excited. I just finished talking to my brother Andrew. He is almost 19, has been playing on the worship team at his church (Richland Center Fellowship, Richland Center, Wisconsin) for a while now, and has the opportunity to lead the worship service in a couple weeks… on the Sunday that the rest of the family is going to be visiting!

We have a musical family. Dad was a music education major, Mom minored in voice, and all of us 5 kids play at least 1 instrument, some of us several. We did occasional special music and such growing up, and I really miss the chances to do stuff with them. We know so much of the same music that it’s ridiculous.

Quick picture to paint: we’re all home at Christmastime, and I’m sitting in the living room just goofing around on my guitar with Caedmon’s Call’s Hands of the Potter. My brother Aaron (age 21) is working on installing a cat door in the porch door, I didn’t even think he’s paying attention, and as I get to the chorus, he just kicks in singing the backup part. It was way too cool.

Anyhow, Aaron is off in Panama doing missions, but Ryan (age 25) and Andrew and I will all be around on that Sunday, and the plan is that we will all help out with the worship time, playing and singing. This is exciting for multiple reasons; first, to get to play music with those guys again is a treat. Second, I’m the worship leader of a church of 150 or so rather subdued worshippers (God’s “frozen chosen” :-)). We’ll be leading at a church of 400 or so more energetic types. Thirdly (and maybe this should be first, priority-wise), I get to help encourage Andrew in his quest to head down a similar path as I’ve gone down, to use his musical talents as a worship leader. That will be the best part, for sure.

I suppose I should get back to work now, but excitement like this needs someplace to be poured out, even if it is just to a window in WordPress. :-)

"energy dependence"

Another day, another NRO column to comment on. Today it’s Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren arguing on the “myths” of energy independence. They have some interesting views on the subject, noting that:

  1. it’s a global marketplace, so the amount of oil we import vs the amount of oil we produce doesn’t affect the price - only the global quantity on the market affects the price

and,

  1. it wouldn’t be wise to totally cut ourselves off from the foriegn oil market, because a limited domestic production is easier for terrorists to strike than a distributed (global) production.

Now, they’re good libertarians from the Cato Institute, so their answer is to quit subsidizing the fuel situation, and just let the free market play itself out. I’m not so sure I agree with this; part of me would like to see a “Manhattan Project”-style effort to develop a usable alternative fuel system. But their comments about the global oil market make the article worth a read.

softball starts tonight!

Our first softball game of the season is tonight. I’m soooo much looking forward to it. It’ll be nasty conditions for playing - probably 50 degrees and a 20 mph wind. But that’s not the point - it’s just great to be out playing.

I’ll have the additional fun of getting to umpire the early game - in our league it’s recreational enough that we don’t have paid umps, instead each team that plays the early game supplies somebody to ump for the late game, and vice versa. I enjoy the umping at least as much as the playing…. weird.

Hopefully Laura doesn’t freeze tonight out with us; if she’s getting cold, it’ll be up to me to keep track of her so Becky can keep playing. The joys of spring softball in Iowa - we had flurries here this morning! :-)

zzzzzzzzz.....

OK, so it’s Friday afternoon, and I’m bored. I’ve hit the end of the task list for work today, and nobody else has updated their blogs to give me something to read… so I post this whiny entry with the knowledge that in 30 minutes my weekend will begin. I guess I’ll make it. :-)

Tonight we’re going to our favorite coffeehouse, Brewed Awakenings to hear a friend perform. He’s a heck of a singer, doesn’t do any originals, but covers everybody from Dylan and the Beatles to John Denver to James Taylor to Crash Test Dummies… good times.

Then Saturday will be a work day at home, maybe I’ll get done last weekend’s projects… then Sunday is typical church stuff, and the Monday starts the softball season! I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks. Sounds like it’ll be chilly for the first game (in the 50’s) but that just makes it more fun.

Well that’s all for now… have a great weekend!

The war by? on? Christians in America...

Stanley Kurtz has an excellent (if a bit long) column today discussing the current edition of Harper’s Magazine - cover story: “The Christian Right’s War on America”.

