Emmylou, berds, and onion guy

What a night! I went and watched Emmylou Harris perform at the zoo. Before the show however, the zoo did a bird show. The birds were enormous! I know one was a turkey vulture named Clive. After the berd show a speaker came up and talked about how great of a venue and one of the arguments was “where else can you see birds fly?”

I dunno… maybe anywhere?

Eventually Emmylou came up and played which was amazing. What was almost as amazing was the guy sitting a small ways away from us. He knew most of the words and sang along a lot. He also was eating raw onion! I hope I can be anywhere near as special as onion guy when I grow up!

what a wonderfully odd video (i LOV it!)

nerdiness += 8

Confession: I am back into sci-fi.  Zach and Mike got me hooked on Stargate Atlantis, and it has gotten me back into realizing I love movies and shows about adventures in space.  I realized it was getting out of hand when I thought it would be clever to put old Star Trek sounds on my iphone.

I just spent > 1hr reading a friends blog because I was trying to find a post I commented on.

The computer works is still destroying my life(translation: I’m getting plenty of work).  This is going to be a wild week because there is a ton of work to do that I should have done a while ago(hw for summer classes).  I just keep having to remind myself that the end is in sight.

This weekend I get to hang out with Jonba and his fiance.  It’s always a good time when I hang out with Jonba.  Just have to get work done in the mean time.

the “peticure”

I just saw a funny ad for something called the “peticure.”  It is in essence a device that grinds your pet’s nails instead of clipping them.  It was a great example of not so subtle visual marketing(in my opinion).  They show someone who is trying to clip their pets nails, and the pet is fidgeting and not wanting to be there.  Then they show the same pet with the “peticure” and it is sitting there, smiling and generally happy about the fact that it is getting its claws ground off.

Truth be told, this is probably a false comparison, because I don’t know many animals that like their feet being messed with period.

However I think that sometimes Christians can do something similar with the gospel.  We treat the gospel like we are used car salesmen, because if we were to be really really honest we don’t necessarily believe the gospel is as good as we proclaim it to be.  So instead we make these before and after pictures, the fidgety pet, and the happy pet.  Before, my life sucked.  Now I have Jesus and everything is perfect.  I like to call this the “I came to Jesus, and then I won the lottery” approach.

And it’s not all false, life is better with Jesus.  But not in the “everything is now great” way.  Rather a true presentation of the gospel to me is “I came to Jesus and He ruined my life. But somehow it’s better than I could have described before.”

Good words from the Pope

Just read an interesting article highlighting what the pope spoke about at World Youth Day.  I especially liked this piece:

And though the images of his arrival were being broadcast to an international audience of more than 1billion people, he had a warning for the internet and television generation. “In our personal lives and in our communities we can encounter a hostility, something dangerous, a poison which threatens to corrode what is good, reshape who we are, and distort the purpose for which we have been created.

“Examples abound, as you yourselves know. Among the more prevalent are alcohol and drug abuse, and the exaltation of violence and sexual degradation often presented through television and the internet as entertainment.”

He told the young people not to be fooled by those “who see you as just another consumer in market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty and subjective experience displaces truth.”

Here’s the full article if you want to read it.

new iPhone!

some of you may know that I bought myself an iPhone for my birthday. I decided it would be fun to post a picture of me and the beauty. How much better that I do it from my phone!

Title Change

Hi friends, I just changed my tagline for two reasons…

1. I’m not really a seminary student any more, so musings of a seminarian about to be pastor doesn’t really work since I’m officially done with the seminary thing.

2. I had an amazing interchange with an old woman at church today who, after hearing me speak told me that she had a feeling I would be the Johnny Appleseed of the Gospel in Southeast Portland.  I found it really interesting and kind of humbling, knowing that I couldn’t really say anything more than thank you.  It really was a fun compliment though, so I thought it could make a fun tag line on here for a little while

I find this picture ________…

Fill in the blank

proof I might be becoming a coffee snob

The other day we had a girl from Boston who’s thinking about coming to Multnomah sit in on a class.  During the break she asked me for a place to get coffee here’s how that went down:

girl: Are there any good places to get coffee around here, you know like Starbucks?

me: Starbucks? I thought you wanted good coffee….

girl: yeah, isn’t Starbucks good coffee?

me: you’re from the East Coast aren’t you?  we really should introduce you to stumptown.

girl: stump what?

me: never mind, there’s a starbucks(kind of) on campus, I’ll just tell you how to go there.

I never thought I’d become pretentious coffee guy! might be time to go on a hiatus.

Steve McQueen

Sometimes I just want to shout
Obsenities come from I don’t know where
Frustrations and fears fighting for consciousness
while I fight to put them back

Yet those words are still there
floating above my tongue
clanging up against my teeth
waiting for my mouth to open
that they might escape and forsake
this appearance that I so desperately try to keep

In the end though
I will swallow those words
they will go back down in my stomach and flail around
I will drink some water or maybe a beer
to try and drown them and put them to rest
because that would be better than telling you how I really feel.