On a Wing and a Prayer

STS-135

2011-07-22T06:00:00.001-04:00

I never did see a Shuttle launch. The closest I ever got to it was two years ago while on family vacation in Orlando. It was a rocket launch, and not a heavy rocket either. The name escapes me, but it was the standard send-a-satellite-up every month or so launch that's special for tourists but not Florida residents.

Orlando is a ways away from the Cape, and so we had contented ourselves to watching the launch on NASA TV as Eli slept. It was a night launch too, so it was about 11:00 or so when there was a frantic (and rather loud) knock on our condo door.

My dad didn't wait for me to open the door. "Jase! Quick! You can SEE it! You can SEE it!"

So there we were, making way too much racket for that late at night, watching as the plume of barely-visible smoke rose into the night sky on it's way to a near-earth orbit.

But the Space Shuttle program, for my entire life, was NASA's bread and butter. The crowing achievement of the agency, as well as the nation. My entire generation grew up watching Shuttle launches, and having astronauts as heroes. It was a piece of America, and for a kid who grew up around airplanes, it became almost a part of the landscape, as normal as going to the airport, or hearing an airplane overhead. It was so much a part of our lives that we didn't hardly think it was a big deal sometimes.

I'm told that all the classrooms in my school had the TV on when the Challenger went down. I don't remember watching it, but I do remember I was on the playground and all the other kids were talking about it.

I remember feeling sick when the Columbia came apart, I remember watching the glowing pieces fall on live TV and following the recovery efforts, and the shock and the fear.

And now the chapter is closed, apparently without the next one being written. Yesterday, the Space Shuttle Atlantis landed safely, completing STS-135.

135 flights into space, distributed between five different orbiters is, even with the loss of two, a spectacular human achievement. We should be proud of those brave men and women who worked hard and sacrificed much to push the boundaries of human exploration.

Naturally, this is a bittersweet moment for our nation. On one hand, for the first time since 1961, NASA will not have the capability to send an astronaut into space. This is a humbling, perhaps even humiliating fact for many Americans. There is, as there should be, a large amount of pride in being the premier nation in space exploration. Since we do not have a replacement program, have we wasted the talent and sacrifice of NASA thus far? Have we squandered the bravery and dedication of those who have given their lives in pursuit of space? Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, and fellow Michigander shuttle astronaut Jerry Linenger have all shared their disagreement with the decision to end the Shuttle. Linenger, in a recent interview, said,

"The headline should have been, 'United States cancels manned spaceflight program. Unable to get a human being, a US citizen, into space for the first time since 1961. We hope that in five years we are able to build a capsule that we built in 1962.' That's what (the headline) should have read, but the spin is just unbelievable."

On the other hand, another brutal reality: though a spectacular achievement, the Shuttle isn't very practical as a space vehicle. Rockets are far less glamorous, but far less expensive to build and launch.

Also, as any good pilot or mechanic knows, no amount of upgrading and repairing will make an airframe last forever. With the extreme stresses placed upon the orbiters, they will not last as long as some aircraft do, and most aircraft have useful lives of somewhere around 15-20 years. So it's old technology, and the system is showing it's age, and further missions will only increase the danger of catastrophic failure. As much as it pains me to say it, better to quit while ahead.

I would like to think that this will merely be the intermission before the second act. The orbiting capsules that paved the way for the moon shots that paved the way for the Shuttle and the ISS were a spectacular opener, and as we watch the curtain come down on the "Space Bus", let us recapture the imagination and ingenuity that NASA fostered and grew during the 1960's.

Linenger would do well to remember that although the U.S. government lacks the capability of manned space flight, the spirit of innovation and creation is now embodied, at least partially, in private enterprises, many of which will share the heavy lifting of manned space flight in the years to come. Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, and Scaled Composites are three such companies who are gladly taking up the mantle that NASA has placed in front of them.

It may seem a step back to some, to cut our space program back to where it was in the early 1960's, but we need to remember what happened in 1969. From virtually nothing in 1961, to landing on the moon eight short years later.

Today, as we prepare to send the Atlantis the short distance to it's final home, let us imagine where the curtain will open for the second act.

I vote for the moon.

jj

UGH...

2011-05-20T06:00:00.001-04:00

Any more nowadays, it seems every time I click on "New Post" the blank screen taunts me, Qwerty laughs, and my fingers freeze up.

My notebook and pen are ever present, their weight reminding me of their disuse. I carried them the other night while chasing the offspring around their new trampoline, and finally put them back on the front seat of my truck, where they sit so I don't lose them.

Several ideas bounce around in my head, daring me to put them to paper or screen, and then avoiding my reach when the time comes.

A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in his blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up. Like other gunners, he must cultivate patience; he may have to work many covers to bring down one partridge.

-E.B. White

Here's to roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.

jj

Sunday Quote 120510

2010-12-05T06:00:00.001-05:00

From The BioLogos Forum blog, Science and the Sacred. The post was written by Rev. Kerry L. Bender, and can be found here in it's entirity. You may also wish to read Part One, here.

This theme, which began at the very beginning of the epistle, is carried through to the verses immediately leading up to the Armor of God. The verses immediately preceding the Armor of God describe how unity and peace are to be kept in all of our relationships by submitting to one another (5:21) and then Paul gives three examples of how this plays out: husbands and wives (5:22-33), parents and children (6:1-4), and slaves and masters (think employees and employers for today) (6:5-9). Therefore, the Armor of God, and specifically the Sword of the Spirit, which is not just the Bible, but more specifically, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is not to be used against one another, but against the evil forces that try to divide us, that attempt to create hostility between us, that take pleasure in seeing us at each others’ throats.

The emphasis was added by me.

jj

Sunday Quote 112810

2010-11-28T06:00:00.001-05:00

The point here is a simple one. The name “Jesus” evokes an historical reality (like the name “Karl Marx” or “Sigmund Freud”). More than this, it is not testimony to some individual or group providing ideas about the world but rather testifies to a concrete expression of some new way of living in the world. In other words, something was witnessed. Something that might have existed independently of the one bearing witness (theistic Christianity) or that might have been made real by the eye of the beholder (atheistic Christianity).
So, at its zero level, to lay hold of the name “Jesus” is to make a claim that a new mode of being has been made manifest in the world, a particular mode of being that can be expressed through the categories of Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection and Salvation. In addition to this it is a claim that one participates to some degree in that mode of being.

Peter Rollins, Why Jesus, his blog post from yesterday, 11-27-10

jj

Here I go again...

2010-10-20T06:00:00.081-04:00

The other night, I stopped at our local Goodwill to drop some things off. I know that they sell books there, so I snuck over quick to see if they had anything.

I found a copy of a beloved childhood story book that I remember, and I thought it might be cool to read to my kids.

I also found a book by Greg Boyd, titled Letters From a Skeptic.

And then I fell flat on my face. Not literally. I would have preferred to fall literally, rather than how I did. It started at the checkout counter, as the person behind the counter rang me up.

He looked at the Boyd book, and then at me.

"This book is not what you think it is." he said.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Well, this Greg Boyd, he's not a skeptic. He's a believer."

"Well, I'm curious about the book." I said. Nothing more.

I didn't say that I knew Boyd was a believer. I didn't say I was well aware of his religious position, and aware of how hard it was for him to come to such a position.

I negotiated for peace from my weakness when God told me to fight with His strength.

I didn't say that I myself was a believer in Christ. I didn't say that I had heard Dr. Boyd speak at my church, and have been reading his blog and his other articles since then. I didn't say that I found his perspective on things impressively well thought out and intelligent.

I whitewashed the walls of my tomb.

By the clerk's manner towards the book and me, I could tell he assumed I was a skeptic as well. I didn't even correct him.

I washed my hands of this.

I did not water the mustard seed.

The clerk went on to explain that the entire book was basically Pascal's Wager, and that said wager was really more of an "ad hoc" argument that "isn't that good, as far as arguments go."

I didn't tell him that I agreed that Pascal's Wager is based on outmoded and older assumptions on the nature of God that we may not have today. I didn't tell him either, that Dawkin's counter argument is based on the same outmoded religious model.

Neither did I tell him that Pascal's wager wasn't really an ad hoc argument, but was based in sound logic and reasoning.

Nor did I explain to him that the idea that a transcendent, supernatural deity could be explained by reason and logic alone was absurd.

I did not land on good soil.

I did not suggest to him, as I thought later, that perhaps a man of Boyd's obvious education and intelligence and background would probably not use said wager in convincing anyone of the validity of his beliefs.

Instead, what I did was go along with the clerk's assumptions about me and the book, not shedding any light on my views and beliefs.

I simply stood there, giving approval to the clerk's views without offering my own.

On the way home, a small voice inside my head talked to me. "Hey you." it said, "Cock-a-doodle-do."
I'm pretty sure somewhere, there are rocks crying out praises to our Lord.

Who will save me from this body of death?

jj

God and Science

2010-09-29T06:00:00.002-04:00

I sit on my tug on the ramp. I should be pulling my departure around, but I've some time to spare, and so I pull the park brake and turn the engine off.

The sun is just beginning to peek above the FedEx building across the airport to the east. The air is quiet, still, and for a fleeting moment I imagine my dusty fly rod in my hands.

I breathe deep of the cool morning air and watch the day begin.

I could explain that at this moment we're moving toward the sunrise at approximately 700 miles an hour as the earth rotates, and that we are also orbiting around the sunrise at about 67,000 miles an hour. I could tell you that the sun and it's planets are moving at 155 miles per second through our Milky Way galaxy, and that the Milky Way itself is moving through the universe at about 185 miles per second.

I could tell you that the radiation given off from the sun is of a certain composition well suited to provide light for the photosynthesis of plants, as well as heat that provides the engine that drives our weather patterns, distributing the water of this fine planet to the plants and the animals.

I could explain that the earth's atmosphere is of such a combination of elements so as to provide a diverse mixture of gasses to support the abundant life on this planet, as well as refracting our sun's light to make our skies blue and our clouds white.

I could say that the many beautiful colors of the sunrise are a result of this refraction, moving through the visible spectrum from red to orange to yellow to green to cyan to blue to violet, and I could say that all of these colors and all combinations of these colors could be seen on any given day.

I might even go so far as to explain that the inner workings of our eye are best suited to receive certain colors and that we see the world differently than some animals because of the features of our eye.

I could say all these things. I could give you endless links to Wikipedia, and university websites where people spend their entire careers studying sunrises and sunsets and sunlight.

I could tell you all of this and more, but you will still never know a sunrise.

We can understand every little shred of insignificant scientific facts about the sunrise, and still not understand the sunrise.

Instead, I will invite you to sit next to me on my tug, with the engine quiet and the windsock limp, to breathe deep of the cool morning air, and truly understand the sunrise.

jj

Sunday Quote 92610

2010-09-26T06:00:00.004-04:00

Denying God’s power might quiet the nerves of some, but I truly cannot begin to understand why. When the roller coaster inverts me, twists me, and sends me in a tight spiral, I do not struggle philosophically or religiously with the idea of someone being in control or of engineers having been involved or of all of this being in some way intentional. As I quease and scream, do not stroke my cheek and try to reassure me by pointing to a panicking carnie as he wiggles powerless controls. Don’t start holding my hand, telling me about the engineers’ good intentions, but the impossibility of them actually knowing what the ride was going to do or where it would end when they created it.
In those stories, vomiting is my only option. And preferably on you.

– N.D. Wilson, Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl, p. 71-72

Numbers

2010-09-21T06:00:00.014-04:00

I want to offer a sincere and heartfelt thank you to all who donated your resources for the continuing work of the Lakeshore Pregnancy Center. It is your efforts that continue this ministry that enables new parents to make the best possible decisions for their new family.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

It's done.

I survived one ridiculously long day of golfing. I was sick of it by 1100, and still had six and a half hours to go.

We pushed through, and managed to score a team record, my Dad and I.

Because we in America are fascinated with numbers and results, here's some important numbers from the LPC Golf Marathon 2010:

19: The number of golfers that participated.

2,475: Total number of holes played by those golfers.

225: Most holes played by an individual golfer.

242: Most holes played by a team of two golfers.

162: Holes played by Dad and I (a team record).

$9,300: Most money raised by individual golfer.

$31,763: Corporate sponsorship raised.

$57,713: Total money raised.

10%: Percent of LPC budget typically raised during the golf marathon.

And some other interesting numbers!!

13: Number of inches away from a hole in one on Hole 7, shot by my sister on her first ever golf swing on a golf course. First. Ever. Cue the jealousy from every other golfer out there.

4: Number of $10,000 winning hole in one shots I put into the weeds on Hole 5.

3: Number of times I drove the green on the four par 3 holes on the course. (It's a pathetic number).

1: Number of puffball mushrooms I "golfed". It popped pretty good, I wish I had my camera on a tripod with a timer, it would have been sweet!

2: Number of golf carts we used during the course of the day.

??: The number of golf balls we lost in completing this golf marathon. We stocked up at the beginning of play, and I think we were through two boxes (of 12 balls) by the time we were into the second hour of play. It's a marathon...you can't go searching the woods for every ball hit out of play.

This last number I give you is, in my humble opinion, absolutely false.

135: The supposed range from the white tee box to the green on Hole 14.

Some perspective on the number, for those who may not golf. A typical hole on a golf course has three or four tee boxes. Tee boxes are where you begin that particular hole. Usually there is a tee box set farther back marked in blue for the better golfers or professionals. There is then the white box, which is used for average golfers and non-professionals. Sometimes there may be a special box marked in yellow for seniors to play from. The closest box to the green is marked in red, and is used for women golfers. When in the tee box, you may use a tee to elevate the ball, enabling better contact and more distance, as opposed to anywhere else on the course where you must play the ball as it lies. Usually, depending on long the hole is, the golfer will use the biggest club they have off the tee.

The golf clubs with the most range traditionally were made of wood, and hence are called woods. The clubs with the shorter distance are called irons, because they are traditionally made of some sort of metal. The lower the number, the higher the range of the club, thus a 1 wood will hit farther than a 3 wood, and a 3 iron will hit farther than a 7 iron or a 9 iron.

On the shorter holes, golfers do not have to use a large club to reach the green, they will use a club with a shorter range.

Now, on the one time a year that I do golf, I play from the white box, as I am not a professional, a senior, or a woman.

On this particular hole, the range indicated to the green was 135 from the white tee box.

The golfers among you are already picking out your clubs, right?

Probably a 9 iron, maybe an 8 iron with an easy swing. Perhaps a wedge club if you've got arms like Popeye.

When I golf, if I am within 150 yards of the green, I will typically go with my 7 iron. Inside of 100 yards, I'll use my 9 iron.

135 yards falls right in the middle of the two, so it's my choice. Either club would probably make the green, from there it depends on the specific layout of the green and how big it is.

Except for Hole 14.

Hole 14 is a beautiful hole, with trees flanking the left side, and continuing completely around the green. I would say the fairway is nice, but there is no fairway. None. Just ahead and to the right of the white tee box is the yellow tee box, and just where that tee box ends is a ravine. The ravine has dangerous sloping sides that descend quickly to a small creek, and ascend just as steeply back up to a well-placed sand bunker right in front of the green.

So in order to complete the hole, you must hit your ball squarely from the tee box right on to the green. There is no room for error.

135 yards is easily reachable with my 7 iron, especially considering that I could use a tee, which I did.

I lined up three balls on their tees, and swung.

All of them fell short.

Well, if I can't get the range with my 7 iron, I'll try my 4 iron. (lower number=more distance, remember?) If you're wondering why I didn't try 6 or 5 and went straight to 4, it's hard to use a club that you don't have.

No such luck.

The next time around, I dropped even one more number. I was teeing off with my 3 iron on a 135 yard hole.

Four balls this time, disappeared into the flora somehow hanging on to the sheer wall of this ravine.

I protested loudly that I would not use my wood clubs, being that this hole should have been short enough for any competent schmuck with a 7 iron, and continued feeding balls to the ever-hungry gaping maw of that cursed ravine.

My Dad, not being hung up on pride like myself, used his 5 wood for those blasted 135 yards, but to no avail. Nearly every ball he loosed upon the hole was devoured as mine were.

If we hadn't been golfing for charity, and didn't have families to go home to, I'd think we'd still be there, searching out whatever magic potion of club, ball, and golfer it took to cross the ravine and complete the hole with one ball. With our limited time, we weren't able to figure it out on a consistent enough basis. I think I got one ball onto this green through the entire ten hours we played.

Aside from the 135 yards of hell, we had a great time helping out a great cause. The Lakeshore Pregnancy Center is able to continue helping new parents make the best decisions possible for themselves and their new family because of donors like you, you who were willing to give of your resources to help those in need.

And for that, I offer a sincere and heart-felt thank you. May your blessing bless others.

jj

Last Quick Note

2010-09-17T06:00:00.001-04:00

By the time most of you read this, I'll be golfing my way to and beyond 100 holes, and hands full of blisters. My Dad and I are golfing together, and by this time we've probably both gone through at least two boxes of golf balls (12 per box). Last year, I brought my softball bat and had almost better luck with it than with my driver.

The course we play on is beautiful, and I always think I should come back. But by five o'clock, and however many holes we manage to play, I'm sick of it. It's all we can do to peel ourselves out of the golf cart and walk our bag to the truck afterwards.

My wife and I recently dug out our GameCube and played Mario Golf a few times, so I feel like this year I'm all practiced up.

Wish me luck, and there's still time to contribute if you feel so led!

jj

Another Quick Note

2010-09-15T06:00:00.003-04:00

This Friday I am golfing just as much as I can stand between 0730 and 1700. I hope to get at least 100 holes in, but I'll probably get just a bit more than that. My record, if memory serves me, is 135.

We'll not eat much breakfast so we can move without barfing. We'll eat our lunch on the course in the golf cart as we go along. Dinner won't be until later than we are used to.

There will be blisters a plenty, but we'll keep going. One year, it was 90 degrees and humid, and I had white crusts all down my arms and legs and had to throw the shirt I was wearing away afterwards. One year, it rained almost three inches by noon, and then let up only slightly.

Every April, down in Augusta Georgia, the best and the brightest golf talent in the world will gather at the exclusive Agusta Golf Club for the Master's Tournament. Over the course of one week, the players will play up to 36 holes a day for five days. Maybe even more. That's 180 holes of golf. In a week.

Last year, the man with the most holes during our golf marathon made over 200. In one day.

Why would I do this instead of playing paintball?

Because every $100 I and the other golfers raise will help one person with the emotional, physical, and spiritual support they need during their crisis or unplanned pregnancy.

The people that come to the Lakeshore Pregnancy Center are often young, unmarried, and usually without support from their families and friends. They usually don't have a church community to turn to either.

We can not let that happen. I could not be content with saying I am pro-life and doing nothing for those who are deciding what to do about their unplanned pregnancy.

I invite you to join me by praying for us golfers the day of for peace, at least marginal weather, and no major bloodletting or other mishaps.

If you would like to do more than pray, follow this link and you will be given an opportunity to support me financially. The donations are handled through PayPal, so your donation will be secure.

I thank you for any support you can give for this wonderful ministry!

jj

Your Next Show

2010-09-14T06:00:00.003-04:00

Somehow we have gotten to a point where a seemingly intelligent, grown man can study Jesus his entire life and come to the conclusion that Jesus would, in fact, burn books in protest of a building as an insult to a worldwide religious community.

Somehow this man can convince his few followers and random strangers that his message is one that Jesus would approve of, and even preach were He still preaching.

I, for one, do not understand how this message is in any way biblical, much less Christian.

I am reminded of something I was taught when I was a DJ.

In the early and mid-aughts, I was at the top of my game as a DJ. I was winning awards and gaining recognition within my company, as well as the Grand Rapids wedding community. Vendors knew me. Reception halls knew me and would recommend me to their clientele. The sky was the limit, and the only thing that kept me from it was the amount of time I was willing to invest in the effort.

It is during those times that we are at the greatest risk of temptation by laziness, or by resting on our laurels. We're doing fine, we think, there's no need to work as hard or put as much effort into it.

The danger is that we will slack off.

Once a DJ starts to slack, his performance suffers, and it doesn't take long at all. I was off for a month stretch during that period, and my next three shows bombed. It only took four weeks and I was off my game. It took about a month and a half for me to get back into my groove.

My boss always used to tell us that we're only as good as our next show.

It doesn't matter what you did last week.

Your performance of a lifetime last month doesn't matter to tonight's bride and groom.

You are only as good as your next show.

I think the lesson can apply to our walk with Christ as well.

You are only as Christian as your next act of Christ.

In Luke 6:43-45 Jesus is very clear about good and bad, and how people will know Christians.

Paul tells us in Philippians 2:11-13 that we should continue to work out our salvation.

We will be known in the image of Christ by the fruit we bear. Is book burning good fruit?

Is carrying a weapon because of death threats good fruit?

Are those that threaten death bearing good fruit?

I don't want to point fingers and claim that this Mr. Jones is not a Christian. It seems he is giving us all the proof we need.

jj

A Quick Note

2010-09-07T06:00:00.000-04:00

Some of you may know, but most of you probably don't know, that every year I am involved in a golf marathon to raise money for a local charity.

On September 17, just a few short days away, I will be hopefully completing 100 (or more) holes of golf in nine hours. This is a marathon to raise money for the Lakeshore Pregnancy Center, a ministry who helps those who are dealing unplanned pregnancies. They provide testing kits, ultrasounds and other basic care, as well as parenting classes and counseling for those dealing with unplanned pregnancies.

This year, LPC has set up a website in order to facilitate online donations as well as their mailings. I have a huge stack of mailing cards that I've been giving away, but I also have a website set up in my name if you would like to make a donation. If you are interested, click this link!

As I said, it's a local charity, so all the funds raised will go to help those hurting right here next to us. Every $100 we raise is enough to provide one person with the tools to help them cope with their life's situation.

I have already sponsored myself for $1.25 per hole. Will you help?

jj

Sunday Quote 90510

2010-09-05T06:00:00.000-04:00

I would like to thank Bob Robinson of Vanguard Church who found this week's Sunday Quote! I shamelessly ripped this right off his blog. So Bob, if you're reading my little corner of the interwebs, thanks for stopping by, and thanks for finding this quote!

“I have come to the conclusion that for we who live in the Western world, the major challenge to the viability of Christianity is not Buddhism, with all its philosophical appeal to the Western mind, nor is it Islam, with all the challenge that it poses to Western culture.
It is not the New Age that poses such a threat; in fact, because there is a genuine search going on in new religious movements, it can actually be an asset to we who are willing to share the faith amidst the search.
All these are challenges to us, no doubt, but I have come to believe that the major threat to the viability of our faith is that of consumerism.
This is a far more heinous and insidious challenge to the gospel, because in so many ways it infects each and every one of us.”

- Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church, pp. 106-7

It's kinda creepy...

2010-08-19T06:00:00.104-04:00

I learned early on when I began to blog that a serious blogger never apologizes for any long delays or silences. If there are technical difficulties with the site that prevent a post here and there, or problems that jack up the comment stream or other user interface, okay, apologize.

But if you post randomly (or not at all) for, say, a month and a half or two months or two and a half months, don't apologize. Why should you have to justify your blog or your posting schedule (or lack thereof) to someone else?

The best thing to do is just keep on writing.

My aunt Kathy stopped by a couple of weeks ago for a short visit. Her son, my cousin Matt, and his wife Ashley have two daughters that are on the way out of their infant and toddler clothes, and so since we have Princess Maddie, (who, by the way, began crawling on her eight-month birthday the other day!!) we get bags of hand-me-downs from time to time.

On this visit, my aunt also brought a book with her. She was shopping at a second hand store and found it on the dollar-book rack. There were airplanes on the cover, and the book was appropriately titled "A Wing and A Prayer". The title of the book sounded slightly familiar for some reason, so she thought I might be interested in reading it.

I was, and I did.

A Wing and A Prayer is a war memoir by Lt. Col (Lieutenant Colonel) Harry H. Crosby, who was a navigator on a B-17 during World War II. He flew 37 missions over occupied Europe in the "Bloody 100th", a hard-hit heavy bombardment group that lost 86 percent of its original crews. Over the course of two years, the 100th Bomb Group lost over 200 aircraft to flak and enemy fighters, with 1,772 men killed or captured after being shot down. Crosby himself was with his crew when they just barely made it back to England after a mission, crash-landing at an abandoned fighter base along the Channel coast.

As far as memoirs go, this one is excellent. Crosby did not spend too much time on his training or background, or for that matter what he did after the war. The memoir focuses on what I believe a war memoir should focus on, and the writing is crisp and concise. I caught the faintest glimpses of Joseph Heller's Catch 22 in the way Crosby explored the absurdity of fighting a war in the air, then coming home to a relatively peaceful and normal England to eat at the same mess hall, sleep in the same cot in the same building. Crosby questions the morality of strategic bombing as well, wondering if he actually did make a difference, and if the difference was worth the effort. In one passage, after he has been promoted to the staff level, he sees just how many people were working around the clock just to put he and his crew up in the air. He puts the number at around three thousand people, whose responsibility it was to ensure that a bomber could get airborne and to it's target. He concludes, like Heller, that it is a very strange way to fight a war.

Crosby consistently decries what he calls "raunch", the machismo and braggadocio that most often accompanies young men with much responsibility. Swearing, excessive drinking, and flashy dress were all part of this raunch, as well as a healthy dose of locker-room boasting, and the entire package was almost expected out of the young officers who took to the sky. Crosby would have none of that, preferring to simply do his job well and get back home. One is left to wonder what Crosby thought of Tom Wolfe and The Right Stuff. I can only imagine that to a straight-laced guy like that, the stories that came out of Edwards Air Force Base after the war and into the 1950's were enough to make him airsick.

An excellent read, and one that was right up my alley. I'm honestly surprised I hadn't heard of this book before, being familiar as I am with some of what went on in the Army Air Corps during World War Two.

Here's the kinda creepy part:

Obviously I have named my blog after the song that was written to express a sentiment that Crosby also wanted to express in his book, and he does it well. That is coincidence enough.

That my aunt found the book for me and gave it to me is simply a nice gesture. A nice little gift. As I paged through it, it turns out to be more than just a gift. I turn to the title page, where I see that it has been autographed by the author. Bonus!! When I travel to airshows, I make it a point to get autographs wherever I can, especially for the vanishing generation of warriors who fought in WW2. They are getting to be few and far between these days, and any time I can connect my library directly to these men of history, I jump at the opportunity. It was already autographed. Not to me, but it's still an autograph.

I flip the page to the publishing information. Copyright 1993, which is about the time it became okay for the Greatest Generation to begin sharing their stories and being honest about what they did and what they saw. Underneath that, in all caps: FIRST EDITION.

Double Bonus!! While a war memoir will probably never be as highly valued a collectible as some other literature, it's still desirable to have an autographed first edition on your bookshelf, and so I was well pleased with the gift.

So here I am with a signed first edition copy of a book with the same title as my blog, by an author who probably would have been one of my childhood heroes had I known of him before my aunt gave me the book.

I decide to do some research on Lt. Col. Harry Herbert Crosby, PhD. I went to wikipedia and came up empty, which was strange. I went to amazon, and found only a few copies of his book, all later paperback editions. I then got busy and dropped the issue for a couple of days, until today, when I did a Google search with his name.

