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"I always think I'm right, but I don't think I'm always right."

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"You have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have."
Gandalf to Frodo, 
LOTR i.2

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"Oh, miracle -- thus to be able to give what we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands!"
Diary of a Country Priest

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"This is not pleasant to you, Emma--and it is very far from pleasant to me; but I must, I will,--I will tell you truths while I can; satisfied with proving myself your friend by very faithful counsel, and trusting that you will some time or other do me greater justice than you can do now."
Knightly to Emma

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My writing is like Shakespeare's.  At lease in the sense that I use many of the same words.

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I spent a good part of Sunday afternoon watching a selection of capital campaign videos from across this great country of ours.  Zion is launching such a campaign because we hope to build a children's wing, there being very very little true Christian Ed / activity space in our current setup, and I'm the video project chairman.  The consulting group that is providing resources and guidance for us gave us several sample videos to look at for ideas.

First, it was an ecumenical experience.  Churches everywhere share at least two things: Jesus Christ and the need for money.  There is a remarkable sameness about all these churches: Baptist, Pentecostal, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Unspecified.

Second, it was a cultural experience.  One lesson: go easy on the cool, techy, up-tempo stuff.  You will never be a Coke commercial or an MTV video, and you will not look good trying.

Third -- and this is big -- you must have interview segments with the pastor who is sitting in the current worship hall, turned around, his arm over the back of the pew/chair, talking to the camera in the row behind him, sharing in a friendly, casual way about his vision and the current need. 

Fourth:  you may *want* to use "May Those Who Come Behind Us Find Us Faithful" for the closing montage, but I would suggest you reconsider.

We watched the 1999 version of A Midsummer Night's Dream last night.  It is a good-enough production, though not the best.  It's PG-13, and with all these mixed up lovers running around in the woods at night, it is short on modesty.

Kevin Kline is Bottum, and steals the show.  But I found it very odd and disappointing that having invented a wife character for him, and developing a minor sub-plot about Bottum's unhappy marriage, then why, when all the pixie dust settles, and all the couples are at long last happy, why end the movie with Bottum standing at the window of his house unreconciled?  Why withhold that one last gift?

But I love this play for the Duke's graciousness at the end.  When Hippolyta complains that the tradesmen's performance will likely be tedious, Theseus insists on hearing it, and later makes a wonderful comment on the nature of grace:

I will hear that play;
For never anything can be amiss
When simpleness and duty tender it.
...
The kinder we, to give them thanks for nothing.
Our sport shall be to take what they mistake:
And what poor duty cannot do,
Noble respect takes it in might, not merit.

I also love Theseus' speech about the office of the artist and performer:

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

"Gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name."  Art is incarnational.

One of my Christmas DVD's was the 1974 movie version of The Little Prince.  This particular gift was a good choice for me because I played The Aviator in a production of this story at the community playhouse in 2001, and still remember it as one of the most satisfying things I've ever done.  Our director made some really good choices in making the story ours and telling it well.

The original book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is a well-loved classic of sorts, and there are strong Christological themes that sort of sneak up on you in a powerful way.

So.  Read the book, at least.  It's short and simple and sweet.

I have seen copies of the movie on the shelf at the video store and have often been tempted to buy or rent it, but I always held back, a bit suspicious of what might happen in an adaptation festooned with musical numbers by Lerner and Lowe.  And choreography by Bob Fosse.  

And now that I've finally seen it, I must say that it is a very odd piece. The Aviator is a handsome baritone, and the Little Prince is maybe five years old (still had all his baby teeth -- think of the Tiny Tim actor in the George C. Scott version of Dickens' Christmas Carol).  The bare, almost poetic simplicity of the book just does not lend itself to the big-music Broadway style that crashes in every so often.  Didn't anyone have the sense to ask "does this music really fit this story?"

I can imagine that children could enjoy watching this, so I'll keep it around for any grandchildren I might have.  And Gene Wilder does a great job as the Fox. (And hey: I owned a fuzzy corduroy jacket with a split/pleated back along about 1974 ...)

 

January 26

I know a man, whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out of of the body, I cannot tell; such an one was in a Tuesday night league doubles foursome playing three 8-game sets, partnered for one set in turn with each of the other three.  And the games were well played and the players evenly matched so that the first set score was 4-4, and with new partners the second set score was 4-4.  And in the third set with new partners -- but now probably the better two being paired on the other team -- this man and his partner were down 0-2, 30-40 in the third game, and expectations were low.

