Snow and a Clean(er) Room

It snowed here yesterday. It may snow again later today. If I recall correctly in my four years of college in Minnesota it never snowed noticeably this early in the year (though they've probably got snow now). It got real cold (cold enough to make your teeth hurt) and flurried the third weekend of October '91, and of course it snowed three feet on Halloween that year, but yesterday still felt unique. It even stuck yesterday for an hour or so before it melted. It was a pretty morning.

I took yesterday off to stay home and do some cleaning. I've been frustrated for a while with the state of my bedroom but haven't felt like I've had the time to do anything about it. Of course if I read Flylady I'd know that I had the time, but I don't so I didn't. All my free time I end up hanging out with friends or watching stuff on t.v. Finally it occurred to me that I get a day off for my birthday to be used anytime in October and if I took that day then there wouldn't be anything good on t.v. and all my friends would be at work. So I took it. I got to sleep for about 10 hrs., do 6 loads of laundry, put away all my cd's, do dishes, put all my commentaries and Bibles back in order, put several items that had come up for various trips this summer back into storage, and consolidate all the random papers lying around my room onto my desk. Now I've got clean clothes and a clean floor and a two feet deep stack of stuff on my desk, which becomes a project for some other time. Still I'm pretty happy with my progress yesterday. The only sad part was that I finished both my birthday Riesen and my French Silk Pie. At least I've still got the Dove dark chocolate.

Verse of the day:
"Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge,
but he who hates reproof is stupid." Proverbs 12:1 (ESV)

Happy Birthday Weekend

That was a long full weekend.
Friday started off with our annual Technical Services Department inventory where we try to account for all the books, etc. that Voyager says we have in various departmental locations. Of the nearly 400 items I was responsible for I found all but four. One of those I'm positive is buried in my office. One I'm pretty sure is just gone. The other two I don't think anybody'll miss but hopefully they'll turn up somewhere. It's a long, hard process but I'm glad we do it. After work I joined a professor from the college for a game of The War of the Ring. It was supposed to involve a team from the library and a team from Information Technology but it ended up just being me and Dr. Fratt. He took the basic game, which is based on the events depicted in The Lord of the Rings, and turned it into a huge elaborate setup. He made a massive map of Middle Earth, maybe 6'X12' and then set up mountain ranges and fortresses and has lots of miniature soldiers as well as 6" LotR action figures. We played for a few rounds over a couple of hours as he taught me the game. It was fun. After that I headed up to Grayslake, about 20-30 min. from Trinity, to the College of Lake County where one of the college students from church had a drawing in an art gallery show at the college. The show was a juried show for Lake County artists so it was more than just a student show and entries had to be judged to get in. Josiah told me about it last Sunday at church and invited me to the opening. He's a gifted artist and I remember some of the stuff he'd drawn back when he was in the junior high youth group and being impressed. It was a neat drawing and a big honor for him to be included in the show. I'm glad I made it. When I got home I watched The Phantom of the Opera. I don't know how closely the movie sticks to the musical but I was glad to finally get the story that goes with the soundtrack.
Saturday I hosted my first Coen brothers' movie marathon. We started around 10:30 a.m. and watched Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou, and then watched Hudsucker again for the late comers. Dianne came for whole thing and made chili for lunch. She also brought Riesen and Dove chocolate. Steve got home around the end of Fargo and Catherine soon followed. We took a break between Fargo and O Brother and went to the park to stretch out a little and throw the aerobie. When we got back we found that Aaron had joined us. We had some ice cream with our second Hudsucker and eventually everybody left around 10:30. I enjoyed the chance to watch the four movies in succession like that. Also just before everybody left I had another friend turn up whom I hadn't seen in a few months. It turned out that he had been in jail for something someone else had done and had recently been released when the other person confessed. He had a great testimony of how God had been working in his life while he was in jail and it was good to spend some time visiting and catching up. After everybody left I watched Intolerable Cruelty for good measure. I love the Baron's testimony.

Sunday morning we had a another good sermon on Jonah, ch.3, confession, and God's compassion from our associate pastor whom Steve's taken to calling 2nd John. The senior pastor is 1st John and one of our former deacons who also preaches occasionally is 3rd John. While we were hanging around after the service Ann Schwaar gathered a bunch of people around me in a circle and they sang Happy Birthday. Then we went out to Golden Corral for lunch. After lunch some friends felt bad that I didn't have a birthday cake so they went to Bakers Square and bought me a French Silk pie which Sarah took home to refrigerate while a few of us went and played a couple of rounds of disc golf in Libertyville. Following golf we went over to Sarah, Danni, and Mary's for pie and to watch the movie Thank You for Smoking. That was a pretty funny black comedy about a tobacco lobbyist. Finally we made it home. It was a great weekend but very tiring.

