Friday Randomness

- Since we live on a narrow peninsula surrounded by the Puget Sound, flooding is never much of a problem for us, like it is for the folks over in Carnation and Puyallup and Centralia. Still, all the wet weather has affected us. Our church chair and his wife have been trying to get home from Canada since early this week, and are still stuck on the other side of freeways that have been closed. The roof of a gym at Vaughn Elementary School collapsed just before Christmas. And on Wednesday we had 1/2 an inch of water in our church basement, coming up through a "previously unknown fault line" in the concrete. Thankfully, we have wonderful, servant-hearted people in our church, and by last night that mess was pretty much cleaned up.

- The first job I ever had was delivering papers for the Seattle P-I. I began around junior high, and carried the job on through high school, eventually handing it off to my brother. Before that, my grandfather worked as an ad man for the P-I for 39 years. So we've always been a newspaper family, and we've always been a P-I family. Yesterday, the story broke that the P-I may be put up for sale, with the thought that nobody will purchase it, and thus, within 30 days, will close for good, leaving Seattle with The Times as its sole major newspaper (The Stranger doesn't count). I would be sad to see it go.

- A headline just appeared stating that sometime today Boeing is going to anounce a plan to lay off 4,000 people. My brother-in-law works for Boeing. This might not be good.

- That obnoxious photo box on the local paper's website leads me to believe it must be awards season again. Pictures of Paris Hilton (are people still enthralled by her?), Ann Hathaway (did I mention how much I didn't like "Rachel Getting Married"?) and the rest. A couple years ago I made a conscious effort to distance myself from celebrity culture. And I resent the way it keeps trying to push its way back into my life. But. . .if you're interested in some reviews of the movies that seem to be getting all the awards buzz, go check out the blog of Barbara Nicolosi. She doesn't shy away from having an opinion.

- What I've been listening to lately:


She may just be the successor to Alison Krauss' crown. To be so talented at 16. . .and from all reports, she's a sweet kid, too. Why is it that artists like Sierra get scant attention, while MixMaster Sledge and the Sexual Perverts get the multi-million dollar contracts and MTV airtime? Rhetorical question, there. If you want a taste, go watch this.

- Good Quote: "Indeed, having people who walk and work and live alongside us, people whom we call 'holy friends,' is indispensable to resurrecting excellence in Christian life. We all need holy friends in our own lives, and we are called to be holy friends to others. We are also called to show hospitality to strangers and to love our enemies, practices that help us discover the grace of navigating relationships in the light of God's friendship with the world, and with each of us, in Jesus Christ. In the midst of sin and brokenness, we discover through hospitality and searching love that strangers and even enemies can become holy friends." L. Gregory Jones and Kevin r. Armstrong, in Resurrecting Excellence

Quote for the Day

St. Irenaeus, a second-century church leader, said, "The glory of God is a person fully alive." Contradicting his vision, Christians are often seen as legalistic, uptight, literalistic, negative, repressed, less likely to celebrate life in God than wag fingers of disapproval at those whose lifestyle or doctrine seems alien to them. Hesitant to transgress, such Christian believers live out of restricted lives following traditional rules rather than moving into fresh, original, Holy Spirit-stirred thinking and living.

Religious fundamentalism of any variety tends to produce fear. Fear flows from the "fortress mentality," a protective, defensive "us-versus-them" attitude. Paranoia may result. Because of the stringent attempt to preserve orthodoxy, because of the fear that any belief that hasn't been spelled out and codified may in some way jeopardize the central tenets of our faith, any attempt to question the standard interpretation of a creedal statement is likely to be characterized as heterodox, a detour into liberalism.

Luci Shaw, in The Crime of Living Cautiously.

And thanks, Luci. I needed that right at the moment.