And how, I know not how, this man and his partner won six games in a row -- tennis being a game of many near misses and improbable winners -- and the third set score was 6-2.  

I am become a fool in glorying, but this kind of thing almost never happens to the team on my side of the net

There is no FDISK in Windows XP.  Under every previous version of the OS, when you got a new hard drive out of the box, you would plug it in, stop in the BIOS setup to get it recognized by the hardware environment during bootup, go a DOS prompt and give it a one-time low-level format with FDISK, and then format it from the DOS prompt with FORMAT D:  

But no more.  

In case you're wondering, you can skip the BIOS setup because XP finds new drives automatically.  But you still need a low-level format.  Maybe XP does the low-level format automatically when it first sees a new drive, but I had an existing drive that had been incorrectly partitioned on a previous machine  (a 60Gb drive that was showing only 7Gb total capacity).  Clearly it needed to be correctly partitioned with a new low-level format, but where is FDISK in XP?

Ah.  Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Computer Management / Storage / Disk Management.  

Et voila.

Watched the last half of Gattaca last night over a late supper.  It's just chock full of Christological elements, has a neat futuristic visual style, a rich story premise, a murder to solve, and of course, Alan Arkin.  And Uma Thurman.  (Should I watch the Kill Bill movies?)

Ethan Hawke plays the main role and does a decent job, but I found him hard to like.  The story requires that you be rooting for him, but my sympathy is only mildly provoked.  

There are some striking parallels and contrasts in James 5 between the warnings to the rich and the admonition to the brethren.  This seems like the place to start in working on the passage.  Looking ahead, our sermon series on James continues at Zion, and my next turn comes Feb 27, and this is the text.

January 24

Wow.  That was one busy week.  

Sermon Notes for January 23; James 2:14-26.  One of my goals here was to avoid the temptation to present everything in schoolroom terms and teach about Paul vs. James.  I finally decided to adopt James' "someone may say" strategy, and posit two straw men to illustrate the arguments in human terms.  

And the most helpful wedge was the justification language in Psalm 51:4 where David says that God is justified by his words and blameless in his judgment.  In that usage, "justified" means something like "shown to be right by public evidence."  In other words, those who complain that God is unjust have their mouths stopped by what they see.  If David can say that God is justified by his works in that sense, then there is no problem in seeing how Abraham and Rahab are likewise justified by their works, and seeing how similar deeds of faithfulness justify us.

Other events of the week/weekend: a Zion officers overnight retreat, and my little sister's 50th birthday celebration.  She was born on the day that the first U.S. atomic submarine sailed in 1955. 

By the way, I got a PCI dual-monitor display board on ebay and now have a large Windows desktop on two screens again at home.

And I finally got around to watching Emma Thompson in the 2001 film version of Wit, which was produced by HBO.  I blubbered.  It's a very strong story.  I remember sitting in a restaurant, tears running down my cheeks when I read the stage play for the playreading committee at the community playhouse a few years ago.  I guess I do think that more could have been made out of John Donne's Christian faith.  The movie sort of lets it sit as a universalistic hope of eternal life; My memory may be fooling me, but I think the play has a bit more of Christ in it.  And I like the last moments of the play better.  But there's just not much to complain about.  I liked this a lot.

Daughter Bess organized a family trip to Omaha Saturday morning to see the Renaissance to Rococo exhibit at the Joslyn Art Museum.  We actually got there soon after 10:00 and ponyed up for tickets after learning that the museum's "free Saturday morning" policy applies only to the permanent collection.  I'm a bit dumb about art, so it was nice to have Bess along; she has a better idea of what to look for.  And the museum's notes alongside each painting are likewise helpful.

When you view a painting up close and in person (but "no closer than 12 inches, please!"), you are impressed by the immediacy of the paint an canvas.  Some guy with a brush stood in front of this canvas 300 years ago and made this thing.  Some of the brush work is broad and visible: often in the folds and wrinkles of fabric.  Other brushwork is imperceptible.  The same painting that shows broad strokes on the hat or sleeve, will show no brushwork at all on the face.

