Gilbert & Sullivan & an embarassing admission

During an online conversation with Lydia this morning I was chiding for her unfamiliarity with Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Three Little Maids from School Are We”. Just to get everyone on the same page, here it is:

But then I got to thinking about my familiarity with Gilbert & Sullivan, which leads me to an embarrassing admission: most of my familiarity with the music of Gilbert & Sullivan comes from two sources: the movie Chariots of Fire, and the “Cape Feare” episode of The Simpsons.

In Chariots of Fire, as I recall, one of the main characters is interested in an actress who is playing one of the three little maids in The Mikado. There’s also a scene when the olympic team is traveling on the ship and they’re singing Gilbert & Sullivan songs around the piano. (The scene always sticks in my mind because the audio is just off - the piano chord sounds a split-second before the actor’s hand hits the keys.)

In The Simpsons, the villain Sideshow Bob tracks down the Simpson family (who were living on a houseboat in a witness relocation program), ties up the parents, and is just about to kill Bart. Bart stalls Sideshow Bob by challenging him to sing the entire score of The Pirates of Penzance H.M.S. Pinafore (thanks for the correction, Jamie!). Bob can’t resist the challenge and so sings and sings and sings while the boat floats down the river, into town, and to the authorities.

I really should take some time to become more familiar with these guys.

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.

Yet another reason I love my brother...

Lately I’ve had a quote from Chuck (a rather fun TV show on NBC Mondays) set as my IM status message. (Oh, it’s also at the top of my blog header.) In the show, Chuck complains that it’d never work to have a relationship with his hot love interest Sarah, because she’s a CIA agent, and he says he’d try calling her, and she wouldn’t be available because she’d be “off somewhere in Paraguay quelling revolution with a fork…” I loved it. What a great line.

So it’s been my IM status for a week or so now. And every time Ryan starts a chat, he starts it out this way: “viva! viva! viva!”. (The first time he followed up with “fork that!” :-) )

For Ryan, I have but three words, and I’ll even make ’em Spanish: ¡Si se puede!

Observations from the weekend

  • Your house doesn’t have to be amazingly clean to invite friends over.
  • Even if it was amazingly clean when the night starts, it won’t be when it ends. Not with 4 kids playing for three hours.
  • That’s OK. You can always clean up again.
  • Good food + good conversation = a great time.
  • Hearing friends’ back stories is fantastic.
  • When your friends read your blog, you have to try to remember which stories you’ve already blogged and thus shouldn’t re-tell.
  • We should do this more often.

The Church Search, Week 3

After deciding early in the week that Cedar Valley Bible was off our short list, we spent a lot of time talking about where we might go next. We know the other place we definitely want to try out is Maranatha Bible Church, so we tentatively decided last night that we’d head there this morning.

Then last night Laura decided she didn’t want to sleep. From 3:00 until 5:00 she was awake in our room at least four times. Needless to say, Becky and I didn’t get a lot of sleep. Finally Laura went to sleep and slept in until 8:00. As I write this at 9:15, Becky is still sleeping. Given that we’d need to leave the house in 30 minutes to get to Maranatha on time, I think we’ll be cashing it in this morning and giving it another shot next week. Part of me feels guilty for not getting to church; the other part of me is happy that we have the freedom to just rest when we need to. God is good.

Time for some piano music

I switched over from my usual podcasts and indie rock this morning to give some iPod love to a genre I’ve ignored far too much as of late: classical piano. To be more specific: Bach and Chopin. What a fantastic way to start the morning.

Now, I’ve spent innumerable hours over the past 20+ years with my backside on a piano bench and my fingers hacking away at some composer or another. And ever since I was a kid, let’s face it, I did a lot of hacking. Sure, I had assigned pieces that I was supposed to practice every day. But more often than not what I’d do is just play through those pieces once or twice, then put them down and move on to something far too hard for me, say, a Rachmaninoff piano concerto or a Chopin Ballade or something by Debussy. The weeks when I actually did practice my lesson, my teacher was always blown away by my progress. I wonder at times how well I would’ve progressed if I’d practice like he expected.

