Mandles

This made me laugh.

Ultimate Fighting Championship

My father-in-law has been staying with us and he is a huge boxing and fighting fan. We have been watching a lot of UFC. Those guys are insane, but it's fun to watch.

Busy Weekend

I was gone all Friday at a Trustees Meeting at my alma mater. Then I went straight to our church camp for our annual Men’s Retreat. We had a great time — 35 guys experienced some wonderful fellowship and some in-depth teaching by my good friend Mark Christian (we have known each other since we were 10 years old). He also preached at Cedar Creek yesterday and did an outstanding job.

Purina Diet

My friend John Dobbs told this true story about an incident that happended to him at Wal-Mart:

I have 2 large dogs, and was buying a large bag of Purina at Wal-Mart and was in line to check out. The woman behind me asked if I had a dog? Duh.

On impulse, I told her no, I was starting The Purina Diet again, although I probably shouldn’t because I’d ended up in the hospital the last time. But I’d lost 50 pounds before I awakened in an intensive care ward with tubes everywhere and IVs in both arms.

I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and the way it works is to load your pockets with Purina nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry. The food is nutritionally complete so I was going to try it again.

I have to mention here that practically everyone in line was now enthralled with my story, particularly a tall guy who was standing behind her.

Horrified, she asked if I ended up in intensive care because the dog food poisoned me?

I told her no, I’d been sitting in the street waiting for a car to chase, when another car hit me.

I thought the guy standing behind her was going to need help as he staggered to the door laughing.

I Am Your Brother

Ah'll Be Bach (or will I?)

If you think it through, time travel in movies/television never really works. Yes, I watched The Sarah Connor Chronicles (I just couldn’t turn away) – Sunday night, but I missed last night’s episode. I have to admit that it wasn’t as cheesy as I thought it might be (and wouldn’t a teenage boy prefer a pretty teenage girl terminator to Ah-nold anyway?)But here’s my time travel conundrum. If the Terminators come back from the future to kill young John Connor, thus preventing him from doing whatever heroic thing he’s going to do as an adult, then they never would have existed anyway, right? Like, let’s say my parents beat me when I was a child. So I think, “I’ll fix them”, and I build a time machine and go back to the 1960’s and keep them from ever meeting each other, that way they won’t beat me when I’m born. But wait, I will never BE born, so I won’t be able to go back and keep myself from being beaten. Are you still with me?

It works in the other direction too. If I could jump forward to, say 2027, to find myself eating breakfast at the house I built, I couldn’t meet myself, since I wouldn’t have been there during the time I missed (I couldn’t have built the house, etc.). Does anyone remember the movie Timecop (starring Jean Claude Van Damme)? Oh right. Of course not. I had the same problem with that movie. He went back 10 years to prevent his wife’s murder. And some politician went ahead into time and met himself (their bodies touched and he blew up or something). And then when Timecop went back to the present and mentioned the Senator, people looked at him strangely and said, “The Senator disappeared 10 years ago, never to be seen again” (or something like that, my memory is fuzzy).

The math never works. It’s an endless cycle. If you could travel to the past to meet yourself, you'd probably just end up erasing your future you, which would be your current you. And once you do travel back in time, the present becomes the future that has not yet happened.

Queen Esther

Last night for Family Movie Night we watched One Night With the King. It tells the biblical story of Esther, a Jewish girl who becomes Queen of Persia and saves her people from annihilation. Of course the filmmakers used some artistic license, but they stayed mostly true to the biblical account. We enjoyed it.

Ob La De, Ob La Da, Obadiah

I decided to preach through the Minor Prophets for our winter/spring session of The Well (our Wednesday night program). So I started staring at the book of Obadiah, asking, “What was I thinking?”

But tonight's service/sermon actually went pretty well.

Moron Arrested After Driving Truck Into House

You can't make this stuff up.

Luke's Baptism

My Son, My Brother

This morning I had the privilege of baptizing my son into Christ. Yay God!

What About Tongues?

I've been asked to teach our college-age Sunday School class tomorrow. They want to ask me some questions about speaking in tongues and other so-called charismatic gifts. It should be an interesting discussion.

Welcome to 2008