I must confess, I like "real" paintings much more than modern abstracts.  You never get a response to a modern piece like the one you get from this one titled "Indolence":

It also speaks volumes about my level of taste when I admit that I also liked The Grasshopper and the Ant from the permanent collection.  It doesn't show too well in the image here, but the Ant is a stout cleric whose brethren are ahead on the road with a wagon full of plenty.  (And how would the minstrel play that over-sized mandolin?  You'd have to stand it up like a string bass.)

So let that be a lesson to all who want to make a living in the arts.  The Church is where the big bucks are.

Road Closed

Must have been a lot of rain in California to loosen that thing.

And now how do you move it?

One of our Christmas DVD's was Green Card.  I remember enjoying it when it came out in 1990.

This time around, however, the heart was not warmed.  The Andie MacDowell character has just too little to commend her to our sympathy.  I couldn't buy into her plight.  

There are also several forced plot complications.  For instance: when Bronte has to answer the phone during the INS's first visit and thus abandon Georges to the INS people, there is no reason for that phone call to go on and on and on, with the result that Georges exposes his ignorance.  Any normal person would finish that call in 2 seconds: "I can't talk now" and hang up.  Stories do not work when the plot requires the characters to be much stupider than everyone in the audience.  It only makes the audience mad and it is a sign of a lazy storyteller.  It's much more interesting when the characters are well motivated and very smart.  THEN I am sympathetic with their problems rather than, "Well, stupid, if you would only ..."

The piano scene at the party still (almost) makes it worth watching.

I did amuse myself by working on a Christological reading.  The woman longs to enter the garden but cannot do so without the husband she has denied.  She transgresses and takes the garden for her own, exposing herself to the advances of a false husband.  But her true husband comes to her, shows her honest love, brings fruit bearing plants to the garden, and finally sacrifices himself for her.  He is taken away under the law and goes to a place where he will wait for her, saying every day "my beloved, when will you come ..."

Hope that doesn't spoil it for you if you haven't seen it.  Gerard Depardieu is interesting.  Also starring her apartment.

 

January 07

- Sam delivered successfully into the hands of the U.S. Army.

- Even booting to the PCI display adapter(s) and disabling the onboard AGP does not allow multiple monitors on that eMachines box.

- The Windows Phone Dialer is in Program Files / Windows NT / dialer.exe.  At least that's where it is under XP.  (And now I wonder if it would be just too cool to get a modem that lets me plug in a headset and do the whole phone thing from the computer keyboard.  But certainly that would be overkill.  Though fun.)

- Daughter Anne works her last day in the mail room at MicroImages today; begins her student teaching in the music department at Norris High School on Monday.

- I must get started on our Let The Children Come video project for Zion's capital campaign for the new children's wing.

- Tonight I get to enjoy a nice rehearsal dinner for a wedding.  Being married to an accomplished in-demand piano player, I enjoy such benefits from time to time.  The wedding party reckons me as an extra mouth to feed. I see it as a nice, free date.

- Though attending the wedding tomorrow afternoon will nix my weekly tennis match with Juan.

 

January 06

Our blizzard was enough to postpone the Army for a day.  So once again I need to drive son Sam to Omaha this afternoon and drop him on the Army's doorstep, brown towels in hand.

I bought a cheap eMachines computer for the desk at home.  I was just too jealous of the upgrade I did in the Juno room.  It has onboard AGP graphics, and so far there doesn't seem to be any way to make it coexist with a second display adapter to support a second monitor.  Alas.  I really like the 2-monitor world and I'm terribly spoiled at work, where I bask all day in the glow of two 21-inch 1280 x 1024 screens.  I can interrupt the eMachines boot sequence and tell it to look for the PCI adapter first, but then the AGP adapter doesn't work.  The hardware profile says "Device Cannot Start.  Code 10."

Well, okay.  Code 10, after all.  

Windows has supported multiple monitors since Windows 98.  It's a really nice productivity feature, and it makes no sense to sell machines that prevent it in the hardware.

And as I was setting things up and transferring stuff from the notebook computer I have been using, I somehow came across the Windows Phone Dialer program on the new machine.  Since I will be doing quite a bit more phone stuff as I move up to a 1/4 time role as Associate Pastor (still keeping the day job), I thought it would be handy to enter my frequently called numbers into the Windows Phone Dialer to see if that would make things easier.  Point and click from the screen, and the modem dials the phone.  So I spent a long half hour entering names and numbers and playing with the dialer.  Cool.  Could be useful.

