I have spent a good portion of the day working on putting together my resume.  I am not going to need the resume for a while but some weird compulsion overtook me and I spent  a lot of time being retrospective. Here are a couple of the random conclusions that I have come to… 

My life has been a weird path.  I made a list of what I did and when I did it, and it is relatively amazing that I ended up where I am now.  It is not weird that I am in seminary but the way I got here just seems really weird to me.  It was almost five years ago that I left my first full time pastoral position.  At that point I basically swore off the ministry altogether, and completely changed the course that my life was on.  During that time in my life, if you would have told me that would be half way done with seminary and heading back into the ministry in just five years I would have told you that you were crazy. But,  lo and behold, here I am, in seminary and headed for pastoral ministry.  It is amazing what God can do in your life over five short years.

The other thing that I realized during my day of introspection is that I remember the great failures in my life far better than I remember the victories.  While attempting to fill out a  timeline for my life I had virtually no problems remembering the details of when, where and why I failed.  On the other hand, I had a difficult time remembering the circumstances that surrounded the victories of my life.  This is not a shock to me since I tend to be pretty self deprecating most of the time, but I was amazed at how fresh many of the failures still feel even though they happened so long ago. 

I am glad that my life has become what it is.  Even though I took a really weird path to get to where I am, looking back you can see God in it and for that I am very thankful.  Now if I can just figure out a way to get over my failures and get a hold of some victories I will be set.

Weeks nine and ten always kills my ability to blog. I am in the process of writing so many papers for school that the thought of blogging turns my stomach. I will leave you with this thought… 

I have decided that I hate elevators.  As a chubby man if I am seen getting off an elevator people will wrongly assume that I am fat/chubby because I am lazy.  ”If he would have used the stairs he may not be such an unsightly blot on humanity” these slendor types no doubt think.   This is a sad assumption but I would like to avoid it at all costs. Therefore I am never riding an elevator again.  I would rather be thought of as chubby because of my deep love for food and an almost complete inability to turn away any type of food.  So take that skinny judging jerks, I am not lazy I just have no self control.

Google Reader.  Pure Awesome.  When Erik told me about it I was skeptical, but then I tried it and now everything has changed.  All these blog posts just get delivered to you like you are the king of Idaho and the entire world is at your feet.  I can say that I have never experienced this height of luxury and I worry that I may never feel this level of excitement again. 

The Welcome Wagon.  Hymn Awesome.  This is a group that I bought a while ago but just started listening too.  it is really fun.  They do some really old hymns and cover songs in a folkish way and it is nice and pleasing to the ears as well as uplifting to the soul. 

Turning off the TV.  Productivity Awesome.  Apparently if you are not spending copious amounts of time watching TV you can do more productive things.  Since I have been watching less TV I have found much more productive things to do like… write pointless blogs…surf the interwebs… sit and be contemplative.  So maybe I am not more productive, but my time wasters are more varied, that is good right?

This morning here is what I am thinking….. 

You can put practically anything in a burrito and it will be awesome.  

College students are the best thing in the world and everyone should be required to know at least 20.

My wife has been gone for most of the week and I am kind of out of sorts. I almost forgot to put pants on before I left the house.

I would like to walk to the end of a long road that goes nowhere just to turn around and come back.

Postmodernism is a sham.

I would really like to go to Mexico and just sit. 

I miss my brother. 

From very far away fried chicken and cookies smell the same. 

That is all. The end.

I hate the dentist.  There are very few things in this life that I can say that I fully hate, but going to the dentist is one of them.  Some people just hate the scraping or the drilling but I hate all of it.  I had to go to the dentist yesterday and it was horrible.  Not because anything traumatic happened just because I so intensely dislike going to that place of torture and terror.  I have also come to the conclusion that it takes a certain type of person that would want to work by putting your fingers in someones  mouth for a living.  I don’t think that I would say that they like to hurt people they are just disconnected from reality and don’t realize that they are hurting people.  I was getting a procedure done that is not comfortable and the torturer kept asking me if I was alright.  I wanted to respond that no, I was not in fact alright, but because I am a man I just responded with a little shrug (a shrug was really all that I could muster because I was pinned to a chair by my mouth).  

The more that I reflect on my experience the more I realize that dentists ask you the most ridiculous questions ever. They say things like “does that hurt” or “how are you felling”.  I know that it is a question that must be asked but I wonder what they are really expecting.    Do they want some type of joyous response, “oh yes this is wonderful, having a half numb face is just delightful, I love drooling on myself”.  Dentists/Hygienists should ask questions better so that they do not sound like they are ignorant to the pain that they are causing.  Questions like “is the pain/annoyance that I am causing you about to make you throw up?” or “I know you want to punch me in the face but do you think that you can stand to be in the room with me for five more minutes?”  If these tooth witch doctors were to ask questions more rooted in reality I would not dislike them so.

