Things you Don't say to Your Wife

Coporate America comes to Worship

If you've spent any time around contemporary Christian worship, you'll find this video hilarious. I captured it from my friend Molly.

The Financial Crisis Explained

Wondering how this financial crisis came about, really?

This American Life, a weekly NPR radio program has done two really great shows this summer explaining both the mortgage crisis and the financial bail out. Since the two are connected, it'd be good to listen to this show about the mortgage crisis first (it was taped three months ago) and then listen to this show taped two weeks ago explaining the reasons for the financial bail out.

These shows do a great job of explaining in layman's terms exactly what happened and why.

I happen to feel that the bailout was one of the biggest mistakes in American history, in case you're wondering.

The Billings Housing Market

My friend Doug has spent several years studying the Billings housing market. He recently put together a well-researched, comprehensive video examining our local real estate market. It's a half an hour long but worth watching. Naturally, these are Doug's opinions and not mine, though I agree with nearly all of it. Well done, Doug!


Housing Boom in Billings, 2008 from Doug A on Vimeo.

It was a Funny Trick

Last night I was giving Matthew, our youngest, a bath while his 3-year old brother waited for his turn. Elijah was disrobed and playing in his room when he came into the bathroom.

"Dad, my bear is wet."

"Really? How did he get wet?"

"I peed on him."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. I peed on my bed. And I pooped on my bed. It was a funny trick. Let me show you!"

He wasn't kidding.

Wordsworth Effect

I'm back from from Blog hiatus. I hadn't planned on being back on a certain day, but saw this and it fit so well that I couldn't not post it.

The Wordsworth Effect
by Joyce Sutphen

Is when you return to a place
and it's not nearly as amazing
as you once thought it was,

or when you remember how you felt
about something (or someone) but you know
you'll never feel that way again.

It's when you notice someone has turned
down the volume, and you realize
it was you; when you have the

suspicion that you've met the enemy
and you are it, or when you get
your best ideas from your sister's journal.

Is also-to be fair-the thing that enables
you to walk for miles and miles chanting to
yourself in iambic pentameter

and to travel through Europe with
only a clean shirt, a change of
underwear, a notebook and a pen.

And yes: is when you stretch out
on your couch and summon up ten thousand
daffodils, all dancing in the breeze.

Prosperity and Piper

John Piper, using the strongest language that I've heard him use, on the Prosperity Gospel message:

The End of Christianity...Again.

The N.Y. Times recently published an article about the discovery of an ancient tablet (actually found quite awhile ago) that speaks of a Messiah dying and being resurrected in three days, which dates prior to the birth of Jesus. Shane also noticed this article. The Times article claims that

"If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time."

This strikes me as another attempt by the Times to once and for all debunk the wildly popular myth of Christianity that victimizes so many feeble minds.

Scott Richart has a different perspective:

"It's over, folks. The gig is up. Christianity has had a pretty impressive 2,000 year run, but new evidence shows that everything we Christians ever thought about the irreducible uniqueness of Jesus Christ is just a tired old rehashing of Jewish messianic ideas that had emerged in the decades before Christ's birth...

The laughter comes from the fact that a professor of Bible studies could be so naive as to believe that he could "shake the world of Christology" by proving that--gasp!--at least some Jews at the time of Jesus had come to believe that a messiah would die and then rise again in three days.

Israel Knohl, the professor, is a man on a mission. Before he'd ever heard of the tablet, which has been dubbed "Gabriel's Revelation" he had already posited in a book published in 2000 the idea of a suffering messiah--a Jewish national savior--before Jesus, using a variety of rabbinic and early apocalyptic literature as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls." But the book "did not shake the world of Christology as he had hoped" (my emphasis).

The idea that 'a savior who died and rose after three days was an established concept at the time of Jesus' is hardly surprising. Christ, we believe, was the fulfillment of the Old Testament. Nor, for that matter, is it surprising that the "suffering servant" was often viewed in political terms. We have evidence from the Gospels that such a concept was widespread..."

This discovery could be significant. But, as with all things, people are going to interpret the tablet according to their own agendas (including Christians), and we must be careful not to assess these things too quickly.

Epitaph for a Legend

Felt like a little Johnny Cash today.

The Exchange

The Exchange
by Ron Rash

Between Wytheville, Virginia
and the North Carolina line,
he meets a wagon headed
where he's been, seated beside
her parents a dark-eyed girl
who grips the reins in her fist,
no more than sixteen, he'd guess
as they come closer and she
doesn't look away or blush
but allows his eyes to hold
hers that moment their lives pass.
He rides into Boone at dusk,
stops at an inn where he buys
his supper, a sleepless night
thinking of fallow fields still
miles away, the girl he might
not find the like of again.
When dawn breaks he mounts his roan,
then backtracks, searches three days
hamlets and farms, any smoke
rising above the tree line
before he heads south, toward home,
the French Broad's valley where spring
unclinches the dogwood buds
as he plants the bottomland,
come night by candlelight builds
a butter churn and cradle,
cherry headboard for the bed,
forges a dougle-eagle
into a wedding ring and then
back to Virginia and spends
five weeks riding and asking
from Elk Creek to Damascas
before he finds the wagon
tethered to the hitching post
of a crossroads store, inside
the girl who smiles as if she'd
known all along his gray eyes
would search until they found her.
She asks one question, his name,
as her eyes study the gold
smoldering there between them,
the offered palm she lightens,
slips the ring on herself so
he knows right then the woman
she will be, bold enough match
for a man rash as his name.

Bonhoeffer on American Protestantism

“For the first generation of fugitives the journey to America was a decision of faith for their whole lives. For them the renunciation of confessional struggle was therefore a hard-fought Christian possibility. A danger arises here, however, for the subsequent generations, who are born into this battle-free situation without themselves having decided to spend their lives under these conditions. Sooner or later they must misunderstand their position.

What was for their fathers a right of their Christian faith won at the risk of their lives becomes for the sons a general Christian rule. The struggle over creed, because of which the fathers took flight, has become for the sons something which is in itself unchristian. Absence of struggle becomes for them the normal and ideal state of Christianity. The descendants of the fugitives grow up in a peace that is not won, but inherited.”

–“Protestantism Without Reformation”, in No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures, and Notes p. 103

Bizarro Does Weddings

The Faith of a... Little Spider.

At work yesterday I looked over on the wall next to me and there was this little spider. He was vigorously making his way up the wall- to what I could not tell.

Annoyed, I flicked him off of his precarious perch and continued working. Ten minutes later I happened to glance at the wall, and there he was again. So I flicked him again.

I go off to meeting. I get back, sit down at my desk and there he is again, making his way to some unseen sanctuary. I grabbed a tissue to put an end to his meaningless little existence. Then I hesitated for just a moment.

I had to admire his adamant pursuit of the unseen.

So I flicked him across the room and went home. When I got to work this morning, there he was, in the same path, continuing his journey upward.

Who am I to get in the way of a tireless, faithful pursuit? Go well, little friend.

Faith and Doubt and Aaron Espe

Next Date Night

From Take Your Vitamin Z