When you have small children, though, the amount of time available for you to practice the piano goes down quite a bit. First, they take up your time directly. Second, they go to sleep early and playing the piano would wake them up. So I haven’t done a lot of practicing in the past few years. Occasionally I’d pull out a book and hack through a little bit of Rachmaninoff, but that has been about it. If I get a chance to sit down at a piano somewhere else, I usually just improvise for a while, though it has been frightening just how much I remember of Beethoven Sonatas and Bach Fugues that I learned back in high school.

The other night I sat down at the piano after dinner and actually practiced a new piece. Rachmaninoff’s Polichinelle Op. 3 No. 4, if you really care. (You can hear Rachmaninoff himself perform it on YouTube.) It’s difficult enough that I can’t just sight read through it at full speed, but not so difficult that I get disheartened trying to practice. I am hoping that I can actually put a little time into it, commit it to memory, and eventually have something new to play on occasion, rather than just murdering a section from Chopin’s Ballade #1 like I usually do.

How I do love my piano music.

Short list got shorter

Well, we talked about it some more last night and agreed that Cedar Valley Bible Church is off our short list for the reasons I discussed earlier. So now we’re back to looking at our short list, figuring out where to head next. Not sure if we’ll visit Stonebridge one more week or skip down to the next church on the list.

More likely we’ll sit down with the phonebook, newspaper, or some other reference list and work through the short list again to figure out what places we might have missed… then we’ll go from there. Still praying for guidance on a daily basis.

Buffalo Chicken Dip recipe

Lydia asked for it, so here it is…

Ingredients

  • 2 (10 ounce) cans chunk chicken, drained - I prefer to boil a couple of chicken breasts and shred those in place of the canned chicken
  • 2 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, softened
  • 1 cup Ranch dressing
  • 3/4 cup pepper sauce, such as Franks® Red Hot®
  • 1 1/2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese

Instructions Heat chicken and hot sauce in a skillet over medium heat, until heated through. Stir in cream cheese and ranch dressing. Cook, stirring until well blended and warm.

Mix in half of the shredded cheese, and transfer the mixture to a slow cooker. Sprinkle the remaining cheese over the top, cover, and cook on Low setting until hot and bubbly. Serve with celery sticks and crackers or tortilla chips or, my favorite: Fritos Scoops.

An end-times deal-breaker

So yesterday afternoon I noted that the next church on our short list for visiting during the Church Search was probably Cedar Valley Bible Church. I know a few folks there, including the couple that has brought Andrew Peterson and company to town twice for concerts. I’ve been to a wedding there, too, and my overall impression was that the church might be a little further over into the conservative homeschooling culture than I’d be comfortable with, but then, it might be OK.

The only other note I’d made about Cedar Valley thus far was when perusing their Doctrinal Statement online, it seemed to me that they had a far more detailed and lengthy statement on the End Times than do most doctrinal statements I’ve read. A very literal, pre-trib, dispensational sort of end times view. Still, as of yesterday, the church was still on my short list.

Then last night I cruised on over to the Cedar Valley website again to check out Sunday morning service times, and I noted this link on the sidebar: “2008 Second Coming Conference”. That’s right, in November Cedar Valley Bible will be bringing in a special speaker from Friends of Israel to speak three times over two days. The topics:

  • “Close to Construction” - Presentation on the movement in Israel to rebuild the Temple and how it could fit into Bible prophecy.
  • “Pre-Tribulation Rapture” - A look at some different views of the rapture along with Biblical proof for the pre-tribulation position.
  • “Signs of the Times” - Biblical evidence that we are now living in the end times.

And that’s just about a deal-breaker for me. Let me explain a little bit why.

I grew up in what I’d consider a pretty standard set of evangelical churches. We attended a C&MA church for a while in Fremont, NE, then a Bible church in Granbury, TX. I got the basic dispensational teaching on the end times - basically, Left Behind without all the dramatic stuff that made LaHaye and Jenkins best-sellers. Imminent rapture, followed by a 7-year tribulation, followed by Christ’s return for 1000 years, followed by Satan being let loose again on the earth, followed by another clean-up and the ultimate destruction of the earth and creation of a new one, etc. Most of the time I was just confused by it. Maybe it was partly my practical engineering nature - we’re not gonna know what’s happening until it’s done, right? So who really cares?

