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Chris​Hubbs​.com

Avionics engineer by day, web and tech nerd by night.

personal

    ∞

    Am I coming or going?

    I looked at the calendar today and it said July, and I thought surely that has to be a mistake. July already? Where has the time gone? Then I reviewed. Since the beginning of May, here’s what my weeks have looked like:

    • NHD State Competition in Des Moines + one day work offsite
    • Two days of work travel to Minnesota
    • Three days of work travel to DC
    • Three days of vacation for HS graduation activities
    • Memorial Day holiday week
    • Three day work offsite
    • Full week of vacation - NHD nationals in DC
    • Half week of vacation - DC trip
    • Full week in the office (finally!)

    Now this week is a holiday-shortened work week and then I’m gonna be out of office Monday/Tuesday next week for college orientation in Nebraska. Then I have five, count ‘em, five regular summer work weeks before taking Anwyn to college for move-in. Then high school starts for Katie, we’re down to just one kid in the house (oof) and it’s fall.

    I am not ready for this.

    ∞

    The State of my Task Management, 2024

    As a new year begins and I settle into a new-ish position at work, it has been time to again rethink my task management strategy.

    Let’s set out the constraints first. My work computing ecosystem is a highly-constrained Windows laptop. My employer doesn’t provide any sort of task management software, and restricts any data flow between company devices and personal devices. I have access to my work email and calendar on my personal device, but it’s very hard to move data back and forth between domains.

    Historically I haven’t really used task management apps. I have downloaded free ones and purchased paid ones on occasion, tried them out for a week or two, and then fell away from them one I got comfortable enough with the new task or role that the overhead of using the tool outweighed the benefit it provided me. I use my email inbox as my primary to-do list. If an email is still in the inbox, it means I need to take action on it. I like to use the inbox “snooze” function when I can to dismiss the email from my inbox and bring it back at some scheduled later date, but unfortunately “snooze” only works on the web version of Outlook, not the app versions, so I rarely use it. The upside of this is that I always have all my pending tasks staring me in the face. The downside of this is that I always have all my pending tasks staring me in the face.

    I paid for Things on my iPhone and iPad a few years ago and have largely neglected them. But right now I have just enough different and new things on my plate between work and church that I need a coordinated reminder system to help make sure I don’t forget something. So last week I jumped back into Things, added a few categories and a couple dozen tasks, put a widget on my iPad Home Screen, and decided to give it a go.

    I’m sure I cribbed my basic pattern for using Things from Rands but I have no idea which post. It works like this:

    1. During the day, as new to-dos come up, dump them into the Things inbox with as little overhead as possible.
    2. Every morning, triage that Inbox, assign due dates to things that need them, and file them appropriately into projects.
    3. Every morning, after triage, see what’s in Today. If there’s enough to keep me busy all day, I’m done. If I have some extra bandwidth, review the “Someday” tasks to see if there’s so thing to pull into Today.
    4. Start working and checking off tasks once they’re completed!

    I’ve been working this way for a couple weeks now and I think it might take this time. I really enjoy being able to just quickly dump a to-do onto my phone when I think of it, knowing that I’ve already got a plan for reviewing it later. I have also unexpectedly enjoyed not having all my to-dos staring me in the face. By doing the triage and scheduling tasks, I have a level of comfort in knowing that whatever is on my Today widget on my iPad is all I need to worry about today. I’ve had a couple small panics so far where I jump into the Upcoming view to make sure I do have some particular task scheduled, but I suppose that’ll fade as I start getting more consistent with using Things every day.

    ∞

    A short note on Travel Planning

    I have found myself, since returning home from Washington, DC in mid-December, without any travel on my calendar. Normally I travel a half-dozen times per year for work, meaning usually at any given point I’ve got something at least on the calendar. But right now? Nope.

    That may be changing here in the next week or two, with a new possible travel destination for me: York, UK. Somehow I’ve been to Europe 8 or 9 times but never to the UK. I’d be happy to add it to my list!

    ∞

    Reviewing Two Decades of My Thoughts

    A big chunk of effort in migrating the blog was going through each post to review and clean up content. On the technical side, I started by using a conversion tool that took the Wordpress data dump and transformed it into Markdown files. It was good as far as it went. But it was only so good. I ended up touching every post back to 2004, tagging, cleaning up formatting, improving links when possible, removing them when they were super-dead, etc. It took a while. But it gave me the opportunity to review my own progression of thought and growth in a way I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to, and that made it well worth it. Today I want to review some impressions this review left on me.