The first hit was an obituary. I rather expected it, since in the book he mentions that he was born in 1919, and being born then and living even until 1993 to see your memoir published would have been a good long life for many. My grandfather was born in 1919, and he was 84 when he passed away in 2003. Dr. Crosby would have been the same age, obviously, and as I was reading the book, I really didn't expect him to still be living.

I clicked on the obituary. I could not believe the date on the top. July 28, 2010. Not only did this man live to the ripe old age of 91, he passed away just about the same time I was discovering his book! How is that for coincidence?

So, my not-so-belated-as-I-thought tribute:

Thank you, Lieutenant Colonel Crosby, for your service to freedom during those dark times. Thank you for your lifelong devotion to learning and teaching. Thank you for sharing your experiences during those two years of your life with us. Thank you for your unflinching honesty about what you felt and did. Thank you for not attempting to sugar coat the realities of warfare. Thank you for your attempt to make the world a better place.

jj

Wal-Mart

2010-06-09T06:00:00.002-04:00

It was pretty scuzzy weather thanks to a rather slow-moving warm front. The pilot in me knew this, and also knew that if you didn't mind getting wet, then the air is pretty stable during warm fronts, and therefore the flying really isn't that bad, if you have your IFR qualifications up to date (but I don't, says the poor blogger) and don't mind not seeing where you're going.

It was not, however, a good day to be outside if you're a parent of a two year old who seems to have some sort of divining rod for the slightest bit of damp mud or any puddles within a five-mile radius. He only has so many clothes, you see, and we refuse to do more than two loads of laundry per day.

By the time Mommy got home and we ate dinner, Eli was ready to be out of the house. Luckily, it just so happened that we had some errands to run. We packed up the Boy and the Princess and headed out to our friendly neighborhood WalMart super store.

Now, typically, if we want to get out of the house, the mall is the first choice for a quick getaway, because Eli's favorite store is the escalators. And the carousel. And the tree house.

But we had some things to exchange, so WalMart it was. I packed the offspring into the cart and headed to the toy section while Mommy returned the items.

On my way back there, I happened to walk past some dude walking the other way. We made eye contact, so I did the polite thing and nodded. You know the little twitch of the head nod you give to strangers? It's usually followed by a "W'Sup.", or some other mumbled greeting to affirm that we do indeed know that we are not the only people on this earth. He nodded back. Social transaction complete. We are not jerks towards total strangers.

We continued towards the toy aisles, where we could dazzle the Boy with bright colors and perhaps give him a toy to play with while we walked around a bit. The Princess was jabbering away in her car seat, content to let us push her around so she could see what was going on.

Mommy caught up with us then, and we moved down the aisle with all the outside water/pool toys. Remember what I said about Eli and water? So this aisle was full of all sorts of neat little gadgets to make your pool experience more exciting, because a two-and-a-half-foot tall boy and a three foot deep pool just isn't exciting enough.

I stopped and looked at some ball that you could put a water balloon in, and set a timer for it to pop the water balloon after a certain period of time. A sort of "hot potato" game with water balloons. That'd be pretty neat. I was fiddling around with it when he showed up.

The dude was back.

He stopped right next to me and pretended to look at some toy on the shelf.

"Picking out some stuff for the little one?" he asked.

"Yep. We've got two of 'em."

"Yeah, my sister has two as well, and we like to buy them things. You know, help them out and stuff."

"It's pretty cool, isn't it? Being able to play with all these neat toys?"

We both chuckled. Mommy, pushing the cart, cracked some lame joke and continued to walk down the aisle. I missed her signal.

Looking back, I missed all the signals. The dude, not interested in any of the toys anymore, proceeded to chat me up. Making conversation, just being nice, you know? Like you would over coffee or something. Or a friendly chat with a co-worker or a client when you run in to them outside your normal environment.

He was pretty practiced at it. Then again, I'm apparently too nice and gullible, so I didn't see it coming. Mommy did, that's why she didn't stop the cart.

He seemed friendly, but his questions were all too general, too vague. And, come to think of it, kinda weird. Are you from around here?

Umm, no. We live in Lansing, this is just our favorite WalMart.

I was slowly realizing that this conversation was being forced. This wasn't just a nice guy. This was very rapidly turning into a sales pitch.

Now I'm stuck.

On one hand, I'm not ready to listen to a sales pitch. I'll chat with a stranger, but the second the stranger tries to sell something, I'm going to disengage as nicely as I can. I may stay and talk, but I don't care anymore. Besides, I came here to hang out with my family, and they're two aisles away from me now, and if I don't find them soon, I'm gonna get lost. I'll have to make my way to the fishing section and wait for them to find me.

On the other hand, yes I would like to make more money. Yes I would like to work from home and set my own hours. Yes I would like freedom from the nine-to-five rat race. So if I say no, I feel like a dirty rotten liar.

The dude seemed to turn desperate when he realized that I realized what he was up to. He rattled off the rest of his pitch at machine gun pace, all the while his voice growing lower and less confident of his success.

I barely let him finish as I turned to go find my family. When I caught up with them, Mommy turned to me and said, "So, are we selling Amway now?"

"I don't know." I said. "We didn't get to that part."

"I saw that coming a mile away." She said, shaking her head.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is yet another bullet on the long list of reasons I married her.

And on the way out, no doubt showing his frustration that I didn't buy him water balloon hot potato, Eli knocked over a huge display of shoeboxes.

It was a great night.

jj

Sunday Quote 60610

2010-06-06T06:00:00.025-04:00

A rather longish passage from G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, which fits in very well, I think, with this recent blog post by Seth Godin.

I apologize for the delay, here's another Sunday Quote!

It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle. Take one quite external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motorcars; but this is not due to human activity but to human repose. There would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people were simply walking about. Our world would be more silent if it were more strenuous. And this which is true of the apparent physical bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the intellect. Most of the machinery of modern language is labor-saving machinery; and it saves mental labor very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say, " The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp 116-17

jj

Sunday Quote 51610

2010-05-16T06:00:00.001-04:00

I think I may have a man-crush on Tony Woodlief. He writes more eloquently than I can think. It is good that he is such a spectacular wordsmith, for a less-gifted writer would be considered an arrogant jerk spouting off at the mouth, worthy of neither attention nor time. But his high-minded writing style softens the blows somehow. I would liken it to a brain surgeon using a baseball bat and still getting the same delicate results as with his scalpel and finely-practiced hand. Enough of my man-crush, here's your Sunday Quote:

Pain and suffering simply are; they are part of a broken world, and so the question for man is how he will confront them when they come to him. If Christ Himself trembled in the Garden of Gethsemane, how then can we blame the non-Christian, contorted with multiple sclerosis, when he asks for what seems a dignified release?

We cannot blame him. And though we are obligated to declare the growing industry of facilitated murder in Switzerland a wicked enterprise, we should be mindful that it is the natural, rational action of people alienated from Christ. Which means the response cannot be simply to oppose suicide and the various forms of murder dabbled in at the fringes of the medical profession. We must oppose these things, because as Christians we are called to oppose evil. But the root cause is man’s alienation from Christ, and the only solution is his reunion with Christ, which means that for every Christian effort to change a law, there should be a hundred Christian efforts to change hearts.

You can read the rest of this post here.

If you like what you read, you can buy his book here.

jj

From the Top Down

2010-05-12T06:00:00.020-04:00

When things come from the top down, there is friction. We chafe at the thought of being told what to do. When we were kids, we hated getting punished by our parents. As adults, we scream bloody murder when our governing bodies assume more control.

There seems to be something deep and primal about this kind of rebellion.

When we see governments getting too big and controlling, we revolt. When we get punished, we get angry.

Could this be because we are hard-wired against oppression? Could it be that freedom is so absolutely essential to our existence as humans that regardless of our spiritual state, we recognize oppression for the evil it is?

Or is this post an entirely made up Western conservative social construct?

I'm not so sure on the last part.

Look in the book of 1 Samuel. In chapter 8, we see Israel wanting a king, a leader they could look up to like the nations around them. They wanted national pride. They wanted to be counted among the great nations of the world.

But the prophet Samuel gives them a warning, in verses 10-18. Essentially, Samuel is saying that if Israel chooses a king, if they choose to have a worldly style of leadership, it will not go good with them. The best that they have to offer of everything will be taken from them, and used for the leaders.

In short, Samuel says, "This is not going to be how you think it is. It's going to be bad for you. You will be forced to serve the king, in ways that you really don't want."

God was telling the Israelites that the authority they craved would not come from any king or government. But then where does this authority come from?

Let's look in the book of Mark.

In chapter 10, Jesus has just finished telling some rich dude that he can't be rich and follow Jesus. His disciples, on the other hand, probably weren't rich, but they did have lives and families that they had left to follow Christ. At the end of his little explanation, he says this: "But many who are first will be last, and the last first."(v31)

We can begin to see where Jesus says authority comes from. If many of the last will be first, that means that the ones on the bottom will have the authority.

This is why communism failed as a governing system.

This is also why capitalism is failing as a governing system.

There is a sense that we have, deep down, that authority is not supposed to work like this. It is supposed to work the opposite way: From the bottom up.

Think about the way the American Indians thought of themselves as belonging to the land. When the European settlers arrived, they thought of the land as belonging to them. This is not just a different way to see things, this is a complete reversal of a paradigm. Instead of ordering their lives around their environment, they ordered their environment around their lives. From the top down, not from the bottom up.

When the Israelites were wandering in the desert, before they arrived in Canaan, God appeared to them on Mt Sinai, and enacted a covenant with them. He promised to protect them, and they promised to follow Him.

God was telling them even back then that they didn't need a king. That kings were not the way He had ordered His creation. Sure, they can be benevolent, merciful, absolutely wonderful human beings, wise and just in their leadership, but all the Israelites needed was to trust and follow God. He would take care of the rest.

And now we're back in Mark, where in chapter 9 we find that the disciples were arguing about who was the greatest. Jesus says that in order to be great, you need to become lesser(33-37). If you want to lead people, you need to serve them.

And then again, later in chapter 10, two of His disciples had a request that had loud echoes of 1 Samuel. They asked to sit beside Jesus in glory.

This sounds a lot like politics today, doesn't it? At the time, some of the disciples thought that Jesus was going to become a great ruler, and finally kick the Romans out of Israel. Naturally, since they were following Jesus from the beginning, they could expect a plum position in the new administration, right?

Wrong. Jesus explained that the governments of this world lord it over them, just the same way that Samuel explained it to the Israelites. But that's not the way Jesus' "government" would work. Instead, Jesus again said that in order to become great, you must become less.

We get a glimpse of this in Acts 2, at the end of the chapter, where it says that the community that Jesus had started was selling their possessions and giving to anyone who needed something. They were becoming less. They were getting rid of stuff. They were not seeking power. But notice that the text doesn't say "...and so the disciples devised a hierarchy to place themselves in power so that they could ensure that those who came to Jesus would give away all their stuff."

The followers of Christ were not forced to sell their stuff and give the money to those who needed it. It was not enforced from above, it was enacted from below.

They did it out of Love. The were seeking to Love their neighbors. I can't imagine much more loving that selling everything you have to give to those who have a need.

This is where real authority comes from: Love. That's why Paul said that the greatest of these is Love: because of faith, hope, and love, love is what gives the other two things, and indeed all things, life.

Love breeds hope.

Hope leads to faith.

You can't legislate Love. You can't make Love the law of the land. Love cannot be enforced from the top down. It must be enacted from the bottom.

jj

Sunday Quote 50910

2010-05-09T06:00:00.002-04:00

RICHER THAN GOLD

I had a mother who read me things
That wholesome life to the boy heart brings --
Stories that stir with an upward touch,
Oh, that each mother of boys were such!
You may have tangible wealth untold;
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be --
I had a mother who read to me.

~~ Strickland Gillilan (1869-1954)

Happy Mothers Day!

National Day of Prayer

2010-05-06T06:00:00.070-04:00

Abba, Father, God,

We come to you today in prayer for our nation. When our Founding Fathers began this great experiment, they believed that freedom was paramount to the human experience, indeed that our freedom was given to us by You.

They believed that no man should have to live in fear of another man, and that governments should rule only by the consent of the governed.

Today, Lord, we pray for those who govern for us. We pray that they may have the strength to stand for what they believe, that they have the will to govern fairly, and that above all, they may have the heart of a servant.

When we pray for our nation, Father God, we remember those who have taken up the uniform of our armed services. We ask for their safety and protection.

But more than that, Lord, we ask that they will diligently and honesty seek freedom for those who have had it taken from them. We ask that they truly seek ways to love our enemies.

We recognize and mourn the fallen state of Creation. We understand that in this imperfect world, all we have is imperfect solutions. In the midst of all that, Lord, we ask that our leaders direct our dealings with other nations with respect to all life, including the lives of those who wish harm upon those around them. We ask not for mere military strength, we ask not simply for an end to terrorism, we stand today and ask for Justice. We pray that your Justice thunder down around and through us, silencing those who fill our ears with inane babble, and giving loud voices to those who need to be heard.

We know what tension there is between Your Kingdom, and the state of Your Creation today.

We know that the world is not entirely as it was created to be. We ask for your forgiveness for our failings in stewarding Your Creation. We have not done the best with it, and we are truly sorry.

We pray that You would give us keen insight into how Your Creation works. We praise you for the myriad ways You have demonstrated Your Glory to us through Your Creation. We thank you for them, and we promise to use the knowledge we receive to better care for Your Creation.

We ask, Lord, that we may see clearly the path laid out for us by Jesus Christ. We ask that you give us the strength and the will to choose the path of Christ over our political affiliations, over the expedient solutions, over the status quo, and over mere business as usual.

We pray, Lord God, that we recognize not only today, but every day, that you are Lord of Creation. We desire to live so deeply into Your will that we will truly be free.

All of this, Lord, we ask for our nation, and our leaders: that we will be a beacon of Your Hope, of Your Love, of Your Justice, for all people, and all nations.

In the Name of the Father who created and who sustains us,
And of the Son, who has redeemed us,
And of the Holy Spirit, who empowers us,

Amen.

Sunday Quote 50210

2010-05-02T06:00:00.003-04:00

Scott McKnight, author and blogger has this to say in his commentary on Galatians:

Paul says literally (in Galatians 515): “If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.” Technically, Paul could have said: “If you keep on biting and devouring each other, you will be destroyed by each other.” The addition of “watch out for” puts emphasis, emotionally, on the sin. The problem of the Galatians is typically human: egos enter into the debates between people and before long the issue is who is going to win; it becomes who is right, not what is right.

We would do very well indeed to remember that our Holy Scriptures should not be used to prove ourselves right and someone else wrong.

Instead, we should read Psalm 119, and consider the relationship between the Word of God and our life. The Scriptures were not given to us in order that we may be right, they were given to us that we may have life.

And when we have that kind of life, of course we'll be "right".

jj

The Woman at the Well

2010-04-28T06:00:00.085-04:00

Recently, our pastor preached a service on water.

We've been focusing on water as a community for a while now. The sermon was on the Samaritan woman at the well.

We examined the dichotomy in the conversation, how the woman was talking about water, and Jesus was talking about something else entirely, yet they had this whole conversation about it. The woman was talking about water, and Jesus was talking about spiritual life, spiritual water.

Jesus was talking about the thirst that we all have, the thirst that drives all of our interactions, indeed our lives. The woman was talking about having to go to the well every day to draw water.

The living water that Jesus was talking about is what we all crave. We all thirst for this living water, because that is the only thing that will quench our thirst.

The thing is, we don't understand our thirst. We think that just anything might be able to quench it, much the same way as we believe that a can of soda pop will quench our physical thirst. It doesn't. The soda will actually make us more thirsty, just like anything we chase after trying to give ourselves the living water of Jesus will only leave us more spiritually thirsty, more parched, and more in need of Jesus.

The woman at the well, like us, didn't realize how thirsty she was.

Jesus said to the woman, "Go, call your husband and come back."

She replied that she did not have a husband, and Jesus said, "You're right. You don't. You've had five, and you're not married to the guy you're with now."

There was no judgement in Jesus' statement. He did not condemn the woman. He merely pointed out the facts of her life to her, in a way that she could see how thirsty she was. In effect, Jesus was saying to the woman, "You're right. You don't have a husband. You've gone to that well many times, and every time it's left you thirsty again, just like Jacob's well does. That water you're drinking isn't quenching your thirst very well."

Jesus shows us how desperately thirsty we are, and then He calls us to all drink from His well.

He knows we are all thirsty for living water.

Deep down, we know it too. But, like the woman at the well, we don't realize what we are thirsty for. So we drink whatever we can find.

Some try to quench this thirst with money.

Some with the right career.

Power.

Alcohol.

Drugs.

Porn.

I do it with relationships.

I crave relationships and intimacy, and I tend to chase after them like I'm chasing cool. I mope around when no-one calls. I whine like a baby if I don't get the kind of attention I want from people, especially my wife and family.

I found myself identifying with the Samaritan woman. Here she was, drawing water from a well, all the while feeling the dull ache of emptiness in her life. Her thirst.

I am thirsty too.

We are all thirsty.

All too often, we take the easy way out, we seek alternatives to quench our thirst.

Jeff Zimm, who writes over at groans from within, says that this idea of seeking the easy way out applies to everything. His post specifically had to do with eating healthy, but he notes a trend in our society:

"We have drugs that will take away your hunger, we have classes, shakes, machines, you name it, we’ve made it the answer to a better/skinnier life, the whole time forgetting that if we eat less and run more, good things will happen, and instead of spending money, you may even save some."

This is what we do at the well. We take the easy way out. We don't want to exercise, we take a pill instead. We don't want to eat healthy, we want to eat junk food that has been "fortified with vitamins".

We don't want to do the hard work of entering into a relationship with someone, we watch porn instead.

We insulate ourselves from our fear by accumulating junk. If we stock our basements with food, or our bank accounts with money, we'll be okay. The rich young man in the Book of Matthew thought this as well. (19, 16-28)

We work too hard and too long to provide for our family, when all our family needs is for us to stay home a day and hang out and actually engage with them.

This is all drinking from the wrong well, and Jesus' message to us constantly is "drink from my well".

Look at the woman at the well. Look at the rich young man. They, like us, were trying to drink from the wrong well, and it was leaving them still thirsty.

In what ways are you thirsty? How are you trying to quench your thirst?

jj

Sunday Quote 42510

2010-04-25T06:00:00.002-04:00

Found over on Chris Brauns' blog, A Brick in the Valley:

Imagine being asked to stand before a grand gathering of the good and the wise and being asked to make a speech about goodness, beauty, the meaning of life, the point of history, the nature of Almighty God, or some such high subject and having no material at your disposal but an account of a humiliating, bloody execution at a garbage dump outside a rebellious city in the Middle East. It is your task to argue that this story is the key to everything in life and to all that we know about God. This was precisely the position of Paul in Corinth. Before the populace of this cosmopolitan, sophisticated city of the empire, Paul had to proclaim that this whipped, blood, scorned, and derided Jew from Nazareth was God With Us.

Will Willimon, Proclamation and Theology, page 66.

And we think it's hard to tell the people we work with that we go to church.

jj

Weight

2010-04-21T06:00:00.001-04:00

My job at the airport is taking care of the ground servicing for the fleet of aircraft which my company owns and manages. One of the largest parts of my job is preparing the aircraft for their departures, so I spend a large part of my work day fueling airplanes.

Jet fuel weighs right around seven pounds per gallon, and it's not uncommon for me to pump up to five hundred gallons of jet fuel into one aircraft. We have one aircraft that's larger, and that one may take as much as 1,500 gallons. That's over ten thousand pounds!

The fuel truck I drive has a tank on it that can hold three thousand gallons of jet fuel. That's twenty thousand pounds, and that's not including the weight of the truck.

20,000 pounds of liquid.

Ten tons.

Water is heavier than jet fuel. Water weighs close to nine pounds per gallon. If you were to take my fuel truck, and fill it with 3000 gallons of water instead of jet fuel, the weight would increase from twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand pounds.

Last weekend, I did a water walk to raise funds for our church's water ministry. We're raising money for water filtration and rainwater collection systems to bring to Rwanda.

The idea of the water walk is that we would try to experience something similar to people in the developing world, who have to walk sometimes miles to the nearest source of water. Many times, these people have to make that trip twice, or sometimes even three or four times daily. In some places, people end up walking to and from water collection sites for as much as six hours per day.

I walked for nearly two miles; just over a mile to the water collection site, and then a little less than that back to our starting point.

I carried three gallons of water.

That's about twenty five pounds.

And it took me a little over an hour.

I'm a bit ashamed to admit that my back hurt.

I mean, I carried it well, and I probably could have gone farther than I did, but I had a knot in my back.
And I only carried the water for perhaps twenty minutes or so. Not three hours.

And I only did it once, not many times that day.

See, even with this gesture of solidarity, even while walking and collecting water, the differences between us and the reality of water scarcity for much of the world comes into stark contrast.

We walked on sidewalks in a residential area. There were no dirt paths or rough terrain to negotiate. We actually passed a condominium village with a small decorative pond with fountains and a paddle boat. Several of the lawns we passed were recently watered.

The collection site we used was a roadside creek, with ample flow to accommodate the hundreds of walkers that were collecting water. It didn't dry up between collections, so that everyone had to wait, or go dry so that some had to walk back home without.

I could see the bottom of the creek, so this water is pretty clean compared to what many collect and have to drink. I probably could have drank this water without getting life-threateningly sick. In the developing world, about 5,000 children die every day, because the water they drink makes them sick.

The three gallons of water I collected is roughly how much water on average is used by one person daily in the developing world. Imagine only having three gallons of water available for all your cooking, cleaning, and drinking needs. Here in the U.S., the average daily use is around 400 liters, or 105 gallons. That equals about 870 pounds. Try carrying that on your back for a mile.
Imagine a world where everyone has water like I have jet fuel.

Imagine a world where the distribution systems are in place so that no-one has to waste their life walking back and forth to a well of polluted, unsafe water that might dry up before they collect it.

Imagine it, and then let's work towards it.

jj

Sunday Quote 41810

2010-04-18T06:00:00.002-04:00

From Doctrine, by Mark Driscoll and Gary Breshears:

When the clouds of trial, pain, loss, hardship, hurt, and tears roll in, we must never forget that our Lord Jesus Christ imaged God well even when suffering. When Jesus was hurting the most, as he hung on the cross for our sins, he reflected the mercy and justice of God perfectly. Jesus invites us to not waste the worst moments and seasons of our life but rather consider them treasures to be invested purposefully in glorifying God by imaging the character of Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. This is Jesus’ point when he says, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’ Thankfully, unlike so many half-true theologies that speak only of the victories of Christian life and how to image God when we are winning, Jesus shows us that if our aim is to image God, then when we win and lose and as we live and die, every moment is a sacred opportunity to be captured for his glory, our joy, and others’ good.

Doctrine, Driscoll & Breshears, pp 142

jj

Sunday Quote 41110

2010-04-11T06:00:00.002-04:00

From the upcoming book by Tullian Tchividjian, entitled Surprised by Grace: God’s Relentless Pursuit of Rebels:

Most Christians assume that the gospel is something non-Christians must believe in order to be saved, but after we believe it, we advance to deeper theological waters. The truth is, however, that once God rescues sinners, his plan isn’t to steer them beyond the gospel but to move them more deeply into it. After all, the only antidote to sin is the gospel—and since Christians remain sinners even after they’re converted, the gospel must be the medicine a Christian takes every day.

The Gospel message is one that we need to live in, and live through. Only then will it have the impact it was meant to have for the hurting, broken Creation. Every day I remind myself that Jesus is the fulfillment of this Gospel, and I remind myself that God is present in the here and now, as close as our next breath.

jj

Fourth Day

2010-04-05T06:00:00.087-04:00

Jesus changed everything.

And the fourth day was the first day in that change.

When I was in high school, and then later in college, I was a part of a ministry geared towards youths. This ministry put on events that would last one weekend. I volunteered for several of them, and always had awesome experiences.

The weekend retreats were modeled loosely on the Passion of Christ. On Friday, we would have discussions and talks on what it meant to live like Christ, to "take up our crosses". Saturday we explored what it meant that we are sinners, and what Christ did for us on the cross. Sunday was a special day. We usually took part in the worship service of whatever church hosted us, with singing and fellowship afterwards. It was always a day full of celebration and fun.

One of the talks always given was the "Fourth Day Talk". Since the retreats were always three days, and during those three days you were surrounded for the most part with fellow believers, something always to be considered (especially for youths going back to school on Monday) was what we were to do with the day after.

We have just had this important, perhaps even life-changing event, and now we were going back into the "real world".

But the Fourth Day concept is larger than just a day: it is the rest of our lives. We all find ourselves in some sort of fourth day situation. Whether it's a weekend youth retreat, or reading a book, or some other revelation, or perhaps a season of suffering and doubt that has now come to an end, we are different people than we were before the experience. Something has happened, something has changed, and we know that we will never be the same.

The Fourth Day is filled with despair and questions: We are walking down the road, and the weight of the experience sits heavy on us. Who will we be? What will happen now? (Luke 24, 13-35)

The Fourth Day is filled with hope: We have found and empty tomb where death was just yesterday. (John 20, 1-9)

The Fourth Day is filled with rejoicing: Our crucified rabbi has appeared to us and eaten with us!(Luke 24, 36-49)

So on this, the day after Easter, the Fourth Day and for the rest of your life, know that the hope you feel is real despite the despair. That your rejoicing is not in vain, no matter what fears and questions you have.

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." Matthew 28, 19-20 (emphasis mine)

He is Risen!

jj

Easter Sunday

2010-04-04T06:00:00.040-04:00

HE IS RISEN!
HE IS RISEN INDEED!

The Lamb without defect was sacrificed for our sins. He has conquered death!

No more are we doomed to remain seperated from God!

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him!"

So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus' head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)
Then the disciples went back to their homes, but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus' body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

They asked her, "Woman, why are you crying?"

"They have taken my Lord away," she said, "and I don't know where they have put him." At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

"Woman," he said, "why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?"

Thinking he was the gardener, she said, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him."

Jesus said to her, "Mary."

She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, "Rabboni!" (which means Teacher).

Jesus said, "Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, 'I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.' "

Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: "I have seen the Lord!" And she told them that he had said these things to her.

John 20 1-18

Holy Saturday

2010-04-03T06:00:00.016-04:00

I am laid low in the dust;
preserve my life according to your word.
I recounted my ways and you answered me;
teach me your decrees.

Let me understand the teaching of your precepts;
then I will meditate on your wonders.
My soul is weary with sorrow;
strengthen me according to your word.

Keep me from deceitful ways;
be gracious to me through your law.
I have chosen the way of truth;
I have set my heart on your laws.

I hold fast to your statutes, O LORD;
do not let me be put to shame.
I run in the path of your commands,
for you have set my heart free.

Teach me, O LORD, to follow your decrees;
then I will keep them to the end.
Give me understanding, and I will keep your law
and obey it with all my heart.

Direct me in the path of your commands,
for there I find delight.
Turn my heart toward your statutes
and not toward selfish gain.

Turn my eyes away from worthless things;
preserve my life according to your word.
Fulfill your promise to your servant,
so that you may be feared.
Take away the disgrace I dread,
for your laws are good.
How I long for your precepts!
Preserve my life in your righteousness.

