disciple, husband, father, college minister
Tonight we fed Dana fish sticks for the first time. The following is as close to a verbatim transcription as I can muster:
Me: “Dana, do you like those?”
Dana: “Yes.”
Me: “Those are fish sticks.”
Dana: “Chicken nuggets.”
Me: “No, they’re fish sticks.”
Dana: “Chicken.”
Me: “Fish sticks.”
Dana: “Chicken nuggets.”
Me: “Dana, those are fish sticks.”
Dana, greatly vexed, shook her fish stick at me and said, “This goes cluck!”
That just charmed my socks off.
People often mock the Song of Songs for having bizarre romantic imagery. Song of Solomon 7:4 is a notorious example: “your nose is like the tower of Lebanon” (to which I always want to add “which means you can think of that zit as more of a banner, if you prefer”).
Stuff like that keeps many from taking the Song of Solomon seriously as a love song. We obsess over the pictures that the song employs and fail to get the point.
And we act as though we’ve never seen such outlandish imagery before. Then without even realizing it we turn the radio on and hear the Commodores belting out “she’s a brick house
.”
In the cultural smackdown between us and the ancient near east, I have to give this round to the ancients. Which would you rather be called? A tower is slender, graceful, and curved. A brick house is short, squat, and angular. Quite frankly, we have no stones to throw.
And it’s that way throughout the Song.
So the next time you hear the Black Eyed Peas inquiring about the junk in your trunk, cut the Song of Solomon some slack and interpret it the way you would interpret any other love song–poetically.
Computer crashes are horrible. It’s as though an old-time preacher was ambushed by an eraser-wielding demon in the night who removed all the notes from the margins of his Bible.
Things I bookmarked last week on del.icio.us.
Disclaimer: these links are posted automatically using the excellent yawd hack and are merely things that were interesting enough to bookmark for future reference–I may or may not agree with the views expressed by the linked pages. In fact, I may not have even read them yet.
I really like the fake church sign in this article from Lark News. Thanks to Church Marketing Sucks for noticing the story.
As promised, here’s the agenda for Chi Alpha’s upcoming Advisory Leadership Team meeting.
Agenda:
1. Review XA 2010 Implementation Team Work
2. Calendar
3. Community of mission statement
4. Missionary furlough survey
5. Campus Ministers Conference
6. Suggestions for Department Directors
At this point I don’t have much info beyond that. I assume the names for CMC are potential speakers.
As you will note, we’ve created several new departments and so we need to recruit people to those roles. Suggestions are welcome. You can email me, call me, or leave a comment on the blog (just remember that comments can be read by everyone). I’m there to represent folks on the field, and I can do that more effectively if some folks on the field let me know their perspective on things. 🙂
These are the books our ministry team selected for our reading group.
We’re starting with the Nicomachean Ethics first. Paula and I spent some time looking at different translations (like the Bible, you can get Aristostle in King James through CEV flavoring). We settled on Terence Irwin’s translation as the most readable.
I just got a wonderfully encouraging email:
I haven’t been to a chi alpha meeting since that one time at the ‘obey your parents’ sermon, but I check out the mp3s every now and then and I think your sermons are great. I’d like to be more descriptive than that, but I’m fairly brain-dead tonight (can you say sleepdep?). Anyways, a big thanks to whoever does the recording and website work…I’m LOVING the google videos!
The potential hairstyle pictures were…great. More than great…really great. Maybe I should go to bed. I’ll try (harder) to actually come to a meeting before the quarter runs out!
Occasionally I wonder whether any students ever really listen to the stuff we put online. I guess they do.
It’s amazing how a little thing like that can totally make my day.
You now have a chance to mess with Glen’s head. That’s right–you get to pick my next hairstyle.
Why? I have a dilemma: I am balding yet not bald. I don’t know what to do.
Almost anything (emphasis on almost) will be considered.
Assuming there’s no evidence of vote fraud (always a peril on the internet), I commit to giving the winning hairstyle a sincere try.
So what are you waiting for? Mess with my head!
Courtesy of the cool Einstein dynamic chalkboard generator.