Author: Glen

After I post­ed last night’s entry I was filled with even more mem­o­ries of the hol­i­days.

• Home cook­ing. Home Cajun cook­ing.
• Eat­ing at the Steam­boat for our anniver­sary. Tasty beyond belief.
• Teach­ing my nephew Rick why you should nev­er lose at Tic-Tac-Toe. Also, reduc­ing niece Rebec­ca to whin­ing because I would­n’t “go easy on her” while demon­strat­ing my mad Tic-Tac-Toe skil­lz to a suit­ably impressed Rick.
• Read­ing Sol­dier, Ask Not as an adult and real­iz­ing the hero is some­one oth­er than I thought it was when I first read it as a kid.
• Being a mis­sion­ary table host for the stu­dents from FSU Chi Alpha when the assigned dis­cus­sion top­ic was sex­u­al puri­ty. There was so much bois­ter­ous laugh­ter at our table that we got a dirty look from one table and a snide com­ment from anoth­er, “Do you see how that table is laugh­ing over there? They don’t take sex seri­ous­ly.” To which my reply was, “I find humor in every­thing I val­ue greatly–laughter is one way of delight­ing in some­thing pre­cious. Besides, if you can’t laugh at some­thing as ridicu­lous as sex you are seri­ous­ly humor-chal­lenged.” In the oth­er table’s defense, how­ev­er, we were hav­ing a dis­rup­tive­ly good time.
• Find­ing out that many of my for­mer RUi stu­dents real­ly enjoyed my ses­sions and remem­bered them in sur­pris­ing detail.
• See­ing how many Chi Alphas are spread­ing into the elite schools. One cou­ple I helped dis­ci­ple is head­ing to estab­lish a min­istry at Cor­nell and I met anoth­er chap head­ing to Brown (his bril­liant sup­port-rais­ing mot­to: “What can you do for Brown?”). Of Amer­i­ca’s extreme­ly pres­ti­gious schools, that makes staff-sup­port­ed chap­ters at Stan­ford, George­town, MIT, Brown, Yale and Cor­nell. We’re mak­ing major progress on that front.
• Chat­ting with Gene Bre­it­en­bach about the recent intel­li­gent design court case (he’s a huge fan of the way the case was decid­ed).
• Real­iz­ing how stark the imbal­ance is between Chi Alpha Xan­ga users and the more enlight­ened Chi Alpha Word­Press crowd. I may have to post an arti­cle on that some­day (but only if I want to endure a good-natured web fight, espe­cial­ly since my wife is a Xan­gan).
• Dana scream­ing “Home!” with delight when we stepped back through the door of our apart­ment.

As always, we spent Christ­mas in Lou­siana. In addi­tion, I got to spend around 14 hours in a car dri­ving from Lafayette, LA to Louisville, KY for The World Mis­sions Sum­mit. Near­ly 4,000 col­lege stu­dents from Chi Alpha groups across Amer­i­ca gath­ered to con­sid­er their role in God’s glob­al plan. And then I got to spend 14 hours dri­ving back again.
Some high­lights from the trip:

• Get­ting loot for Christ­mas, includ­ing Munchkin.
• Hav­ing Dana decide that dad­dy was her favorite for a lit­tle while.
• Watch­ing my par­ents final­ly get broad­band inter­net ser­vice. Also, fix­ing com­put­ers for both my par­ents and my in-laws.
• Dis­cov­er­ing that Steve Barke has a snore that would cause a dead per­son to search for ear plugs. Also, pur­chas­ing ear plugs.
• Lis­ten­ing to J. Rufus Fears talk about Win­ston Churchill for 12 hours. I’ve long admired Churchill based on what lit­tle I knew about him–now that I know more I’m astound­ed. He was among the great­est of all time.
• Hang­ing out with Greg for 14 hours in a car.
• Dis­cov­er­ing that there are whole stretch­es of road in the South which only receive coun­try and/or rap sta­tions.
• Chat­ting with Lind­sey and Nic­ho­lette about their upcom­ing moves to join us. They’re both such great people–Paula and I can’t wait for them to be here!
• Meet­ing Will Phillips. He was every bit as enter­tain­ing in per­son as I had hoped he would be. For some rea­son he thinks he out-geeks me. Some­day I may have to dis­abuse him of that notion (I con­tribute to Wikipedia, for cry­ing out loud).
• See­ing my old bud Randy Jumper again. We were class­mates at AGTS and have kept in touch dig­i­tal­ly since. Nice to have a face-to-face again.
• Dis­cov­er­ing that Stan­ford frosh John Sill­cox can focus out of each eye sep­a­rate­ly. Freaky.
• Way cool wor­ship in the morn­ing. In an odd turn of events, the morn­ing ser­vices were con­sis­tent­ly 5 to 7 times bet­ter than the evening ser­vices.
• See­ing over 650 stu­dents make a one-year com­mitt­ment to mis­sions with the option for a life­time exten­sion. Woohoo! And they weren’t just sign­ing up for the easy places, either. A lot of closed coun­tries are in for a big sur­prise.
• Watch­ing the amaz­ing lev­el of panache with which the Ascent (a Chi Alpha staff event) was pulled off. Know­ing that Belkas Lehmann and I had planned the whole thing made it extra-spe­cial.
• Get­ting a free copy of Full Gospel, Frac­tured Minds. I’m enjoy­ing it so far, and I’ll post a review when I’m done. Big thanks to Jer­ry Gib­son for hook­ing me up.
• Ran­dom­ly walk­ing around Louisville at dark look­ing for food (which I final­ly dis­cov­ered at a gas sta­tion).
• Final­ly watch­ing The Mag­nif­i­cent Sev­en.
• Watch­ing The Fan­tas­tic Four and final­ly real­iz­ing that they’re the four ele­ments.
• Hav­ing Dana behave on both flights.