LifeGroup, Dreams, Pizza and Gab

Monday night we had our LIFEgroup meeting in the midst of a tornado warning. You can possibly tell which of us pay any attention to news be seeing who was there and who wasn't. I found out about the tornado warning on Tuesday morning. Oh well. We had a good time discussing 1 John 1:5-7 and walking in the light and fellowship. We'd planned to study more but spent more time on verse 7 than I'd expected. Still it was a good conversation about the nature of Christian fellowship and how we should make time for one another and care for one another. We also had an interesting conversation about dreams before we started the Bible study. I mentioned I had been woken up in the middle of the night by a nightmare about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (this is why I don't watch horror movies, I get nightmares from the commercials). One bad part of the dream was where I realized it was a dream and woke up, only I was still in the dream. Eventually I woke up for real, before I got shredded, and spent about 20 minutes praying and reading scripture. Anyway that led to conversation about being able to control dreams once you realize it is a dream, recurring dreams, and good dreams or dreams you enjoy. After the nightmare I had had an interesting dream about the editorial board of a journal I read and had remembered specific facts from real life that made the events of the dream plausible. I remember certain kinds of facts anyway but it was odd to find the memory in the dream. A lot of people had flying dreams and at least one other guy shared the problem I often have in dreams where I'm fighting somebody and my punches have no impact.

Tuesday night was our Pizza and Gab time with the youth for this semester. As the name implies this is a night where, instead of our usual format of hang-out, game, teaching, worship, small groups, we order pizza and then sit around talking about stuff. Usually we have students submit questions over the previous couple of weeks and then we select some of the questions and all talk about them together. In the past this has been completely open to any questions students want to ask. This time we tried to have a theme to give it a little more focus. We chose Heaven, Hell, Angels and Demons. We talked about the resurrection body, reincarnation, what Hell is like, and how to get to Heaven. Because our question cards said to ask about anything we also discussed what to do when your parents are getting a divorce and what the Bible says about divorce. It was a good time. We had 23 kids, which may have been our biggest turnout this year. There were three visitors and a couple of regular kids who weren't there.

Verse of the day:
"But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin." 1 John 1:7 (ESV)

Quote of the day:
"When we get our new bodies could it be like an animal you want to be?"
Student question submitted for Pizza and Gab

Gratuitous Coen Brothers' Movie Quote in anticipation of this weekend's marathon:
"Son, you got a panty on your head."

On a Monday, a Monday, a Monday

Despite the crushing pain of not getting a 4th consecutive post on Friday I managed to overcome and have a good weekend anyway.

On Friday night Steve and I got two $5 Dominick's Pizza's, one of the best deals in the business, some Bass and IBC and watched The House of Flying Daggers. We had to cut the movie short to head up to Round Lake and watch an amusing independent film, The Godfather of Green Bay, with Danni, Nicole, and Andrew, natives of Green Bay and Nothern Wisconsin. It was a funny little movie about a couple of comics from L.A. hoping to get noticed by a booker for the Tonight Show at a little bar in Northeast Wisconsin. To make matters worse, one of the comics grew up in Chicago and it's the weekend of the Bears/Packers game (a big deal). Also the Chicago guy is falling for a women who's dating a drug dealer known as the Godfather of Green Bay who's being tracked by a hitman from L.A. Much hilarity and parody of Northwoods life ensues.

On Saturday I got together with a couple of guys from my youth small group and watched The Day After Tomorrow projected on a big screen at church and ate pizza. We also tossed the aerobie in the parking lot where we managed to get it stuck on the roof and in two separate trees. Fortunately we were able to get it down all three times. It is truly the world's most easily overthrown object. Afterwards Steve and I got in a game of disc golf, good for me but bad for him, before going to Jason and Bonnie's for games. We got to play Carcassonne, Boggle, and Speed Scrabble before going home and watching Tombstone. In a rare reversal I went to bed almost an hour before he did.