    Post Content and Strategy

    Man, back in the early years I posted a lot. Almost every day for a while, or at least multiple times a week. I started this blog a solid two years before Twitter went live or Facebook became available for non-students, and I used it for a lot of mundane life updates that would eventually move over to FB and Twitter. Once I started engaging on those platforms (and particularly Twitter), my blog posting tailed off to something closer to its current state - roughly one post per week at most.

    One thing hasn’t changed so much: I post a lot about books I’m reading. I have written year-in-review blog posts since 2007. My books tag has 165 posts. At times I tried to post about every single book I read; now I’m doing that in short form over on my books site and only summarizing and sharing highlights here. Still reading lots of Christian thought and theology, too. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

    Evolution of thought

    I grew up in a very conservative, nay, fundamentalist Christian household. Those lessons stuck with me long into adulthood. To steal a hopefully-not-too-outdated term from the youths, wow, a lot of my old content is cringe. To be gentle with myself: I was doing my best to fit in and emulate the examples of good Christian people that I saw and read. And boy, I was good at it. The evangelical-ese just dripped from my tongue. I was super-earnest (good, I guess) and super-presumptuous that I had it figured out (not so good).

    I was not always an LGBTQIA-affirming person. I didn’t write anything super-offensive even in my non-affirming days, but I was very clearly non-affirming. You can see cracks starting to form in that wall back as early as 2007 when I pondered whether the church should be fighting same-sex marriage. In 2008 I was reading a bunch of Andrew Sullivan, and was more convinced that same-sex civil marriage should be OK. By 2014 I was fully uncertain what I thought about trans issues, but was sure that we shouldn’t be breaking bruised reeds. I was at heart fully affirming sometime before the COVID era, but I’m sad it took until 2022 for me to publicly post about it.

    My journey through and eventually out of evangelicalism was clearly also a search for heroes I could latch onto. Sadly, my posting chronicles how one by one they have fallen. John Piper (eek). Mark Driscoll. Matt Chandler. More recently, and less notably, but still: John G. Stackhouse. I listened to them, quoted them, looked up to them… and then watched them fall by the wayside. Their less-famous acolytes championed so many others that also went off the rails: Mahaney, MacDonald, Mohler. Maybe this accelerated my departure from evangelicalism as much as anything.

    I still have a long way to go to undo the tangled mess of my childhood fundamentalism, but I’m happy to see progress. We’ll see what another 20 years bring.

    Random thoughts and Surprises

    1. If you’d asked me who was most influential in my theological evolution by default I’d say N. T. Wright. But if you look back through 20 years of blog posts, another name rises to the surface: Richard Beck. I guess if you need a complement to an Anglican bishop, a Texan Church of Christ psychology professor is a good fit. My nerd self has a ton of respect for the fact that Beck has been blogging on Blogspot since God only knows when and only recently added a Substack since nobody except me uses RSS any more.
    2. There is one song whose lyrics I quoted probably more than all other songs combined: Rich Mullins' “Land of My Sojourn”. Amusingly enough, I don’t have those lyrics memorized. I quoted them first as early as 2005 and as recently as 2017 and I’m sure I’ll pull them out again before long.
    3. There have been friends along the way who are, amazingly, still there and still influential, many of whom I have met in-person rarely or never. We owe Geof (RIP) for being the community leader and glue who brought us together, and I’m not sure any of us will appropriately uphold his legacy. I risk disappointing many by naming any, but two must be named here. Kari (whom I have never met in person but someday simply must), a children’s- librarian-turned-ordained-Baptist-minister who gave me an example of what a Christian feminist looks like, and who always had a timely encouraging word even when I was much more stubborn and conservative than I am now. And then there’s Dan. Have we really only met up that once? Dan is my Canadian brother-from-another-mother, homeschool kid, pianist, sometime worship leader, programmer, armchair theologian, and, most importantly, the inventor of the bullet points format that I adopted. Before we met in person I thought there’s no way this guy could really be this awesome in person. Then we met and I found out I was wrong. One of these days, my friend, we’ll meet again.

    Wrapping up

    I’ll write a proper 20-year anniversary post when October 2024 comes. In the mean time, I’m glad I had the chance for this retrospective.

    Life, man.

