Thursday’s Child Has Far to Go…

Paula and I went to see the doc­tor today, and we’re going to have labor induced this Thurs­day.

Pret­ty strange to think about, that we can sched­ule that. There is the chance that she’ll come ear­ly, but the doc­tor did­n’t seem to expect it.

Expect some good news and a pho­to soon!

Let’s just hope the poem is wrong…

Mon­day’s Child is fair of face
Tues­day’s Child is full of grace
Wednes­day’s Child is full of woe
Thurs­day’s Child has far to go
Fri­day’s Child is lov­ing and giv­ing
Sat­ur­day’s Child works hard for a liv­ing
But the child that is born on the Sab­bath day
Is bon­ny and blithe and good and gay.

Then again, I’m not sure what that means. Thurs­day’s Child has far to go in order to reach what des­ti­na­tion?

Could be worse, I suppose–we could have induced on Wednes­day.

On a com­plete­ly unre­lat­ed note, I was very dis­ap­point­ed ear­li­er today. John Ort­berg is the teach­ing pas­tor at Men­lo Park Pres­by­ter­ian Church, which is about two blocks from my apart­ment. He’s also con­sid­ered one of the best preach­ers in Amer­i­ca.

Well, I’m always try­ing become a bet­ter preach­er, so I emailed him and asked to inter­view him about the ser­mon prepa­ra­tion and deliv­ery process (which I was plan­ning to encode in MP3 for­mat and upload to a web­site, prob­a­bly Reach The U).

After a few days he emailed me back and declined, cit­ing a busy teach­ing sched­ule. I was pret­ty bummed. I sup­pose I half expect­ed it–for all he knows I’m some whacko–but it’s still dis­ap­point­ing. I con­sid­er him a pro­fes­sion­al role mod­el, and so it would have been nice to meet him and fig­ure out how he does what he does.

Maybe it will work out some­day. I used to have a lot of suc­cess at meet­ing peo­ple I esteemed (or was just curi­ous about), but my last few attempts have bombed (Doug Fields, Dan Bet­zer, Dan Kim­ball, and now John Ort­berg).

Passion Pro-Semitic?

Most of the con­tro­ver­sy about Mel Gib­son’s The Pas­sion of the Christ was pred­i­cat­ed on the assump­tion that at worst it would pro­voke pro­found anti-semi­tism and at the best it would leave peo­ple unswayed (as regards the cul­pa­bil­i­ty of the Jew­ish peo­ple for the death of Jesus).

Looks like every­one was wrong–just ask the San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle. The film seems to have nuanced peo­ple’s views and made them less will­ing to assign spe­cif­ic blame.

See a relat­ed arti­cle in the Wash­ing­ton Times down­load dive bomber movie .

Note: the sur­vey was pret­ty small. Read the Chron­i­cle sto­ry to get the scoop on the method­ol­o­gy.

Wild Parrots Roam San Francisco?

No baby yet.

Onei­da Shen, a Chi Alpha intern in Ari­zona, just spent the last few days with us check­ing out cam­pus­es in Nor Cal and Neva­da. She’s seri­ous­ly con­sid­er­ing com­ing to work along­side Paula and I here at Stan­ford. Pret­ty cool.

Also, appar­ent­ly one of our alum­ni is cur­rent­ly in the Miss Uni­verse Sin­ga­pore finals (accord­ing to anoth­er Sin­ga­pore­an alum­nus). How wild is that?

And I just learned one more real­ly strange thing about the Bay Area–there are flocks of wild par­rots that roam San Fran­cis­co. Seriously–there’s even a book about it. Appar­ent­ly they just fly around the city. Read the FAQ. It reminds me of a chap­ter in the Life of Pi.

Cardinal Contributions

I present with­out com­men­tary the 2004 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign con­tri­bu­tion records for the Stan­ford ZIP codes: 94305 and 94309.

Chi Alpha Got the Giddy

First, no baby yet. You’ll know when baby Davis arrives. Relax.

Sec­ond, I was talk­ing with a church staffer yes­ter­day and he said, “One of the things that drew me to Chi Alpha was that you guys got the gid­dy.”

That’s a cool phrase–we got the gid­dy.

