Saturday, July 29, 2006

Bushes, bushes everywhere!

Took out the hedge trimmer this morning at 10, the 50' extention cord, a towel, 2 cans of soda and 4 advil. I was ready to trim the bushes! :) Now it's noon, I'm done, it's 84 degrees already, the towel and all articles of clothing are soaked, the soda is gone and I want 4 more advil before I step into the shower.

These things must have gone at least 4 years without trimming. Various spruces, cedars, some azaleas (almost like hedges), and holly! They all smell so good when trimming them. I think this is going to be a multi-year project to get them matched and balanced. But now I can get to the water meter, the outdoor faucets and outlets! They were REALLY overgrown.

What a busy week this week! Many, many "conversations" with nervous employees waiting to see where they'll be placed. Writing up and vetting my organizational announcement, trying to nail down the occupant of my last senior opening left to fill, keeping my bosses informed and communicating with each other, getting project inventories from all my staff, and the usual meetings meetings meetings... whew! I'm glad I'll be on the road for a while starting Tuesday. I need a break! :)

Heading for St. Paul for a few days on business, and then a few days of vacation, seeing some elusive rarely-sighted migrating family members, and maybe a friend or two, etc., after that. Back on the 10th, for two weeks alone with the dog, as Deb goes to see family and friends from the 9th until the 23rd. We actually pass each other in the airport. :) It's strange. But with no kids, it can work to function a little more independently like this. But I'll have to mow the grass! Yuk. Maybe it will be really dry and it will all turn brown and stop growing. Oh, but then I have to water it... oh well. Guess I have to do some lawn work. I suppose it will keep me off the streets...

The job-hunting saga continues for Jenny. An interview in Naperville on Tuesday with the company I work for! An entry-level claims adjuster position, which could allow a transfer in 2 years or so to the fine arts claim unit where she really wants to work. Plus, there's openings here in New England now in a regional claim office of ours, and her resume' is circulating there. Wouldn't that be strange? And, no, don't even think about it... she'd get an apartment. :)

Jonny will finally get his butt hauled into the eye doctor and the DMV while Deb is back home. Honestly, he's 19. What's so hard about calling Sears Optical, or standing in line for a license renewal? I hope he finds a wife who can manage his life for him. Sometimes he seems so helpless. Maybe that's why girls are so attracted to him. He's like a puppy they can care for and he's soooo cute!

There, I think the perspiration has finally stopped and I can go shower. Then, off for a drive in the car with the newly recharged a/c. Mmmm... cool, man!

Monday, July 24, 2006

Now THAT'S worship!

Went here on Sunday, me for the third time:

http://www.firstcathedral.org/

Wow! I could get real comfortable here. The place is enormous, but so doggone friendly. I don't know if they would have someone like us over to the house for a meal (kind of like the Bernie Mac remake of "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner"), but I sure felt welcome in the service. And the songs are so good and the enthusiasm of the congregation and worship leader and choir so contagious...

Communion is weird with the little "creamer" cups they use - a wafer sealed in plastic, sitting on top of a serving of wine, also sealed in plastic. Like those little flavored half & half cups you get at the gas station. That kind of container. Very modern but... weird. But afterwards when they sing "The Blood Shall Never Lose Its Power" with that slow swing shuffle beat... you forget about the container.

And the pastor - whooeee! You are defiinitely not bored when he preaches... If it wasn't for the prosperity theology that underpins much of the church's philosophy... oh well. And like most predominantly black churches, they are very politically wired in. Sharing the platform on Sunday were Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and the guy she was stumping for, Ned Lamont, the Democratic challenger to Joltin' Joe Lieberman's Senate bid. Not exactly conservatives. What they "preach" on the campaign circuit is not exactly what you hear from the pulpit in this church. I wonder if they allow the opposition to stump, too. At least they waited until the service was over and people could stay or go as they wished. Maybe I'll go back next week and see if Joe is there! :) Go Joe Go!

Switching gears, I had my first staff meeting last week. With real staff, yet! :) Things are finally looking up in that department. Should be able to put out an announcement next week and then... get some real work done!

Now if it would just cool off and stop raining...

Oh, and - did I mention we have a house to sell? We got another offer yesterday, anyway. Lower than the previous one we had gotten. Arghh... they're going backwards!!!