    ∞

    On LGBTQIA+ Affirmation

    June 2022 was quite a month for me. It started with the death of a long-time friend. It ended with my being on a phone call with my father while he experienced a stroke-like event. (Turns out: not a stroke. He’s home, and doing ok. Hallelujah.) In the middle was a thing called Pride Month, which had a little more visibility at our home than usual. Two of my kids identify as LGBTQIA+ and have embraced visibility more this year than ever before. (I got their permission to say this here.) So, one of these things is not like the other, but stick with me here and I’ll connect the dots.

    Part 1: Online Community

    Since Geof died last month, the online community he fostered for nearly 20 years (referred to as “RMFO” for reasons long since forgotten) has been renewed. I have hosted two Zoom “happy hour” calls, and both times 15-20 people have joined, chatted for 2-3 hours, and left with a request that we schedule another one. We have spent these hours catching up on life and recounting our own personal histories as they interact with the RMFO community: singles who met their future spouses in the group; couples once struggling to conceive who now have teenagers; marriages, divorces, job changes, moves, faith evolutions. Online friendships have led to “real-life” friendships, meet-ups, and job opportunities. At the end of the first call I realized that, while I had long considered many of these people meaningful to me, the call helped me realize that I was meaningful to them, too. My thought last week as I closed out the second call: this is the closest thing I’ve had to a healthy, functioning community in my adult life.

    During last week’s call I talked about how my own personal views on some issues have evolved over the years, and how I have struggled to find an in-person community (specifically, a church community) where that evolution was welcome. Share those views too loudly and you will be welcome to find some other church to serve and worship at. Five years of quiet discomfort weren’t enough to dislodge me from my last church; their tepid COVID response was the straw that gave me the courage to break the proverbial camel’s back. Two years later I still haven’t found a new place to join. If I’m honest, I haven’t really looked too hard.

    Part 2: My Dad

    My dad is talking a little slower thanks to the medications he’s on after his health scare, but he’s not talking any less. When we talked last week after he got home from the hospital, we spent a while comparing current reading lists and discussing how some of the books I have given him over the years have helped guide his journey out of a fundamentalist faith into something much more open and gracious. That’s his story to tell, not mine. But what he said toward the end of the call stuck with me: that coming close to death now makes him unwilling to stay quiet on the topics important to him. And I thought to myself: that’s a lesson I should take to heart here in my 40s.

    Part 3: Chuck Pearson

    Chuck Pearson is a friend of one of the RMFO guys — someone I have never met but have followed on Twitter for years. Last week he posted a beautiful essay about his journey leaving a tenured professorship at a Southern Baptist university when he knew he would eventually be required to sign a “personal lifestyle statement” that would “[force] him to disown his LGBTQ+ friends and family”. Chuck ultimately found a post at another university, but still sat quiet about the topic of LGBTQ+ inclusion:

    Ultimately, it stayed private because I didn’t want to burn those bridges. Even as I made that realization that I had to choose between two sides I cared about deeply, I couldn’t bring myself to take that final step of declaring my choice.

    In his essay, Chuck quotes from an Alan Jacobs essay from 2014 that argues for Christians to stand firm against the cultural evolution of views on sexuality. Here is Jacobs' conclusion [preserving the emphasis from the original post]:

    Either throughout your history or at some significant point in your history you let your views on a massively important issue be shaped largely by what was acceptable in the cultural circles within which you hoped to be welcome. How do you plan to keep that from happening again?

    Clearly Jacobs has in mind a call to resist the desire to be welcomed by “the world” by accepting “worldly” views on sexuality. But for me his question takes the exact opposite orientation. How long have I been convinced about full acceptance of LGBTQIA+ people in the church but been afraid to say so, knowing that it would make me unwelcome in the evangelical church circles I have run in my entire life? Far too long.

    Conclusion

    So let me make a long-overdue statement as clearly as I can. I am a Christian, and I affirm those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual as they are, unconditionally, including their full inclusion into the assembled body of Christ known as the local church. I know there are those who would say I cannot hold that view and be a Christian. I reject that assertion.

    There are multiple serious approaches to the Scripture on the topic which I will not go into here. Suffice it for now to say that you cannot read Scripture as a flat text. It is the product of thousands of years of God’s progressive revelation as understood and recorded by humans. In the end you have to come to some conclusion on which texts capture most clearly the essence of who God is, and use those as the framework from which to understand the rest.

    And so, to quote Brian Zahnd:

    God is like Jesus.
    God has always been like Jesus.
    There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus.
    We have not always known what God is like—
    But now we do.