I also think that I would place dentists in a special category with chiropractors and witch doctors because I am not sure if they actually do anything beneficial.  These maleficents say that they must remove the diabolical plaque from my teeth but the plaque is not bothering me one bit.  In fact, I think of the plaque as a little helper.  I never have pain in my mouth and that is because the helpful, friendly, little plaque friends wrap themselves around my cavities so that I feel no discomfort.  And what do these little helpers get for there work?  They are vilified and scraped out and discarded with extreme prejudice.   

After the agony is over the deviant dentists  always reprimand you for not brushing correctly and never flossing.  These evil friends of the devil always have that smug dentist look on their face like you are the biggest dummy ever from not flossing.  Next time this happens I am going to take a stand. I am going to stand on the nearest counter and declare aloud, “No! I do not floss.  And I do not intend to start either.  I will not have your artificial standards thrust upon me.  I do not feel that flossing is necessary and I will not live under your standard just because you are a dentist.  What do dentists know about teeth anyway?”  And I will finish off the whole diatribe with a Jerry Springeresque  ”You don’t know me”   

The dentist says that my teeth will fall out if I do not take care of them, but I just say that’s their opinion and that I feel differently about it.  Dentists don’t seem to be to open to other ways of thinking.  You would think that all those years of college would make them more open minded.  I guess postmodernity has not infiltrated the witch doctor schools yet.

To my loyal readers I apologize that I have been unfaithful to my blog.

School has been so crazy lately that Ihave not had one blog worthy thought in the last three weeks.  The funny thing is in the last day I have gone from super busy to not having anything to do.  It is a weird feeling to say the least.  I have gotten so used to going a million miles a hour that when I finally slow down I do not know what to do.  So in this post i will write down all of the things that are going on in my head. 

The new Killers CD is good. 

I want a turkey sandwich now!

I want to pee outside. 

I have the best wife ever!

Nap. 

That is all I could think of. I am going to try to write a couple blogs over break so stay tuned….

Apparently there is some kind of election going on.  I am very confused because I thought we already had one of those recently.  I guess the office of supreme chancellor, or whatever it is called, of the United States only lasts for a couple years.  I don’t know how we can expect our dictator to do anything if they are only allowed to work for eight years.  I mean Castro was in charge of Cuba for like fifty years, but I think that they are on the metric system so that is like 215 years in the US, I am a little fuzzy on my conversions, anyway,  he had at least 200 years and barely even got started on anything.  So I guess I have to go through the grueling process of deciding who to vote for.  I hope this guy lasts longer than the last guy, if he rules for less than fifty metric years I am going to be pretty pissed.  The best way to decide who to vote for is to look at the arguments against each candidate and see who has the better argument.  I will now frame the arguments as I understand them.  

So apparently there is an old man named McCain and he wants to destroy the economy and keep us in a war for 100 years (not sure if that is metric or not).  I am not sure why he wants to destroy the economy but I guess he must really like rich people because he wants to give them all of the money.   I heard that if we elect him all the rich will just get richer and the poor people will all die or something.  The poor people will die pretty fast because he also does not want to give anyone health care.  This could be a huge problem.  If all the poor people die that will make the middle class the new poorest people.  Then McCain would probably want those new poor people to die.  By the end of his reign all that would be left would be McCain, Bill Gates, Bono and Claire from Heroes, she is indestructible so McCain’s duplicitious scheme does not effect her.  But they would have a problem too because I heard that McCain also wants to destroy the environment.  It would not do any good to kill all the poor people because everyone left is going to die anyway when McCain implodes the earth. 

I guess there is another chioce, but it seems just as dire.  There is a young man named Barack Obama and I heard that he is a sercet Muslim.  I also heard that he is a huge fan of abortion, being gay, never going to war, and he wants to take money from the rich people and give it to the poor people.  I read in a letter from the future* that he wants to shut down the Boy Scouts, form an all gay military, shut down all churches and let whoever wants to invade us come right in.  So according to my unbiased, objective sources if Obama get elected a number of things would happen.  First, all the rich people would become poor because he would take all their money and give it to the poor, who would probably just spend it all on lottery tickets anyway, and then every one would be poor.  Then, once everyone was poor and there was no one to pay taxes, all of Obama’s secret Muslim friends would invade the US and we could do nothing about it because we would have no money to fund our all gay army.  And then we would all die.  

