You've GOT to be kidding me...

Jane had a fun little quiz on her site, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Here are my results for the Yankee or Dixie quiz: 66% (Dixie). A definitive Southern score! Thats even with me knowing about Devil's Night.

I am clearly spending way too much time with Tripp and Jeff.

10!

The Indigo Girls have a new album out this week - All That We Let In. I'm listening to it right now. It sounds most like their last album Become You. That makes 10 Indigo Girls cds in my collection.
This morning Luke, AKMA, and I drove up the Evanston Hospital, but not for anything as dramatic as my Hoosier friend! It was the Winter quarter blood drive here at Seabury. While we were trying not to pass out or anything embarassing, we watched TV and there was an ad for a book. Does anyone else find it ironic to be advertising a book on TV? Maybe not so much ironic as desperate? This morning though, I just found it funny.

Tis A Gift...

Yesterday was one of those days when a lot of great stuff happened, but I was tired and almost didn't notice. We had a community forum on worship and music here at Seabury, which I helped some other people plan. It went really well, I thought. The discussion and stories were great, but the best part for me was actually sharing music and feeling it build community- especially with one particular song. THen I had preaching class. I wasn't scheduled to read or preach, so I just sat and listened to three sermons. I heard sad stories and happy endings, failure and renewal, death and resurrection. Preaching class can be difficult- two hours of sitting in less-than-comfy wooden pews, at a sleep time of day- but yesterday it was a great gift to me. As was mentioned in a sermon yesterday, sometimes we don't always want the gifts that God has for us - and I didn't particularly want to be there. But it was beautiful and refreshing and challenging and... simply, a gift.
Speaking of gifts, I am about to check out some wedding registries. Luke & I are heading to Boston this weekend, for his best friend's wedding. Ruben was one of the two "best men" at our wedding. It should be a joyous time, and I can't wait to see them and all of Luke's Oberlin friends. Yay.
And, speaking of Luke - he has actually joined the Blogiverse! Along with some friends and colleagues, he has founded an organization called CYSIonline. The idea is to get young social innovators together and talking about what they do. So, the blog is a collection of articles thus far, and they just launced it today. So go visit and check out what my husband does for a living. Maybe he can join Tripp's satellite campus too!

Credit/No Credit

Did y'all catch West Wing this week? Naturally, Luke & I did. It was quite interesting. One of the main characters- Toby- spent the episode trying to capitalize on an opportunity to save social security. In the end, the only way to make it happen was for the White House and President to pretend that they had nothing to do with it. The show ended with Toby, sitting in his office watching the TV coverage of the amazing social security deal, and the news channel criticizing the White House for not having been part of the process.
What a model for ministry! We can call get on board, at least nominally, with doing good things and not taking the credit. But how much harder to know that you have done something good, and not only not take the credit, but stand by while others criticize you for not having done whatever it was you actually did? I think that will be incredibly hard.
Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven....

projects and projecting

Heather stayed over last night, a welcome and common occurance when she is on her day off from field ed. And it gave us the opportunity to get started on a fun new project: a concordance/index/reference-type-book for praise music. The idea is that we will catalog song name, author, and copyright info for a bunch of praise music, and assign categories, and related Scripture verses. Do you know those books where you can look up Scripture verses and they list hymns that go well with that particular reading? Thats the general idea. Right now, our categories are mostly based on the categories in the Hymnal 1982, and we've added general praise, renewal, healing, light... and some others I can't think of right now. Luke asked if we were going to make a lot of money off this. I doubt it... but hopefully it will make some folks happy. If we ever get it done!
I love when something has been on your mind, and then all of a sudden it seems like everything is trying to illuminate the issue. AKMA went on a bit of a tangent at the end of New Testament class today on the role of suffering in Christianity. He articulated both what I have been thinking about and what I have been needing to understand, all in just a few minutes. Grace, my friends, is an amazing and surprising thing. Even after 2000 years of it being surprising.

bouncing back

So, I'm trying a new comment system, since Klink family is totally down. Sigh. I was wondering why no one had anything to say about my posts recently. Guess I need to give people more credit. But then again, that seems to be my lesson for the day.

So... is anyone still out there? :)

Patriots 32, Panthers 29

Dude. That rocks.

Hail to the Victors valiant, Hail to the conquering heroes
Hail, Hail to Michigan the Champions of the West.

Did I mention that Tom Brady went to Michigan?

PS: I need a new comment server. If somone has one the like, please let me know.