    Jesus taught these two principles in summation of all the teaching: love God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself. He embraced the outsiders and rebuked the self-righteous. He called us to follow Him in lives of self-sacrificial love.

    In addition to Jesus’ teaching, we have the witness of the Holy Spirit in the lives of our LGBTQIA+ brothers and sisters — so many dear, tender souls who consistently model what it means to follow Jesus, even in the midst of a church that rarely welcomes them. And to that I can only respond as the Apostle Peter did after first seeing the conversion of Gentiles to Christ: “Can anyone object to their being baptized, now that they have received the Holy Spirit just as we did?” (Acts 10:47)

    Rachel Held Evans summarized it this way: “The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget—that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out but who it lets in.”

    To this I say: Amen. May it be so.

    ∞

    An Easter 2021 Meditation

    This last year has felt a lot like death.

    We’ve had a pandemic sweep the world, and in this country had our leaders fail to lead, instead spreading rumors and assigning blame. Hundreds of thousands are unnecessarily dead. We’ve necessarily stayed cut off from work, family, friends, school, church, and travel plans to protect ourselves and each other. It feels a lot like death.

    We left our church last year. This year I‘ve been watching as the evangelical church in America consistently chooses the hope of political power over truth and justice. Chooses to side with abusers rather than victims. Chooses to marginalize women in the name of Biblical literalism. Chooses to persecute LGBTQIA people rather than love and accept them. Chooses “personal freedom” rather than taking basic steps to protect others amid the pandemic. It feels a lot like death.

    In August last year we had a derecho destroy our city. The majority of our tree canopy is gone. Everyone had house damage. Our power was out for almost two weeks. Eight months later, I don’t have to drive further than my own street to see houses still missing siding and fences, roofs with tarps where shingles should be. In my own yard where three old friendly trees once stood, all that remains are ragged scars and chips left by a hurried stump grinder. It feels a lot like death.

    There are other stories too personal to post. Stories that aren’t mine to tell. Stories that have kept us awake at night, on the floor in desperation, in helpless gnawing realization of things that aren’t alright. That has often felt a lot like death.

    This is the first Easter in my memory that I haven’t been to church to celebrate. That, too, feeels like death.

    Somehow, through all this, Jesus still holds on to me. I don’t know how. Even after I put away the fear wrought by legalism, after the habits are ripped away, after the culture that taught me Jesus for 40 years has turned from Him in the name of power and freedom, Jesus is still there. Faithfully loving and sustaining me. Faithfully promising that, in the end, this mess will be redeemed.

    In this year that has felt a lot like death I will cling to the hope that Jesus is risen. Somehow, He feels a lot like life.

    ∞

    Psalm 126

    1 When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
        we were like those who dream.
    2 Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
        and our tongue with shouts of joy;
    then it was said among the nations,
        “The Lord has done great things for them.”
    3 The Lord has done great things for us,
        and we rejoiced.

    Psalm 126 has been chasing me around this past year. I read it shortly after the COVID shutdowns started in March 2020. Our church had just stopped meeting in person on Sundays. I was the music ministry leader, and I made a mental note to remember this passage for when we started meeting again. Once things got back to normal, I thought, that first Sunday back would indeed feel like a dream, with good cause to rejoice.

    Three months later our church’s insistence on a mask-optional reopening was the last straw in a multi-year struggle over whether to stay. I resigned from my music ministry duties and let the pastor know we’d be looking for a new church once things reopened.

    It’s now January 2021 and we’re still waiting.

    4 Restore our fortunes, O Lord,
        like the watercourses in the Negeb.
    5 May those who sow in tears
        reap with shouts of joy.

    This past summer a friend invited us to join their church group’s Zoom meetings. They’ve been a godsend this year — a regular time of discussion, prayer, and Bible study with some likeminded people. It’s not the same as a local in-person meeting, but I’m already anticipating the loss when they start meeting in person again and the Zoom is no longer available to us.

    2020 was hard for lots of reasons, in lots of ways; some of them public, some personal. One Monday last month during Advent, the pastor of our online group had us read this psalm. It felt different. There’s still a lot of going out weeping, a lot of sowing tears. We’re still in verses 4 and 5. Searching for hope, praying for joy on the other side of all this sadness. It’s January. The days are short and cold. I always feel fragile in January; this year even more so.

    At this point in a post like this there are traditionally some words of hope, something about spring coming and things getting better. But I don’t really have those words in my heart today.

    I’m thankful there’s still a verse left in the psalm.