Psalm 119, 25-40

jj

Good Friday

2010-04-02T06:00:00.009-04:00

The season of Lent is coming to a close.

There is a strange tension that we feel during this time of year. All around us, winter is breaking apart, and spring is breaking through. But Lent is about death.

The massive snow piles that have dominated my ramp at work for the past few months are gone, replaced with mud, and my airplanes are no longer coming back with sticky slick puddles of de-ice fluid dripping from them.

All around us, the world is waking back up with new life: I can now see the pile of leaves in my front yard that I didn't rake last fall. My tulips are pushing through the rock garden, and our cottonwood and maple tree are budding. The days are getting longer and warmer, and The Boy is trying to spend every possible minute outside.

It is strange, then, in this season of new life, that we should focus on death, but that is precisely what Lent is about.

During the buildup to Easter, we focus on what makes us most in need of a Savior. We prayerfully consider our sin, and some abstain from certain things to tangibly express the sacrifice of Christ. In order to fully accept our Savior and our salvation, we examine the dark corners of our heart. We dig out the junk that needs to be dug out, we sweep up the cobwebs that have built up.

And then today, Good Friday, we walk it down the Way of Suffering, and we place it on Calvary, at the foot of the Cross.

We humbly ask for forgiveness as Jesus looks down at us in Love.

We beg him to remember us when He comes into His Kingdom, despite our flaws, despite our sin, despite all our junk that we brought here.

And He tells us, we broken, dirty sinners, that "Today, you will be with Me in Paradise."

We call it Good Friday, for on this day Creation was redeemed back to God.

But the symbol of this Good Friday is a cross.

A symbol of Death.

Oppression.

Sin.

Today it seemed as if the world and the powers that be had won. The disciples scattered. Their teacher hung by his bleeding arms as a reminder to anyone else who would dare challenge the status quo. His few family watched and cried in horror as their brother and son slowly and painfully died. The Roman soldiers had seen this before and ignored the cries of pain as they had hundreds of times previous.

This whole Messiah thing didn't seem like it was working out very well.

But Jesus called out "It is finished!"

He willingly gave His life back to God. It wasn't the final gasping breath of a man fighting to remain alive. It wasn't the final choking words of one who didn't want to die. It was, in the end, a willing sacrifice of atonement, the final lamb to be slaughtered for the sins of Israel and all of humanity. The man who had lived his whole life wholly within the will of God, who for the past three years had knowingly set himself up for this moment, let God take his life as a final act of sacrifice.

At the Temple, the curtain was torn in two: No longer were people separated from God. All people now had equal access to Him. The separation that Adam and Eve had brought down was no longer there.

And it truly was a Good day.

jj

Sunday Quote 32810

2010-03-28T06:00:00.020-04:00

As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, "Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, tell him that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away."

This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet:

"Say to the Daughter of Zion,
'See, your king comes to you,
gentle and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.' "

The disciples went and did as Jesus had instructed them. They brought the donkey and the colt, placed their cloaks on them, and Jesus sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,

"Hosanna to the Son of David!"
"Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!"
"Hosanna in the highest!"

When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, "Who is this?"

The crowds answered, "This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee."

Matthew 21:1-11, NIV

jj

Sunday Quote 32110

2010-03-21T06:00:00.008-04:00

From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.

Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. "Never, Lord!" he said. "This shall never happen to you!"

Jesus turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men."

Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father's glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what he has done. I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom."

Matthew 16: 21-28, NIV

jj

Two Letters

2010-03-17T06:00:00.087-04:00

Dwight Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander in charge of all of the Allied Forces in Europe during WWII. During the final preparations for the invasion of Europe, Operation Overlord, he penned two letters, intending that one or the other would be distributed after the first day of the invasion. One letter was an anouncement of the success of the invasion, how our troops were fighting hard and winning a foothold against Hitler in Europe.

The other letter was an anouncement of failure. The invasion failed, and what survivors are left are returning to England to regroup for a later date.

Eisenhower didn't have to use the second note. We know that the invasion was ultimately a success, and that the Allied Powers prevailed against Hitler's evil.

But Eisenhower didn't know that.

In fact, even at the end of June 6, 1944, the outcome was still up in the air. The British and American paratroopers were far from coherent fighting forces behind enemy lines, and none of the five beachheads were as large or as secure as they were supposed to be at that time.

Even at the end of that Day of Days, the Allied leaders were still preparing for a counter attack that would throw our forces back into the English Channel.

The outcome was far from certain.

As Christians, we live with a similar tension. Eisenhower no doubt believed that the Allies would ultimately prevail, but the success of Operation Overlord still was to be decided.

Likewise, we know that the final fate of the world is to be reconciled and be made good again through Christ. But we do not know, from day to day, what progress will be made, and what setbacks we will encounter.
We must press on, fully realizing our victory through Christ, while at the same time fully realizing that we're not quite there yet.

This is why, in Philippians 2, Paul writes that we must continue to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. We cannot simply sit back on the work of Jesus on the Cross, and wait for Him to complete His work.

His work is done, and it is up to us now to put it into action.

This is why the "faith vs works" argument is so misleading. When we put forth one or the other, it is always at the expense of the opposing side. But faith and works were never meant to be seperated. When we read James 2 we are reminded of this as well.

Because when our "invasion" is over, which letter do we want read?

Do we want success? Or do we accept failure?

jj

Sunday Quote 31410

2010-03-14T06:00:00.002-04:00

Robb McCoy at his blog The Fat Pastor has this to say about Jesus and His impending trial:

So he sat there in Gethsemane and he prayed. He prayed for another way out. He prayed in anguish. He prayed as a man who could feel pain, who would be hurt by betrayal, who would be scarred by the scourge, and would bleed when nails were driven into his arms and legs. He prayed as a man who knew that if he would follow God’s will, he would be charged, convicted, mocked, humiliated, abandoned, and nailed to a cross. Knowing all of this full well he prayed, “Not my will, but yours.” Then he rose and stood up for all that he had lived for.

As we approach Easter, this is a powerful reminder of the choices we face each day. How many times could Jesus have backed down, but didn't? How many times, in the course of his earthly ministry, could he have toed the line and not rocked the boat? How many times could he have accepted the status quo?

How many times do we?

jj

Do It

2010-03-10T06:00:00.002-05:00

The Rogue Warrior series of novels is one of my guilty pleasures. The plotlines are paper-thin and ridiculously repetative, and in the grand scheme of literature, they have little or no redeeming value. The characters are static and cliche, as is the dialogue, and the books are riddled with enough salty language to raise your sodium levels to unsafe heights. All in all, it is exactly the kind of book one would expect from a boisterous, over-the-top ex Navy SEAL like CDR Richard "Dick" Marcinko.

Let me put it this way: if James Bond didn't have his dashing British pedigree to fall back on, then he would be a character in these books.

For all their shortcomings, the Rogue Warrior books do contain little snippets of Special Operations warfare tactics and strategies, as well as Marcinko's wisdom on warfare. It is these elements that give the stories their staying power. The reader gets an inside look at the shadowy world of SO, and almost feels as if they could join Marcinko on one of his many ficticious adventures. If I had to offer up a reason, this is why I keep reading them.

One of "Demo Dick's" little pearls of wisdom is this:

You don't have to like it, you just have to do it.

How many times has God said this to you? How many times have you felt called to do something you didn't exactly want to do? How many times have you had to do something that was rather unpleasant for you in the name of Christ?

I remember one time in particular that was very uncomfortable for my wife and I.

We struggled when we started our family. We had tried to get pregnant for a long time, and it seemed that everyone else around us simply looked at their spouse and popped out kids. We suffered two miscarriages, and were very discouraged.

During this time, my wife got involved in a support group for women who were journeying through infertility and miscarriages.

One sunday at church, a guest pastor was going to be speaking about he and his wife's personal struggle with their miscarriage, and this women's group was asked to be available for prayer and support after the service. My wife and I volunteered, believing that even in the midst of our pain, we could perhaps help those experiencing similar circumstances. We wanted to be available, because we knew what a lonely road it could be.

After the service, the response was overwhelming. Shan and I prayed with many couples, sharing our pain and trying to bring comfort to those who needed it.

We had just finished praying with a couple who had just a month previous suffered a miscarriage, and I happened to glance up and I saw a pregnant couple talking with Pastor Rob. He gave them both hugs, and then looked around to see if there was a prayer group available to pray with them.

He and I made eye contact, and he motioned the pregnant couple over to us.

Here's what I thought: "Oh, eff. Can I say "eff" in church? Cuz I just did. Are you kidding me? I'm here to support those who have suffered pregnancy loss. Clearly this couple hasn't. This isn't fair. I don't want to pray for their baby. I want to pray for my baby. Both of them. The ones I didn't get to meet. Why do I have to pray for their baby instead?"

I didn't hear an answer directly, but in the back of my mind, I knew what God would have said:

You don't have to like it, you just have to do it.

This couple was concerned and frightened because there was a few indications at their last ultrasound that baby wasn't quite healthy. Pregnancy issues are one of the most frightening things a couple can face, no matter the consequences or the story behind them. There is not much more scary or destructive than being told that your baby is gone, or that there are problems, or that the doctors aren't quite sure what is going on. Fighting a fire? Bring it. Earthquakes and hurricanes? We'll do what needs doing. But don't tell me that there might be something wrong with my unborn child. Pregnancy complications call up our deep-seated fear of the unknown, with the added maternal and paternal nurturing instincts we all possess. Though our story was much different, and on the surface more difficult, this couple was faced with the same uncertainty that we had. And clearly, they were in need of the Peace that passes all understanding.

So we prayed for them. We prayed for the health and continued well-being of their baby, even though Shan and I wanted to pray for our future baby.

We tried to give that couple the comfort they needed, even though we wanted our own comfort.

It sucked. It was hard to not turn the prayer towards our situation. But that's not what we were there to do. We were there to pray for others in their time of distress.

We didn't have to like it, we just had to do it.

jj

Sunday Quote 30710

2010-03-07T06:00:00.006-05:00

Tony Woodlief of Sand in the Gears on "Christianizing" the history of this nation.

It seems far more likely that we are born into this country, fellow Christians, not because God decided to bless us, but because He knows our weak faiths and frames couldn’t handle being truly oppressed in places like Somalia or Pakistan or China. Think about it — God can place you anywhere in history and space, and he chooses not to make you a martyr under the Romans or Muslims or Communists, but an upper-middle class white person in the most prosperous, healthiest, and safest country on the planet. You think that’s because you’re especially righteous? Think again. If America is a special haven carved out by God, it’s because he knew his weakest children needed a safe place.

Touche, Tony. Touche.

jj

Zealots

2010-03-03T06:00:00.003-05:00

Seth Godin wrote a blog post recently about zealots.

Although his writing is geared more for a marketing and business audience, much of what he says can apply to our Christian walk as well.

His post on zealots is a post that I think we could all learn something from.

And so it's left to the zealots. The people at either end have little hope of moving the masses all the way to their end of the argument. Instead, what they do is make it feel safer to change the boundaries, safer to recalibrate the compromise. Over time, as the edges feel more palatable, the masses are more likely to be willing to edge their way closer to one edge or another. Successful zealots don't argue to win. They argue to move the goalposts and to make it appear sane to do so.

Now when you think religious extremists, what picture do you have?

I'll tell you: Angry people protesting with banners condemning everyone around them to hell. Or maybe angry people shouting "Death to America!" while waving their AK-47 in the air.

I'm telling you right now, I don't condone or support any of those behaviors.

But Jesus calls us to be zealots, to be extremists. Absolutely not in a violent, angry, hateful way, but with Love.

We need to zealously love our neighbor. Zealously care for our community. We are called to show so much love to those around us that they begin to think we're crazy.

Imagine what would happen if Christians loved the world so much that the world started thinking we were crazy. If we all lived so zealously for Christ that the rest of the world would stand up and take notice.

Imagine if we moved the goalposts so far into God's Love that the middle had no choice but to move in the same direction.

Let's get to it.

jj

Sunday Quote 22810

2010-02-28T06:00:00.004-05:00

John Piper on Bible study:

“A pastor will not be able to feed his flock rich and challenging insight into God’s word unless he becomes a disciplined thinker. But almost none of us does this by nature. We must train ourselves to do it. And one of the best ways to train ourselves to think about what we read is to read with pen in hand and to write down a train of thought that comes to mind. Without this, we simply cannot sustain a sequence of questions and answers long enough to come to penetrating conclusions”

I have a steno notebook that I carry in my Bible holder where I can keep all my notes and thoughts while I read and listen to Pastor Rob. But we don't have to do that only during church. I usually find myself looking up Bible verses online, and so can't write in my Bible at that time. But I am never, ever far away from a notebook, legal pad, or at the very least, a scrap of paper to scribble something down on. I can't tell you how many times I've gone back to my notes and discovered some other connection or insight that I had written down before.

jj

On Optimism

2010-02-24T06:00:00.002-05:00

Last week was a difficult week in the Wingnut home.

It started with our dishwasher.

It had been slowly fading away as all appliances do, and we decided to bite the bullet and purchased a new one. The hassles that go along with any major purchase like that are enough to drive most people a bit insane, and we were looking forward to having it delivered and installed and over with.

There was confusion with the subcontractor who was going to install it, but we finally hammered all that out and scheduled the delivery and installation.

As we were reading some of the online reviews of our particular model, we discovered that we could possibly need a part that would not be included. The contractor said he had the parts on his truck, but he would have to charge us all his ususual markups. Off to the home improvement warehouse we go to save ourselves fifteen bucks or so.

My wife went out to run the errands, and was gone longer than I had thought she would be.

When she finally did come home, she was a mess. She had been crying, and continued to cry as she walked in the door. She could hardly speak, and finally managed to squeak out, "I got in an accident."

It wasn't bad in terms of human suffering, but our car cannot be repaired, or at least not with our budget.

It's very easy to become overwhelmed with the amount of money flowing out of our bank account at this point.

Shan is on maternity leave right now, leaving us with one income. Our savings account was to be used for the inevitable hospital bills, as well as to cover any monthly shortcomings until Shan goes back to work.

The hospital bills have been higher than expected, and then our dishwasher died, and now we need to buy a car.

Add that to the normal everyday stresses of having two children to care for, and it's a fairly disheartening situation.

It's hard to be optimistic sometimes, isn't it?

But I still believe it's the right way to live. As Christians who believe that Jesus came to redeem all of the Cosmos and bring it back to it's perfect state, we have no business being pessimistic in this life.

If we truly believe that Christ suffered and died to reconcile this entire Creation to God, then we must believe that everything will turn out okay in the end. Maybe not for a few weeks, or months, or years, maybe not even in our lifetime. Maybe we won't see it get better. But we still believe it will.

In order to continue this hope that we have, for the renewal of all things, we need to practice it every single day, in every situation we encounter.

That's why optimism is the best way to live.

We could lament and moan and cry for the fact that we have to buy a new car now. Or, we can be thankful that no-one was injured severely.

We could live in fear because we won't have any money left in our savings, or we could be thankful that we did have the savings in the first place.

Living optimistically is not easy all the time. But the times when it does get increasingly difficult to live optimistically are precisely times when it becomes all the more important to remain optimistic.

"It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters."

-Epictetus

“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it”

-Charles R. Swindoll

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

Matthew 28:16-20 (emphasis mine)

Sunday Quote 22110

2010-02-21T06:00:00.002-05:00

A poem I found while surfing the web recently:

IMPRESSIONS OF A PILOT

Flight is freedom in its purest form,
To dance with the clouds which follow a storm;
To roll and glide, to wheel and spin,
To feel the joy that swells within;

To leave the earth with its troubles and fly,
And know the warmth of a clear spring sky;
Then back to earth at the end of a day,
Released from the tensions which melted away.

Should my end come while I am in flight,
Whether brightest day or darkest night;
Spare me your pity and shrug off the pain,
Secure in the knowledge that I'd do it again;

For each of us is created to die,
And within me I know,
I was born to fly.

— Gary Claude Stoker

The Logbook: .7-2.0 hours

2010-02-16T06:00:00.002-05:00

This is the second in my Logbook series, chronicling my journey from earth-bound neanderthal to the much more evolved Homo Pilotus. You can read the first entry here.

Four days after my introduction flight, I was back at it. I arrived at the airport just a tad before my scheduled time, ready to hop in and go.

But I couldn't. Adam, my instructor, was there, but because I was the pilot, I was responsible for the pre-flight and getting the airplane ready. So the machine that I would spend most of my training in, N1353U, was still in the hangar, which is where Adam pointed me when I showed up.

"The light switches are on the wall over there. This button opens the hangar door. The checklist is in the pilot's door pouch. Come get me when you're done."

I didn't know what I was doing and said as much.

"You're the pilot. Follow the checklist." And he walked away.

I had only booked the airplane for an hour and a half, and had assumed that like my intro flight, the airplane would be sitting out ready to go. Lesson learned: get there in plenty of time to leave on schedule. For the rest of my training, I was there at least a half-hour before I had the airplane scheduled in order to have it ready to go.

After Adam walked me through my pre-flight inspection, we got ready and climbed in. This time, the information flew at me (literally!) fast and furious. Most of it went in one ear and out the other, I simply didn't have time to catch it all. Here's your checklist, do everything it says. Anticipate the turns on the ground, because there's an input lag. Don't do the engine run up here. Pay attention to your temperatures. Don't be looking at the gauges all the time, you need to look outside. Make sure your engine is running smoothly. How do we do that? Check the gauges. Don't cross that yellow line on the ground. Make sure you call on the radio. Don't do it right now, you need to listen if anyone else is here. Which runway are we using? Did you check the winds? Where is the windsock? Is your seat belt secure? Are the doors secure?

The last few items Adam called the WHATSL checklist. It was an extra checklist, and he made me complete it every flight before we taxied onto the runway.
W is winds. Double check the windsock for direction and speed.
H is heading. Make sure the magnetic compass and heading indicator are in agreement, and double check both of them with the runway heading as a rough accuracy check.
A is for altitude. Aircraft altimeters can change with atmospheric pressure changes, so it is important to set your altimeter to the field elevation, typically found in large letters somewhere visible like the side of a hangar or a sign near the ramp. If nothing else, you can find field elevation on your sectional map.
T is for transponder. An aircraft transponder is what communicates the aircraft's position and altitude to the air traffic controllers. There are different settings for different situations, and it is very important to have it set correctly before flight.
S is for safety. While it is possible to fly with the windows open, and while you can fly with a door unlatched, it is generally not recommended. So check them now, and while you're at it, make sure you and all your passengers are buckled in securely.
L is for lights. Daytime running lights on cars make good sense, and that good sense doesn't disappear when you're in the air. Make sure your position lights are on, and your nav lights are working, and while you're down low, below 2000 feet or so, put your landing light on too.

My head was spinning pretty fast already, and we weren't even in the air. We weren't even on the runway yet! And there was much more to come...

Adam handled the takeoff, allowing me to "fly", but I could feel his inputs, just like my first landing. That ended as soon as the wheels cleared the ground.

"You need to climb out straight. How do you do that?" He demanded.

"Uhhh...keep it straight?" I stammered. There was a way to do it, but apparently I was failing at it. It seemed obvious, so why was he asking me?

"You've got your heading indicator right there. You've got rudder pedals. Keep it lined up with the runway."

How do you do that? That's the trick. In an airplane, especially when climbing, there are no real good reference points to use looking outside. There are no white lines painted in the sky for you to follow. The reference point you were using, the runway, is directly behind you so you can't see it without a visit to the chiropractor. In order to climb straight out on the runway heading, you need to pay attention to your instruments, specifically your heading indicator. This is in addition to keeping an eye outside the airplane for traffic, birds, towers, etc.

This was my quick and rough introduction to the pilot's scan. Just like in a car, you cannot be looking inside all the time. You need to pay attention to what's happening outside the car. But you cannot devote all your attention outside the car, or you may miss vital information that the car itself is showing you on the tachometer, the speedometer, and other guages. The trick is to scan the instruments, in a car or airplane, taking in all that information in as little time as possible, so that you can be aware and attentive to the outside world.

In an airplane, there is much more information presented to you. The equipment is much more complex, and there is much more to do than simply steering. Therefore, it is extremely important to establish a good routine when scanning. A pilot must be able to take in the information presented on the instrument panel almost instantaneously, in order to turn his or her attention back to outside.

Much more than my introductory flight, this flight was my real first flight. My instructor had laid my fragile, maleable matter onto the anvil, and had begun hammering and shaping. It was a hammering that would continue every minute I was in the air up until the time I soloed. When I landed this time around, I enjoyed the flight, but there was a quiet, concerned voice in the back of my head asking me just what had I gotten myself into.

jj

Sunday Quote 21410

2010-02-14T06:00:00.004-05:00

It's a strange tension we feel when we fly. Tense and relaxed at the same time, alert, and yet strangely aloof, consummate, coolly professional and safe, yet risking our lives every single time we go up. Charles Lindbergh said it better:

"I may be flying a complicated airplane, rushing through space, but in this cabin I'm surrounded by simplicity and thoughts set free of time. How detached the intimate things around me seem from the great world down below. How strange is this combination of proximity and separation. That ground — seconds away — thousands of miles away. This air, stirring mildly around me. That air, rushing by with the speed of a tornado, an inch beyond. These minute details in my cockpit. The grandeur of the world outside. The nearness of death. The longness of life."

Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis

jj

Dear Sir.

2010-02-11T06:00:00.002-05:00

To the gentleman exiting Westbound I-196 at Rivertown Parkway Tuesday afternoon:

I understand that you are upset and angry. I recognize that you probably didn't want anything to do with my wife yesterday. We cannot blame you for that. Your emotions are well justified, given the circumstances that you found yourself in. In all honesty, we too would rather this situation not have happened. We sincerely apologize for everything that happened.

Unfortunately, my wife found herself sliding downhill on a road slick with ice, and had no choice but to swerve. She was not going fast, in fact I can tell you that she is a more careful driver than I am. Had I been at the wheel, sir, the outcome would have been far less pleasant.

I suppose I could tell you that she recognized the situation, and, while still sliding and unable to stop, managed to swerve two lanes over to avoid other cars at the intersection. Though this is a worthy effort on anyone's part, I doubt it would do much to assuage your anger. I honestly question whether any driver could have done better than she in this situation.

I may be so bold, I would like to make a request of you.

In the future, sir (and I use that term loosely), please do yourself the honor of being humble and forgiving at the scene of the accident.

Please, for the love of all that is good and holy in this world, at the very least step out of your car and approach my wife as a fellow human being.

Please, if this happens again, please at least attempt to care if everyone else is okay. Please, if you have any shred of dignity and love about you, ask if my wife is okay, as she did for you.

Please, if you consider yourself a decent human being, do not make my wife stand out in the cold blowing snow, spitting blood from her split lip while you wait for the police to arrive.

At the very least, open your door when you talk to her, and not just roll down your window an inch or so to yell.

At the very least, sir (yes, loosely again), make even a token attempt to understand that there is a world outside of your car.

Remember also, should an event like this befall you again, that it is not becoming of any person who considers himself a man to raise their voice at a police officer. May I remind you, sir (loosely) that everyone involved would have preferred to be somewhere else. I am sure that no-one wanted to spend nearly an hour outside in the cold wind, making sure everything is getting cleared up and taken care of. Perhaps that thought did not occur to you, since you did stay in your car the entire time.

In short, I can only offer up my most sincere apology on behalf of my family, and only hope that you somehow find the gentlemanly strength required to fogive us.

Sincerely,

My Family

Why do We do This?

2010-02-08T06:00:00.046-05:00

The Hughes H-1 racer is a beautiful machine. It was originally conceived and built by Howard Hughes and his mechanic Glenn Odekirk in 1935. Several technologies used on the aircraft were groundbreaking, including flush rivets that did not protrude out from the aircraft skin, and retractable landing gear. The engine was a top of the line radial engine, the Pratt&Whitney R-1535, capable of producing 1,000 horsepower. When it was completed, with Hughes himself at the controls, it broke two speed records: the land-plane speed record (352 mph), and the trans-continental speed record. Hughes flew from Los Angeles to New York City in 7 hours, 28 minutes, and 25 seconds, for an average speed of 322 mph.

The aircraft never flew again. In 1975, the Hughes H-1 was donated to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, where it is still on display.

Several years ago, a team of aviation enthusiasts got together and decided to build a replica of Hughes' beautiful racing machine. Since the only other example was at the Smithsonian, special access was given to them to measure, photograph, examine, and create templates from the original aircraft. The team did research and contacted many people who were familiar with the original, including two of the men who actually worked with Hughes on the project. Hundreds of man-hours were spent in a fruitless attempt to track down the original blueprints. Since they were not found, the team had to "reverse-engineer" much of the aircraft from photographs taken of the original. Obviously, with a one-of-a-kind aircraft, parts could not simply be found or ordered, they had to be made from stock metals, which is a worthy project in itself!

Nearly 65 years after the original Hughes H-1 last screamed through the air, it's unmistakable shape was once again dancing among the clouds. The pilot, Jim Wright, broke another speed record with the replica. Later, in the summer of 2003, Jim flew the H-1 to the annual gathering of the Experimental Aircraft Association, Airventure, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

I was there. I watched it fly. I marveled at the highly polished smooth skin of the plane. Even sitting on the ground, it looked like it was going fast. There was a constant crowd around it, as people gathered and celebrated this beautiful example of craftsmanship. It was a perfect storm of aviation: A legendary man built a legendary plane, and then an accomplished pilot and a skilled builder recreated the legend, starting with only photographs of the original. It was an absolutely beautiful moment, bringing together the best of human ingenuity, creativity, and skill.

But why did Howard Hughes build it in the first place? One could argue that Hughes was attempting to sell the design (or at least the ideas) to the Army Air Corp (the forerunner to the Air Force), which in the thirties was in desperate need of modernization. But why the focus on speed?

Why did he put so much effort into simply going fast? Why do we still do that? Why do we still insist today, be it aviation, or sports, or endurance, that "records are made to be broken?"

We do this because we are drawn to excitement and exploration. We have been created that way, and aviation is just one small way in which we can express ourselves and this drive to explore, to learn, to constantly push our boundaries and expand our horizons.

John Eldredge believes the answer to this question is found in Genesis.

In Genesis we read that Adam was created, and then placed into the Garden. Adam was created outside of the Garden, in the wilderness, where it is dangerous and unpredictable. Even still today, we have that deep longing to be out there, to discover what's out there, and discover ourselves in the process.

We crave the wilderness, the unknown. We want adventure.

This is why we build cars to go fast. This is why we build airplanes to go fast. This is why we love looking through telescopes, or microscopes. This is why we innovate and invent and build.

We have been created to search, to explore, to live in the wilderness.

Howard Hughes did it with airplanes.

Albert Einstein did it with math.

J.R.R. Tolkien did it with writing.

We can find adventure in the wilderness everywhere we look. Sometimes, we start to think that all the adventures have been had, that there is nothing else to conquer or explore, that there is no more wilderness around us.

But that's a poor attitude to have. I could say that all I do is work and then go home to my family. Or, I could say that raising a two-year-old and having an infant at home is an adventure. There is wilderness there, and there is adventure there. I never know what Eli will do, and I get winded just trying to follow him around the kitchen.