He argues that by accusing the “Christian Right” of being hateful and “at war with America”, Harper’s (as just one participant in a trend by the media) is themselves promoting “hatred” of a group… the Christian Right. He writes:

According to Harper’s, conservative Christians are making “war on America.” Can you imagine the reaction to a cover story about a “war on America” by blacks, gays, Hispanics, or Jews?

It’s worth reading the whole article.

bleary eyed

I know I owe everybody a blog post (it’s been a couple days… time to keep writing) but it’s been pretty slow around here lately. My latest task at work has been to manually compare two 200-ish-page documents and mark all the changes. (At this point, the geeks reading this are asking “why manually diff it when you could use a tool?” The answer is, I’m looking for functional differences, not trivial wording differences. Ugh.) I finally finished that up this morning but my eyes are a little bleary now and I know more about this next new airplane than I really wanted to.

I did some fun website stuff last night for my RecMinUsa site… my pastor (who runs RecMinUsa) wants to be able to update the “upcoming events” page without having to look at HTML. So, I created a formatted text file that he can update, and then a perl script to post-process the text file and merge it with an HTML template to create the page. It seems to work OK… hopefully I kept it simple enough. :-)

I read some more of Peterson’s Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places last night. I’m to the point in the book where he’s talking about how Christ “plays” in community. I’m still organizing my thoughts on the topic, but it’s good stuff. I’ll have to devote a post to it when I get the time to think.

Well that’s the 8:45 news from Iowa… kind of boring, huh? Sorry. Come back again, it’ll be more interesting next time. I promise.

sticking to our guns

Ned Rice has a great column today on NRO where he makes a strong argument that the folks whining about the lack of liberalism in the new pope should suck it up, think about what they’re saying, take their beliefs (and the church’s beliefs) seriously, and then pack it up and leave if they’re really that unhappy. The column deals specifically with the Roman Catholic church, but I think the ideas are applicable to any person complaining about their church’s beliefs.

The whole column is worth reading, but I’ll copy a few of the choice lines here.

…a truly liberal Holy Father might have moved the Church towards the proverbial, doctrinal hat trick: allowing actively gay men to be Catholics, then ordaining them as priests, and then allowing them to marry their male partners. There’s a name for churches that condone that sort of thing, and that name is “Episcopalian.”

…if you believe that your church was literally founded by the Son of God, based on principles he personally handed down to His followers (as Catholics do), why would you make your church’s doctrine conveniently open to revision by its flock? It’s like deliberately designing a bucket with holes in it, then wondering why it won’t hold any water.

So if you think this or any other pope is just plain wrong on celibacy or homosexuality or anything else big, and this upsets you so much it interferes with your spiritual life, you’d be well advised to find yourself another church. Otherwise you’re like the orthodox Jew who, in light of recent developments, has taken it upon himself to decide that it’s all right for him to eat pork. You can be an orthodox Jew, and you can eat pork. You’re free to do either one. But folks, you just can’t do both. There are names for Catholics who don’t accept that they can’t do certain things and still receive the sacraments, and one of those names is Senator John Kerry.

And last but not least…

Warning of the “tyranny of relativism” that’s become so pervasive, Cardinal Ratzinger argued that it’s better to be guided by time-honored principles of morality than to be endlessly buffeted about by the myriad whims of conventional wisdom in the name of “freedom.” With the clear implication being, if you don’t like these principles the rest of us here have agreed to live by, maybe this isn’t the Church for you. Or as my Dad used to say during dinner, if you don’t like what we’re serving here, try next door.

Good stuff.

slowly getting more out of touch...

I have this “movies I’ve watched recently” link section on the side of the blog. I intended to list movies that I saw in the theater or on DVD. If you’re a regular reader, you will have noted that it hasn’t changed in quite some time.

I noted a progression yesterday while talking with Becky. We were thinking of renting Meet The Fockers, but decided to just watch something recorded on the Tivo instead. The progression goes something like this:

  • Back before we had Laura we’d go watch movies in the theater.
  • Once Laura was born, we’d wait until they came out on DVD.
  • Now that we got our Tivo, we’ll end up waiting until the movie gets shown on TV. :-)

I will have to break this chain for some movies; obviously when the new Star Wars movie comes out I’ll be watching it in the theater. But as a whole, I feel myself slipping more and more into behind-the-times oblivion, at least as far as pop culture goes. Oh well. It’s not always bad to be out of touch. :-)