    6 Those who go out weeping,
        bearing the seed for sowing,
    shall come home with shouts of joy,
        carrying their sheaves.

    ∞

    First Day of School, 2020

    It’s hard for me to express how big a deal today is for my household. Back in January we first floated the idea with an unmotivated daughter that switching from home school to public school might be a good step. She was very excited. In late February we went to an open house at the local high school and then in early March we got her registered for fall classes.

    Two weeks later, COVID shut everything down and the spring and summer became a long slog. For months we’ve been holding on to the lifeline of knowing that in late August school would start and we would get some structure back. The school district instituted a 50/50 virtual/in-person scheme that would have the kids at school at least a couple days a week. We bought school supplies and marked our calendars.

    Then in mid-August, a week before school was set to start, the derecho hit. We were 11 days without power. And almost every school building in the district was damaged. The girls' high school lost part of its roof and sustained significant water damage to the gym, auditorium, and much of the rest of the building. School got delayed by another month, and will be 100% virtual until January at the earliest.

    But finally… today is the day. At 7:50 AM the first class hour started and our middle daughter was logged into Google Meet with 19 other tired-looking freshmen (freshpeople? first years?) to start her German class. (Our oldest daughter had first hour off but is now logged in for second hour.)

    It’s been a long year, friends. Today is just one day, just a start, but it’s a significant milestone. And there are better days to come.

    (Oh, and it’s September 21, so we started the morning with this song…)

    www.youtube.com/watch

    ∞

    "Get Freed"

    The other day I posted a belated review and recommendation of Lyz Lenz’s book God Land. Today I’d like to tell the story of why this review was delayed a year.

    Lyz is, as I am, from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. We have some small personal connection. Her (now ex-)husband works for the same huge employer that I (and 8000 other people in town) do. We have some of the same friends. And for a short time a decade or so ago, we attended the same church. That last bit is what made this whole thing complicated.

    God Land is about religion in the Midwest, liberally strewn with Lyz’s stories from her own life. In the first chapter of the book, she recounts bad experiences at a church where she and her husband were members. She wanted to discuss women’s roles within the church. She got brushed off by one pastor with a series of nebulous promises that it could be discussed later. Later, on a mission trip, another pastor refused to let her lead prayer during morning devotions, saying it wasn’t a woman’s place to do so. Eventually she and her husband left that church to join a church plant. (The Guardian published a long excerpt from that chapter if you want to read it.)

    A year ago, when reading and reviewing the book, I was still a member of that church. Not only that, I was being paid to lead the music ministry. So when I published my review on Goodreads early on a Monday morning and it got auto-tweeted on my feed, before lunchtime I had a phone call from the new senior pastor telling me that, as a church “staff member” (the first time anyone had called me that!) I shouldn’t be recommending the book. It was gossip, he told me, and I shouldn’t be spreading it. I wasn’t ready to die on that hill that day, so I discussed it with him for a little while and then deleted the tweet. But it still really bugged me.

    No one that I’ve talked to has disputed the broad strokes of Lyz’s stories about our church. She privately told me the same basic stories a few years before. In the book she changes the names of the pastors and doesn’t name the church, but if you’ve been in the Cedar Rapids evangelical church scene very long you can probably guess who they are. I’ve been told by others in the know that the events she described on the mission trip did indeed happen that way. And I’ve heard second hand from the other pastor that he didn’t remember his episode “quite that way”, but didn’t dispute the basic facts. (He did confirm Lyz’s note that he has tried reach out again to her on several occasions, and that she hasn’t responded.)

    So if the accounts are basically true, why should their mention be suppressed? If someone hasn’t read the book or doesn’t know the people, they won’t be any the wiser. If someone has read the book and does know the people, trying to suppress the discussion only makes it look like the church has something to hide. Why can’t we just speak honestly about it? I count the pastors involved as friends, and I love the people of that church. I don’t want to hurt them. But suppressing truth, even painful truth, isn’t beneficial. Better to acknowledge and learn from mistakes than try to pretend they didn’t happen.

    Back last year when the book came out I attended a reading & signing that Lyz did at a local bookstore. During the Q&A after the reading I mentioned that I, too, was trying to figure out if or when my route should lead me out of the evangelical churches where I’ve spent most of my life. Later on that night when she signed my copy of the book, she wrote this message inside: “To the Hubbs' — get freed!”