The wilderness can be dangerous. The adventure may well hurt us in some way. But we accept these risks, not becuase we have some sort of pathological death wish, but because we know that in some sense, our lives are meant to be lived out in the wilderness. Sometimes, Eli has a bad day, and then we all have a bad day. Sometimes little Maddie won't stop crying. Sometimes your theoretical models are scoffed at and ignored by your peers. Sometimes, you can't find a publisher because everyone thinks your book is crazy.

Sometimes, your adventure will hurt you. Jim Wright, the man behind the team that built the replica, and the man who flew it, was killed when the H-1 crashed on the way home from Oshkosh later that week.

But that does not make us stop. We remain driven to explore, to push our boundaries, to fully examine the world we live in.

Because God created us to live adventurously within His Creation.

We just need to go find our adventure.

jj

Sunday Quote 20710

2010-02-07T06:00:00.006-05:00

I am currently reading a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, so naturally anything that mentions him catches my eye of late. I consider him a model for all to follow. I daresay that we need more men willing to stand for what they believe as he did, unafraid of what consequences there may be. On the opening of the Panama Canal, he once again extolled the virtues of what he called "the strenuous life". Don't talk, just do.

"Why, gentlemen, there never was a great feat done yet that there were not some men evil enough, small enough, or foolish enough, to wish to try to interfere with it and to sneer at those who are actually doing the work. From time to time, little men will come along to find fault with what you have done; to say that something could have been done better; that there has been some mistake, some shortcoming; that things are not really managed in the best of all possible manners, in the best of all possible worlds. They will have their say and they will go downstream like bubbles; they will vanish; but the work you have done will remain for the ages. It is the man who does the job who counts, not the little scolding critic who thinks how it ought to have been done."

President Theodore Roosevelt at the dedication of the Panama Canal. November 16, 1906

jj

My Blog Does Not Define Me!

2010-02-02T06:00:00.010-05:00

But it is a part of who I am.

Since I began this blog, my only intention was that it would be a place for me to jot down my sometimes random thoughts on life.

I'm not able to pigeon-hole my existence into one thing, and I am not able to separate the many things that I do within their own particular venues.

If anyone reads and benefits from my musings and ramblings, I will enjoy the community and the dialogue. If no-one reads, then I will at least have recorded and ordered my thoughts so that I can make sense of them.
I will never try to collect followers for followers sake, and I will never advertise on this blog (I don't think donating to the Haiti Relief Effort counts, do you?). If I could make money writing here or in books or wherever, great. If not, my life will not be over. The sun will still rise and set, I will still play with my kids and love on my wife. I'll still probably do some fishing, and maybe scrape together enough bones to go flying every once in a while. I will still camp and walk trails and bike and catch critters and continue the love affair I have with the great outdoors. And play paintball, probably twice a year or so.

Even if my blog disappears right now, I will continue to write what I think, and explore different ideas that I have had and continue to probe just how I can be the best person I can be.

I have tried here to be open and honest with myself, as well as any readers who happen by here. I am always amazed at how the internet can be used to create community, and I am fully aware that the online community affords us some measure of anonymity while at the same time creating sometimes a more honest dialogue with those we interact with.

We can talk about things on the internet and say things on the internet that we might not say to someone face to face. Our screen names and online persona allow us to be completely ourselves, without any sort of accountability that may come from interacting face to face in the real world.

In short, we can have our cake and eat it too. Online cake. Web 2.0 flavor, with Google icing and some Yahoo candles on it for good measure.

I think I have been guilty of that here. I'm not saying I haven't been honest or open, but I am guilty of hiding behind my screen name every once in a while.

Other blogs that I frequent have the author's name spread out over the entire blog, so you just can't miss who is actually writing the posts.

Other blogs are more subtle, but it is still clear that the blog author is a real person, living in the real world, with other real people forming real relationships.

Not so much with me.

I do live in the real world, with other real people, and I do have real relationships.

And none of those other people call me wingnut. Only me, and only here.

I wonder how open and honest I can be if I am at the same time building up an online persona that only partly represents who I am. Maybe the only person this matters to is me, but it's been on my mind a bit lately, and I think it's time I fess up. In the interest of being completely open and honest and myself, here I am.

My name is Jason.

I live in West Michigan with my wife and two children.

I love God, and constantly try to be the person He created me to be.

I love my family, and try to build them up and love them and support them in every possible way.

I love aviation, and can usually be found drooling over some sort of machine that can leave the ground under it's own power or mechanical features. If not that, then never very far from an airport.

I also enjoy being outside in whatever capacity I can be, whether it be walking, biking, hiking, fishing, or playing paintball.

That's me, a brief overview. I intend to ratchet up the community on here, to be as honest and open and myself as I can possibly be online.

If you've got a moment, please introduce yourself!

jj

Sunday Quote 13110

2010-01-31T06:00:00.004-05:00

St John Chrysostom on free will:

“We are directed by free will and not, as some say, subjected to the compulsion of inescapable fate. That is why God has given us the promise of his kingdom but also threatened us with punishment. He would not have done that to people in the toils of necessity. He would not have laid down laws, he would not have given us exhortations if we had been prisoners of destiny. . . The myth of a compelling destiny is nonsense. Our lives are subject to no unavoidable fate. Everything, as I have argued, points to the beauty of free will.”

Thank-you to Tony Woodlief of Sand in the Gears, who had this quote up. You can read his post about it here.

jj

This Humble Pie is Very....Tasty??

2010-01-28T06:00:00.010-05:00

I recently wrote a blog post that I was very proud of.

It succinctly outlined and introduced certain ideas that have been forming and reforming in my mind for some time now, and it was nice to put the ideas out there for all to read and comment upon.

I got some hits that day, and was fairly pleased with the numbers.

Then, later in the morning, my cousin posted a link to my blog on his facebook account, with a small blurb saying how he thought it was a good blog post.

I was super stoked, excited, and instantly began to think that I had gone viral and would, at the end of the day, be right up there with The Huffington Post in terms of popularity.
Funny how quickly we can start to build ourselves up in our own mind, isn't it?

As the day went on, I continued to check my blog visitor stats, and each time I checked them, they told me the same story: This was it!

This is the beginning of my big break! Ever-growing internet popularity, followed by speaking gigs, and then a book deal, the sky was the limit!

Finally I wouldn't have to wake up so early to go to work!

Finally I could work from home!

Finally I could get paid to sit at the computer and write all day, and read my favorite books all the time, and hang out in coffee shops every week!

At the end of the day, I had logged a record number of unique visitors to my blog. Granted, it wasn't a large number, but it was still a record for me.

The next day, I started checking my stats early, and was absolutely amazed to see the trend continuing!

By the end of that day, I had broken the record of the previous day! It was only a matter of time before the visitors would start commenting, and dialoging and building the online community that I would love to host.

The third day began the same way, and I was absolutely blown away, so much so that I began to pressure myself. I spent a good portion of the day rewriting some posts in my head to make them snappier and more attractive to the new readers I had accumulated.

After all, I wanted this blog to be worth their time, so they would feel like they hadn't wasted whatever time they had spent reading my blog. I set up a posting schedule, imagined another series of posts I could do, jotted down a half-dozen ideas that could turn into posts, and generally felt that I was being pretty creative.

All the while thinking in the back of my mind that this was not the intention behind this blog. From the start, I never intended this blog to be anything more than my thoughts on life and God.

Would I try to write well, improving my craft through practice? Yes.

Would I continually work to make my blog an enjoyable experience? Of course!

Would I make my blog the best-looking blog I can make it? Absolutely.

But I never wanted to force myself to turn my blog into a commodity, an income, just another thing I have to do, for whatever reason.

But if a series of events let me to that end, then, well, that's validation for all the hard work and creative energy that went into this project, right?

I don't want my desire for a popular blog to consume me, but if my blog does get popular, I won't really mind, right? I can do that, can't I? I can have it both ways? Have a popular blog and be a writer, but not work towards that goal?

Sure, kid. I have an ocean front beach lot you can have real cheap too. It's near Tempe.

About the same time I was salivating at the thought of my new life as a popular writer, I made some changes to my blog.

Also at about that same time, the computer I use at work erased the browsing history, along with the temporary folder and all cache and cookies.

So not long after I finished rewriting some older posts in my head and updating and imagining my life as a witty writer, I realized that the increase in my visitor stats was due to my blocking cookie being erased.

I don't want to artificially inflate the numbers I see on my blog stats, so I have a cookie installed that blocks my personal visits from being counted. That little piece of code was deleted, and my blog was counting all of my visits, as I wrote and rewrote and tweaked and retweaked little things about my blog. I was boosting my own numbers, all the while imagining that I had begun to get famous.

It was all me.

The big numbers.

The record-breaking number of visitors.

The beginning of my dream life as a writer.

It was all in my head.

Not only was I responsible for the sharp increase in traffic because I erased the blocking cookie, but more importantly, I was responsible for believing that I was getting famous.

Double whammy.

And, I think, a well deserved slice of humble pie. It's very yummy. I would compare it to pecan pie, just not nearly as sugary.

And to you, gentle reader, a request: If I ever start thinking I'm all that and a bag of chips, call me out!

Because a delusional, full-of-himself wingnut is not a healthy, God-fearing wingnut.

jj

The Only Easy Day was Yesterday.

2010-01-26T06:00:00.001-05:00

The training to become a Navy SEAL is probably the most rigorous training a human being can be subjected to.

The first phase of the training is seven weeks of almost non-stop physical activity: timed runs (in boots and fatigue pants), endless sets of push-ups and sit-ups, ocean swims. In addition to this,
the students are divided into teams of usually seven men, and have to complete certain tasks as a team. Log PT is a favorite, where the teams have to complete various physical challenges as a team, while carrying a log that weighs usually right around 150 pounds. Boat activities are also emphasized, with each team being responsible for one boat, sometimes having to complete a beach run while carrying it, paddling the boat in the surf for hours on end, or merely standing with the boat held on the heads of the team mates, while the instructors shovel sand into it to make it heavier.

This first phase of training culminates with "Hell Week", which is 132 hours of non-stop physical activity, in addition to being limited to only about four or five hours of sleep. That's putting it very dryly. But understand this: there are only 168 hours in a week.

Typically, the drop-out rate is between 70-80% of students. There has been at least one class where no-one was able to graduate.

It only gets slightly easier from there, and the high attrition rate continues throughout the school, as the students learn more and more technical skills pertaining to the world of Special Operations.

On the training headquarters building at the Naval Special Warfare Center in Coronado California is a sign with the motto, "The Only Easy Day was Yesterday."

Obviously with a training school like BUD/S, no day is easy. It's only easy in comparison to making it through today.

How could that motto change the way we think about our Christian walk?

What if, over every doorway at our churches, we had this saying?

As you walk in, you read it. It will remind you that what you are about to hear may be hard to hear. It may turn some people away. It will cause friction and backlash, and it will definately shake the world.

As you walk out, you read it. It will remind you that the real church is out here, in the world. It will remind you that you are charged with bringing Heaven down to Creation, and Creation up to Heaven, and that the powers of this earth will not like it. There will be friction and backlash, and you will definately shake the world.

When I was a wedding DJ, we had a saying as well that ties in neatly with this.

"You are only as good as your last show."

As a DJ, I had to constantly prove myself as a good DJ. I couldn't slack off. I couldn't say, "Well, my show two weeks ago brought the house down, so I'm just gonna put the CD player on repeat and chill out." I had to push myself to bring the house down every single night I was out.

God calls us to do the same in our relationship with Him.

Every day we will face challenges and obstacles. Nearly every day will be tough. There will be days when it will be easier to simply follow the path of least resistance, give in to the temptations of the world around us.

But if we recognize that there will be hardships in our Christian life, if always remember that "The Only Easy Day was Yesterday", we will find ourselves better prepared to resist the temptation to evil, and better prepared to follow Christ wherever he may lead us.

jj

Sunday Quote 12410

2010-01-24T06:00:00.005-05:00

My pastor is fond of saying that church is more than just the grey chairs. It's more than just Sunday morning. This is from his book, Jesus Wants to Save Christians:

"The measure of a sermon is not whether it affirms what you already believe. A sermon is not a product to be consumed and then evaluated according to who good it was or whether it was pleasing or enjoyable.

If a sermon can be resolved in the time it took to deliver it, then it misses something central to what a sermon even is, which is connected with what the Eucharist is. The gathering of the church, in a service or worship or teaching setting, is to remind, instruct, and inspire people about being the Eucharist for the worlds they find themselves in. It's written in the letter to the Hebrews that they shouldn't give up meeting together because they should "consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds."

The phrase "good deeds" comes from the Hebrew word mitzvot, which refers to actions taken to heal and repair the world. It's a concept rich with significance in the Jewish tradition. For the writer of Hebrews, the church gathers so that the body will spur one another on to live a particular way day in and day out.

These gatherings aren't the end; they're the beginning. They're the start. They put things into perspective, they remind, they provoke, they comfort, they inspire, they challenge, but ultimately they are about the Eucharist. About these people in this place at this time being equipped to be a Eucharist.

The sermon is about starting the discussion. The sermon is about having the first word. The sermon is a catalyst that inspires people into whole new ways of seeing their lives.

The Eucharist is ultimately about what we do out there, in the flow of everyday life."

Rob Bell and Don Golden, Jesus Wants to Save Christians pp159,160

jj

You Know What the News is. In a Moment...(connections 3)

2010-01-19T06:00:00.005-05:00

...You're Going to Hear The Rest of the Story

There is always more to the story, isn't there? Here's my "more".

I wrote about how my backyard landscaping prompted me to look into this beautiful Creation and our Creator, and how it spurred me to write on how this beautiful Creation-and the honest study of it-fits together in my mind.

But it really didn't start there. I could also tell you about college, and how college was for me, as most young people, a time of broad stretching and learning and growing. New ideas colliding with old ideas, and no idea exactly what I would be at the end of it all.

But it really didn't start there either.

There were rumblings, even in high school.

I went to a private Christian high school. There I learned most of the doctrine one needed to learn in order to be a good CRC Christian. Or at least had them told to me. Early on, I got the sense that there was something more. That this wasn't what it was all about. I never got the sense that the answers my teachers were giving were the right ones.

I didn't even know what questions I should be asking, so I can't tell you how it occurred to me that there was something deeper, but it did. Around my senior year of high school, I started to become disillusioned with everything the teachers were saying.

I was not satisfied.

Then in college, I learned a bunch of things that really blew my mind. Things like textual criticism, literary criticism, astronomy, geology, etc...

Suddenly the things I learned in high school were wrong, or at the very least not quite accurate. The questions I began to have in high school were being answered, but not at all how I expected them to be.

I faced, like many people at that age, a crisis of faith: the things that I was told were essential things to believe in order to follow Jesus were being systematically dismantled, by professors who mostly claimed the same Savior as I did.

I remember, after one very confusing reading and cross-referencing session, feeling absolutely lost. I didn't understand how what I was reading had anything to do with how to live a Christian life, and I wasn't even sure that I wanted to live that life if this is what I had to understand.

That night, I prayed and asked God to tell me what to do. If you want me to follow You, I said, You'd better give me an understanding of this, because I am totally lost. I just don't get it, and if this is what You want me to get, then I guess I'll see You from the other side of the fence.

It was the end of my senior year, and I was preparing to go to college, because that's what you do after high school. I got accepted at Calvin, and prepared to move ~~away~~ to the other side of the city.

That summer I spent playing chess in the Meijer parking lot and sitting at 7Eleven all night with my friends. I met my roommate, and he and I hit it off right away, and we began doing regular college stuff. I pretty much gave up on trying to figure out the questions that had bothered me in high school, and my nagging doubts were replaced by the busy life of a college freshman away from home for the first time.

Until my roommate found a book in the college bookstore. I think he had to read it for one of his classes or something. But he gave it to me, and we had some wild discussions about it.

The book was titled Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, by Marcus Borg. It blew me away, and set in motion a new thought process that would lead me to the theological framework I live within today.

Freed from the constricting literal view that I was born into, I no longer had to struggle to justify what I was learning in my astronomy class with what I was taught about Genesis. Incidentally, my astronomy professor, Howard VanTill, encountered a similar situation when he wrote his astronomy book, and caused quite a ruckus within the religious community. As a result, he was very nearly fired from Calvin.

I realized early on that this was the answer I was looking for, this was what I had prayed for.

It did not look anything like I thought it would, and I knew I would never be able to be the same person I was before I went to college.

College was, for me, the first time I really set foot in God's Creation story. Like the Gettysburg analogy, I had begun to understand that I was, in fact, standing within the story. As I once set foot on the battlefield at Gettysburg, I was now looking at Creation, it's study, and indeed our Creator with new eyes. The more I studied, the deeper I dug, the less it mattered when it happened, or how we're supposed to think it happened.

The point is that it happened.

And quite honestly, the more questions go unanswered, the more mysteries we have to solve, the greater God becomes. Because wherever we discover something "new", God has been and is already there.

jj

Sunday Quote 11710

2010-01-17T06:00:00.004-05:00

I have emphasized what I think is the meat and potatoes of this quote, and quite honestly, of our walk with Christ. Blind adherance to a certain political party will not change anything, nor will blind adherance to a certain denominational stance.

"We need a transformation of our religion and our politics that acknowledges that the old ways don't work. But we need more than critique. We must ask what's wrong, but also what the answers are. At it's heart, we must offer a challenge to hope, which is the only real path to change.

Our private religions have failed, but we must not lose a personal God. Instead of trying to strike an elusive "balance" between private piety and the social gospel, we must go to the heart of the prophetic religion itself in which a personal God demands public justice as an act of worship (emphasis mine). We meet the personal God in the public arena and are invited to take our relationship to that God right into the struggle for justice. Indeed, without that personal relationship we will lose the political struggle. That shift-bringing the personal God into the public arena-is at the heart of the prophet's message and will transform both our religion and our politics."

Jim Wallis, God's Politics pp40

jj

Cue the Beatles

2010-01-15T13:54:00.000-05:00

Elijah Jason turned two years old today.

We're doing cake. We're doing ice cream. We're doing Chuck E. Cheese.

And then tomorrow? More cake. More ice cream.

And pictures. Lots and lots of pictures.

He used to sleep only in our arms as we walked him around the house. Last night, we put him in his big boy bed for the first time.

He used to not have any teeth. Now we fear for those times when we need to fish something out of his mouth, wondering if we'll get our whole finger back.

Two years ago, he weighed 7 pounds, 4 ounces. Now he weighs almost 40 pounds.

If someone were to ask me for ways to make two years go by in the next month, I would tell them to have a kid.

"Hurricane Eli" has been a whirlwind adventure for us, all ~~three~~ four of us, and though we are fatigued and tired even before he wakes up, we are energized by the anticipation of what he might do that day.

We love him dearly, and would not trade these past two years for anything.

Happy Birthday Eli!

We love you and pray that God will abundantly bless you as you continue to grow into the man He made you to be.

jj

Haiti

2010-01-13T15:49:00.000-05:00

Just a quick note.

My cousin is doing mission work with a medical organization in Haiti. He was based about ten miles outside of Port Au Prince.

I cannot imagine the pain and suffering he is experiencing right now, as he works to help those around him.

From the early information we have, my cousin and those he works with are okay, and we pray that God will use him and the rest of the staff to the best possible end in the midst of this horrible tragedy.

jj

Backyard Landscaping (connections 2)

2010-01-12T06:00:00.006-05:00

How I came Upon Chunks of the Canadian Shield in Jenison

In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Roughly 13.7 billion years later, I did some landscaping in my backyard.

It struck me, as Shan and I were helping Elijah pick out some neat rocks from our rockpile, just how connected we are with God's creative story.

The small pile of rocks in my driveway came from a mound of sediment left over from the last glacier to grind it's way south about 11,000 years ago. When the glacial ice retreated, it left the newly formed Great Lakes, as well as the glacial till that covers most of the Upper Midwest.

This glacial till was ground and scraped off of some exposed bedrock up north, probably somewhere between Lake Superior and the Hudson Bay.

The exposed bedrock came from the remnants of the Canadian Shield, part of the North American craton that was formed by plate tectonics about 1 billion years ago.

The oldest rock formations on this North American craton, an area relatively untouched by fault lines and other major geologic events, has been dated to nearly 4 billion years ago. The Earth itself isn't much older than that, so these rocks may have been present when the Earth and the rest of our Solar System cooled enough to separate the planets and our Sun from the collapsing molecular cloud surrounding and forming it.

These molecular clouds, also called stellar nurseries, provide the correct conditions for the formation of matter as we know it. If we can imagine a molecular cloud as a balloon, we can begin to understand how stars and planets form. If we have inflated a balloon outside on a hot day, the higher temperature will provide the molecules within the balloon with enough energy to keep the balloon inflated. If we take that same balloon, and place it into a freezer, the temperature will drop, and we will notice a drastic change in the size of the balloon. It will appear to have deflated, though it will have the same amount of matter inside it.

When the molecular cloud shrinks, the material has to go somewhere. Because even molecules have gravity, some will be pulled together. If this happens over and over again, eventually we will end up with stars, and other solid bodies that have pulled themselves together by their own gravitational force.

So the material that eventually made it's way into the rock pile on my driveway was at one time floating around inside a molecular cloud, a molecular cloud very similar to countless other molecular clouds that were, at one point, the only things found in the entire universe.

And then,

13.7 billion years ago, give or take,

God spoke. His words set in motion a series of events that would eventually lead to me shoveling rocks in my driveway and putting them in my backyard.

You see, we tend to read Genesis with the mostly unconscious thought that it happened a long time ago. We treat it like history, as if those stories happened somewhere else. As if now, today, those stories don't mean much. We distance ourselves from the creation story. But in the process, we distance ourselves from the Creator, and His Creation. When we read Genesis like we read any history text, the words remain rather dry and unimportant to us. We need to understand that we are connected to Genesis, and the rest of God's story, just as closely as we are connected to our house, to our community, to our families.

The Battle of Gettysburg takes up quite a bit of space in textbooks and historical works. We can study the battle, the commanders, the soldiers, the equipment used, the weather, the terrain, the social circumstances around the battle. We can analyze, in excruciating detail, nearly every single second of the battle, what was done, what was said, what happened and why it happened. We can memorize every single detail about the battle.

But we remain disconnected to that knowledge until we actually visit the battlefield. We can stand on Cemetery Ridge. We can climb Little Round Top. We can walk where General Pickett walked, and be amazed he even made it as far as he did. And only when we glimpse the personal view of the battlefield will we begin to understand everything we know.

History did not happen in a textbook. It happened on this planet, in a real and very physical place. The Bible is no different. It happened here, on this planet. In this solar system, within the Milky Way galaxy, within our universe.

And it all started with God speaking.

Sunday Quote 11010

2010-01-10T06:00:00.006-05:00

N.T. Wright is one of my favorite writers. Here's a short sampling as to why:

"Christian spirituality normally involves a measure of suffering. One of the times when Jesus is recorded as having used the Abba-prayer was when, in Gethsemane, he asked his Father if there was another way, if he really had to go through the horrible fate that lay in store for him. The answer was yes, he did. But if Jesus prayed like that, we can be sure that we will often have to as well. Both Paul and John lay great stress on this. Those who follow Jesus are called to live by the rules of the new world rather than the old one, and the old one won't like it. Although the life of heaven is designed to bring healing to the life of earth, the powers that presently run this earth have carved it up to their own advantage, and they resent any suggestion of a different way.

Suffering may, then, take the form of actual persecution....But suffering comes in many other forms, too: illness, depression, bereavement, moral dilemmas, poverty, tragedy, accidents, and death. Nobody reading the New Testament or any of the other Christian literature from the first two or three centuries could have accused the early Christians of painting too rosy a picture of what life would be like for those who follow Jesus. But the point is this: it is precisely when we are suffering that we can most confidently expect the Spirit to be with us. We don't seek, or court, suffering or martyrdom. But if and when it comes, in whatever guise, we know that, as Paul says toward the end of his great Spirit-chapter, "in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us" (Romans 8:37)"

N.T. Wright, Simply Christian pp137, 138

jj

Sunday Quote 10310

2010-01-03T06:00:00.005-05:00

So, I've never considered myself to be a very good Calvinist, even though I'm Dutch (and therefore supposed to like TULIPs), and attended his collegiate namesake before I couldn't afford it anymore.

But some recent blog and facebook conversations have brought my web-scanning eye to this quote, and I thought I would share it here:

"That there exists in the human minds and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead, the memory of which he constantly renews and occasionally enlarges, that all to a man being aware that there is a God, and that he is their Maker, may be condemned by their own conscience when they neither worship him nor consecrate their lives to his service. Certainly, if there is any quarter where it may be supposed that God is unknown, the most likely for such an instance to exist is among the dullest tribes farthest removed from civilization. But, as a heathen tells us, there is no nation so barbarous, no race so brutish, as not to be imbued with the conviction that there is a God. Even those who, in other respects, seem to differ least from the lower animals, constantly retain some sense of religion; so thoroughly has this common conviction possessed the mind, so firmly is it stamped on the breasts of all men. Since, then, there never has been, from the very first, any quarter of the globe, any city, any household even, without religion, this amounts to a tacit confession, that a sense of Deity is inscribed on every heart.”

Thanks to Unpacking Forgiveness author Chris Brauns for providing this great quote on his blog, A Brick in the Valley.

wingnut

Toy Helicopters and Teeth

2009-12-31T14:46:00.004-05:00

Elijah is nearing his second birthday, and already I think he has more toys than I had my entire childhood.

For some reason, he plays with his helicopter toys the most. So of course, there are now dozens of toy helicopters around for him to play with. I think they reproduce in the toy box at night.

While I firmly believe that one should be able to see the structure holding them aloft, and therefore cannot intellectually accept the fact that my son is showing preference to helicopters over fixed wing aircraft, I will never tell my child that he cannot play with a toy. As long as it's his. As for professional career options, I've still got some time to convince him of his folly. (By the way, all helicopters have extensive connection systems to ensure that the rotors do, in fact, stay connected to the airframe. Most of those familiar with such systems commonly call it "The Jesus Nut". Because if that nut comes loose, that's the first name on everybody's lips. I'm digressing badly here, just thought I would mention that tidbit.)

Eli plays with his toy helicopters all the time. He carries them around while eating his snack, or watching a movie. He throws them down the steps, then goes down the steps himself to retrieve them and do it again. He chews on them constantly. There are teeth marks on all of his favorite toys. In fact, one toy helicopter of his is so badly mangled that it hardly looks like a helicopter anymore. It looks more like a cicada. We're going to have to throw it away soon.

Such is the tension that we all feel at one point or another: We love something so much that we use it up and need to replace it.

We want to save the object, to treasure it forever, and it's tough to let it get beat up. But with toys especially, if we don't use them, they're no good anyway. I mean, if Eli didn't play with his helicopters, we would probably toss them or give them away.

When our nephew Jeremiah was born, my wife made him a blanket. It was not a large blanket, but perfect for a newborn or to have handy for the car seat. But it somehow became one of Jeremiah's favorite blankets. He slept with it in the cradle, and then the crib. He would carry it around with him. He still keeps it nearby.

Shan and I were over to his house recently, and we saw it. It looked really sad. It's stretched out, worn out, pulled, torn in one corner, and nowhere near it original color. It's more of a dingy greyish-brown now.