Sunday, July 16, 2006

The Priesthood?

Visited another new church this week: a congregational church that left the UCC a few years ago and affiliated last year with the Evangelical Free Church, an old familiar favorite denomination. They had to ask for the liberty to NOT agree to point 11 of the EFCA doctrinal statement (regarding the pretribulational return of Christ), but hey - who doesn't disagree with that? ;)

Anyway, one of the ushers took pains to spend time talking with us before and after, and I instantly liked him. He reminded me of a dear friend where we used to live (Mark M) but 15 years older. Same outgoing, warm, engaging and caring personality - just ... old! Old but full of vitality. My kind of "old" guy... ;) Old on the outside only!

But HOT? Oh my. No A/C in this building either. It's an old building from the 1850's and there's just no way...

Ha! I asked about church planting, do they do that kind of thing, plant new churches? And he said "well sure! We ourselves were a church plant - about 150 years ago." Apparently their "mother" church was formed across the river in 1630. Guess the gestation period here is pretty long for birthing new churches, but - at least they did it once. So now this 150 year old church is birthing a new one down on the coast in a poor community with lots of opportunity for service work. Maybe their biological clock was ticking...

The sermon on this brutally hot day was from 2 Peter, on the subject of the priesthood of all believers. For once, when I read the passage, it struck me that the priestly role the church has is essentially and subtantively ministry to God, service to Him, not primarily to the rest of the world, either in evangelism or social action. Those things are commanded of us, yes, but still ancillary to our primary purpose of offering ourselves in service to God in whatever role He guides us to. It's not unlike the Old Testament priesthood, where many priests were given duties in worship/music, or temple care, or people care, or scripture care (scribes), but all were separated out for service, and some were appointed to serve constantly in the temple making offerings before God, which was the highest call to service there was. Service to people's needs or witness to the nations never superceded that - it attended it, accompanied it, but never came before it. The same in the New Testament in Acts when the deacons were called to serve the people so the Apostles could attend to prayer and the Word. Service to the world was ancillary and an extention of the primary call of service to God.

Hm. I got it, I think. Even though the pastor was on vacation and it was an elder who preached. He fell victim to the same temptation every elder does who gets to substitute for the pastor. He stuffed 10 pounds of sausage into a 5 pound casing. 40 minutes of sermon instead of 20. I was getting faint toward the end and had to go out to the car and sit in the air conditioning for 10 minutes. When I got back he was still preaching...

Guess I've done the same thing myself especially years ago when I first preached. I've learned since then to write it, time it, cut it, time it, cut it, and then read it verbatim (with great feeling, of course) to keep within people's absorbatory limits. Is that a word? Absorbatory? Hm. It is now.

Sunday, July 09, 2006

Alternating Current

The sermon this morning at the Episcopal church (the last one here before the search for a church moves elsewhere) was a good one. This is the regular guy, the head dude, who they call a rector. Hm. Then there's the sexton, and the vestry... more terms of vague anglo-saxon origin. It all feels very... what? 17th century. :)

So, he's preaching from the Epistle for the day, which I gather somebody a few hundred years ago said SHOULD be the Epistle lesson on this particular Sunday. He's in Corinthians where Paul is talking about the thorn in his flesh, which God arranged for Satan to harass him with, to keep him from getting too uppity over the vision of Paradise he had 14 long years before.

Now, I've heard people say that "you should never get too happy with your situation or pleased with your life, because God will have to come along and smack you - send you tragedy - to bring you back to reality." And I usually think "that's nonsense, God doesn't do that kind of thing, doesn't send you tragedy because you're too ecstatic about your life." But boy, in the divinely inspired Word from today's lesson, which is infallible, without error in the original languages, it certainly sounds like that's what He did to Paul - spot on, in fact. "...to keep me from becoming too exalted" he puts it. Hm.

Anyway, the preacher used that illustration to describe our lives on earth as if they were AC, alternating current, where the electrical charge goes out from the power source to the end of the circuit and then returns, back and forth, back and forth, a bazillion times a second or so. Or thereabouts. Approximately. :)

Negative/positive/negative/positive/negative/positive, etc.

