Hospitality

Benedict on hospitality…

Hospitality is the way we come out of ourselves.  It is the first step toward dismantling the barriers of the world.  Hospitality is the way we turn a prejudiced world around, one heart at a time.

Preach on, brother Benedict!

A New Heart

Richard Wurmbrand wrote a book called, “With God in Solitary Confinement,” which describes how Christ ministered to him while he endured three years of solitary confinement in a prison cell.

I haven’t read the book, but I came across this staggering quote from it today…

And what if I am tortured? Christ saved a robber while He was on the cross. My brethren to my right and left have sometimes brought their torturers to Christ. A Communist officer, beating a Christian prisoner with a rubber truncheon, put his stick aside and asked, ‘What is it about you? How is it that your face is shining? You have something like a halo around your head. How can you look at me so lovingly? I would never love a man who jailed and beat me. How is that you can obey the foolish commandment of your Christ to love your enemy?’

The Christian answered, ‘I am not obeying a commandment. It is not hat I love you only because Jesus orders me to. Jesus has given me a new heart and a new character. If I wanted to hate you, I would no longer be able to do so. A nightingale cannot sound like a crow, because it is a nightingale and not a crow. So a Christian can only love.’

That rubber truncheon has remained put aside forever.

A new heart… that’s no fluffy thought.  It’s a world-shaking type of force, and it appears to be available to us all, if we are open to the Heart Re-Maker.

Two Sports for Lumsden

Few of us ever attain anything close to elite athletic status.  Even fewer do so in more than one sport.  Bo, Deion,  and MJ are a few that come to mind, though most of us don’t count Jordan’s baseball days as much more than an experiment.  Charlie Ward and Danny Ainge are couple lesser-known athletes who collected paychecks from two different sports.  Google the name Jim Thorpe if you want to meet a true multi-sport star.

But what about Jesse Lumsden?

The CFL star, one of the most punishing running backs but also one who can hardly stay healthy for a season at at time, used his recenttly shortened season to knock on some new doors of opportunity.

If I gave you three guesses, you’d never get what his second sport has become.

Answer is HERE.

Dad & Daughter Day

Today is our day!

Shannon’s got day-long course to re-certify her CPR and First Aid, so I’m in full-blown fathering mode.  Instructions on snacks and schedules have been left–these are the details I miss on a nearly daily basis–and my little girl hasn’t even woke up yet.  Perhaps she’s sleeping in, aware that a Mom-less adventure awaits her over the next 8 hours.

I’ve got a few pieces of housework to do before I have a little cutie dangling off my legs, so this is it for now.

Signing off,
Mr. Mom

Review: “The Road”

I don’t usually do book reviews–consider me compelled into this one.

“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy has all the makings of a successful book.  It says “National Bestseller” on the top, it’s being released as a Hollywood film in the near future–it even has Oprah’s sticker on it!  (I’ll let you take that last bit as seriously or sarcastically as you need to.)

But the problem is that this book was a nearly complete waste of time… and I bought it from Value Village for $3.

A bunch of big newspapers are quoted on the back cover, calling this “one of the best books of the year”.  I’d like to believe that the journalists who write such words are required to read an actual plurality of books in a given year, but I’ve got my doubts.

To be fair, McCarthy receives a lot of praise for his imagining of a post-apocalyptic world.  And I can appreciate that–he’s got an imagination, and that’s worth something.  Now if he’d spent some time on the plot and on the story that would actually unfold in this wonderfully imagined world… now, that would have been a book!  When my wife asked me at page 127 what was happening in my book so far, and I replied with, “Nothing,” that should have been my hint to bail out.  But I’ve got an anti-bailing clause in my book-reading mentality.  I broke it once, but I couldn’t do it again.  May have been my latest mistake.

Donald Miller’s latest book (one that IS worth reading) shares some behind-the-scenes ideas of how directors and producers go about converting written stories into movies.  One point I remember is that movies have to have action–the visual story happens through events and happenings.  That’s how the story moves.  With that in mind, I’m feeling a bit fearful for “The Road” as a film.  I mean, If a book is almost always better than a movie, then yikes!  Why would I pay even 99 cents at my local corner store to rent a movie based on a book that was bad enough to drive me to blog about it?  That said, the world imagined in the book could likely be depicted quite well post-blaze in a forest fire zone, so perhaps the film can make back its low budget simply from Oprah and her friends buying tickets.

I’m sure someone will read this post who LOVED the book and claims that it changed their life.  All I can say is I’d be curious to see inside such a life; perhaps I’d be enlightened.  But for me, this book just confirmed that there is a realm of art that I simply don’t get.  It gets praised as brilliant (and I don’t doubt the creators of such pieces are indeed bright), but it lies in a landscape so void of concrete meaning and shape that I just can’t grasp it.  This is, of course, assuming that there IS something to be grasped.  It seems to be wandering aimlessly.  And when a guy whose blog is “a disorderly pile of who-knows-what” calls out “aimless”, you can take that as something of an observation.

The image I just found to attach to this post shows that this book also won the Pulitzer Prize.  Did all the authors of the world take sabbaticals in 2006?!  Speechless–that’s all I’ve got.

A Good Quote Badly Quoted

I read a great quote last week.  It was by legendary NFL coach Vince Lombardi, and it spoke of determination and grit.  When you read it, you’ll probably think, “I’ve heard a hundred like that one,” and you likely have.  It’s still a great thought to absorb.

However, somewhere between reading it and remembering it and reciting it, one word got added in my head.  When I spoke it out loud to myself, all I could do was roll my eyes and smile.  And desperate as I was for a new blog post, well, here I am.

Here’s the quote, plus one word that doesn’t belong…

“It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get knocked up.”

I’m not convinced that THIS version is going to catch on… and that’s likely a good thing!

God’s Word Wordled

Wordle is a slick little website that helps make “word clouds”.  It’s pretty slick to play with and can be used for pretty much anything you might dream up.

Someone decided they had some time on their hands, so they “wordled” all the key words of the New Testament.  It came out like this…

You know there’s always a “one-upper” out there, so someone else had to do the whole Bible.  Here you go…

Wake Up the World

I know I’m late, but this is my new favourite Christmas song.

Thank you J.J. Heller.

Parable of the Rich Fool

I went searching for a video online, something I could use for this Sunday’s lesson.

I found one, but it’s not one of these two…

1) I love that this one describes itself as “Produced to engage bible stories with the younger generation.”  It might work.

2) If my church was full of gamers, this would have been sweet… in an odd way.  But alas, that’s not my church family.

Google VS China

Consider THIS a battle of heavyweights, I suppose.

If you’re any bit interested in discussions of censorship, this is an intriguing story.