Shan told me on the way home how seeing that blanket was sort of a bitter sweet experience for her. On one hand, she gave him the blanket as a keepsake, a token of our love for our new nephew. Those are things to be treasured, to be remembered, to be kept.

On the other hand, Shan knows beyond a shadow of a doubt how much that blanket means to Jeremiah. And that makes it special, to see it used and appreciated and loved. As much as she would want Jeremiah to maybe pass it down to his children, or to keep it as a treasured memory of us after we're gone, it warmed Shan's heart to see it bringing joy to our nephew.

In the Book of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples a story about a business man who went on a trip out of town. While he was gone, he entrusted some of his property to his servants, to do with as they wished.

The first two servants doubled their investments by using the property given them. The third took what was given to him and buried it, and did not use it.

He was punished severly, and what he did have was, in the end, taken from him.

He tried to save it, and ended up losing it.

I think the point of the parable is this: Use it or lose it. When I was growing up, this parable always had a spiritual connotation to it. We need to find out what our talents are, our God-given abilities, and use them and foster their growth and development in order to be the people God made us to me.

But the emphasis on the spiritual dimension always came at the detriment to the physical dimension. Of course there is a deep spirituality behind any of Jesus' parables, and this one is no different.

But the men in the story were not given special abilities to develop and improve. They were given physical objects.

Our physical belongings, cars, houses, lawnmowers, shovels, books, kitchen sinks, toy helicopters and blankets are for us to use and appreciate.

Only if we use them will we gain any value out of them.

My nephew will go on using and loving his blanket until my sister decides it's beyond saving and it goes in the trash. Or a ziploc baggie like my mom did for the rat's nest that I turned my blanket into.

Eli will go on chewing helicopters until we decide they are unairworthy and beyond repair, and send them to the boneyard.

When we use those things that we love, sometimes we destroy them in the process. But toy helicopters and blankets are useless otherwise.

wingnut

Welcome Home!

2009-12-20T13:58:00.005-05:00

Holidays are for coming home, for family and friends and loved ones.

Any holiday season is busy, with parties and driving and gifts and celebrations.

How much more so when one of the parties takes place at the hospital? This past Thursday, we celebrated a birthday!

Not mine.

Not Wifey's.

Not Elijah's.

We celebrated the arrival of our daughter, Madison Patricia!

She was born just after 5pm, and weighed eight pounds exactly! She is also 19 inches long.

We praise God for the healthy addition to our family, and we pray that she will continue to grow into the woman God created her to be!

Both Mommy and Maddie are doing very well, and trying to catch up on sleep while Daddy distracts Hurricane Eli.

It's gonna get crazy 'round here!!!

wingnut

We're not alone...even though our kid was the only toddler going down the big slide.

2009-12-08T14:45:00.003-05:00

I'd first like to thank Pastor Larry Doornbos of Evergreen Ministries for finding this link and posting it on his blog, where I could hijack it and bring it here.

It seems there is a backlash against over-protective parenting. The article, by Nancy Gibbs from Time.com, calls these parents "Helicopter Parents". As if I needed another reason to dislike rotor-wing aircraft.

Helicopter parents are constantly hovering, making sure their kid is safe and secure at all times, ensuring a successful and bright future. Football helmets for playgrounds and toddler knee pads, these parents are all about protecting their offspring.

But many are calling out that these parents are going about it the wrong way. By protecting their children from accidents, they fail to learn how to play and be active. Not allowing them to walk home from the bus stop for fear of kidnapping contributes to their sense of entitlement, not to mention their expanding waistlines and sedentary lifestyle.

Overparenting is like an allergic reaction, calling up all of the body's reserves even as the threat is diminished, or non-existent. Consider this statement by Gibbs:

"From peace and prosperity, there arose fear and anxiety; crime went down, yet parents stopped letting kids out of their sight; the percentage of kids walking or biking to school dropped from 41% in 1969 to 13% in 2001. Death by injury has dropped more than 50% since 1980; yet parents lobbied to take the jungle gyms out of playgrounds, and strollers suddenly needed the label "Remove Child Before Folding"."

Shan and I experience this all the time. We were at the park last summer, letting Eli run around and be himself. He had just discovered that the stairs on the play structure went all the way to the top of the big slide. Once up there, he went down the big slide. This is the same big slide that scared Mommy a few months before, and gave Daddy all sorts of floor-burn type injuries on his hands, feet, toes, fingers, knees, and elbows not long after.

It's a really big slide.

Eli was going down the slide all by himself.

There was another boy there, about four, who's grandmother repeatedly told him not to go down the slide, as it was too big and dangerous, and "it scares Grandma. You're too little."

I'm sure that Grandma means well, and wants the best for little Jimmy, or Timmy, or whatever the little dude's name was. But in telling him no, she was severely limiting his ability to learn and discover his limits. He wanted to go down the slide. I would have let him. If it scared him, then he wouldn't do it any more. If not, well, he just discovered something else fun to do.

Just as four-year-old little Jimmy or Timmy was being denied a ride because of his diminutive size, one-and-a-half year old Elijah popped out from the bottom of the slide, huge grin on his face, and made a beeline for the stairs to have another go.

We will never produce daring, adventurous, risk-taking people who move and shake the world if we never let them take any risks as children. If we teach them to be afraid of everything, they will be.

Along with the risk-averse parenting that doesn't let children be children, there also comes a ridiculously high standard set for education. Preschools introducing Mandarin Chinese into their curriculum, in order to prepare children for their place in the coming global business world. Preschools! "What color is this crayon, Johnny?" "Purple." "No, Johnny, in Mandarin, please."

Parents rush out to buy cookbooks featuring recipes that supposedly increase intelligence. Some states have even provided every newborn with a copy of the CD Build Your Baby's Brain Through the Power of Music, based on some research claiming that classical music will temporarily increase IQ.

But it doesn't stop there. Many college campuses have web cams in common areas, specifically for parents who wish to check in on their students. Or consider global powerhouse Ernst & Young, who provides "parent packs" for all new hires, on the assumption that parents will be present for salary and benefit negotiations.

Good luck standing up for yourself, Johnny! Even if you do, Mommy will be right behind you anyway.

Imagine the stress we're placing Johnny under! Think of all the things he'll have to live up to, never knowing if he is truly "good enough" for Mommy. That's not to mention all the stress that Mommy and Daddy are feeling every time little Johnny isn't at the top of his class. It's probably due to their poor parenting skills, they assume, and rush to buy another Dr. Phil book. Or Dr. Dobson, take your pick.

Let them be kids. Let them skin their knees on bicycles and jungle gyms. Let them walk to school, or ride their bike. Let them run around in the woods with the rest of their friends.

We are raising our children to become responsible adults in the world. Before they can become adults, we need to let them be kids.

On the way out, here's a funny comic about overparenting.

wingnut

The Logbook: 0.0-0.7 hours

2009-11-29T15:53:00.002-05:00

This is the first in a series of posts chronicling my journey from earth-bound Neanderthal to Homo Pilotus. I hope you all enjoy reading about it as much as I enjoyed doing it!

Every pilot owns a logbook.

I was taught, by previous examples as well as articles and books, to write as much information into the logbook as you can possibly fit.

Though serving mostly as a legal record of aviation accomplishments and experience, a logbook is more than that: once the actual flight fades from experience to memory, the logbook becomes the only record of the flight.

When my Bride and I were planning our wedding, we discussed the flower situation. Our conclusion was to purchase silk flowers.

We reasoned that in many years, long after the ceremony and the reception, long after the real flowers had wilted and died, the things that would be left from that time would be the pictures.

And when we looked at the pictures, after those many years, it would not matter much whether or not our flowers were real. What would matter was the pictures. Honestly, you can't even tell the flowers weren't real anyway.

So as I went through flight school, I wrote as much as I could about the flight, weather conditions, what I practiced, what my instructor and I did, where I went. Because after some long years, all that would be left from that time would by my logbook.

Ernest Gann wrote an entire book based mostly on his logbook notes and other notes of his many hours aloft. It's called Fate is the Hunter, and it's well worth reading, even if you're not all psychotic for airplanes.

For what it's worth, here is my pithy, nearly empty logbook, laid out flight by flight. 68.2 hours of my life, in mostly hour and a half chunks.

The first flight in my logbook was one of the shortest, at .7 hours. I had called Adam, my flight instructor, the previous week, and said that I wanted to learn how to fly. He took all my information, and scheduled me for an introductory flight.

When I showed up at the field, imagine my surprise when he told me to climb in the left seat.

"Really?"

"Well, that is where you fly it from." he said. "You said you wanted to learn to fly."

Adam had to pick something up in Grand Haven, so it worked out that he took me along for the ride.

It was a clear, calm day, perfect for spring and perfect for flying. Adam spent the time quizzing me on my aviation experience and history. I told him that I had grown up around airplanes, and that my Dad had taken me up quite a few times as a child. But then I told him to assume that I knew nothing about airplanes, and teach me accordingly. He assured me that he does that anyway.

When we landed in Grand Haven, Adam took care of whatever errand he was on, while I looked around in the airport lounge. I had been there a few times as a child, so seeing the building was almost like seeing an old friend. Not much changes quickly at airports, and Grand Haven was no exception. About the only thing really different was a weather computer on the desk in the flight planning room. Even the pictures on the wall were the same, or at least as I remembered them.

It was time to go back now, and Adam graciously let me actually handle the plane more on the way back. I got to call out positions on the radio, and Adam taught me to always call out near the radio towers on GVSU's campus. The towers are close enough to Riverview Airport that every pilot who flies there regularly knows exactly where they are, and can use their position to know where you are. It would become a sort of mantra for me over the next summer: "Riverview air traffic, November One Three Five Three Uniform off the towers, inbound..."

My first landing was fairly decent, although I could feel Adam's feet on the rudder pedals fighting with my inputs, so I don't know how much was me and how much was him.

When we went inside, Adam showed me how to properly fill out my logbook, and gave me advice often read and repeated, "Fill every available space with notes. You'll want to remember this."

He promised to call me and bug me until I scheduled my next flight, but he didn't have to, because as soon as I got home, I did schedule it.

wingnut

Dispatches From the Line MK.VII

2009-11-21T06:00:00.002-05:00

With the imminent arrival of cold and snow here in Michigan, I thought it appropriate to resurrect an old series with a look into some of the "finer" points of working outside in a Michigan Winter.

On Winter at the Airport.

I've never been a huge fan of ice and snow. I would choose the hottest temperatures on record in Michigan any day over anything below 40 degrees. I'll take flip flops over shoes or boots any time of the year.

Yet I have found that there is something deep and satisfying about working in the cold, and have felt that for most of my life.

Perhaps it is the knowledge that not many people would willingly go out in such conditions, yet I do. There is the sense that I have answered a question which many do not even ask: I have been tested against the very worst that Michigan has to offer, and have come through relatively unscathed.

When I first started at the airport, I was brought on specifically to assist part time with winter operations. Obviously weather always has a direct impact on any flight operations, yet winter has special conditions that require special attention. I began my aviation career 60 feet above the ramp, open to the snow and the blowing cold, covered in steaming hot glycol, in a bucket just barely big enough for one person. The deice season was upon us, and I found myself in the thick of the snow and cold.

The work was challenging and physical, and I enjoyed it immensely. I still look back on de-ice operations with a mixture of disdain and fondness I can never quite articulate.

I suppose it's mostly because winter always seems to be the season we love to hate. We hate the cold cars, the icy roads, the slush, the salt, the shoveling.

On the flip side of the coin, there is not much more peaceful than the softly falling snow, or much more quiet and reserved as the calm of a clear winter night. The cold air energizes us as it fills our lungs. We can see clearer and breathe deeper.

The always loud and chaotic airport is somehow calmed and hushed by the snow. Even my thick work boots make no noise on the way out to my fuel truck.

Many years ago, Mike and I would share cigarettes and coffee outside as the snow fell around us. It was cold, way too cold for intelligent people to be outside, but we still burned our mouths on the coffee and froze our fingers around our cigarettes. When we would go back in, we had sometimes close to an inch of snow on our heads and shoulders.

I look back on the late nights spent putting airplanes in the hangar. Most times we would start around 8 or 9PM, but some nights we wouldn't be able to start until after midnight. Everyone is tired, nobody feels like being there, but we're there anyway, because it's our job. We look scruffy with all our layers on, like the shop-worn and weather-worn blue collar knuckle draggers we are. Phil never wears gloves, no matter how cold it is. A Carhartt jacket and maybe some overalls is all he wears for the cold. Jeremy has to shave twice a day, but for the winter he grows his massive beard out. It is red and glorious. Clint is wearing a ski mask and goggles with his cold weather gear. I don't know why he's wearing the goggles, but the mask is because Clint probably couldn't grow a beard if he drank Rogaine. Andy's goatee has grown past his collar, and nobody has said anything yet. We're taking bets on when they do.

Then there's me, with all my winter gear on, including my scarf, which is wrapped around the top of my head and across my face, covering everything except my eyes, which are covered by my ski goggles. The correct name for my scarf is a shemagh, or keffiyeh. It might be a bit off-putting to see a person working at an airport wearing something like that, but I have to say, it's probably the best piece of cold-weather gear I have. It's warmer than you think it would be, I can use it as a scarf, or head wrap, or total head cover, or as a hat. Besides that, after winter is over, it goes into my paintball gear box and is used as a towel, sweatband, and neck protection.

Winter forces us to deal with Creation on a personal basis. It challenges us, complicating even the most mundane of activities. It's no longer simply a drive to work. It's a challenge to stay on the road and avoid other drivers. And that's after the driveway is clear to a point where the car can get out of the garage. When one works outside, simple tasks are made harder by the weather. Cold, stiff fingers are hard to move through stiff, frozen gloves. Thick, heavy boots fight through drifts, and a ten-minute walk easily turns into twenty. Machines break, engines don't run well, hangar doors freeze shut.

It is hard to work outside in the winter. But I think the biggest challenge is to accept this season as well as the others, and look forward to the day when we can, once again, wear our flip flops.

wingnut

Take Two Minutes....

2009-11-11T11:00:00.002-05:00

Take your caps off.

Find a flag.

Shut your yap.

Consider freedom and it's price.

Consider the fallen world we live in, where Creation groans and the Creator weeps.

And promise to end war.

wingnut

In the Beginning....was Ardi. (connections 1)

2009-10-06T14:58:00.000-04:00

I've been reading and noting and jotting and scanning and wikipedia-ing for a while now on origins. The Beginning. Genesis. The Big Bang. Adam and Eve. Evolution.

It all started when I was doing some landscaping in our back yard this past summer. My friend Tony and I dug out some old mulch and did some weeding, and then put up a nice retaining wall and filled the space with gravel. Eli was fascinated with the rock pile in our driveway, and began to pick some of the brighter ones out to hand to my Bride and I. All three of us ended up poring over the rock pile in our driveway, no doubt looking rather strange to our neighbors as we picked out fossils, sandstones, granite, quartz, all from the pile delivered to us from Belmont.

It amazed me, that I would be looking at the remnants of a hillside in Belmont sitting in my driveway in Jenison. The hillside in question was formed about 10,000 years ago as the Wisconsin glaciation retreated, leaving all sorts of boulders and rocks and sand and dirt that was further shaped and formed by the Grand River as it moved and eroded the glacial till away to Lake Michigan.

It further amazed me that these rocks themselves were formed when the ground we stand upon was largely underwater in some sort of marine environment, and the shells and fossils I can see were once living creatures at the bottom of this ocean. They were then covered and compressed under different layers of silt and sand, and the whole works became the different strata of rock that we can see as we look at something like the Grand Canyon, or Niagara Falls.

I can't help but get the feeling that whatever time scale is involved, this whole place was prepared just for us...

Last week, an international team of paleoanthropologists went public with their findings on "Ardi", the name they've given to the species they've discovered and researched for 15 years. Turns out, Ardipithecus ramidus, the species in question, is about 4.4 million years old, and is now the oldest hominid yet discovered. What bones and fragments the researchers have suggest that Ardi walked upright, but could still probably swing through the trees with the best of them.

Ardi's dental record is absent of longer fangs, like chimps, gorillas and other primates, suggesting a less aggressive, more cooperative lifestyle not dependant on long sharp teeth and violence to survive.

Her hands were more human-like than ape-like, ready to grasp and use tools when she learned how to make them.

It is far too soon to make any sort of concrete claims as to how Ardi fits into our family tree, but what struck me about this is that the researchers are surprised at how "human" Ardi seems.

It is a far more complex picture than the "us from chimps" story that some would have us believe. In fact, Ardi seems to make the opposite claim: she is more human than chimp. It's more like "chimps from us". As if we were created special, we were given certain traits that then over time manifested themselves in different ways.

Is anyone else hearing Genesis 1 thundering through their head, or is it just me?

We are all connected. To each other, to our history, our environment, our societies and our cultures, to the Creation, and ultimately, to the Creator. I hope to explore these connections in further detail. I don't know how many posts my random jottings will ultimately create, but for now, let's just enjoy the ride.

wingnut

Playing in the Rain

2009-09-17T15:02:00.001-04:00

A couple of years ago, a journalist with the Washington Post decided to do an experiment. The question was, would people recognize concert-level performance art if it were slightly out of context?

The journalist contacted Joshua Bell, one of the worlds leading violin players, and asked him to play for just a little while in the entrance to a busy subway station in Washington D.C.

Joshua showed up to play wearing regular clothing, jeans and a beat up long sleeve shirt, and a Washington Nationals cap. His violin was beat up. To the passersby, he looked like any other street musician trying to feed himself.

He played for about 45 minutes, expertly performing some beautiful and complicated pieces. Not many people stopped. At the end of the 45 minutes, he had made about 32 dollars.

(You can read the original article here. Also, here is a later article, as the author responds to various emails and questions about the piece.)

Pastor Rob gave this example one Sunday in a sermon on context.

If we don't pay attention, we could miss things. We could miss the free Joshua Bell concert that's worth at least a hundred bucks a seat, because we don't recognize what's actually going on. Pastor Rob's point was that we miss out on hundreds of these sacred moments each day, and we need to learn how to look for God and pay attention to what He's trying to tell us. We need to teach ourselves to see God's movement in everything.

There is a beauty to this life, even in the subway station. If we move too fast, or don't remember to look, we'll miss it.

When Shan and I were talking about it later, she said the thing that struck her the most is that the children were the ones to stop.

It's rush hour on a weekday morning at a subway station. There's people heading to work, and parents are bringing their children to daycare, or school, or perhaps along with them.

And the kids are the ones who stop to listen. The kids, probably without any sort of experience with classical music. The kids, who would recognize SpongeBob but not Joshua Bell. The kids, who if asked, might say the instrument the man was playing was a guitar or a flute or a trombone.

The children are the ones who stop to listen.

The children, who are not burdened with work schedules or bosses, with budgets and shopping lists, car repairs and school and shrinking paychecks, are the ones who stop to listen.

In our year and a half of parenting, Shan and I have been intentional in our goal to let Elijah do things that other parents might not let their children do.

It's not that we think we're better, it's not that we think we've got this thing figured out at all. We're just trying to give it our best shot.

And both of us feel strongly that we should never make Elijah feel as if he isn't capable of doing something, or that he can never have any fun.

We let him jump on the bed, for crying out loud. Since he was only a few months old, we would play the "Hop" game with him. From a very young age, Eli enjoyed movement. We would take him in our arms and jump around the house, and he would smile and giggle and wave his arms. In the morning, sometimes we would take him in bed with us and do the same thing. Eventually, this evolved into the "Hop" game. When Eli got old enough to support himself, we would hold his hands and make him stand up, then bounce up and down, carrying him with us, all the while singing "Hop Hop Hop!"

Now, Eli does it all by himself. That's right. Not only did we encourage jumping on the bed, we taught him how fun it could be.

A while back, we went outside. We had our front door open, and we were listening to the sound of the rain on our tree and our roof. At one point, it was nearly too loud to talk, the rain was coming down so hard. Eli didn't leave the front door. He stood there watching and listening. Eventually, he reached up for the handle. By that time, the rain had died down a bit, so we went outside. We stood on our front porch and let the rain wash over the gutters and splash at our feet. We put our hands in the stream. Eli put his head in the stream, and laughed when it dripped down his nose. I remember playing in the rain and puddles as a kid, and I want Elijah to enjoy it as well.

Meal times can get pretty messy when you're teaching your child to eat with utensils. One of Eli's favorite meals is spaghetti. So we make it fairly often, and cut the noodles short enough so Eli doesn't choke, and let him go to town. Eventually, Eli gives up on the fork and goes with his hands, and spaghetti gets everywhere. Floor, walls, table, ears, hair, nose, armpits, inside the diaper...It takes longer to clean up than it did to eat dinner.

We're not trying to be the "cool" parents by doing these things. We're not trying to intentionally spoil Eli-we don't let him walk all over us.

We're merely trying to teach him that life is meant to be lived. That there is beauty and joy and good things all around him. That there is beauty in watching a child enjoy a messy dinner. That there is fun to be had playing in the rain. That joy can be found bouncing up and down on a queen mattress.

We do this because we want Elijah to experience life. We want him to stop and listen when he hears music in the subway station. We don't want him to simply walk by on the way to the next thing.

We do this also because it helps us stop and listen as well. Eli's discovery of spaghetti was worth a whole month of bath times for us. Who really thinks spaghetti is that much fun? Jumping on the bed? Who thinks of the consequences when you're kid is laughing so hard he's about to barf on your sheets? Who thinks of going back inside when your child is laughing at every single drop of water running off the roof?

It's about the experience.

It's about life.

Shan told me, "I let Eli do these things so that I don't forget them."

I hope we all never forget.

wingnut

Roughing It

2009-09-08T15:32:00.000-04:00

Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Camper.

My wife and I bought a camper this past week.

First of all let me clear the air by saying that this is not something that I would have done normally. You don't have to listen to me long to know that I feel that some (most) people take entirely way too many things with them when they "camp". I use the quotes because the way some people do it is not camping to me.

I suppose it's a semantic issue, really. What those people do is called "RVing", and it truly is a different subset of vacations, that simply happens to share quite a bit of space and facilities with us campers. So if you want to call it RVing, go ahead and stuff that forty foot long fifth wheel trailer with all the comforts of home, set up your satellite TV and kick back in your recliner. I don't mind. Just don't call what you're doing the same thing as what I'm doing as I set up my tent and pump my air mattress and chop kindling. What we're doing? Camping. What you're doing? You're staying at a hotel. You just brought it with you, that's all.

And don't try to convince yourself or your site's neighbors that you're "getting away" for a while. You have a freaking apartment on wheels. What exactly are you getting away from? And for crying out loud, do not, for the love of all that's holy, make that stupid joke about how you're "roughing it". For those of us that are, in fact, roughing it, you just sound spoiled and arrogant. Not to mention a little bit wussy for indirectly admitting your need for all that junk when on vacation. And also pretty lame for laughing at such an old joke.

My wife and I do not like trailers. I grew up with one, and I prefer tents. She grew up with a cottage, so any living space that you can pack in a car, or pull behind your truck, or is in any way mobile is completely foreign to her. Now that we've been vacationing together for some time, we have both come to the conclusion that a tent is the only way to go. It took more convincing for her than for me, but convinced we were (and are).

Enter Elijah.

Last year, Elijah joined us on our vacation to the Conference Grounds. In a tent. It worked out well, but we began to have doubts. The thin, nylon walls of our home away from home do not hide well the sound of a teething child at five in the morning.

Also, tents do not make good places to put microwaves to warm up milk, just in case the teething child in question is spoiled and will not drink cold milk.

So we slept with Eli's bottles between our legs to keep them warm, and we practiced getting up off the air mattress in time to stop Eli from screaming too loud. The weather was gorgeous, and Eli was not quite as fast as he is now, so for a week, we dealt with the inconvenience and enjoyed ourselves.

A few weeks ago, we did it again. We camped with Elijah at the Conference Grounds. In a tent. This time, there were a few major differences. Eli is now not as picky about the temperature of his milk, but now we need to deal with keeping a cooler cold enough for milk. And milk is a bit more touchy when it comes to temperature than, say, Daddy's Mountain Dew Game Fuel. Eli is also way faster than he was last year. He runs now, and Daddy and Mommy almost have to run themselves to keep up with him. He is also old enough to memorize the way to the playground, and just old enough to hurt himself when he falls off the toys at the playground. He doesn't stop for naps if it's not dark out, and tents don't get as dark as we can get his bedroom. Nap time was craptacular.

Probably the biggest difference is that Mommy is pregnant with Eli's little sister, and pretty much down for the count when it comes to chasing after Eli.

Add in the less than perfect weather that we've had all summer long, and what we had was a less than relaxing vacation.

Enter Baby J #2.

She will want milk and formula, probably warmed up. She will need the Pack n Play, meaning Eli will get a big boy air mattress, and therefore will be free to roam if he were to wake up at some point during the night. She will also be teething eventually.

To make my incredibly long story short, we are in the midst of outgrowing our tent. I had a choice: give up camping as a vacation, and settle for cottages and hotels, or give up our tent.

Sorry Coleman. You lose. Daddy's got to get his camp on.

So this past week, because we weren't busy enough preparing for another child, getting another cat to keep Moose occupied, re-doing our kitchen, and working on my Blazer, we decided to buy a camper.

It's not something we did with great excitement, but we both accepted the inevitable in order to continue camping as a family activity. We searched around for a good deal, and then when we found it, we took it. Tuesday I looked at it, and that night we made an offer. Friday, the guy dropped it off and we took care of business. It's ours, and is currently set up in our driveway.

A few things made this a bit more palatable to my Wild at Heart-ness. First, I grew up with travel trailers, so transitioning from tent to pop-up is at least familiar to me. Second, it's a pop-up. There's enough canvas on it to make you think you're still in a tent, except it's got wheels. But you can't see them from the inside, so you're okay.

Third, I came across this blog a while back, and read the whole thing. This family trucked it across Australia in their SUV and pop-up camper. Just you go and try pulling your apartment on wheels down some of the roads they went down! Impossible, I daresay! If I read this travel blog correctly, then I must conclude that the pop-up camper was what made this adventure possible. It could not have been done with a massive trailer, and a tent would not have been durable enough to make it that long. Therefore, pop-up campers allow you to rough it more than a tent would (This is my argument. Let me make it.)

I mean, look at what the Halls did! 85 days and 11,000 kilometers. That's like 6800 miles, which is like 340 trips to the Conference Grounds. Given our current rate of vacation travel, that's over 300 years of camping adventures.

So, from now on, when the Wingnut family camps, we'll have to do it with an asterisk and footnotes denoting our love of tents rather than trailers.

Paul, the gentleman who we bought our camper from, was more than helpful in explaining things to us. Lists and advice and all sorts of great information. Thanks Paul! We promise to have lots of adventures with it!

I would also like to thank Craig, who made his amazing list. Without you, Craig, we wouldn't have found Paul.

There you have it. The first step on the slippery slope to a forty-foot fifth wheel trailer with three slide outs, full kitchen, recliners, plasma TV and satellite dish, air conditioning, and a seasonal spot at our favorite RV park, complete with a little sign showing our last name and the town we're from.