I remember a few years ago that nice Puff Daddy…P.Diddy…Sean Combs fellow told us to vote or die.  He should have said vote which way to die.  Because apparently whoever you vote for you will surely die.  So I am going to write in a candidate.  One that would never try to kill me. This year I am going to vote iPhone for the new King of the US.  I mean could we get a better King, that thing is awesome! 

*http://focusfamaction.edgeboss.net/download/focusfamaction/pdfs/10-22-08_2012letter.pdf

Kelly told me that my last blog was really depressing and that I needed to write a new one.  She said that it sounded like I was in a place that I did not want to be so I decided that I should clear the air.  I am very happy with were I am at in my life. I love Fuller.  I am learning a lot and I am excited about the prospect of putting what I am learning into action someday.  We live in a real nice community and we are building some really good friendships.  Kelly and I recently started a college group at church and though it is small we are having a lot of fun hanging out with college students.  So I am extremely happy with what is going on but occasionally I really do miss Oregon. 

I was getting ready to go to a night class and Kelly told me that it was getting chilly out and I got really excited.  I know the idea of being chilly is a common feeling for the rest of the world that actually has discernible seasons, but in California it still feels like July.  All that to say I was happy for it to actually feel like fall and I went to my closet and pulled out a nice sweatshirt.  As I walked to school just being able to wear a sweatshirt put me in a particularly good mood.  I don’t think that I ever really appreciated the weather in Oregon.  It was an annoyance that you just had to deal with but I never really thought about how nice it was to never really know what you are going to get, I miss unpredictability.   

It really made me think about how many things I love that I really take for granted.  (I have found my self missing mud lately but that is for another blog.)  Oftentimes our lives are so ordered that we lose sight of the blessings that surround us because we have grown so used to them.  I know this is no great epiphany.  My prayer is that I might always be reminded of how my life is blessed. That I would be able to take joy in the little things like sweatshirts, mud and the changing of seasons.

Since moving to California Kelly and I have become pretty big fans of Disneyland.  We purchased season passes about a month ago and we live close enough that we can easily go and spend an afternoon or an evening there.  We decided to go there yesterday after church and when we arrived we were meet with an interesting site.  Occasionally Disneyland has special days that are geared toward certain people and we happened to go on a day that  was extra special because there were two special days.  Not only was it MIley Cyrus’ sweet sixteen birthday party but it was also the 11th annual Anaheim Disney Gay Day.

It was kind of intersting to see these two groups mixing together and I am not sure that such a large repersentation of these two groups have ever been mixed together.  You had literally thousands of gay men all dresssed in red shirts to show that they were in fact there for Gay Day.  There were equally as many young tweens who at the mere mention of Miley Cyrus would surely die with excitment.  By observing these two groups for a day I have come to a number of conclusions.  

I am scared of Miley Cyrus and I think that she might be a cult leader.  There were ravenous packs of crazed little girls moving like a swarm of locust throughout Disneyland devouring anything Cyrus as well as sending churro vendors running for the hills.  It was scary.  I kept joking around to Kelly that I though I saw Miley.  She would get mad and tell me to be quiet because she did not want me to start a riot.  At first I though that she was joking but then I realized that it was a real concern and decided that being trampled by a mob of prepubescent girls that are all jacked up on energy drinks, churros and Miley-mania is not the way that I want to go out.  So when faced with the craziness we did the only safe thing,  we backed away slowly and abandonded the madness.  

I also though it was incredibly useful that you could identify people based on the color of their shirts.   You could glance across a crowd that day and discern that the large group of men in red shirts were there for Gay Day and not just a large group of Hannah Montana devotees, although they could have been both I guess. I think that we should use clothes more to signify what we are about.  I am not advocating the wearing of t-shirts with christian slogans but the use of clothing to make it easier to judge people.  Judging people already comes easily to most people but this would make it much easier.  Here are a few examples: 

You can usually identify someone who works in an office by the attire he or she is wearing but I think it could get much more specific.  For instance, I am a business man who likes golf and sleazy romance novels this could be signified by the wearing of a crushed velvet shirt with a green tie.  Then you could see someone walking down the street and immediately say “what a pervert he reads smutty novels” or “I hate golf, what a idiot”.  This would work really good in the church as well.  For instance,  say someone wanted people to know that they were a moderate Calvinist, who only sings worship songs that were written within the last two years, and that they think that Jesus is one “hip” dude.  I would wear flip flops, khaki shorts and a yellow polo shirt (preferably Lacoste).  That way people would look at me and think, “Wow! God preordained that guy to be one hip dude and know the best worship tunes”. 

If only everyone could get on board with this idea, I could know how to judge people in much less time. I could judge without ever even having to talk to anyone.  Awesome.