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she's graduated!
This weekend was my sister Rebecca’s high school graduation. She’s the youngest of us 5 kids, and the only girl, which means she’s spoiled just a little. :-) She graduated in a class of 8 students from her christian school, and I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t quite proud of her. Anyway, here’s Rebecca the graduate.
Rebecca is normally quite a goofball and lots of fun; here she’s showing her more ornery side…
Andrew (our brother) is only 16 months older than Rebecca and they have always been best buddies. And they’re so cute! :-) (Andrew’s gonna bring the smackdown on me for that comment…)
This next one is all of us Hubbs kids except for Aaron, who is in Panama working with YWAM there. Sure wish he could’ve made it back! We do miss him. (l-r is Ryan, Rebecca, me, and Andrew)
This last one is from the party on Sunday - we had over 100 people at our house for a big party. At one point, we had volleyball, football, and soccer games all going on at the same point. It was a blast. Actually, there’s no games being played in this picture, but Rebecca is having fun with her niece (my daughter) Laura. That’s Rebecca’s friend April trying to duck out of the picture there in the background.
The one person I didn’t manage to get a picture of was Andrew’s girlfriend Amber. I did get to meet her, and I should say some nice things about her since she’ll probably be reading this post eventually. This is the first time I’ve met her, but she seems really nice, and for a girl who’s all of about 5'1", she plays a mean game of volleyball. I only spiked on her a couple times. :-)
Well that’s enough photos for now… hope you enjoyed them. It was a wonderful weekend.
Music, family style... for real.
Well, the long-awaited Sunday finally got here and I got to play keyboards in the worship team at my family’s church with my brother Andrew leading. It was awesome. It was his first time leading a worship band but he did a very good job. The set list was something like this:
- Blessed Be Your Name
- Be Glorified In Me
- Unfailing Love (a new Chris Tomlin song… very good, very singable)
- Draw Me Close
- Knowing You
- I Will Praise Him Still
Somewhere in there Andrew and Ryan (another of my brothers) and I did a special number, the old Steve Camp song Love That Will Not Let Me Go. It was fantastic.
I really enjoyed getting to play keys and sing backup on the team; I’ve been leading my own team for so long, it was fun to play second-fiddle. It was also really neat to see my brother pursue a dream of his, to lead the team. I’m sure he’ll be doing it again… and maybe one of these days I’ll get him to come down here and play on my team. :-)
Call me Mr. Fix-it
No, this isn’t a home-improvement post… It’s more of a dealing-with-being-a-man-and-an-engineer post. :-)
One of the things I’ve had to learn over the past almost 7 years of marriage is to resist my instinctual impulse to “fix” everything. It’s different than at work. At work, my job is being presented with problems and designing solutions. At home, it’s not so much that way. When my wife comes to me with a problem, most of the time she doesn’t want me to design an elegant solution to her problem… most of the time she just wants me to shut up and listen, sympathize with her pain/frustration/whatever, and give her a hug. Once the emotional part is over then she’s enough of an engineer, too, that we can both work out a good solution to the problem. Still, it’s dang hard to shut my mouth sometimes.
Another one lately that has prompted this internal “you don’t have to fix it” reminder has been observing a recent brouhaha played out at least a bit over the blogs and comments of my sister, my brother, his girlfriend, and some other assorted players. The big brother and engineer part of me wants to dive right in, take sides, give lots of advice, try to fix everything up so that they’re happy again. But then I think back to my high-school years… I had undue amounts of girl-anguish, people that I really disliked, frustrations with life, and the like. But nobody needed to come fix them for me… I needed to live through them, learn from them. God used them to work in my life.
I was reading in Lamentations this morning (kinda painful to read, to be honest) and I was struck by how the prophet says God allowed all this pain and anguish of His people so that they would learn a lesson and repent. Read it again sometime. It’s a short book, but there’s a lot of painful descriptions there. Life would not have been fun for the Israelites who lived through the fulfillment of that prophecy. But then in the same little book, we get the reminder - God’s mercies are new every morning, great is His faithfulness.
So Andrew, Rebecca, Amber, if you’re reading this - I’ll give my two cents’ worth of advice right here, and be done with it. :-) Love God and pursue Him above all else. As far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men. Live life one day at a time, and remember that today is only one day of maybe 30,000 in your whole life. There’s plenty left to be lived.
I've been replaced by a machine!
At least for Sunday, that is… I was unable to wrangle up a musician for the Sunday service, so my next option is to record my piano-playing on the electronic keyboard, so they can just play it back on Sunday. How lame is that? (I am humongously opposed to using recorded music in a church service, pretty much just because it can cause so much trouble for anyone who loses their place, it seems artificial, etc. Live accompaniment is always better.) Anyhow, it’s a nice Roland keyboard with a disk drive built in, so I’ll be recording the tracks and then they can play them back live… it’s at least better than recording on audio tape and playing it back. :-)
I’m sure it’ll end up uncoordinated and kind of lame on Sunday, but unfortunately I can’t really help that. We need more musicians!
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:
- 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,
- 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!