Ours says Allendale, even though we're from Jenison.

wingnut

On DJing

2009-08-07T13:16:00.001-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, on a Thursday afternoon, I came home from work to a son with a fever of over 100. There went my weekend. I had Friday off, and was planning another biking outing with Eli. We had biked Millennium Park the previous Tuesday, and I was torn between going back because the trails in Millennium are awesome, or finding some other trails that were a short drive away. Now, with Eli sick, we couldn't go. Instead, we spent Friday enjoying a Pixar film festival from our couch.

Saturday was not much different, except for a just-to-be-sure-we're-doing-everything-right doctor visit. We were doing everything we could, but it was nice to find out why our son was sick. Turns out he had herpangina. Again. We try to tell him he should just stop putting everything in his mouth, but everything tastes like candy to him apparently.

Saturday morning turned into Saturday lunchtime, and lunchtime gave way to nap time and early afternoon. When Eli woke from his nap, he was a bit cranky. Aside from the trip across town to see the doctor, he had been inside since Thursday lunchtime. Eli, like his Mommy and Daddy, tends to get a bit restless when he is indoors for long periods of time. Mommy and Daddy, for their part, were restless because they were busy watching a sick child.

At this point, I had been indoors for over 24 hours, and it was hard to tell who was more cranky, Eli with his throat lesions, or me with cabin fever. For the health of all four of us, I went outside to finish up some landscaping.

It's funny how kids don't act sick when they have something to occupy them, and such was the case with Eli. When I went outside, he watched my every move from the slider. He eventually threw a fit until Mommy let him outside, fever and all, to run around the backyard. He played in his sandbox, helped me level out some of the gravel, and threw things into the ivy bushes around our deck.

While Eli was acting completely normal despite his fever, I heard music. It wasn't close music, it was drifting on the breeze from far off. It must have been loud, because from our backyard, we could still hear enough to make out what songs were playing. But it was mellow, muffled, distorted somehow, like hearing Charlie Brown's parents. It came to us in waves, sometimes loud, sometimes not so loud. It seemed to be coming from the other side of the park, somewhere across the lake.

And something began to happen. It was so subtle at first that I hardly noticed. I was finishing up the landscaping and I grabbed a beer. Shan was sitting on our deck talking with me, and Eli was running around acting normal despite his fever. The music was drifting into our backyard, and the moment was absolutely beautiful. The stress and anxiety from the past few days was dissipating, seemingly blown away on the same breeze that carried the music to us. It no longer mattered that our weekend plans were ruined, or that our kid was sick. I faced the wind and inhaled deeply.

I spent over a decade of my life as a mobile Disc Jockey, playing music and entertaining people at wedding receptions and other parties all over West Michigan. It was a wonderful time, with many wonderful memories. I doubt that I will ever be able to attend a wedding reception for the rest of my life without poking my head behind the DJ table and checking out the system. I will pretend to be nice (mostly), but what I'm really doing is making a mental checklist of everything that I would do different (better) if this were my show. So it happened, there in my backyard, that I was thinking back on DJing, and wedding receptions, and the life of an entertainer.

It was a wonderful trip down memory lane, crazy kids and loud music, finicky equipment and long miles, people loving you and hating you all at the same time.

It's funny how some things become a part of us, even though we insist they're not. How a part-time job can easily consume your identity if you let it. It was that way with DJing for me.

I had a blast doing it. What other job lets you party it up week after week and get paid for it? Where else can you gain exclusive access to some of the best reception halls in town, what other job has you dressed to kill every night you work?

Before long, you become a DJ. Not just at your shows, but in your normal life. When people ask you where you work, you tell them you DJ before you tell them what your full time job is. A co-worker gives you a nickname, and you begin to use it all the time. Even when you're not working, anytime there is music, people look to you to be the entertainer.

But with any identity, the energy you put into it has to come from somewhere else. I was a DJ, and often I put that before being a husband. "The show must go on!" I said, "Shan needs to understand that." Other times, when I was at my full time job, I would put off my responsibilities there in order to take care of DJ business.

For years Shan had been trying to talk to me about it, trying to get me to see what I was doing. But I didn't get it. Finally, after Eli was born, I realized I couldn't do both. When Shan and I were finally getting to experience our pregnancy and childbirth, it began to wear on me. I would be DJing, and out of nowhere I would feel this sense that I should be somewhere else right now. Sometimes, that feeling would come at me before I even started playing music, sometimes on the drive to pick up the equipment, or on the way to the show. "I should be home right now. I should be spending time with my wife." I finally understood what Shan had been saying.

I remembered how hard it was some days, knowing I wouldn't see my wife or my family until the next day. Or having to leave the beach or pool or something early in order to go to someone elses party.

When the time came to finally call it my last show, I talked with my friend on the phone for nearly twenty minutes. That phone call consisted almost entirely of me going back and forth trying to work out options where I could still DJ, knowing that what I wanted was impossible: I couldn't be the Husband and Daddy I wanted to be if I was DJing all the time. And I couldn't be the best DJ I could be if I only did it once a month or so.

I had to walk away.

But that Saturday, that beautiful moment with the breeze blowing the music into our backyard, it was easy to see why I DJed for so long. You always remember the good times. I breathed deeply of that light wind and let it carry me in a pleasant jumble of fond memories. I was taken back, briefly, to the place where I was DJing and that was my life's purpose.

But as I sat there drinking my beer and reminiscing, a thought continued on looped playback in my mind: "If you were DJing, you wouldn't be here."

I wouldn't be on my deck with a beer in my hand. I wouldn't be watching Eli heal "miraculously" from being outside. I wouldn't be sitting next to Shan, enjoying her company and her voice and the music and the sunset. I wouldn't be where I wanted to be, where I needed to be.

And so we sat. And we talked. And we listened to the music, and chased our "sick" boy all over the back yard. We breathed in the moment and the music and the breeze.

And for the first time in years, I didn't want to be behind the system.

wingnut

Daddy's Day Part 2

2009-08-02T07:56:00.000-04:00

Shan is pregnant with our second child.

Things have been progressing quite normally, with the nausea and the near barfing, as well as the tiredness, the soreness, the "pregmentia".

All this while chasing an 18 month old who does not stop, even when he falls off our deck, or even when he has a fever of 103, or when he hasn't had a nap in two days.

We've been busy.

Since my sister has three boys, my other sister one boy, plus Elijah, there have been many jokes around our house about boys versus girls. We had nearly come to believe that we were not able to make girls, since our track record as a family was 100% wiener. My dad has been loving the craziness that comes with five grandsons, and takes every opportunity he can to scoop them all up at once and take pictures. Three of them won't sit still (and the other two are well on their way), so it's always fun watching that happen.

My mother, on the other hand, while she absolutely adores her grandsons, feels somewhat left out.

She wants to buy pink stuff, and Barbie dolls and My Little Ponies. Tea parties and sleepovers and girl talk and shopping and all that. So far, she's been unsuccessful in her attempts to convince her grandsons that pink is awesome.

This past Monday, Shan and I had our 20 week ultrasound. This is the big one, where we really get to examine the baby's progress. At this point, the baby is developed enough that one can study organ shape, bone structure, as well as movement. So we watched as our baby kicked against the pressure of the ultrasound wand, we watched our baby suck it's thumb, roll over, play with it's toes.

We watched our baby's tiny heart beating.

One of the other things we get to do at this ultrasound is determine the sex of the child.

This was the moment. My whole family was waiting with baited breath to hear if it was a boy or a girl. In fact, nearly everyone we know came out of the woodwork with an opinion. We actually have a sheet taped to our kitchen wall with three choices (boy, girl, no preference), and as opinions came in, I would write them down. Our friend Aubrey wanted a puppy. Sorry Aub. No puppy.

There we sat in the darkened room. Eli was getting antsy. Mommy I think was antsy. Daddy was focused on keeping Eli from kicking a hole in any of the medical equipment.

With this whole boy versus girl thing, my standard response was, "It's a boy. Think what you want, it's a boy." I had been saying the entire pregnancy as a way to be somewhat funny, and at the same time make the point that my wife and I really don't care what we're having.

Somewhere along the way, and I don't know quite where, I began to assume that I was right. I mean, look at our track record! My sister? All boys. My other sister? All boy. Us? All boy.

So in that darkened room, with our doctor waiting to congratulate us, and the ultrasound tech pushing all over Shan's belly to get a good view, and Eli try desperately to climb down and help the ultrasound tech operate her machine, Shan and I were surprised.

Me more so than her, because she confessed to me later that she has had several dreams to this effect, and had a hunch at the outcome. But me? The look on my face was genuine surprise.

We're having a daughter!

A matched set!

The million-dollar family!

We can't wait to see what the future holds for this special little girl. We can't wait to meet her, and we can't wait for her to meet Elijah!

wingnut

Daddy's Day

2009-06-19T15:06:00.000-04:00

Elijah was in the garage the other day, seeing what trouble he could find. Before I caught up to him, he had discovered my stash....of little green army men.

He was chewing on one (or maybe picking his teeth with the bayonet, I don't know), and had three others in his hand. I'm not sure he grabbed a complete fire team, or if it was a mixed unit, but we'll probably cover that in a few years.

I gently took his arm, took Sergeant Bayonet out of his mouth, and put the rest of the soldiers back into the bag.

"Maybe later, buddy, when you can throw marbles at them, okay?" I said, as I guided him to the car, our original destination.

I chuckled a bit when I reflected on the moment.

How hilarious is it, really, when a 24 year old man still has his army men stored at his parents house? How strange is it for that same man, at 26, moving all his toys into his new house?

How cool is it that that same man, now 31, can someday throw marbles at his army men with his son?

I have a massive Star Wars action figure collection (ebay and retirement. That's all I'm sayin').

I kept all my Lego's. And occasionally still buy Lego's.

My excuse always was that I would have them around for my kids to play with. Now it's not an excuse.

I was reading the other day in the paper an article on how today's "New Dad" is one who sacrifices career advancement and places a good portion of his time and effort into raising his children. "New Dad" doesn't mind changing diapers and giving baths. "New Dad" is more willing to help out around the house, and take part in kid's activities.

Isn't that always what Daddy has been?

The article was talking about the new trend in society where men, traditionally the outside the home breadwinners, are getting more and more involved in the inside the home stuff. Gone are the days of Dad coming home from work, eating dinner, and sitting in front of the tube while his kids don't bother him.

But I think being involved is where Daddy always was.

My Dad changed diapers. He had to, it was a matter of necessity. Four kids and two parents who work means that whoever is around gets the job. My Dad made it to school functions. My Dad played with all of us. My Dad never checked out when he got home.

This domestic involvement is nothing new to me. Growing up, all the Dads in my family were involved. And now their sons are becoming Daddies themselves, and they're involved.

No, "New Dad" is "Old Dad" is "Always Dad".

What is changing is not the role of Dad, but society's view of what that role should be.

For a long time, we have convinced ourselves that the role of Dad in the family is to make the money and keep the peace. Dad did that by working long hours and yelling when kids made noise. If it got really bad, the belt would come out, or the paddle, or the wooden spoon, or whatever. That's it. Dad's job was to keep kid's quiet, and kid's job was to keep Dad from reaching for the wooden spoon.

But that was never Daddy's job. That was the job of a father.

Daddy has a far more difficult job, and therefore the title of Daddy is much more coveted and valuable than father.

Any male has the capacity to be a father. But only real men can be Daddies. Andrew Galasetti, entrepreneur and writer, said in a recent blog post,

"“What’s the difference?” you might be asking. Well, a father is a proper term for a male that produces a child. But in the eyes of a kid, a father is a “dad” or “daddy.” It’s a name that has to be earned; earned by being supportive of your child both financially and mentally. You don’t become a “dad” without working hard for it or without being there whenever your kids need you."

The entire post can be read here.

In effect, what men are doing now is rediscovering what Daddies always have been: A loving male role model who takes an active role in the raising and care of his children.

What we are learning, in the article, is that this active role is way more than simply putting food on the table, or money in the bank account.

We're ignoring the societal pressure to conform to the old stereotype of Dad and masculine identity. We're blazing a new trail through fatherhood, one dirty diaper at a time.

I have always thought that it would be awesome if I could play video games and goof off with my Lego sets and play with all my toys for the rest of my life. Now I can, and I have a partner in crime (and another on the way!). We can have our cake and eat it too, playing with all our kid's toys, while at the same time raising them up as strong, upstanding future adults who will eventually replace us in society. How awesome is that?

The other night, we went to the beach. Sand and water and the occasional gull feather will keep Eli occupied for hours. All we have to do is make sure he doesn't walk out too deep and fall over. Just next to us on the beach, there was a young boy playing and splashing in the water. He was desperately trying to get his "dad's" attention, but "dad" was more interested in playing kissyface with his-I'll say wife for the benefit of a doubt-than he was in what his son was doing. It broke Shan and I's heart, to watch this little boy full of so much energy and excitement, calling out to dad over and over, only to get one word replies.

Eli and I were building a sand pile to turn into a castle, and it caught this little dude's attention. So I asked if he wanted to help build it. Of course he did. He even found a neat feather to put on top of it, and he found a bunch of shiny stones for his "dad's" rock collection. His "dad" merely smirked at every stone the kid brought over.

The worst part about this is that this kid will grow up effectively without a Daddy, and at the same time, the father thinks he's being a good Daddy by taking his kid to the beach.

When I was DJing for wedding receptions, one of the rules my company made was "Be There".

Obviously, in order to DJ we have to be physically present at the event. But it took more than this to fulfill the requirement of Be There. Be There meant that we were fully there physically and mentally: not just physically present, but focused on the event at hand. Be There meant fully available for your client's and their guest's needs. You can't Be There if you're texting or talking on your cell phone. You can't Be There if your too busy flirting with the cute bridesmaids. You can't Be There if you're trying to scam a free meal from the caterers.

The same holds true for Daddies. You can't be a Daddy if you can't leave work at work. You can't be a Daddy if you're playing kissyface while your child plays alone on the beach. You can't be a Daddy if you don't live near your children.

You can't be a Daddy if you don't Be There.

Like a Marine officer's sword, the title Daddy is earned, never given. And it will not be given unless we Be There for the job at hand.

And that job is most likely a dirty diaper.

wingnut

OOOH Pentecost!!

2009-06-01T12:29:00.002-04:00

Here's some verses as we consider Pentecost:

Our world is broken

We will fix it

We fix it not only because of the restoration in the present time, but we fix things also with an eye towards the future. Nehimiah's work was only a small step in the restoration of the entire cosmos.

Nehimiah rebuilt the City where Jesus culminated his earthly ministry.

From the rebuilt city, Christ's power and love was given to the whole world.

So for us today, we start with Acts 2. We have been given the Holy Spirit to empower us to live as Christ.

Let's read Nehimiah closely. No where in the text does it say, "And God came to Nehimiah and told him to rebuild the city of Jerusalem."

Nehimiah saw how his ancestral lands were laid low. He saw how his people had fallen and were destitute.

And he took it upon himself to change things. He didn't wait for a divine command. He saw the injustice and decided to do something about it.

In doing so, he laid the literal foundations that Jesus would stand on as he redeemed the world from evil.

And then Jesus sent His spirit to his disciples, and through them to the entire world.

We are all Nehimiahs now.

And this is what we're working towards.

wingnut

Memorial Day?

2009-05-25T20:40:00.004-04:00

A picture is worth a thousand words.

So, in a thousand words, this was my weekend.

This is me, and this is how I spent all day Thursday and all day today. I'm in the forward cargo hold of a Boeing 737-400. We spent the weekend throwing luggage and fueling airliners.

Thank God for kneepads.

wingnut

Yellow Baby Bears

2009-05-06T08:53:00.006-04:00

I have aviation in my blood.

I am a pilot.

My dad is a pilot.

My grandfather was a pilot.

In addition to having his pilot license, my dad has been an aviation mechanic for his entire career.

So in my home growing up, there was always talk about airplanes. We went to airshows all the time. I tagged along with dad to work on a few occasions, always fascinated with these flying machines.

One of the first books I remember reading was Chuck Yeager's autobiography. Yeager was a WWII fighter pilot, and went on to become a very accomplished and well-known test pilot. He is best known for being the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound.

Another book that I read early on was Jungle Pilot, the story of Nate Saint, one of the first missionary pilots, who was killed with his fellow missionaries by a tribe that they were trying to reach with the Gospel.

My grandfather actually owned an airplane for a time. It was a Piper Cub. That airplane was one of the first airplanes that started the boom in general aviation, because it was cheap and easy to fly. Many were built for service in World War Two, and after the war were bought up and used for flight schools and many other uses. Many many pilots first got their wings in a Piper Cub.

Piper Cubs were traditionally painted a bright yellow, and my grandfather's was no exception. I imagine it was a beautiful sight, glowing in the bright sun. I imagine how fun it was to ride in the front seat, staring out at the world below. It wasn't a fast airplane, but that really wasn't the point. I didn't get to ride with Grandpa, he sold the plane long before my time.

But my dad has always had a soft spot for little yellow slow-poke airplanes. He had a Piper T-shirt that he would wear constantly, the same bright yellow color as the airplane itself, with a little teddy-bear-like logo on the front, proudly displaying the name Piper.

So he passed on his soft spot for little yellow slow-poke airplanes to me. Whenever I see one, I need to go look at it. It doesn't matter what other airplanes are around me, I go look at the little yellow one. When I see one, or when I get near to it, a voice deep within me says, "This is flying. Forget all that other stuff. This is where it's at."

Low and slow, seeing the world go by below you. So slow you can have the windows down. You could even take the doors off, like a Jeep, if you want. It wouldn't matter much. It sure couldn't slow you down any! Cars are zipping along on the highway, going faster than you are, but you're still seeing more than they ever could.

This is where it's at.

I figure that I'll pass along this love of little yellow slow-poke airplanes to my son. I've already taught him to look to the sky when we hear airplanes fly overhead, in the landing pattern for Riverview.

In a way, I think I already have, without much even trying.

Yesterday, my mother was over at our house watching Eli while we were at work. Shan called me, and said that she had to tell me something.

Mom had put a video in for Eli to watch during lunch, and at the very beginning, there was a scene with an airplane.

It was a Stearman, a big military training biplane that was used, like the Piper Cub, during WWII. After the war, it followed a similar path, with many being sold as surplus and used for a myriad of different purposes. Again, like the Cub, the Stearman carried many pilots aloft for their first flights.

So Eli is watching this airplane, and he starts making noise. Excited noise. I think it was an Aha! moment for him. He quickly got up, ran to his toy box, and began digging around. My mom thought he was going to fall in he was digging so deep.

When he finally emerged, he had in his hand a cheap toy that we had bought for him, I think before he was even born. It was an airplane, molded in red and yellow plastic.

He proudly carried the airplane back to where he was sitting, and proceeded to watch the video, holding on to his toy airplane. He kept looking up at the screen, and then back down at his toy. He flipped the toy upside down and looked at the yellow underside, and then back at the screen to look at the yellow airplane in the video.

I laughed when I heard the story, and thought, "Well, it's the beginning of the end. He's gonna fly now, he has no choice in the matter."

Later that afternoon, after I had come home from work, I put in a video for me to watch as I did chores around the house. Eli didn't pay much attention to it, he was busy doing his own chores, including pulling all the clean Tupperware out of the kitchen cabinets, trying to help me load the dishwasher, and reorganizing his toys across the living room floor.

The video I put in was One Six Right, a documentary on general aviation, through the history and legacy surrounding Van Nuys Airport in Los Angeles. The airport is very busy, and supports a thriving community of pilots and aircraft owners, with a range of aircraft from the biggest and fastest, to the smallest and the slowest. All these different people and airplanes come together out of their love of aviation.

It's a wonderfully produced video, and if you don't want to fly after watching it, there's something seriously wrong with you.

Like most DVDs, it has a start menu, with different choices you can select. As these choices are displayed, a loop of various footage from the film plays in the background.

The video ended, and Shan was home now, and we ate dinner, with the music from the DVD filling the house. After dinner, Shan was on the computer while I was clearing the dishes, and Eli was watching the DVD menu screen, with it's looping footage.

Every once in a while, while playing and watching the DVD, Eli would start laughing and screaming and being very loud. It was only every few minutes, and then he would go back to whatever he was doing. Then back with the yelling and whooping. Then quiet again, with the music and the footage still playing.

After a few times through this, we noticed a pattern. Eli would only yell and scream and laugh at one particular part in this footage.

So we watched the footage playing on the menu, and sure enough, there were a few shots of a little yellow slow-poke airplane on the screen.

It was a Piper Cub.

wingnut

The Day After

2009-04-13T10:10:00.003-04:00

Yesterday was Easter. Apparently, I am not a good Christian blogger, because I did not write a little something special for the occasion. I guess I was too busy celebrating New Creation with my family.

When I woke up this morning, I glanced through my reading list, and realized that nearly everyone but me apparently takes time out to write about Easter. So, although it's a day late, here's my Easter post.

It's interesting to see how the world goes back to normal after the holidays. We get our time off from work, enjoy the long weekend, eat too much food, and then the day after, we pick up where we left off, and life returns to normal.

Today was like pretty much every crazy Monday in the life of young parents: I was up at 3am for work, the boy was getting into everything, which resulted in a "just to be safe" phone call to Poison Control before Shan left for work. It turns out that shampoo might cause barfing if ingested in large enough quantities. Whether or not Eli did ingest a large enough quantity remains to be seen, but so far, no barf.

While at work, I launched one airplane, which came back broke, launched a second airplane, and re-filled my fuel truck from being left un-filled over the weekend, all before most intelligent and sane people punch in for the day.

The world returned to normal. But it got me to thinking, how we have come to the place where we can return to normal after something like this? How can we return to normal when just yesterday, the Creator of the Universe began the process to make all things new?

Were the Disciples able to "return to normal"? Did they wake up the day after and say, "Wow! What an amazing day yesterday! Well, time to get back to the Lake. Those nets won't mend themselves, you know!"

I doubt it.

I imagine they wandered around Jerusalem half in a daze, looking at one another and shaking their heads. "Did this really happen?" "Did we see what we think we saw?" "Did He really just....?" "I can't believe Thomas did that!"

Luke says that they stayed in the Temple continuously, praising and worshipping God.

I'd be willing to bet that every sunrise took on new meaning for them.

Every breath they took was fresh and new.

Every tree, every building in the city probably glowed with newly discovered life.

Imagine what the gold and bronze in the Temple courtyard looked like to them! It probably burned their eyes with it's new found significance.

What words could they possibly use to worship?

What psalms could they sing adequate praises with?

I think part of our problem is that we forget the significance of the holiday. We forget that it is a celebration of New Creation. We lose sight of the power that Easter represents, and the implications of that power. It becomes just another day to stuff yourself silly with family, take naps, and watch golf, or baseball, or racing, or any other sport that happens to be on.

One of our friends on Facebook commented that she was glad that she managed to celebrate Easter without all that "Jesus stuff".

Really?

We can do that now?

Is that not the whole point of Easter?

How can we separate the two?

If you celebrated Easter without Jesus, then you didn't really celebrate Easter, did you?

We can't separate the two. And we must not let ourselves believe that we can or should just "return to normal" afterwards.

My hope is that through all the days after, all the crazy Mondays, all the early departures and broken airplanes and empty fuel trucks and the pressing schedules and the poison control centers and the shampoo-guzzling contests, through all of these things, that the wonder and the beauty of Easter remains strong, bright and inexplicable to us. That we won't be able to "return to normal". Because the Renewal of all things has begun, and there's no going back.

That's the whole point.

wingnut

Picking a Winner

2009-04-06T08:32:00.003-04:00

It was 3:12am when he woke up. He was fussing for some reason, and wouldn't go back to sleep. He probably couldn't breathe very well, he was fighting a cold and was a bit stuffed up.

He was wide awake, we were not. I brought him out to the couch, where we could hopefully both fall back asleep for a while, but he did not. He lay there, on my chest, all calm and relaxed. He was breathing deep, as if he were sleeping.

But when I shifted ever so slightly, he picked his head up and looked at me. He then leaned his forehead in to be kissed, which I dutifully did. I then got up and walked him around the house. As little as two months ago, the walking would have put him clean out in a matter of seconds.

But not tonight. Instead, as I attempted to stumble around in my fatigue without dropping him, he stared at every little light from outside, every little twinkling reflection that caught his eye. He reached for the magnets as we walked by the fridge. He craned his neck to see over my shoulder as we walked by the sink, looking to see if his bottle was ready for him yet. No, buddy, not yet. It's still sleepy time.

He finally calmed down to the point where I wanted him. He was ready to go back to his bed.

As I put him down, he grabbed the collar of my shirt and would not let go. Bad sign. He began to pout, and then whimper as I laid him on his pillow. As I turned for the door, he stood up at the railing and began to cry.

I turned around and picked him back up. I know I shouldn't, but I had to be to work early, and my only goal was to get him quiet enough so that I could sleep. I picked him back up, and walked with him into our room, where our nursery rocking chair was. I began to rock him, another thing that usually puts him right out. But he saw Mommy move to look at us, and wanted to go see her.

So it was just after 3:30am that my wife and I ended up with a one year old in between us.

He seemed to calm down and drift off, and so we did too.

But then he flopped over to me.

Then back over to Shan.

Then back to me, where I held him in a bear hug so he couldn't move. He stopped squirming and lay still.

I felt his hand wrap around my thumb, and he wiggled as close as he could to me.

It didn't matter that I had to be up in an hour, everything was just as it should be. My wife was sleeping next to me, and my child was cuddled up in my arms. I sighed and closed my eyes in peace.

Then I felt a finger on my chin.

The finger stroked my chin, and became a hand which touched my lips. It lingered there for a brief moment, and I was smiling for the touch between father and son.

Then a one year old index finger climbed my upper lip, felt around there for a bit, and plunged itself deep into my left nostril.

Yeah....I love you too, buddy!

wingnut

Responsibility, Newspapers, and Airmanship

2009-03-25T09:14:00.001-04:00

I was having a good morning.

I woke up a tad early, and was to work a tad early.

There were things going on, but it wasn't too busy to be overwhelming, and not too slow to be downright boring.

It was going to be a good day, I thought. It wasn't too cold, and the rain was light enough to not be a bother at all. My first departure left early, and I was feeling pretty good about the pace of the rest of the day. Until I read yesterday's Grand Rapids Press.

I am sure that we are all just as saddened and shocked by the recent rash of aircraft incidents and crashes that have happened all over the globe. There has been tremendous heroism in many cases on the part of the air crews involved, and undoubtedly, some of the passengers.

But there is also a dark side to these incidents, above and beyond the tragic loss of life and the devastation that occurs in any air crash.

Amid the stories of heroism and selfless courage, there is the story of the pilot of the stricken airliner who paused for a while before doing his emergency checklist, in order to say a prayer for safety. If the name of my blog is any indication, I fully support this pilot's faith and motives. It's his timing that I am taking issue with. I don't care how pious or devoted you are, how strong your relationship with God is, an emerging crisis while in the air is no time to stop and take a prayer break. There is a time for everything, and now is not that time!

Or the flight crew who attempted to fly to an airport in weather they really shouldn't have flown in.

Or the most recent, the pilot who killed himself and his passengers in Montana because he allowed too many people on the airplane.

Now, I do not want to speak too rashly, or call down premature judgement down on these incidents, but I do want to stress the importance of Airmanship.