Except our lives alternate from failure to success, from tragedy to victory, from ecstacy to despondency, from joy to grief, from hope to despair, from plans destroyed to dreams realized, acceptance to abandonment, from frustration to ease, from encouragement to discouragement, etc., etc. His point was that God sends the times of great pleasure to help us get through the times of sadness that are inevitable in this life, AND that the difficult times are also sent from Him to keep us both humble and dependent on His grace.

It made me think, as a statistician would (good grief! during the sermon yet!) of statistical distributions. The normal curve. I suppose an engineer would think of an oscilloscope and accomplish the same thing, but I like my example better.

The normal or "bell" curve has as much of the probability on the left side as on the right - it's symmetrical. See below:



Random events (or at least events that APPEAR to be random to our eyes - but that's another discussion) fall equally on either side of the middle (the 50th percentile of probability and the mean of the distribution.) The shaded areas represent standard deviations from the mean. And in the Standard Normal curve, one standard deviation around the mean contains about 2/3 of the events that happen. 2 standard deviations (2SD) contain 95% of the things that happen.

This curve describes lots of natural phenomena, and we can see a lot of life events happening this way, too. Good stuff, bad stuff, happy times, sad times, mostly falling fairly close to the middle ground, the "happy medium". I think people differ, though in what their "medium" is. I know people whose "medium", whose normal setting, is NOT at all happy, but rather blah or even morose. And I know others whose medium is almost giddy compared to mine. Seems like those with a "medium" that's pretty positive could stand to help those whose medium is not so upbeat...

But does God "set" the mean of the distribution for people? Does He set mine different from yours, by the events He sends into my life? Does He push for "balance" and "symmetry"? The yin needs the yang, etc.? If not, then what is Paul talking about? Is his experience normative or unique?

Then I got to thinking (and I can here some of you say "and just when was this, during communion?" - noooo. During the canticle for the day which tune I didn't know. Sorry.) about another statistical principle. Kurtosis. Kurtosis, I said! Not ketosis as in the low carb diet phase when you are burning fat and your breath tastes like aluminum foil, no... Kurtosis.

Kurtosis describes how tall or flat the curve is. In other words, how close are most events to the middle? With some people, the events in their life don't vary a lot from the "middle" - they don't have wild highs and brutal lows. They just kind of go along without a lot of variation from one day to the next, one month from the next, one year to the next. They live in the same place for a long time, work for the same company for years, have the same friends, do the same things. Their curve is tall. See below:



Others have a flat, broad, curve, where the events of their lives are spread quite far from the middle. What's normal for these people? Change, I think. Big emotional swings, too, maybe. Over the last couple of years, I have felt like the kurtosis of my life has been changing, making the distribution even flatter than ever before. Big swings in emotions and in life events. I think I still have a "normal" setting, but I'm not sure what it is anymore. I suppose I cross paths with it from time to time as I'm swinging by the middle on my way to something else that's extreme...

I think I could go for a little more height in my curve, God, ok? And the middle? Could you push it a little more to the right, please? Thanks for listening. I'll just wait if you don't mind. :)

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

It's a scorcher out there

Wow! Is it ever hot! 90, sunny, humid... ugh. And to think some people like this stuff.

But this is New England. Why should it be like Savannah around here? Oy!

So, I stay inside today. Yesterday I built shelving for the garage wall, to get all the junk up and off the floor. Getting pretty close to fitting one car inside!

It would have been so much easier if we had sold that big living room sectional while still in the Midwest, but... a consignment place is coming later this week. Maybe they'll take it. Still have 4 dining room chairs, a stereo/TV cabinet, a computer desk, two iorental rugs. Someone! Buy our stuff!

But last night, I retreated from the heat to the existential coolness of the Lounge. Not only is it cool in the sense of hipster cool, but also very cool in the sense of air conditioning cool! :) :) :)

Reading Gods and Generals now, by Jeff Schaara, which I picked up at a bookstore at a Civil War battlefield on the way back from WIlliamsburg earlier this month. Is it ever good! He gets inside the heads of some of the men who were torn between love of homeland and duty to country. Cried a bit last night at one passage... I think I'm getting maudlin as I get older. :)

But I actually wrapped a throw around my legs because I got cold! Ahhhhh... almost like December. And the music in the Lounge - last night was Hawaii Calls from the 60's. Groovy, baby! Makes you want to light the tiki torches.
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