    I don’t feel that implied level of joy from having left our last church. While I have significant disappointments, I don’t feel any personal animus toward any of those church folks. I feel like we left on good terms. But I am glad to now feel free enough to tell this story. Truth will out. Sure, truth can be spoken in ways that are harmful. But speaking the truth peaceably, in love, is a necessity for the church to become the loving, safe community God intends for it to be. This bit of truth from me is overdue.

    ∞

    Ten Years

    Note: I originally wrote this post in January 2019. 18 months later we made the decision to leave this church. It feels like now it’s time to let this post see the light of day.

    We were ten years at our first church out of college.

    After those ten years we recognized that we had poured ourselves into the church to the point of exhaustion. I was leading the worship ministry; my wife was leading behind the scenes doing meals, funerals, kitchen stuff - the practical glue that holds a small church together. We had two kids and a third on the way. I had a full-time job outside of the church. It was just too much.

    We went around and around trying to figure out how to lighten the ministry load without throwing it off altogether. When I tried to shed tasks my pastor would tell me that he sympathized, but that the church just needed me, that I was almost indispensable, and that they would be in a bad place if I quit.

    We watched our handful of real friends at church move out of town or to other churches. When we finally decided the only way to get out was to, well, get out, I found that the pastor who I thought was my friend really cared more about the ministry than about me. The day he called to ask how it was going and I told him that I was leaving the church, he said he wanted to sit down and talk about it… but he didn’t have time in his schedule until two weeks later. Maybe he was just cutting his losses.

    We landed at another church, a bigger one this time, where it’d be harder for us to become indispensable. Our new church had a full-time worship pastor. He listened to my tale of burnout and was protective of my schedule. We developed what felt like a friendship - at least, we’d meet for lunches semi-regularly where we talked about life and ministry for 2 - 3 hours at a go. (Is that what passes for friendship when you’re an adult?)

    18 months ago the creative and philosophical differences between the worship pastor and me got great enough that, no matter how much we discussed them, I just couldn’t stay on board. So, I documented my issues, sent my regrets, and bowed out as gracefully as I knew how. And once again, a pastor who I thought was my friend cut his losses, told me we should do lunch sometime, and then never talked to me again. (Note: six months after originally writing this, that pastor did get in touch and we met for an hour so he could get clarification on some things I said. It was a weird and awkward meeting. We haven’t talked again.)

    Three months after I left the worship ministry, that worship pastor left our church to serve in another ministry and I got asked to be the interim worship ministry leader. I’ve been doing that a year now, with probably at least another year to go before we get someone back on staff to lead it up. Nobody’s yet told me that I’m indispensable, but if I were to bail, the next guy in line who’d pick up the slack would end up just that much closer to burning out, too.

    We’ve been ten years now at our current church.

    It feels like a familiar path. My wife is back to organizing the kitchen, doing luncheons for funerals, quietly helping hold things together. I’m leading the worship ministry. One by one the handful of people we counted as friends have moved out of town or to other churches. And I’m sensing the exhaustion start to creep back in.

    At this point I start to wonder - what am I doing wrong? Or, more painfully, what’s wrong with me? Is this just some sort of built-in ten year cycle, and it’s time to go find a different church? Does that mean that ten years from now I’ll be 50, an empty nester, and starting to look for yet another church? I don’t think I really want that.

    But then what’s the lesson? Never befriend pastors? Never agree to lead a ministry? Follow your friends to their new churches? Resign myself to the idea of serving because I can and assuming that this sort of lonely weariness is just what God has for me?

    It’s a hard decision to even start considering, with kids involved in student ministries and investment in the current people and church efforts and the difficulty of finding and fitting in someplace else. But how much longer should we wait? It’s been ten years.

    ∞

    Desperation

    How desperate am I for live sports?

    I’m watching NASCAR. And hard pressed to turn it off when they went into a rain delay.

    As Groucho Marx toasted the stuffy society lady in Animal Crackers:

    “A toast: to your charm, your beauty, and your brains. Which should give you a general idea of how hard up I am for a drink.”

    Note: I’m like 99% sure that toast came from Animal Crackers_, but the internet isn’t helpful in finding it. So here’s another classic clip from that movie._

    youtu.be/gPSAu8xfm…

    ∞

    21 Years

    I guess this is the point at which we can say we’ve been married half our lives…

    Definitely the better half of mine.

    ∞

    Is it the beard?

    I’ve written before about my Swedish Doppelganger - the botanist Carl Skottsberg in his younger years, at least according to my sister-in-law. Yesterday I was alerted to another one.

