Every couple of weeks (or more) I get the desire to be alone. Too take time to recharge and get away from people. As an introvert I get drained being around people, it’s funny even in video games I get that way. I just want to play & do things away from people who I would normally love to game with.
So I feel bad when someone needs me and I’m trying to be alone. I know that unless I take some time for myself, I’m not going to be able to give them much of any useful help.
That was a running joke in college (and after for a bit), ever so often I remember it, since I sometimes get distracted from what I’m doing. Like now, lol, I’m helping Maggie get part of Handel’s Messiah the Hallelujah Chorus into a presentation on Beauty for her english class.
Of course now I’m listening to the whole thing.
I’m taking seminary classes for my beginning pastoral/deacon training on the weekends and it’s killing my time for things outside of it. So staying focused while reading 5 different books has been challenging. I kinda wish I had more time, Both Helen and I are sad that we’re not getting nearly enough time together as we used too. I’m also not getting in the guitar practice time that I used to. I still practice the scales though so I’m at least keeping up learning the movement.
Computer problems are what have really been problematic this week, we’re down to two! Not having time to fix Helen’s means she’s using the laptop and so we’re also screwed in that sense as well. All that also means is that I need to cut the grass too!
I did patch the roof this week. It was Monday and I almost decided that it was too late and I was too tired and it was Monday and that it would hold until tomorrow and … then the verse from the Bible popped in my head, “Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. How long will you lie there, you sluggard? ”
Actually all I remembered was, “Look at the ants, you sluggard! They do stuff! How long will you lie there!” I felt that God was giving me a mental kick in the butt to get the roof done. So I got home, got the buckets of tar and spent about 2 hours crouched down spreading tar, getting it all over myself and sweating buckets. I’m glad I got it done though. I think it was really needed for a bunch of reasons and so I’m glad I was convicted to do it.
Speaking of conviction, If you haven’t seen ‘em yet, I have started a series of videos on youtube, talking about the things I’ve been learning in seminary. I started it based on going over to my sister’s house one Sunday morning and seeing a TV preacher and thinking that there needed to be some response to the glitz and glamor of their presentation. Not that it’s necessarily bad, it just seems that the normalcy of everyday Christian life gets sacrificed to the desire to look good on TV.
I may start doing them in the evenings as well though, someone commented that I’m much more coherent later in the day! I will post them here as well when I upload them to youtube so that they’re easy to follow.
Well, Maggie is off to class to give a presentation. I’m headed off to church tonight to help with watching the kids for Celebrate Recovery. It’s fun for me and really helps out the other workers. Wed. night a little boy came up and asked me if I would be back. It made me feel special to be remembered.
Well I started this post thinking I’d tell everyone about life & how things are going, but now that I’m here I’m at a loss for words.
I have been reading my brains out for the past two weeks. I started seminary classes this past week and it’s been a LOT of reading. It’s a part time effort at least for now. I am enjoying the learning, but the strain of trying to do everything else as well is stressful.
The biggest hurdle so far has been getting over my negative reaction to every concept that’s presented. In Systematic Theology, the question was if guttural barking was ‘allowed’ in cases where it seemed to be brought about by the holy spirit. I pointed out that all speaking in tongues while a gift required an iterpreter for edification, and if it wasn’t edifying it wasn’t worth having. In Old Testament we learned about typology. In my mind, a type is like an integer, string or array, like the ‘types’ from programming languages. In theology, types are a way of pulling out something God does and relating it to something God does later (usually in the New Testament). So the example was the Israelites going through the sea, is a ‘type’ of baptism since they went through water. I said that couldn’t be true since they weren’t fully immersed… I just grinned at my professor, it took him a second to get the joke. Anyway, it sounds like a poor way of categorizing the things God has done, just to compare them to God’s actions later on.
I worry that learning the theoretical bits will take away from the importance of the practical or the hands-on. I don’t want to become the priest who walks on the other side of the road when passing the injured traveler. Also, I want to use this to figure out where God wants me, what places I need to be, if anywhere (else that is).