Then I exited the program.

Then I spend a long half hour looking for the program.  Without success.  Where is it?  The Windows Phone Dialer is part of every Windows XP installation, but I bet you won't be able to find it.  Go ahead.  I dare you.  Search the menus.  Search the directories.  For some reason, Microsoft has seen fit not put it on any of the menus as part of a normal installation.   I finally gave up and went to bed.  I have no idea how I ever stumbled across it in the first place.

Oh, I found it today, after digging through some help screens at Microsoft.com.   On one page they do tell you where it is.  And tomorrow I'll tell you how to find it, too.  But last night, I was totally mystified. 

Moments like these come to mind during the confession of sin on Sunday mornings.

Our blizzard kind of fizzled.  We have a few inches, and it's plenty cold, it's still snowing a bit, and the public schools are canceled, but I think the main part is over.  Which is good, because I need to drive son Sam to Omaha this afternoon and drop him on the Army's doorstep.  He's off to Fort Jackson (near Columbia, SC) for Basic Training, followed by a month or so in Norfolk Virginia for Army Music School, and then off to Camp Zama near Tokyo to start his three-year tour.

Today he has to buy two brown towels.

This fall, I've been part of a small group that has been using the new High Quest material from the Navigators.  The Navs have been doing small groups roughly since the days of Saint Augustine, and they have figured out what works and what doesn't. Their High Quest material is the most completely evolved and perfectly refined format ever conceived by the mind of man.  It is so new, that only the first of the three books is available.  Which presents our little group with a problem, now that we've come to the end of book one.  

So I'm of a mind to rip off the general format of the book, keep the same meeting structure, and print up a series called A Man After God's Heart, using passages from Samuel and Psalms.  As long as I keep a week ahead of the group, what could possibly go wrong?

What do you suppose all the next-generation Muslims will do with Europe's grand cathedrals after the post-Christian Europeans abort themselves out of existence?

And will anyone want to visit England (or anyplace else) when the historical character of the place is completely gone?

Just wondering, you know.  Because the church in Europe doesn't seem to be able to baptize and disciple its own children, let alone any of the immigrant Muslims next door.

And, of course, let him who stands take heed lest he fall over the beam in his own eye.  Yes, the church in the U.S. also seems increasingly irrelevant.  Maybe China really is the future.  I have wondered how God will bring together the fragments of the divided church.  But maybe the church in the west will just shrivel to complete insignificance, quarreling endlessly, while a single church, a billion strong, is raised up elsewhere.

I wonder how you say "John Calvin" in Mandarin?

I was invited to fill the pulpit yesterday at Harvest Community Church (PCA) in Omaha.  They recently moved to a larger building at 39th and Cuming.  This place was built by some Baptists in 1920, and then expanded with a large educational wing in the '50's.  So you've got the beautiful, classic auditorium (with balcony, an adjacent parlor that boasts a stained glass skylight), a large fellowship hall in the basement below the sanctuary, plus all the Christian Ed. space you need.  The Pastor's Study even has a fireplace.  Generally the building is in good repair, and the previous congregation left behind all the furnishings: chairs tables, ... even kitchen supplies.  The only thing they don't have a lot of is parking, but there is room for on-street parking in the neighborhood behind the church.  And get this: Harvest was able to raise all the money for the purchase and make the move debt free.  (Of course the Baptists were happy sellers, and gave them a very low price.)

Harvest has grown from a new congregation less than 10 years ago, to a congregation of 100-plus.  It's great to see a work like that growing.  Alan Mallory, the pastor there for the past three years or so, has a real heart for people and for the gospel.  And he has a vision for central / downtown Omaha.  The house he bought over two years ago was over a mile from their previous location, but only two blocks from the new place.  And he's already looking for for the next church building.  He hopes to see something started even closer to the downtown area in two or three years.  His Assistant Pastor Scott Floyd is fluent in Spanish, and one of their ideas is to find a way to start something in Omaha's Hispanic community.

In short, what an amazing opportunity.  Their new location presents them with opportunities to minister in a neighborhood where there is a real God story waiting to happen.  

P.S.  The Harvest building is literally in the shadow of the huge towers of Saint Cecilia's Cathedral: one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen.  It is Spanish Renaissance-style with huge stone scrollwork buttresses all around on a scale that makes me think of the Lord of the Rings movies.

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