    Information on this alleged doppelganger comes to me from an older lady at church. She approached me yesterday to say that she watches the Jimmy Swaggart (eek!) TV program, gave me the DISH Network channel that she sees it on, and that Jimmy has a pianist who looks “just like” me and plays the piano “just as well” as I do.

    I had to know more.

    It turns out the pianist and band leader at Jimmy Swaggart Ministries is a guy named Brian Haney. And, well… I see the resemblance.

    Brian:

    Me:

    Brian again:

    Me again:

    If I had the time to dig up a few more pictures I’m sure I could find one of me at a piano that has eerie similarities to that one of Brian. I get that the white guy with the shaved head and beard is probably enough to trigger the churchgoing lady’s awareness, but I think there’s a little more than that.

    I watched a few of Brian’s YouTube videos and the dude is a talented musician. I might be able to match his Southern Gospel piano riffs, but he’s got a voice that I sure don’t.

    He does seem to have a tendency for unfortunately-named songs, though… “I Found The Lily In My Valley” and “When God Dips His Pen Of Love In My Heart” make me realize CCM doesn’t have an exclusive on unintended innuendo.

    If you know of other doppelgangers of mine feel free to mention them… but really, the world probably has enough guys that look like me already. We don’t need to overdo it.

    ∞

    Birthday week!

    Today at our house we enter Birthday Week: three of the five of our family members celebrate a birthday between now and next Tuesday. Today it’s Addie entering her last pre-teen year. Tomorrow it’s me leaving 40 behind. Next week KP starts her last year with a single digit age.

    Man oh man, time flies.

    ∞

    Nineteen

    Nineteen years ago today Becky and I were married. If I search back through the archives on this blog I’m sure I’d find that I have used the same phrases almost every year. Yes, it was a hot day. Yes, we were young. No, we really didn’t know what we were getting into.

    But nineteen years later I can say I have been immeasurably blessed by having Becky as my wife and best friend. Three kids, four homes, a dozen or so cats, and hundreds of softball games later we are stronger, closer, and more content than I think we have ever been.

    Here’s to many, many more. Years, that is. And softball games. (Maybe not too many more cats?)

    ∞

    An open letter of apology to my wife, to be reused as necessary

    Dear Becky,

    Tomorrow the postman will drop off an Amazon package in the mailbox. Yes, it’s another book. Yes, I know the last one I ordered just showed up a couple days ago. And the one last week before that.

    I managed to justify them all to myself in one way or another. Last week was a book about major players in my industry, and I figured it’d be good history for me to know. Early this week was one about leadership that a bunch of people have been raving about. Having been in a leadership position at work for almost two years, it’s probably worth reading. Tomorrow is a two-volume (sigh) book of theology.

    Had I been able to arrange the delivery date for tomorrow’s book, I would’ve spaced it out a little bit better, but I ordered it back in January and it just dropped this week. But hey, Amazon tells me I saved $5 by preordering, so that makes it worth it, right?

    And yeah, I know I’ve got a pile of books as long as my arm stacked next to the bed. And another pile as long as my other arm stacked behind that. And full bookshelves everywhere we have bookshelves. But is it really my fault that N.T. Wright is such a prodigious author? Heck, the last time I bought a book of his I spent $4.99 on sale for the Kindle version. That saves bookshelf space!

    (On second thought, let’s not get into how many unread books I still have on the Kindle…)

    I have at various times in the past made a resolution that I won’t buy any more books until I whittle down the unread pile next to the bed. It’s probably time to make that resolution again. (Well, maybe after I use that Half Price Books gift card I was just given.)

    At this point my unread book collection probably outnumbers your cast iron collection, though by weight the cast iron still wins… but maybe not for long. I think we get similar amounts of enjoyment out of our own respective collections, but to be fair I’m sure I get far more benefit from all the yummy stuff you cook in the cast iron than you get from all the rambling I do in conversation with you after reading.

    Thanks for nearly 20 years of putting up with my bad habits. As much as I try to improve, maybe sometimes buying another bookshelf would just be the easier solution. (If we only had room…)

    Love, Chris

    ∞

    Thanks, Obama.

    A little more than 8 years ago I did something I’d never done before, and voted for a Democrat for president. For a born-and-raised Republican, this was a big step. But there was something about this man that was special. He talked in an inspiring way about hope that we hadn’t heard from politicians in quite a while. And there was something special about electing America’s first black president.