I stayed basically in that theological position until reading N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope a year ago. In Surprised by Hope, Wright explains, among other things, the amillennial position on end times in a way that actually made sense to me. It turns out there is a whole ’nother way to interpret the passages in Peter, Thessalonians, and Revelation that I had never been introduced to. And that there were legitimate, reasonable Christians who believed it. Talk about an eye-opener. Since then I’ve read a couple of books by Kim Riddlebarger on amillennialism, which too have been helpful. At the moment I’d say I’m at the point of leaning toward an amillennial position, but feeling no need to be dogmatic about it. There are far more important things to get worked up about than the end times.

Which leads me to my end-times deal-breaker with Cedar Valley Bible. This (apparently second-annual) “Second Coming Conference” shows me that they’re very interested in being dogmatic about a pre-trib dispensational end-times viewpoint. And while I’m OK with them believing that (heck, Noelridge, Imago, and Stonebridge all have the word “premillennial” in their doctrinal statements), I’m not really OK with a church being dogmatic about it. That just won’t work for me.

Becky and I had a good talk about end-times stuff last night and why I feel this way about it. I don’t know that we’ve decided anything yet, but I’m really leaning toward taking Cedar Valley off our list.

[N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope at wtsbooks.com] [Kim Riddlebarger’s A Case for Amillennialism at wtsbooks.com] [Kim Riddlebarger’s The Man of Sin: Uncovering the Truth about the Antichrist at wtsbooks.com]

The Church Search, Week 2

Week 2 of the Church Search took us back to Stonebridge Church for the second week in a row. (We kinda figure it’ll take at least a few weeks at any given place to really be able to make some sort of reasonable judgment on things.) We got out the door five minutes earlier this morning, leaving at 8:30 for a 9:00 service. We were there in 15 minutes, but the child check-in desk was quite a bit crazy this morning, so we still ended up not getting in to the sanctuary until the worship band had just about finished the opening song. Hopefully they’ll get the check-in stuff figured out soon.

Some continued/revised impressions carrying on from last week:

  • The folks seem quite friendly, and I’m enthusiastic about the age range I see. There is a good spread of old, young, teenagers, and children.
  • A lot of the music is unfamiliar, but it’s pretty solid stuff. During each song I’d be wondering “man, where did this song come from?” and then the last slide would have the author’s name and I’d recognize it. The last song of the service was written by Bebo Norman and Mitch Dane and I thought hey, I’ve met Mitch, even had lunch with him. Kinda cool.
  • The worship team was a little bit scant this week - fewer vocalists, no keyboard player at all. Makes me wonder how many folks the worship pastor actually has signed up, if he’s struggling to get people. If we were there I’d like to participate, just not be leading the team.
  • Jeff Holland’s doppelganger of a young adult pastor was supposed to be preaching, but apparently came down with a nasty cold yesterday. So, the senior pastor got to wing it, but still gave us a good sermon on Psalm 23. Enjoyed it.
  • The one thing I’ll gripe about the sermon, and I hassled Richard at Noelridge for the same thing: pastors that somehow refuse to use contractions when preaching. So far as I know, there’s nothing particularly unholy about ‘couldn’t’, ‘won’t’, ‘don’t’, and the like, but Pastor Richard at Noelridge and Pastor Randy at Stonebridge both seem to banish them from their vocabulary as soon as they get behind the pulpit. Anybody else get that from their pastors?

Next week Stonebridge is doing their official dedication of the new building, and they’re expecting a LOT of folks. They’ve actually gone door-to-door to everyone within a one-mile radius of the church dropping off small gift bags and inviting folks to visit. If it’s gonna be that crazy, we’ll probably take next week to visit the next church on our list. Not exactly sure yet which church that’ll be, but I’m kinda guessing Cedar Valley Bible.

It may be a little early to come to conclusions about Stonebridge after only two weeks, but my interim conclusion is that I like it, a lot. There’s a lot of good things going on there, a lot of good attitudes about things I think are important, and good teaching coming from the pulpit. If all the churches we visit are this good, it’s gonna be a difficult decision.