I suppose the real question is Why am I doing this? Going to seminary, studying to be priest or even deacon at the very least. I’ve joked that I want to do it so I don’t have to worry about what to wear, I just get to wear the same black shirt all the time. It’s a feeling that there are some people both outside and inside the church that need to hear me speak about God. His love for us, his clarity of nature, the worship he deserves, the wonder of his creation around us. “I am but dust and ashes, and for my sake the world was created,” the quote goes. I like to teach and so giving talks about God, dare I say it sermons seems right up my alley. I don’t want to get away from the serving aspects of following God either. I have always felt strongly about serving the poor & homeless, so I want to always keep doing that and not get away from it. I can do those things and not be a priest of course, but for some reason I feel called to ‘be’ more. I have been on this road a long time and I can look back and see how God has taken care of me even when I’ve gone wandering off of his path for me. It makes me sad to know that I missed out on some of the blessings he had planned for me, and at the same time makes me happy to see his love for me in action.
I will be in classes for a while yet, at least a year or more. I still have to support my family… I’m reading through Genesis tonight for my Old Testament class and there was always God’s commitment to the guys (Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and Joseph) and through them their families.
Enough for now. It’s really late and I need to sleep. If you want to see something cool, this is a project I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks now:
It’s early morning, I’ve showered and I’m eating a banana & having some old coffee before heading into work.
I can’t wait to get back to some programming I finished up yesterday. I hope to post a link sometime this afternoon… It’s cool stuff with lots of pretty pictures (of Course)!
Moving things around sounds like a good idea at first, but then you get bogged down once it gets hard. I’m trying to move things around on the website here and getting bogged down in stuff, what should go where, etc.. Really the only thing I think I should be worried about it getting more traffic so that I get more money from google ads lol.
It’s been a week of working, helping out at church, watching tv and playing wow. I might have become boring in my old age… except that I found some leftover (well they weren’t leftover as much as I accidentally hit them with the weed wacker and they kinda got broke) little solar powered trail lights. Instead of trashing them I snagged them and hope to make a set of solar powered speakers for my motorcycle… or something.
Job interview, didn’t go well. I both got overly worried about it and they asked several windows questions which I just sucked on. NTLM vs. Kerberose, OCS & Exchange & Sharepoint 2007. Of course most of my experience is in the Unix world, so I was really not as prepared as I should have been. I also screwed myself on several questions by not talking while thinking, so it was just dead air on the phone.
God is in all things and I don’t know where this one is, but I hope that something comes of it. I hate to think that I’m not where I should be or that this isn’t where God wants me… Or maybe it is and this is his way of letting me know it.
I didn’t mean to have four days off from work but it worked out that way. It made it interesting coming back today, classes start again today so Maggie’s with me. She’s both excited about and dreading her classes. I didn’t dread things until later in the semester then it was how much unfinished work I had.
Helen stopped by for lunch today and it was really nice to see her. She brought in the huge super-club from Blue-Boy’s Sandwichshop. It was great. I only wish Helen and I had more time together, that would have been nice.
Lots of updates from the Warcraft world. With blizzcon out & done this past weekend everyone’s buzzing about the new stuff. I only care about the World of Warcraft updates. I am really looking forward to the ‘remaking’ of the old-world with the cataclysm that’s coming. I am pretty sure that for them to make the improvements they want for other future expansion remaking the old world was totally needed. Especially flying mounts, only the outland cities had any thought to dealing with flying mounts, makes sense it was where they were introduced. (…and so restarting a day later…) Helen and I got to play for a while last night while Maggie watched “The Music Man”. We had a good time, I killed everything in sight and she followed me around dragging everything in. We finished up by getting killed by a human paladin when we flagged for PVP in the plaguelands. At first Helen was yelling at me about it, but after we got killed again by the same guy it was funny and we had a blast laughing it up.
An overview of the question of body modification in all it’s aspects, from simple tattooing to cauterising branding, body building to plastic surgery, piercing to full body suspension using large hooks. Some aspects of this documentary are definitely not for children or the squeamish (or me), it includes video of plastic surgeries, branding, body-piercing, guys putting things in their penises, a person getting a tongue split, etc.
If you can handle all that, the interviews with various people examining the nuances behind body modification are interesting. It is approached from several different view points and comes across mostly well thought out. At several points in the film though they degraded to trying to appealing to the salacious appetite of the viewer, with repeated showings of women in various strip shows. I think to show off their piercing(s)/cuts, but it just came across as a way to show T&A.
I can’t say I liked it or would recommend it to anyone else. I didn’t hate it though either. I rate it zero stars out of five for ‘ambivalent’.