    I remember sitting at home watching President-Elect Obama give an acceptance speech before a massive crowd at Grant Park in Chicago. It seemed like a turning point of sorts, a reason to be hopeful about our political situation.

    www.youtube.com/watch

    Now by any measure there are gripes each of us would have with the policies and decisions President Obama has made over the past 8 years. Politics is the art of the compromise. If everyone comes away from the table feeling like they got some of, but not all of, what they wanted, the process probably worked. Now, depending on your political convictions, you may have agreed with most of what he did, or only a little of what he did, but such is the nature of politics.

    Tonight President Obama, a week before leaving office, again gave a Chicago speech, but this time a farewell speech. And what a speech it was.

    www.youtube.com/watch

    President Obama called us as Americans to pursue the higher, nobler, goals of sacrifice for, and service to others. And he spoke clearly about our need to see the world from the perspective of our neighbors. Forgive a long quoted section, but it’s so good:

    But if our democracy is to work the way it should in this increasingly diverse nation, then each one of us need to try to heed the advice of a great character in American fiction, Atticus Finch, who said “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

    For blacks and other minority groups, that means tying our own very real struggles for justice to the challenges that a lot of people in this country face. Not only the refugee or the immigrant or the rural poor or the transgender American, but also the middle-aged white guy who from the outside may seem like he’s got all the advantages, but has seen his world upended by economic, and cultural, and technological change. We have to pay attention and listen.

    For white Americans, it means acknowledging that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow didn’t suddenly vanish in the ’60s; that when minority groups voice discontent, they’re not just engaging in reverse racism or practicing political correctness; when they wage peaceful protest, they’re not demanding special treatment, but the equal treatment that our founders promised.

    For native-born Americans, it means reminding ourselves that the stereotypes about immigrants today were said, almost word for word, about the Irish, and Italians, and Poles, who it was said were going to destroy the fundamental character of America. And as it turned out, America wasn’t weakened by the presence of these newcomers; these newcomers embraced this nation’s creed, and this nation was strengthened.

    So regardless of the station we occupy; we all have to try harder; we all have to start with the premise that each of our fellow citizens loves this country just as much as we do; that they value hard work and family just like we do; that their children are just as curious and hopeful and worthy of love as our own. And that’s not easy to do. For too many of us it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods, or on college campuses, or places of worship, or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions.

    In the rise of naked partisanship and increasing economic and regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste, all this makes this great sorting seem natural, even inevitable. And increasingly we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it’s true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there. And this trend represents a third threat to our democracy.

    Look, politics is a battle of ideas. That’s how our democracy was designed. In the course of a healthy debate, we prioritize different goals, and the different means of reaching them. But without some common baseline of facts, without a willingness to admit new information and concede that your opponent might be making a fair point, and that science and reason matter, then we’re going to keep talking past each other. And we’ll make common ground and compromise impossible. And isn’t that part of what so often makes politics dispiriting? How can elected officials rage about deficits when we propose to spend money on pre-school for kids, but not when we’re cutting taxes for corporations? How do we excuse ethical lapses in our own party, but pounce when the other party does the same thing? It’s not just dishonest, it’s selective sorting of the facts. It’s self-defeating because, as my mom used to tell me, reality has a way of catching up with you.

    President Obama has also traversed eight years of service as a dedicated and loving father and husband. His words at the end of the speech tonight were enough to have any father in tears:

    Michelle… Michelle LaVaughn Robinson of the South Side… … for the past 25 years you have not only been my wife and mother of my children, you have been my best friend. You took on a role you didn’t ask for. And you made it your own with grace and with grit and with style, and good humor. You made the White House a place that belongs to everybody. And a new generation sets its sights higher because it has you as a role model. You have made me proud, and you have made the country proud. Malia and Sasha… … under the strangest of circumstances you have become two amazing young women. You are smart and you are beautiful. But more importantly, you are kind and you are thoughtful and you are full of passion. And you wore the burden of years in the spotlight so easily. Of all that I have done in my life, I am most proud to be your dad.

    The “Thanks, Obama” meme has been around for almost the entire duration of Obama’s presidency. Originally used to sarcastically “thank” the president for anything deemed to be his fault, it quickly grew to blame him for things he had no hand in. In the past couple of years I’ve seen folks of a more liberal stripe using it more ironically, which seems like it’s come full circle in a way.

    But tonight I’d like to say it quite genuinely. Thanks, Obama. Thanks, Mr. President. Our country is better off because of your service, and we are all better for your example of service and faithfulness.

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