Year: 2010

Mission / Travel

Travel Day — Good News/Bad News

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The good news is the flight wasn’t until 9:40a.
The bad news is that we had to be there two hours earlier, which meant getting up at hour-and-a-half before that. If God had meant for people to be up that early, He would have put it later in the day.

The good news is the first flight was only 3½ hours.
The bad news is the next flight was 12½ hours.
The worse news is there was still another 5½ hour flight after that one.

The bad news is that there’s not much your brain can do after sitting in a chair for ten hours straight.

Music

Well Done

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Thirteen years ago this month, I lost a dear friend. Although seldom a week goes by that I don’t think of him, I haven’t written anything about him since he died. I woke up this morning thinking it was time to change that.

He challenged me in so many areas of my life, it’s difficult to think of them all.

He challenged me theologically, but in very subtle ways. He was very well-read, but did not beat you over the head with what he’d learned, but instead weaved it into his conversations so adroitly that you sometimes didn’t realize the depth of what he said until days or weeks later.

Spiritual Journey

smto dvciideta agme vere

Vince1 Comment

Everyone knows by now that the iPhone is misnamed — of all the things it is, a phone is the least of them. It’s a calculator, it’s a camera, it’s a level, it’s a photo album, it’s a DVD player (via Netflix), it’s a floor wax AND a desert topping! (That’s right, there once was a time when SNL was funny.)

It’s also a portable game player, enough so that Sony has started attacking it in it’s PSP ads. I never have been much of a game player myself, much to my son-in-law’s chagrin, but last year at Christmas my sister showed me Word Warp, and I was immediately sucked into the Black Hole from Hades.

Spiritual Journey

The Smaller Picture

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A few years ago, my wife and I went to an actual movie theater to see a movie (radical, I know). The movie, based on a short-lived sci-fi TV series from a few years prior, had received rave reviews, so, although we had never seen any of the series, we thought we’d check it out. Coming out of the theater, our collective opinion of the movie was an unqualified…

…meh!

It wasn’t a bad movie, but we certainly didn’t think it was deserving of the praise being heaped upon it. It was just… well, “meh” is the best word I can think of.

Church / Music

Speed Trap

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I recently attended The Summit, and it was, as always, excellent (more on that later). However, I was almost completely distracted during one of the sessions on the second day by a Music Speed Trap.

You know speed traps on the highway? Those places, almost always outside of small towns who have very small revenue streams, where a speed limit sign is put where you can’t see it (or can’t see it in time), and the police sit just on the other side waiting to catch you going too fast? Well, this is the like that, only with music.

There are two kinds of MST’s.

Justice

Two pollices down

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Being a critic of anything is a thankless job (that’s critic in the formal sense, not in the Internet age “I’m brilliant because I have a computer” sense). The word “critic” comes from a Greek word (doesn’t everything?) that means “able to discern,” and that’s what the best critics do — they are discerning about what they’re watching (TV/movies) or eating (food) or listening to (classical music), and then they express what they discerned in a reasoned, hopefully entertaining, way.

But, as mentioned, in the Internet age, everyone’s a critic, because everyone has an opinion, and most think that an opinion is all it takes to be a critic.