The Wounds of a Friend

What hap­pens when a friend puts your nose out of joint? Find out in the lat­est Chi Alpha video blog — Devi­at­ed Sep­tum (opens Quick­Time movie).

As always, if you like this remem­ber to check the video blog archives for more.

Inci­den­tal­ly, the guy who’s doing this blog was my spir­i­tu­al men­tor when I was a stu­dent. How cool!

Relevant Network

I final­ly received the first install­ment of my sub­scrip­tion to Rel­e­vant Net­work this morn­ing (I say final­ly because I expect­ed it last week).

Any­way, I had won­dered what I would get with my sub­scrip­tion, and now I know. I thought I’d pass it on in case your min­istry is con­sid­er­ing join­ing the net­work.

I got a mag­a­zine called Rel­e­vant Leader. It looks okay–it’s a guide to the resources in the kit (reviews, inter­views with artists, etc) along with a hand­ful of extra arti­cles thrown in.

I got 5 copies of the most recent issue of Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine. That was nice, but for some rea­son the mag­a­zine has always under­whelmed me. I’ve always felt that they try too hard. But then again, I tend to get annoyed at most things I’m sup­posed to find cool (like pop­u­lar music and tele­vi­sion pro­grams), so that’s a clue that Rel­e­vant is hit­ting its demo­graph­ic (for the record, I’m a NPR junkie. If there’s ever any­thing else on in the car it’s prob­a­bly because Paula is dri­ving).

I got 7 books (Red Moon Ris­ing, The 250: Evan­ge­lism Ideas for Your Cam­pus, Enjoy­ing God, Enter the Wor­ship Cir­cle, Soul Sur­vivor, What’s So Amaz­ing About Grace — Visu­al Edi­tion, and The Air I Breathe).

I got 2 study guides (one for Red Moon Ris­ing and the oth­er for Soul Sur­vivor).

And I got 5 CDs (Anony­mous: Accel­er­ate in Slow Motion, Enter The Wor­ship Cir­cle: The Third Cir­cle, Des­per­a­tion, Antho­ny Skin­ner: For­ev­er and a Day, and Tele­cast: The Beau­ty of Sim­plic­i­ty).

Not a bad deal. Not bad at all. I was wor­ried I would be dis­mayed with my pur­chase, but I was actu­al­ly quite sat­is­fied.

I had hoped for some video clips (like the kind of stuff High­way Video puts out), but that was­n’t to be. Per­haps in future install­ments.

UPDATE: After a lit­tle more reflec­tion, I real­ized that I was sur­prised at how few of the resources were actu­al­ly min­istry resources. Most were per­son­al growth resources.

As I men­tioned before, I was most anx­ious to receive tools (such as video clips) that would be use­ful in con­duct­ing wor­ship ser­vices or plan­ning out­reach­es or craft­ing ser­mons. Videos from Nooma, for exam­ple, would be real­ly help­ful. Two or three ser­mons on CD would be extreme­ly use­ful. A bible study or two would be well-received.

I guess I’d pre­fer to see 50%+ of the resources be min­istry tools and the minor­i­ty be per­son­al growth mate­ri­als.

Just some thoughts.

Over­all, it’s a great invest­ment. The books and CDs I received were worth far more than I’m pay­ing for the sub­scrip­tion.

Basketball, Baby!

I was on cam­pus today and noticed a huge crowd in the Stu­dent Union–turns out that some­one had set up a screen and a sound sys­tem and was show­ing the PAC 10 tour­na­ment.

We won our first game, by the way.

Any­way, it was inter­est­ing to watch how many stu­dents were engrossed in the game. It’s the week before finals here, and usu­al­ly that means stu­dents are cram­ming like crazy.

I guess they just love dom­i­nat­ing at a major sport.

Technical Glitch

For some strange rea­son, the MP3 encod­ing of last night’s mes­sage was com­plete­ly blank. Not a sin­gle sound was cap­tured.

Oh well, it was­n’t the best mes­sage I’ve ever preached any­way. It’s still frus­trat­ing.

We do have oth­er mes­sages for down­load, how­ev­er.

On an unre­lat­ed note, is it just me or did every­one start wear­ing a lot less all of a sud­den? I swear that some of the peo­ple on the Farm paint­ed their out­fits on, and did­n’t use much paint in the process…