Sunday we heard a sermon from John M. on Jonah 2 and God's response in crises. After church we went out to Wildberry with friends including Becca and Matt who were up for the weekend from Champaign. Becca used to work with the youth group and hosted my LIFEgroup for a year or so. Later that night I joined some folks from church and we watched the Bears shellac the Seahawks. With the Colts winning earlier both my teams are undefeated.

Verse of the day:
"My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One." 1 John 2:1 (NIV)

Quote of the Day:
"That's a good question."
"I know. I asked it."
-interchange among a couple of coworkers on Friday.

Untitled

Looks like it won't be four days after all. Everybody can breathe now. Have a great weekend.

Verse and Quote of the Day

Okay. Blogger's officially a punk. I started a post this morning and realized that I wasn't going to have enough time to finish. I tried to save it as a draft so as to edit later. Often when I try to post or save something I get a dialog that "The document contains no data." Sometimes after I okay that message I see that it did whatever I was wanting it to anyway. Nevertheless, I always check to make sure it did it. It appeared to have saved the draft (probably because today's post title is the same as yesterday's, mayhaps the punkitude is not all Blogger's) but didn't. So I'm reposting. If anyone knows anything about that dialog box, let me know so I don't have to explore Help or Google it.

Verse of the Day:
"All your works shall give thanks to you, O LORD,
and all your saints shall bless you!
They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom
and tell of your power,
to make known to the children of man your mighty deeds,
and the glorious splendor of your kingdom.
Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom,
and your dominion endures throughout all generations." Psalm 145:10-13a (ESV)
I chose this verse in honor of Ann's comments to my 9/19 post.

Quote of the day:
"'I don't think, Mr. Frodo, that he's done much writing while we've been away. He won't ever write our story now.'
At that Bilbo opened an eye, almost as if he had heard. Then he roused himself. 'You see, I am getting so sleepy,' he said. 'And when I have time to write, I only really like writing poetry. I wonder, Frodo my dear fellow, if you would very much mind tidying things up a bit before you go? Collect all my notes and papers, and my diary too, and take them with you, if you will. You see, I haven't much time for the selection and arrangement and all that. Get Sam to help, and when you've knocked things into shape, come back, and I'll run over it. I won't be too critical.'" J.R.R. Tolkien The Return of the King

I've been meaning to post about this passage since sometime in the summer when I was listening to The Lord of the Rings on CD. I was reminded of it, and another which will be another post, when I listened to the BBC Dramatized Adaptation of LotR on my trip to Tennessee over Labor Day. I find this one of the most poignant passages, among many, in the Return of the King. The Hobbits are on their way home from the quest and spend some time in Rivendell visiting Bilbo. There they discover just what Sam observes and Bilbo confirms, despite all his plans and work the old Hobbit just can't put the material together. He doesn't have the energy. I don't know when this scene was written but I believe the whole of the LotR was complete by 1948 though it took another 6 years to get published. What I find touching is that this is almost a description of what would be the case for Tolkien himself. He spent his whole life working on the Silmarillion but never completed it and had to leave it to his son to collect and edit his notes into something coherent and publishable. There were people who came and spent time with him trying to help him get the notes together but his life's work was never completed. He had already seen some of this, if his story "Leaf by Niggle," written around 1938, is any indication. But there's something in Frodo and Sam's farewell scene with Bilbo that makes it clearer and sadder, as if Tolkien says, "This will be me."

Verse and Quote of the Day

Two in a row. Will there be a third? Stay tuned.

I'm glad Cora is doing okay. We had a good time at 3-D last night discussing Jesus as the Lion and the Lamb. If I never mentioned it we're doing a series called A.K.A. God. It's a study of what we can learn about God based on the various names and descriptions He uses in scripture. Last night's study was based on Revelation 5.

Verse of the Day:
"You open your hand;
you satisfy the desire of every living thing.
The LORD is righteous in all his ways
and kind in all his works.
The LORD is near to all who call on him,
to all who call on him in truth." Psalm 145:16-18 (ESV)

Quote of the Day:
"God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him." John Piper
That statement is at the heart of what Piper likes to call Christian Hedonism and is unpacked in his book Desiring God and its successors. It's been on my mind the last couple of weeks relative to my post about the weekend of the 16th and the ensuing comments. I was was supposed to go to a conference at Piper's church in Minneapolis this weekend but it sold out before I attempted to register. Instead I'll be hanging out with friends and watching a movie with the guys from my 3-D small group.