In the grand scheme of things, I have virtually no piloting experience. But in my short time spent in the cockpit, the importance of checklists, the importance of knowing your equipment (specifically the equipment limitations), and the importance of respecting nature were very much impressed upon me. These qualities, and more, are generally referred to as "Airmanship".

Airmanship is responsible flying.

My actual experience in the cockpit reinforced things about flying that I had been taught as a child, listening to my father's "airtales" that he has collected over his career as a mechanic.

I cannot tell you how many days that I sat at the airport, on the ground, because the weather was right "at limits", as we say, treading that line between okay to fly and staying on the ground. It may clear up, it may get worse.

"It's better to be on the ground, wishing you were in the air, than to be in the air, wishing you were on the ground."

Respect for weather. Airmanship.

When I was in flight school, my instructor would make me do a weight and balance sheet for nearly every flight. It was unnecessary, because the aircraft we were flying was never overloaded with just the two of us on board, but he impressed upon me the importance of the weight and balance. In order to fly correctly, the aircraft must not be overloaded, and the weight that is carried on the aircraft must be distributed evenly, within a certain window. Imagine balancing an object on the tip of a pencil. You must center the object more or less on the pencil tip, or it will fall off to one side or another. The point where the object balances perfectly on the tip of the pencil is the object's center of gravity.

Airplanes have a center of gravity (in fact, everything does), and if you do not balance the weight to keep the center of gravity within the limits specified, the aircraft will not fly correctly.

Aircraft can only carry a certain amount of weight due to their unique design limitations, and if the aircraft is too heavy, it will not fly correctly.

If the pilot in Montana had flown easy, gentle, straight and level all the way down to the field, he probably would have not crashed. But the point is, what he should have done is not take all those people with him in the first place.

Calculating weight and balance and sticking to it is part of Airmanship.

Pilots have checklists for nearly every situation. When I was training, I had a pre-flight checklist, a pre-movement checklist, a pre-takeoff checklist, a climbout checklist, a landing checklist. Add to that the emergency checklist, a maneuver checklist to be completed before starting practice maneuvers, as well as a couple checklists that were not written down, but memorized.

If it is not written down, it did not happen. Responsible pilots always complete their checklists, and never deviate from them. Responsible pilots do their checklists the same way every time they do them, until they have the checklists memorized. And then, responsible pilots still use the checklist, holding it in their hand as they go through it, reading and checking off every line as they go.

If one must rate checklists in order of importance, then the emergency checklist is probably at the top of the list. When something bad happens while you are in the air, you simply must not hesitate to complete the checklist. It will happen quick, and things will go wrong in a hurry, and you will not have time to dwaddle.

This is also a part of Airmanship.

As I said, I read the tragic account of the Montana crash in the Grand Rapids Press. What really got me was the picture above the article.

It was a picture of one of the families that was killed. The entire family, Dad, Mom, and their three young children. They were all sitting pretty and smiling, for a family portrait that was taken recently, and no doubt ended up on their Christmas cards, and was sent to proud grandparents, and given to other family and friends.

And it sickened me that this picture was displayed above the article about the irresponsibility of their tragic death.

It struck me that this was probably just as irresponsible as their pilot was in cramming all his passengers aboard the airplane in the first place.

It wasn't all the victims. It wasn't the pilot. It wasn't anyone else involved in the incident. It wasn't the man who stopped his car on the road driving by to help. It wasn't the first firefighter to arrive, or the first policeman on the scene. It certainly was not the overworked and under appreciated National Transportation Safety Board agent who had the grisly task of examining the wreckage to discover the cause.

It was just the one family.

And unless we are prepared to display pictures of every single person who dies in a tragic, headline-making crash, be it aircraft, trains, boats, or automobiles, we must call this what it is:

Irresponsible.

Un-Airman like conduct, if you will.

And certainly not responsible reporting.

wingnut

The Update...

2009-03-12T16:51:00.000-04:00

Well, I've slowed the pace a bit on here. It's been a fairly busy late winter/early spring, and I just haven't found the time to write as I usually do.

I suspect that the changed work schedule is mostly to blame for the slowdown. I believe that the change has caused a re-ordering of priorities, and the blog has been kicked down a few notches, probably to where it should be anyway.

I do miss writing on here though, and look forward to continuing into the future.

I have also been reading more lately, so look for a book review sometime in the "near" future.

Suffice it to say, though, that for now, we have our hands full.

We took a family vacation to Florida last week, and I had really anticipated at least one or two posts from down there, but unfortunately the resort we were staying at was a bit medieval, and had wireless available only for a price. The price was kinda high, and the connection was pretty slow, so we didn't bother.

But that was after we lugged the laptop and all accessories through airport security and took up space on the plane and weight on our backs. And then didn't even use it. That, my friends, will be a post on the sorry state of airline travel, as if it needs to be explained...

Anyway, I miss you, I love you, I'll be back later!

wingnut

The Call

2009-02-26T16:54:00.000-05:00

The Call ebbs and flows. It has it's own natural rhythm, it's highs and lows. At times, the it is deafening. At times you can barely hear it, but it remains there, primal, deep, instinctual.

When I was a kid, it was much louder. It was loud enough that my best friend Steve and I ventured out one spring day to walk to the nearest golf course, through cornfields and fallow ground. We didn't get far, less than a mile, but it was far enough for us to miss supper and send my dad out looking for us.

It was loud enough that I spend hours of my days wandering through an old, abandoned gravel pit across the street from my house. A large part of my childhood was spent there, fishing, chasing frogs, snakes, and turtles. My friend Tim and I walked unseen in front of a hunter who was target practicing, and spent ten minutes sitting behind a large dirt pile waiting for him to finish shooting. I'm sure it wasn't scary deadly close, but we could hear branches above us cracking and snapping as the bullets went through. And that was close enough for two kids.

My cousins and I would play army there, hiding in the bushes with our sticks-shaped-like-guns, climbing trees and running like we thought soldiers did. We spent the better part of the night out there once, until we all went back to my place and slept outside next to our campfire.

My dad and I once tried to find the source of the small creek that ran through the gravel pit, only to discover that the creek turned and disappeared into a residential area about a mile down the road. We geared up for the expedition too, bringing snacks and a compass to find our way. We were both disappointed, I think, that civilization dared encroach on our journey, and so soon after our departure.

The call was loud on the many family vacations we took, where I would take every opportunity to find a trail to disappear down, either on bike or on foot. It was loud when I tried to ride around Gun Lake unsuccessfully. It was loud when I rode from Grand Haven to Holland and back.

It was loud on our family trip to Washington D.C., when I found an old trail along the Potomac and followed it all afternoon.

Every autumn, in fact, the call grows loud for me. I hear snippets of conversation, bits and pieces of sentences, all having to do with the outdoors, the woods, the wilderness.

The leaves turn yellow, the weather turns cooler, and people all around me talk of hunting, the future hunt, and glorious hunts of days past. It doesn't help that I, for my part, dig out my old Ted Nugent cassette single of "Hunt Music". The tape is badly worn, and the tape player in my truck is in desperate need of cleaning, but that doesn't stop me from listening to "Fred Bear", and "Sunrize" over and over again.

One of these days, I tell myself, one of these days I will make it out into the woods. I will venture out there, and I will return with food for my family.

The call is loud right now, as winter releases it's grip on the ground. There are rivers and ponds to fish. There are trails to follow. There are campsites that need a tent on them.

Last week, my Bride and I were driving up north, following my father in law to a little restaurant in Sparta. We both marveled at the landscape, the gentle rolling hills and hollows, the thick, old forested areas, and the massive space that seemed to separate every house from each other.

We wondered aloud at the idea of finding an old house in the middle of nowhere and fixing it up. We talked of ponds and lakes and summertime cottages. I mentioned cheap land in the Upper Peninsula, and my Bride laughed. Perhaps.

Last fall, we joined some friends in a cabin they own north of White Cloud. It was a wonderful time. We cooked over the fire, we talked and laughed, our son Elijah and their son Jack painted Halloween pumpkins.

We took a walk in the woods. Their cabin, which sits on five acres, abuts a large section of state land. There was an old service road that we followed until it ended at one end of a bog. We then picked our way over a small dike in the middle of the bog, where the trail picked up somewhat. We saw deer bounding away in the distance, birds in the trees, and no other humans.

I could feel the woods come alive. As I became more aware of the living woods, I began to feel the call welling up within me. I did not want to turn around. Finally, we decided we had to, as it was beginning to get close to dusk, and we did not want to have to pick our way through that bog in the dark. Well, they didn't. I wouldn't have cared much.

This call is within each of us. It may be buried, it may not be that loud. But it is there.

We have been created as part of this world, to care for it, to enjoy it.

It makes sense that we would be drawn to the wide open spaces, to woods and wetlands, to fields and grasslands. It makes sense that we wouldn't want to come back from a short walk in the woods.

When we fill ourselves with technology, with shopping malls and the conveniences of modern life, the call grows faint, until we can barely hear it at all. Until we lose the ability to hear it and heed it.

And when we lose that, we lose something important to our soul, to our being. We lose a part of why we were created in the first place.

So I am resolving to spend more time outside. To ride more trails. To fish more ponds. To fill more empty camping spots.

I hope you all do the same.

wingnut

When What You Have is Taken (OP&L two)

2009-02-10T16:57:00.001-05:00

First Lieutenant Richard D. Winters landed alone.

Two years of brutal training, marching, drilling and general army life had culminated in this night. This was the night their training had prepared them for. This was the night that their G.I. life insurance was designed for. The night that the United States and Great Britain would finally bring their armies to Adolf Hitler's Fortress Europe. This was D-Day.

Lieutenant Winters had learned how to train and lead men. He had learned how to jump out of perfectly good airplanes. He had learned how to fight when he landed, behind enemy lines and often surrounded. He was one of the cream of the crop, the best the United States Army had to offer. The airborne army Winters was part of was to parachute in before the invasion, behind enemy lines to secure certain objectives while the main invasion force landed on the beaches of Normandy.

And he landed alone, in the inky night of the French countryside. The only light were the flashes from the many enemy machine guns that were shooting at anything that moved.

Not only did he land without knowing where the rest of his men were, but the shock of the parachute opening had ripped his gear bags right off of him. He was left with only his uniform, helmet, and his combat knife.

How many times has that happened to us?

How many times have we had everything taken away from us?

How often have we planned and prepared for something, only to have it turn out in the exact opposite way?

It could be the college that you had dreamed of getting in to all through high school didn't accept you. Or maybe your dream job disappeared. Or maybe your retirement savings just disappeared. Maybe you had to give up your house to foreclosure.

When my wife and I were trying to start our family, we had a rocky start. We just couldn't get pregnant. And then, when we finally did, we lost the baby to miscarriage. And then we suffered another miscarriage.

We had been hit hard. We had finally opened our hearts and our minds to bring another human being into this world, and it seemed that the world itself was fighting against us. We were left with nothing.

We were like Lieutenant Winters.

We had prepared our hearts, our minds, and our house to accept our new family. We had prayed about it, talked about it, dreamed about it. We bought toys and clothes. We painted our nursery when we moved into our home, thinking that we had time now to do it, we might as well.

Everything we did was geared towards creating our own family.

And when the moment finally came, when we finally stood with our feet on the door jam, and took that first giant step out into the unknown, the world reached up and snatched all of our preparations away. Our nursery was empty. Our toys grew dusty. The books we bought remained unopened.

We landed alone.

But it was in this dark night that God revealed Himself to us in powerful ways. We got connected at church with support groups. We joined a small group. We began volunteering.

We grew closer to God than we had been before.

Because He had given us everything we needed.

It's not that it didn't hurt. It's not that it wasn't difficult. But God led us through it. When all was gone, when everything we had planned was destroyed, we fell on Him.

He has given us everything we need.

Like Lieutenant Winters, when everything we have gets taken, we must rest and move forward in the knowledge that God has provided for us everything we need.

When another paratrooper landed near Winters, he helped him out of his harness. When the other trooper was squared away, Winters said simply, "Follow me." The two of them walked through the French countryside, eventually meeting up with another group of paratroopers. They were able to figure out where they had landed, and where their objective was. By days end, they had successfully secured their objective, a road leading inland from the invasion beaches.

By the end of World War Two, Winters had been promoted to the rank of Major, with a long track record of strong leadership under the worst conditions World War Two had to offer. His actions on D-Day are still studied today at military schools as textbook examples of how to command infantry units.

And he started out with everything taken from him.

wingnut

On Paint and Life (one)

2009-02-02T12:20:00.006-05:00

The referee yells "Game On!" and we are off.

Legs pumping, heart pounding, we dash forward as far as we can get before finding cover from the hail of incoming paintballs. There are six of us on our team, against seven on the opposing team.

The field is long and narrow, diminishing the advantage held by the team with more players. No, the name of this game is volume of fire: whichever team throws the most paint will win the day. No flanking maneuvers, no fancy dodge and feint, no strategic movement. The field is bordered on one side by the actual field boundary fence, and on the other side by a two-track trail that drives straight through a makeshift village. There is roughly thirty feet between the side boundaries. No, this game will be a straight-on, force-on-force paint assault.

The two teams have thrown themselves upon each other, and I have found myself in a good position to watch, but not do much else. There is a player from my team in a bunker ahead of me, and I think he is our "front line". Ahead of him, an empty bunker and a wire spool are all that separates us from the other team's front man. I see paint flying back and forth over my head, and watch as is splatters against the white painted press-board bunkers. The paint itself is a dark pinkish red color, perfect for spotting on any color background.

The popping noise increases as the teams move closer to the center and each other. A teammate attempts to leapfrog my bunker, running on his way up to the front, and receives three paintballs for his effort. His calls of "Out!" are echoed by two people on the opposing team, as well as a call from behind me. It is now four on five, and I have yet to fire my paintball marker. It is time to get in the game.

Slowly, I pick myself up to a crouch, and hold my marker at a low ready position. I stretch my neck and shoulders slowly around the edge of my bunker to take a peek. I see nothing, but bring my marker up to fire. I hear no paint being shot at me, and so I am relatively safe for now.

The popping noises continue, and I try to follow the trajectory of my teammate's paintballs to show me where the opposing team members might be. Then I see it: the barrel of a paintball marker, sticking out ever so slightly from the side of a bunker. It moves to fire, and reveals the other player's hands and forearm. I wait, knowing that from where I am he cannot see me.

He fires two rounds, and I hear one of my teammates call "Out!". The other team member still does not see me, and thinking the coast is clear, moves from behind his bunker to advance his position.

I fire once, and my paintball smashes itself against his thigh. He stands and looks in my direction, and I wave.

The game is still very much alive, although both teams have traded blows and lost players. I try to do a mental count, and I think there are two left on my team, me and one other guy. I don't know how many of our opponents are left, so I decide to move. There is no-one shooting in my direction, so I figure it's as good a time as any.

I crouch and run out from my bunker, and fire a few shots. It's amazing to me, even after playing for so long, how many people instinctively duck at the sound of a paintball marker going off. I figure that if I fire a few paintballs, perhaps the sound of my marker might make them duck, and then I can move without fear of being pelted.

I make it to the next bunker up, without being hit. I don't know whether my shots did in fact make them duck, or if they just weren't looking, but no matter. I made it.

I peek around the corner of my new bunker, and am rewarded by paintballs smashing against the bunker from at least two different players. Now they know I'm here. And I know that there are at least two players left on the other team.

The other man on my team must be on the other side of the field, because I see paintballs flying in both directions along the opposite side from where I lay in my bunker. So is that three players? I can't be sure and so I assume that there are.

I shift my weight, in order to look over the top of the bunker rather than around the side again. The opposing player who has engaged my teammate is oblivious to my presence, and I could get him the same way I got his teammate, but I won't. I don't know where the other players are, and don't want to expose myself just yet.

As I am debating whether to eliminate him or not, my teammate hits him, and he walks off the field. My teammate must be moving, because I see and hear a flurry of activity behind a bunker ahead of me, and I know that one of the opposing players is shooting for him.

I again duck behind my bunker and wait. The paintball frenzy subsides, telling me that everyone has found new hiding spots. I peek around my bunker again, and see one head behind the bunker in front of me. I fire two paintballs which miss, but the head retreats.

I still can't count how many people are on the opposing side. I know that we are down to two, but I don't know how many we are facing. At least one, but there might be two. The lull in the action suggests that the guy behind the bunker facing me is alone, but I can't tell for sure.

His head sticks up again, and he fires his marker. But he's not firing it at me. He is firing at my teammate, who answers with a burst of his own. They begin to duel from behind their bunkers, each one firing a burst and then ducking in their turn. There is only one man firing from behind that bunker. It's two on one, and my team has the advantage.

This is it. This may be my only opportunity to move, and I need to take it.

I wait until the opposing player's head goes back down behind his bunker. I know my teammate will begin firing shortly, and as I crouch to leave my bunker, I hear him open up. I should probably call for covering fire, but to do that would give my position away, and I judge it easier to simply move rather than to try and coordinate with him. Besides, he's doing exactly what I would want him to do anyway.

I leave my bunker, running quickly, half-crouched with my paintball marker pointed at the other team's bunker.

If I run directly at the bunker, I will be right up against it and not be able to see or move. Instead I run down the field borderline, the two-track gravel road that runs about ten feet from the edge of the bunker. As I near it, I twist sideways to aim my paintball marker in their general direction, but do not stop running.

There are two players in the bunker!

One of them turns to see me as I run past, but I've got the drop on him. I let loose a pair of paintballs and watch them both impact, one on his shoulder and one on his forearm. They are still splattering as I moved to cover the second player, and another two paintballs break against him, one on his kidney area and one on his shoulder. They both call out at the same time and seem surprised to see me there.

The game has ended. I lower my paintball marker on it's sling and walk over to them. We shake hands and high five as the rest of the players walk back on to the field. Everyone begins talking about who got whom, and who went where. Many stories are shared on the walk back to the rest area, where there are bratwurst and burgers waiting for us.

The way I play paintball is the way I want to live life: aggressive, but not violent. Risky, but not reckless.

This is a theme that the Apostle Paul touches on many times in his many letters. How we are to live with a spirit of strength, not of fear, confidently going out with full knowledge of the power of Jesus.

And if we go back to Jesus, in the Gospel of Matthew he says that the Kingdom of God is forcefully advancing.

If something is forcefully advancing, there is some sort of bold, aggressive action going on. You cannot participate in a forceful advance by sitting on the sidelines. You will not advance anywhere if you do not risk anything.

Even in the Old Testament, the stories are filled with people whom God called to act out not depending on their strength, but God's strength.

Abraham.

Moses.

Joshua.

Gideon.

That's only off the top of my head, rough first draft. You've probably got a mouthful of names I didn't mention.

These people were called to live in the action-filled life of the Spirit of God, depending not on themselves for the outcome, but on God.

Now here's a thought: We have everything we need to do this.

Pastor Rob said that a while back, and it's stuck with me. Right here, right now, we have everything we need. As you are reading this, you have everything you need to live how God wants you to live.

When I play paintball, I have specific equipment that I need to use in order to be effective on the playing field. I also have experience and practice in order to be effective.

But when the whistle blows, or the referee calls to start the game, standing there on the field, I have everything I need to be effective.

In the same way, God has given us everything we need to be effective.

We are standing on the field, right now.

The game has started.

Paintballs are flying both ways.

And we have everything we need to win.

wingnut

Anticipation.

2009-01-25T07:00:00.000-05:00

I walk across the ramp to the row of broken-down hangars. The wind whips past me, cutting through even my thick winter coat and scarf, and sending chills down my spine.

The snow piles left by the plow trucks have frozen, thawed, and refrozen into mountain ranges of ice, that still stand as tall as a man where they were hastily pushed aside last week.

I step, and nearly slip and fall, on a puddle, frozen solid by the brutal cold sweeping down from the arctic. The cold I can contend with, it's the stiff breeze that makes this Michigan winter day intolerable.

The shining sun in the cloudless sky is merely enhancing the freezing temperatures, casting it's harsh light without the familiar warmth of summer. I open the door to the unlit hangar and step inside, removing my sunglasses as I wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness.

She comes into view, a regal silhouette of years past. She deserves better than a dusty, run-down hangar. She has only been here a few months, yet I can see even in the dim light the layer of dust covering her bright paint. She has not been flown in a good long while, not even moved, her engine sitting silently waiting for her magnetos to be turned on, for her starter to be turned.

Yet even in this state of disuse and dusty neglect, she sits proudly, her stout nose pointed skyward, her smooth, classic lines defying the passing of years.

As I open the hangar doors for her, I remember when she first came to us. All of us at the airport came by to see her, to spend time staring and touching and dreaming. We walked around her, imagining the sound of the spinning propeller, the throaty rumble of the engines, the scent of exhaust and burnt oil. I stood there long after everyone else had moved on, and then sat in the cockpit for a while, just looking.

I looked out over the wing, and imagined seeing my home field, Riverview Airport, gliding beneath me. I look to the front of the airplane, and imagine the massive wood propeller pulling the airframe effortlessly through the West Michigan summer. But summer is a long way away from today.

The hangar is open now, the first sunlight she has seen in probably three months. The brightness of it seems to awaken her, her paint now gleaming even under the dust, the varnish on her propeller blinding with it's reflection. She seems, in my mind, to stir a bit, then stretch, as if her landing gear is stiff from disuse, like a limb fallen asleep.

There are buyers coming. Perhaps they will provide her with the home she deserves. The fact that they expressed enough interest to drive to the airport on this excessively cold day holds at least a small promise for her.

She was built for the air, not the ground. Every inch of her strives to be rid of gravity. I walk toward her, and reach out my hand to gently touch her wing. I lightly tap my fingers on the wing's surface, listening to the hollow, drum-like sound of the stretched fabric. Much of her is merely a wooden skeleton, covered in fabric that is stretched tight and then painted. Craftsmen, perhaps as many as ten or twenty, have slaved over every inch of this airplane, shaving and planing wooden ribs into shape, covering and stretching the fabric. There is some sheet metal on the airframe as well, no doubt bent and riveted and welded with the same craftsman's care as the fabric and wood.

She was built for the air, and every inch of her displays craftsmanship and artistry fit for any museum wall. It saddens me that a piece of art such as this can be reduced to a commodity, bought, sold, and traded on a whim of those who would merely collect it.

No, she was built for the air, and deserves to be flown. She deserves to be flown, to be guided by a caring pilot, and herself guide her pilot towards many unknown horizons.

Perhaps this may be the day she has anticipated! Perhaps these owners will bring her someplace warm, someplace with blue skies not filled with threatening clouds or freezing wind!

Perhaps she will finally be able to dance with the birds, to feel the breeze once again against her windscreen!

Her anticipation spills over into me, as I look toward the warmer days when I will be finally able to once again mingle with the clouds.

For we are both wintering now in a dusty, unused hangar. The dust covering her beautiful paint is the dust that is covering my flight bag.

The oil on the floor beneath her telling of long days spent in the same spot is the brand new sectional map that sits pristine and unopened in my kneeboard.

I am covered with dust. I am rusty, in need of a good, strong scrubbing.

But yet, like the beautiful aircraft I stand next to, I hold my head high, knowing that someday, soon, I will be able to frolic once more with the birds. I, like her, will return to the sky.

wingnut

Happy Birthday!

2009-01-16T10:11:00.005-05:00

From this:

To this, in only 365 days!

Yesterday we celebrated the year anniversary of one of the most tiring, excruciating, nerve-wracking days we have ever experienced as a family.

It was also, hands down, the most joyful day we have ever known.

Three years ago, we were not sure if we would ever experience a day like it.

All the heartache, the pain, the doctor visits, the exotic-sounding medications that may actually harm you, but might help you as well...

...and then the last visit, when the doctor says, "It doesn't look like it's going to happen this month, I'm sorry."

And then it happened.

And then we spent the better part of a year in a constant state of near-panic, thinking that just over every hill, around every corner, lurked some sinister event that would strip away all of our joy, and once again leave us with nothing but broken dreams and an empty cradle.

And then the day. The day that actually started at 8:00 PM the previous evening.

After much pain and discomfort, and little sleep or food, at 2:01 the next afternoon, little Elijah Jason made his entrance.

To say what we've done, or what he has done, or what our accomplishments have been in the past year would take up entirely too much space.

We just want to say Happy Birthday, Elijah.

We love you very much.

Mom and Dad.

Free Stuff!!

2009-01-13T17:01:00.001-05:00

In true Internet tradition, I stumbled upon a blog through a blog. The blog in question is flowerdust, authored by Anne Jackson.

It seems that Anne has a book about to be released, as well as a flippin' sweet giveaway contest going on right now through Saturday.

The giveaway is for Logos Scholar's Library, a collection of study resources, including Greek and Hebrew resources, different Bible translations, as well as certain commentaries, articles, and reference material.

So do yourself a favor and go comment here to enter. You have to chose your favorite Bible verse, and then maybe tell a story about said verse. The winner will be chosen randomly. If you win, that'd be awesome! If you don't, then you still get to read others talk about their favorite Bible verse, and why it is meaningful to them. So you get to enter an awesome contest, and read stories about how God is alive and active and speaking to us through His Book! Win-win-win, I say!

And since I mentioned my favorite Bible verse over there, I would be doing a disservice to not talk about it here, so read along!

Once upon a time, I had foolishly and very quickly decided that a certain girl might just very well be That Girl. At probably about the same time, she had decided that she was not that girl, and told me as much over the phone one night.

It sucked.

I moped around for a good long while after that, and one day found myself on the other end of town, just driving around. At one point I stopped, got out of my car, and walked for a bit. It was a park that I had come to a few times before, on the Thornapple River near the Cascade Dam.

I walked out towards the dam on the seawall (riverwall?), and just stood for a while. I was praying that God would tell me what to do, because what I was doing obviously had not worked out so well for me. I was broken, beaten, lost.

I asked for something, anything that would show me what to do, where to do, anything. I wasn't really looking for a specific path, I think now that I was just looking for God to show me that He did still have a plan, and that I was in it somewhere.

As I turned to return to my car, I kicked something at my feet. It wasn't very big, but it made a metallic clicking noise, so I knew it wasn't just a pebble. I looked down, and then reached down to pick up a small crucifix pendant.

As I picked it up and looked at it, a verse exploded into my mind: "And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

Matthew 28:20.

Jesus had just been crucified, and his religious movement had seemingly failed. The disciples, who had given everything to follow him for the last three years, had absolutely nothing to show for it, except a fear that they were going to be next when the wrath of Rome and the Pharisees finally caught them.

But then they get a message to meet Jesus in Galilee, and so they go. They meet their risen LORD, and he sends them out to all the nations. He tells them to go and make disciples.

Not later, when you finally get all my parables figured out.

Not in a year or two, when Paul gets converted and stops chasing you around.

Not tomorrow, or next week, or next month.

Now.

And then He tells them that He will always be with them, until the end of the age.

Jesus says, "Go tell everyone you know about the way to Heaven. Go now, and don't worry about messing up. Don't put all your energy into getting the message technically correct. Just go show my love to the world. My spirit, my power and authority are with you. This is not about you, this is about me."

How encouraging that was and is for me still.

And, it was shortly after this that God brought my Bride and I together. And I'm telling you, it's better that it ever could have been with anyone else.

wingnut

Motives.

2009-01-10T06:00:00.001-05:00

Well, On a Wing and a Prayer recently celebrated it's 100th post. I had a "massive" celebration planned, I had a special post all written, and had researched all these ridiculous facts about the past year or so, things that have happened on the site, visitors, comments, and so on...It was meant to be a lighthearted look back at the past 100 entries, and a hopeful look into the future, and the next however many entries there will be.

But the magical number 100 passed my by, and so I was going to delay it for two, and poke further fun at the random and completely unusual things that sometimes happen like that. So it was turned into 100 (plus 2) celebration, with even more of the ridiculous facts and corny trivia about OWP. I don't think I'm going to anymore. But this is post number 103, for those of you counting.

Earlier this week I came upon a conversation happening over at Steve Carter's blog, and it caught me short. Steve used to be in charge of the student ministry at Mars Hill, but he is in the middle of moving to another faith community in California. On his blog, he has been doing a series on "stolen teachings", exploring copyright issues concerning religious teachings. The post I stumbled upon was a guest post by Matt Laidlaw, another youth pastor at Mars Hill.

Matt talked about how he thinks this whole discussion is missing the point a bit. It is not our teaching in the first place, so who are we to complain and bicker and argue about who said what first? When we do that, we are treating these teachings not as the life-giving thing that they in fact are, but rather as mere commodities, to be traded, bought, and sold. Obviously there needs to be mechanisms in place to protect against outright theft of ideas, but when considering intellectual property, we must, must, must remember that all this has been given to us by God, and is therefore not ours to begin with.

One of Matt's points concerned the blogging community, and deserves to be quoted at length:

"Some of us like to hear the sound of our own voice. Some people like to see the look of our own typed words. Deep down we all want to think and feel as if our insight and ideas are worth hearing. For some of us in our darkest moments, this is why we’re energized by teaching. For others of us, this is why we blog. As innocent and helpful as blogging might seem on the surface, isn’t it also a dangerous venture?

In Blog World, our experiences define reality. Research, resources, and the consultation of others hold little to no value in the eyes of the average Internet surfer or blog reader. Wisdom and truth are in the eyes of the blogger and the reader, and external verification holds no weight. Meaning: we really have no idea what truth lies behind the written words, what the real story is, or if the thoughts presented could legitimately hold any water.

The nature of blogging allows us to be irresponsible with our ideas and the ideas of others. We can say anything we want, any time we want, about anything or anybody we want. There is no authority—not really—holding us accountable if our ideas are ill-conceived, misinformed, or unoriginal. Blogs run the risk of being nothing more than pooled ignorance, stolen ideas, and vain attempts to prove our talents important and our lives valuable.

Blogging allows everyone to become a “writer”. Not only does this self-proclaimed title carry with it a false sense of worth from a false giver of value; it fuels a destructive and universal self-centeredness. Now that I am a “writer”, and my “work” is out there for the world to see, I have to keep “writing”. Now that I’ve created a false audience for my life to be lived in front of, people “need” to know what I’m doing, how I’m feeling, and what I’m thinking all the time. This behavior, whether I find it in myself or in others, must be called what it is: immature, disgusting, and sinful."

Ouch. Serious, bone-jarring, gut-wrenching ouch.

If I am being honest with myself, I can see me in that quote, as clearly as if I'm looking at a mirror.

So many times I have convinced myself that I am super-insightful, that I am finding a new way to enlighten the world, that the world needs to read my blog. And sitting alone at a laptop is perfect for convincing yourself that you have an army of voracious readers, hungry for every single tidbit you toss through cyberspace in their general direction.

I try not to be careless in my writing, I try to research everything before I post, I try to express the truth as I see it in an honest and forthright way.

But behind all that, deeper and darker and way past that in the depths of my very being, I blog because I am still chasing cool.

So I wonder: is this blog about me? Or is it about something bigger? Is it about my words? Or is it about the Word that has been around since Creation? Do I have the right motivation? Or am I merely a clanging gong?

And if it is about the Word, then why should I care about the number of posts? Why should I care about the number of visitors, or the number of comments, or the farthest-away-from-me-on-the-globe visitor I've had?

So I'm going to delete my "party" post.

Instead, I will offer this prayer:

That God's Word may shine through my broken, sometimes rambling, mostly sincere, always human attempts at expressing His Truth.

wingnut

Nike, Dobson, and One-Year-Old Boys

2009-01-06T16:31:00.000-05:00

Recently, local pastor (and frequent favorite guest at Mars Hill) Ed Dobson was featured on Good Morning America. I tried to embed the video here, but I guess a link will have to do. So if you want to watch the video and read the accompanying article, here ya go!

My first thought was, "I want to read that book!"

My second thought was, "Holy crap, I don't think I could do that!"

As I listened to the interview and read the article, it struck me how difficult it would be. Keeping kosher would be extremely difficult, the traditional beard would be a nuisance. The fasts, feasts and holidays would be hard for me to keep track of.

The hardest part, though, would be what every Christian finds difficult, if not much of the time, then honestly at least a good part of the time: Living up to the loving standard that Jesus set in his teachings.

I wondered again if I could do it, and voiced my apprehension to my wife.

"Do you think Elijah could do it?" She asked.

Do I wonder if my soon-to-be one year old son could obey Torah as Jesus did?

"Do you think he even thinks about it?" she continued.

"I mean, look at him. What has he done this year? He's learned to feed himself. He's learned to crawl, and to pull himself up on things. He's learned to walk. He's figuring out how to make sounds with his mouth. He has learned where we keep all his toys. He's learned no. He's learned that we take care of him, that he comes to us when he needs something."

"That's a lot to learn."

I nodded, and she continued. "Do you think he's stopped to consider whether he can do those things, or should do those things? He just does them."

She's right, of course.

Eli doesn't stop to consider how difficult it will be to learn to walk. He doesn't wonder how long it might take before he figures out how to feed himself.

He knows that if he slides off the couch on his belly, feet first, that the floor will be there. Ditto for our bed, which stands even with his forehead. He doesn't stop to wonder if this will hurt or not. He knows that the floor is down there, and if he slides on his belly and puts his feet over the edge first, he'll find the floor.

He doesn't stop to consider if he is able or not. He takes Nike's advice, and just does it.

He doesn't stop to think about how difficult something might be, he just does it.

In Matthew, Jesus says that the Kingdom of God belongs to children.

I wonder if this "Nike" attitude is why?

wingnut

My Other Half

2008-12-30T00:01:00.002-05:00

When I am weak, she is strong.

When I am timid, she is bold.

When I come up blank,

She is amazingly creative.

She keeps me organized.

She keeps me from thinking I'm all that and a bag of chips.

Because really, I'm not. And maybe just a single chip.

She is strong, independent, loyal.

She is tender, nurturing, and caring.

She is a spectacular mother, and an awesome wife.

I am glad that she let me pick her.

I love you Baby, Happy Birthday!

wingnut

Snowblowing

2008-12-23T22:10:00.002-05:00

I was rushing up and down our icy driveway, trying to clear it before I left for work. I had wanted to be finished with it already, since I really had to leave right now to make it to work on time. Old Man Winter had other plans. My mother, who watches The Boy on Tuesdays, ran into her own weather difficulties, and didn't get to our house when she wanted to.

She was running late, and as a result, I was running late. And as a result of that, I was rushing to clear the driveway, my mind on a hundred different things I had to to at work, and a hundred excuses for my boss when I was late.

I was close to cursing winter and selling our house when I looked up and saw Eli looking out the picture window. He was taking in the beautiful winter scene before him, and then he noticed me. His face broke out in a huge grin, and even from outside I could see his three and a half teeth (with one on the way).

I waved like a madman, and he pounded the window and smiled.

Then I threw a snowball at the window, and he tried to find it after it poofed apart on the window.

Then I did one better, and I aimed the snowblower at the window.

Just before the spray of snow obscured my vision, I saw Eli throw his arm up in front of his face.

When the snow cleared, I saw Eli and Grandma laughing. Grandma's nose was crinkled and her eyes shut, no doubt giggling over Eli's reaction to the snow.

Eli's head was thrown back and his shoulders rocked with great deep guffaws.

I could hear them in my mind, clear as a bell, though I was outside running a noisy snowblower.

I began to laugh behind my scarf, and blew more snow at the window. And for five minutes, I didn't care that it was winter and that I was running behind.

wingnut

INVASION!!!

2008-12-18T12:21:00.003-05:00

I have been listening to NT Wright lately. NT Wright is one of my favorite (if not the favorite) theological thinkers. He has just some absolutely amazing and I think groundbreaking insights into what it means to be a follower of Christ.

I have listened to these talks before, but now I have discovered fresh insights that I did not realize before. The more I thought about it, the more a few parallels began to make themselves clear. I've said before that I'm not quite sure where this is going, but sometimes the glimpse of what might be is even more exciting than finally arriving.

Let's think about the creation story. God created the world, and then He placed in it a garden. This garden was a paradise, the pinnacle of His creation. It was Heaven on Earth. God had, in a sense, invaded the Earth with a little bit of Heaven.

After the Fall, the garden ceased to be. But eventually, God worked through human history to bring about the nation of Israel. He made a covenant with them, and blessed them and freed them from their bondage. God said that He had set aside land for them that was to be their land forever. And so what did the Israelites do after making the covenant? They invaded their land to take it and use it.

But the Israelites also fell away from the covenant, and were carried back into bondage, away from their land. Their Holy Land ceased to be.

But eventually, God worked through human history to prepare for the arrival of His Perfect Human, Jesus. Some Israelites followed this new leader with these new teachings about what it meant to be perfectly in the covenant with God. And what did Jesus tell these followers of his to do? Go out and make more followers of him. Jesus told his followers to invade the world with the message that Jesus is Lord.

Joshua was the leader in charge of the Israelites when they had to invade their land and take it.

Jesus was the leader of the movement to reclaim creation to God's purposes.

We have been ordered to continue the reclamation process.

Erwin McManus once said, when asked what his job was, "My job is to continue the revolution that Jesus started 2,000 years ago."

This is going to get really cool!

wingnut

The Birthday Photo Shoot.

2008-12-15T17:00:00.000-05:00

Who needs a professional? This was waay more fun!!

Wingnut

Questions?

2008-12-10T00:38:00.003-05:00

Why do some of us consider ourselves "Soldiers of Jesus", and others barf at the mere mention of soldiers?

Can we really not get beyond the cultural implications to understand the metaphor?

And how come I never hear any "Emergent types" talking candidly and openly and honestly about spiritual warfare? Am I just ignorant to it? Is it going on and I just don't notice people talking about it?

It seems we accept that there is evil in the world, and that is as far as we're comfortable taking it.

We are quick to say, "Yes, human beings have been given a spiritual component, and that spiritual component allows us to experience God in beautiful ways."

We are not so quick to say, "Yes, human beings have been given a spiritual component, and that spiritual component is as vulnerable as our physical beings to the ravages of sin and evil."

And speaking of evil, who talks about Satan anymore? Have we moved past that? Can we name this evil, this enemy, this oppressive being that sets up man to worship himself?

Do we need to discover a new way to frame this dialog? Do we need a newer framework in which to hang the idea that we are, in fact, fighting against something malevolent in this universe?

Or are we content to simply go along acknowledging all the sin and oppression and evil in the world, and not talk about the source of the evil?

I should go to bed.

wingnut

Oh What a Beautiful Morning!

2008-12-05T05:00:00.002-05:00

I hate mornings.

Well, I guess I don't have to be that harsh about it. Let's just say that I am nowhere near a morning person. I don't like being up anything before 9am. And even that, if there's nothing going on, seems a bit early to me. I would much rather stay in bed until around 10 or so, then maybe get up, surf the Internet for a while, feed The Boy, and stay in my pj's until I have to go to work in the afternoon.

I have always preferred the nights instead of the mornings, as far back as I can remember. When I was a kid, my parents would send me to bed, and I would just stay up and play with Legos or my GI Joes (or both) until I fell asleep. There are a few times I remember waking up the next morning next to my bed, with Lego pieces stuck to my face.

I never wanted to go to bed.

In college and after, if I ever saw 5am, it was usually from the other side. As in, "Holy cow, it's 5am! I really need to stop drinking coffee and go home!"

For the past ten months, I have been able to hang out and watch movies and generally have wonderfully relaxing mornings with The Boy. It's been awesome! Sure, I have to complete my share of the chores, but chasing around a crawling (and now walking) baby made things interesting and fun. Plus, I've been able to watch cartoons all the time, and have excuses to crawl around and play with toys too.

It helps that The Boy is not much of a morning person either. We would both prefer to sit on the couch for a while before we get moving around. I don't quite know if he was simply wired that way from the start, or if I trained him that way. Either way, I'm not complaining.

But there is a down side to this Ante Meridiem utopia: The Bride and I don't get to see each other except for on the weekends, and groggy fifteen minute intervals if I happen to wake up when she leaves for work, or if she happens to be still conscious when I get home from work.

That's not much of a marriage, and it's not much of an example for The Boy to follow.

So, starting sometime around the New Year, I will be making a massive transition to first shift. The gentleman co-worker that previously held the position retired last month after 37 (!!!) years with the company, and I have been given first rights to it.

I am super stoked. I cannot imagine the positive changes that are in store for me, for us as a family, and for those around us!

It will be a hard transition to make, for various reasons. As it is right now, my Bride and I have worked separate shifts for nearly our entire relationship. We have developed our own ways of doing things, and our own habits, and there will be some friction. But that is to be expected, I think, and with our patience with each other and God's grace to us, we'll figure it out.

Also, first shift begins at 0600 hours. Remember what I said above about 5am? Yeah, that's going to be my new alarm clock setting. Unless there's an early departure, then I would be required to be at the airport at least one hour prior to scheduled departure. The little New Ager in me is frantically scrambling to rearrange my biorhythms in order to establish wellness within the paradigm of my new circadian cycle.

It's going to hurt.

But the hardest thing about this shift change will not be the new schedule. No, the hardest thing about this shift change will be that I will miss out on mornings with Eli.

I treasure waking up to hear him jabbering in his crib. It warms my heart to see his gummy, groggy, sleepy smile when I walk into his room. I love the way he tries to climb into my arms.

I love getting ready to face the world with my son.

It is special to me, and now instead, I will have to face the morning with cold, hard metal machines and unforgiving, inflexible schedules.

There is much to be excited about, but I will miss mornings with Eli.

wingnut

We DO Know Where This is Going.

2008-12-04T06:00:00.002-05:00

On my church's website, they have begun a blog specifically for the Advent season. The first week of posts (started on November 30) are all having to do with hope.

One of the posts talked about how there is an element of despair in every hope. Hope, the writer said, is sometimes hopeless.

We talk about how we can hope for something "against all hope", or that there is no hope in a given situation.

But hope and despair come hand in hand. We can hope that we don't get laid off, but only while we are experiencing the despair that comes with the threat of losing our job. We can hope for a comfortable retirement account, but that hope is focused through the despair of a bad economy. We can hope for a better, stronger, brighter America in the future, with despair in the knowledge that it will get worse before it gets better.

Hope is only real when times are tough. Hope only has meaning if one has every reason to despair.

The Bible has much to say about hope. Any sort of casual reading through the prophetic books will show you what despair looks like. I mentioned the Israelite Exile to Babylon briefly last week, and I would like to revisit that in order to illustrate hope.

The Israelites had literally everything taken from them. Their possessions were stolen, their Temple had been destroyed. Their homes were burned. They even had their land taken from them, as they were forced to move to Babylon. It was the absolute lowest point in their history since they were in Egypt.

And during this exile, during this horribly desperate time in their history, the Israelite prophets spoke of the despair, of the pain, of the judgement that they were experiencing from God.

But then they also spoke of hope. Hope for a future where everything is "put to rights". A future where justice prevails, where poverty is eliminated, where everyone eats enough and can afford daily necessities. Where no-one dies in wars, where no-one has their possessions taken from them by force. The prophets wrote that this hope would be for not just the nation of Israel, but for all people, everywhere.

This should be our hope as well.

We believe that the hope of the exiled prophets for a new, better world came to fruition in the flesh of Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the hope that the prophets were talking about. Not just for Israel, but for all people, everywhere.

The Book of Revelation is a strange book to read, and a difficult book to understand. As a child, the book nearly drove me away from faith, but that's a different post.

If we look at the last two chapters of Revelation, we see a glimpse of where Creation is going. We catch the slightest sideways glance at what God, through Jesus, has set in motion:

A New Jerusalem.

A New Heaven.

A New Earth.

A New Creation.

What we're seeing is Hope. That means that I can stand before anyone and tell them that I know where this is going. I know what will happen. I know how this story will end. In this time of growing despair, of fear and war and death, we shall begin to see more clearly the hope that we all have for the future. This hope is firmly rooted in the fact that Jesus has "put the world to rights" in God's eyes. Jesus has enacted the hope of Revelation 21 and 22.

He enacted the hope that we have for the future, and he also empowered us to live out that hope in our lives today.

Gandhi said that we should try to be the change we wish to see in the world.

In this Advent season, when we think of the hope we have for the future, we should attempt to be that hope.

wingnut

Dispatches From the Line Mk.VI

2008-12-03T06:00:00.002-05:00

Work Work Work.

When I say I work at the airport, the next question, without fail, is "What do you do at the airport?"

I attempt to explain to them that my job is basically fueling our airplanes when they come in, and making sure that the airplanes are ready to go for their next trip.

This really doesn't cover it, but if I were to tell people exactly what I do, they wouldn't follow me for long. Or, if I tell them that my job is anything not covered by someone else's job description, they still would have no idea what I get paid to do.

So when I punched in today at 1430 (2:30pm), I tried to keep track of everything I did at work.

When I got in, there was an airplane out on the ramp that was renting hangar space from us. The mechanics were putting it in the hangar, and finished up just as I punched in. I talked with our director of maintenance and he briefed me on what was going on that evening. There was going to be another jet renting hangar space from us that was going to be over shortly, so I had to keep my eye out for that.

After that, I filed some paperwork left over from the weekend, and organized my office a bit. Then I went up to the front office to check in with scheduling to see if there were any schedule changes. There wasn't any. On my way back, I got stopped by Jody, our receptionist, who introduced me to her replacement, since she is leaving for Norway in two weeks.

As I walked back into my office, I was stopped by our facilities maintenance man, who was telling me about the Christmas tree plans and that I might have to help.

When I finally got back into my office, I checked my email and double checked the schedule on the computer. As I was doing that, the jet taxied up for hangar space.

One of the girls at our other facility across the airport had called the hotel shuttle for the pilots, and so I informed them of that, and let them into the front office when they were done shutting down the airplane.

I then waited with them for the hotel shuttle, which drove by once and disappeared. After a half-hour of waiting, I told the crew that I would take them to the hotel. So I dug our crew car out from the snow and ice and drove them to the Airport Hilton on the corner of 28th and Patterson.

When I got back to the airport, I was cornered by one of the office girls, who wanted me to help set up the Christmas Tree. So I helped her do that. As we were working on that, the pilot for my departing airplane was ready to go, so I pulled the jet out of the hangar and got it all set up out on the ramp. The weather was pretty nasty, so I called my supervisor to have the deice truck standing by when they were ready to go.

As I was fueling the departing aircraft, the pilot informed me that they would need a deice, and I confirmed that the truck was on it's way.

The deicing truck arrived, and my jet started up and taxied across the ramp to the deice pad. I climbed into the deicer and drove it while my co-worker, Jerry, sprayed from the bucket.

A deice truck, by the way, looks kinda like those telephone work trucks, with a big boom and bucket on it, enabling whomever is in the bucket to spray the deice fluid even on the tops of the big airliners. I think the bucket can get up to 60 feet high.

When we were done deicing the jet, I signaled to the pilots with a thumbs up, and they left. I finished up the paperwork for the deicing and then went to start stacking my hangar.

Now when we move our airplanes around, we have to use wing walkers, who act as extra spotters to watch and help the tug driver not smash hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of airplane parts together. I usually coordinate with the airplane detail crew. We talk about what airplane we're going to move where, and what all has to be done first.

Today, I had to get a different tow bar attachment to move one of the airplanes who had rented hangar space from us. That meant that I had to drive over to the other side of the field to get it at our other facility.

So back in the crew car I go, over to the other facility. When I got over there, the other line guys were using the attachment that I needed, so I helped them move the airplane they needed to move. They were pretty busy over there, so I helped them fuel the airplane before it left, and then I helped them stack their hangar before I was able to get back to my hangar.

When I got back, the detail crew was waiting for me, so we stacked the hangar. It was an easy stack, we only had to move two airplanes, so it didn't take long.

So far, it's been a fairly typical day at the airport.

I still have one more airplane to fuel and then put in the hangar. I need to update my schedule to the most current version, and I have to make sure all my airplanes are in the right spot for the mornings departures. Then I have to service the potty on one of our airplanes.

Then I still have to top off my fuel truck, and make sure it's ready to go for tomorrow. After that, I have to enter today's fuelings into the computer and make sure our fuel meter numbers match up.

Then I have to update my big status board in the office for the next shift, so that they know what's going on.

It seems like chaos, but it's a controlled chaos!

wingnut

Happy....Holidays

2008-12-01T18:21:00.003-05:00

I didn't get the Thanksgiving post up.

I naively thought that I would have time this weekend to get it done, since we had two extra days off. Plenty of time, right?

Nothing to do but eat, watch TV, and lay around the house, right?

Somewhere between here and Toledo, we filled up our long weekend. It was good though.

The Bride and The Boy and I enjoyed ourselves.

Even though the dinner conversation started out awkward and only got worse. Even though there were stresses hanging over us that didn't go away. Even though we didn't quite get to to everything we wanted to do.

It was still a good weekend, and I'll tell you why:

We weren't at work. We were with family. We got to watch our son discover stairs. And noisy birds. And football. We ate spectacular food. We got to go shopping. We got to walk around outside for a while. We watched movies on a massive screen while eating popcorn and sitting in chairs that are designed to put you to sleep no matter how well rested you are.

But the Thanksgiving was held in tension. The economy is not so hot right now, and those that work in the banking industry are feeling the pinch. That means us.

As at any family gathering, those who are present remember those who cannot be present, and this Thanksgiving was no different.

So it was with more sober thoughts that we gave thanks this year.

But this weekend also was the beginning of the Advent season, a time to prepare and anticipate the birth of Jesus. This anticipation is the anticipation of the New Heaven and the New Earth, the renewal of all creation.

No matter what situation we find ourselves in, Advent is the ultimate Thanksgiving.

wingnut

Mind The Gap!

2008-11-25T07:00:00.001-05:00

I looked for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found none.

-Ezekiel 22:30

This verse is used often when we talk of intercessory prayer. We pray for those who cannot (or will not) pray for themselves. We call this "standing in the gap."

We pray to God for others. We pray for healing for those with no words. We pray for God to embrace those with no hope. We pray for reconciliation for those with no friends.

But often, we focus entirely on the spiritual side of this question, and ignore the physical reality that is written into this passage. It's all about prayer for things to happen, and for God to act. But a faith without works is a dead faith, and so I would like to consider the real, physical, concrete implications this passage would have had for those who heard it.

The book of Ezekiel was written during the Babylonian exile, after the Jewish people had been defeated and carted off to the land of their captors. So the entire population would have been fairly familiar with the military metaphor in use, probably more than they wished.

For years, Israel had been caught between Babylon/Assyria and Egypt. It seemed that every time these superpowers would go to war, that they would stomp all over Israel. So Israel, for a long time, had been paying tribute to whichever nation offered better protection. For a while, it was Egypt. Then it was Babylon. Then Egypt again.

But King Nebuchadnezzer of Babylon decided that he wanted Israel's tribute money, so he went to Jerusalem to "ask" for it. In the process, he took the current Israelite king, a bunch of money, and a bunch of the "high society" people back with him to Babylon. It was said that the only people left in Jerusalem were the very poor. The people that no-one cared about. And a "king" that Nebuchadnezzar appointed over Israel as a tributary.

But this new king, Zedekia, tried to play Babylon's game and revolted. Again, Nebuchadnezzer's army stormed in from the north, this time with orders to completely level the city of Jerusalem. It was in this last invasion and siege that the Temple was destroyed, and most of the remaining Israelites were carried off into slavery.

We talk often about how the Babylonian Captivity was God punishing Israel for it's sins. The prophets of the time are very explicit in this as well, that God was using the nations of the world to punish Israel. What we get, then, is a picture of a vengeful god, who will smite all who do not meet his impossible demands. But this picture is inaccurate, and might be due to a slight misunderstanding of the idea of God punishing Israel.

You see, we have been given a choice in all that we do. Israel had been given a choice. God had delivered Israel from slavery, and brought them to the promised land, and blessed them with global influence and great wealth.

And they had a choice: They could choose the world's way, or God's way. God's way is the way of serving. Of looking out for those who have no-one to look out for them. To help those who need it. To feed the hungry, and care for the sick. To be a friend to the lonely, to be a guide to the lost. In this way, Israel would be a light to all nations, displaying the power of God to all humanity.

The world's way is different. The world's way is protecting your way of life. The world's way is accumulating and collecting more and more wealth, and then using that wealth to secure more wealth. The world's way used military might in order to secure a future for yourself and your people. The world's way did not care for the weak, or the sick, or the poor. The world's way exploited those for the gain of those who wanted more wealth.

So Israel had chosen the world's way. And God was punishing them, but not in the malevolent, lightning-bolt-from-the-sky, hellfire and damnation way we are used to thinking.

I think it was a bit more subtle than that. What we have here is a nation that had been given a special calling to be God's people in the world, and instead of living up to that calling, they have decided to live the world's way. They have decided to play the world's game. Babylon's game. Egypt's game. Assyria's game. The game of empires.

And in this game, there are no winners. Sure, it may for a time look like a winning game, but in the end, all empires will fall, just like the ones that came before.

And so in the end, sitting in captivity, Ezekiel writes that God was looking for someone to stand in the gap before Him, so he didn't have to destroy the land. God was looking for someone to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and defend the city.

The listeners and readers of this passage would have known what that meant. They would have understood. They would have remembered seeing the walls of Jerusalem knocked over, they would have remembered walking through the gaps in the wall as they were being led into captivity.

And they would have known that they didn't stand in the gap.

Obviously this can be taken on two levels. To actually stand and fight against the Babylonian army would have been sure suicide, and those in captivity would have known that, so there is a different, deeper level that this can be understood at:

When God is standing at the front of the army and looking for someone to stand in the gap, God is looking for someone to defend the city. To defend Jerusalem, defend Israel.

And defending Israel means defending the covenant relationship that God had with Israel. Defending and acting out the obligations in that covenant relationship. Watching out for the poor, the sick, the lonely. Taking care of the orphaned, the widowed, the aliens among them.

God is calling out to them, saying,

"I looked for even just one person that was not playing the world's game. Just one person that was looking out for the poor and not just himself. Just one person that wasn't collecting wealth for himself. Just one person that was trying to live out the covenant relationship with me. And I didn't find that person. What I found was that my covenant nation was trying to play the world's game, by the world's rules. And now, guess what? The Babylonians are better at that game than you are."

Defending Israel means choosing God's way, not the world's way.

Standing in the gap means taking care of the sick, the orphaned, the widowed, the poor, the aliens.

Standing in the gap means fighting against oppression, against exploitation, against slavery, and not just fighting for your way of life.

And this is a universal call.

God is standing outside our city walls right now, searching for someone to stand in the gap.

wingnut