General – Emmaus and Things afterward

I haven’t been able to get to the computer to put any thoughts as of late due to lots of schedule problems. Not because I get diverted by a certain woman that I happen to be seeing, although the diversion are really quite nice, but because I just finished up an Emmaus cycle. For those of you who don’t know what a Walk to Emmaus retreat is all about go here. My description of it will be rather mundane, but the actual retreat is one that truly draws one closer to God. I have seen some lives changed, and with my own Walk, it helped me move onto a new level of understanding. During the closing ceremonies of the women’s weekend this last Sunday, one of the pilgrims described it as a masters of God program crammed into a three day event. I would have to agree.

There was a time, when people thought that they needed to keep the weekend a secret, so that we wouldn’t spoil the surprises and they wouldn’t have any expectations about the weekend. However, in the past couple of years, especially, there has been a move afoot to open it up so that people didn’t think it was some kind of cult. There are no secrets about an Emmaus weekend. For the most part it is a series of 15 talks, that range from priorities to grace and the different facets of it. There is a lot of discussion and a few special things that the Emmaus community does to show Christ’s love to the pilgrims taking their walk.

The Walk to Emmaus is actually administered by the Upper Room. It got started by people in the United Methodist Church who had taken a Catholic Cursillo retreat (really the same thing just a different church doing it). The UMC gave it to the Upper Room to maintain and have it become ecumenical. So now, as one who sits on the board of directors of the local community I represent one of many churches in northeast Lower Michigan and portions of east Upper Michigan. I encourage everyone to take a walk, when they feel lead by God to do so. Mine was quite a time.

After the weekends were done, I went on day shifts and just trying to relax a bit before my next round of evening shifts (3pm to midnight) which start tomorrow.

Today was a good day for as I like to call it, decompression. I took care of a few things, and tried my hand at recording an audio tape onto my hard drive in mp3 format. That worked well. So now I can put our church’s Sunday service on the new church website which I hope to start tomorrow or Saturday.

At work, we are entering the pre-spring season, which is the run up to all of the specialized forecasts that we do from spring to fall, like fire weather (I am the program leader on this) and the marine forecasts for our nearshore waters. So I have been busy getting our Annual Operating Plan (AOP) ready for the spring meeting coming up at the end of the month and getting the meeting planned as well. This will be a busy couple of weeks, but not too bad. Oh yeah have to remember to schedule my SAWRS visits too…

Science and YM – God, Man, and tsunamis

Dimitri Vassilaros wrote an insightful piece in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review about the tsunami and God.  I have to say it got me thinking about the decisions we make and who is to blame for stuff.  Many would blame God or say that it is his judgement, but I am of the opinion, as is Dimitri, that it is our own fault that so many people were killed. 

 

Since 1965, there has been a system in place to detect and warn for tsunamis in the Pacific basin, but there isn’t one in the Indian Ocean.  Granted that the Pacific has more earthquake activity and has more tsunamis, but the Indian Ocean is not immune from the same thing.  So along the line, some people made a decision that said that since the frequency is lower we don’t need a warning system.  So now close to 200,000 pay for the short sightedness of a few bureaucrats.  While God may have put the natural world into motion so in a way He caused the earthquake, we will be judged for not loving our brothers and sisters enough to protect them, when we could have. 

 

As Mr. Vassilaros says in his essay,

 

"What is our excuse in 2005? We know how to track storms, avoid fault lines and even sense tsunamis. We have the capabilities to communicate with virtually every person on Earth, whether by broadcast, telephone, Internet or air-raid siren.

"And yet many continue to act as if this tragedy is proof that God is trying to communicate with us.

"And maybe he is, but not in the way his interpreters would have you believe.

"God might be trying to remind us to place greater value on human life and take responsibility when we are at fault instead of automatically blaming him.

"Or maybe God just wants us to sacrifice a goat."

Christ said that second commandment is like the first (the first being love God with all of your heart and all your mind and all your soul), "love your neighbor as yourself."  

In a way, this is where some would call me quite liberal.  I think that no matter the country, we, the richer nations of the world, should have had a system in place year’s ago.  This might have kept the loss of life to lower levels.  Of course, the other way we will be judged is by the amount of comfort and aid to those who have been affected.  Either way, we are the ones at fault.

M&J – Wanted to get something out on the blog

Well, I see I haven’t been posting in a while. Part of it is, I have been working on a Youth Minsitry post that has been sitting in my Pocket PC that wasn’t quite finished. The other part of it is that my schedule, now that we are all past the holidays, is now beginning to settle down. Mary and I have survived the Christmas season as well, and we are doing pretty good. I have to say that this has been the best “dating” relationship that I have had ever. Dating is in quotes, because we are trying to do the courtship thing, so that we truly get to know each other and not like the cultural version of dating that requires you to have to just hang out, go with your emotions, and get confused by the physical feelings that give you that “in love” feeling.

We did one book that is called 101 Questions to Ask Before You Get Engaged. That helped us break the ice, find out about our pasts, and see what our view of life are. That was pretty cool. Next, we both read, seperately, the Five Love Languages, so that we can know at least how each one feels love from others. That was a good book, as well. Our next book will be Choosing God’s Best. It is about singles learning to wait on God to show them their may mate and how to go through a godly courtship, which is what we want.

Other things that are happening, Mary’s church (Gaylord Community Church) has gone to 3 services, 8:45 am, 10:00 am, and 11:30 am. The 845 am service is the one we will go to when I’m not working weekends, and then we can easily get to First UMC (my church) so that I can still sing in the choir. We both like each other’s churches. I like the charasmatic service that they have at GCC, it has been something different that I feel enriches my worchip experience on Sundays. Mary has said that she likes the traditional service at FUMC becuase of the traditional music that we do which is a change of pace for her. I have to say that both Rev. Scheer and Rev. Naile do a great job at preaching and it is great to get something from each message. I learn a lot.

That’s about it. Hopefully, I’ll get to finishing my Youth Ministry post soon. It is a summary of one of the speakers that I saw that the National Youth Workers Convention.

M&J – Mary’s play

I wanted to write about this sooner, but since I am working evenings this week, it has been hard to sit a write a post when your day is filled with snowblowing and your nights predicting the next round of snowblowing. I got a short little break between the balloon and writing our regional weather summary tonight.

You may have noticed recently that I have started to categorize my posts. That’s so that those who want to read about youth ministry (ym) can read those posts and the Meterology posts (met) and so on. Well today’s is listed as M&J for Mary and Jeff. A nice multipurpose subject that can be on relationships which can be used for youth ministry if the subject fits. Today’s however, has to do with the play that Mary was in at her church.

I say was, becuase the play was over the weekend. I got to see it on the opening night. They did a “musical” verision of Scrooge. The only difference was that they ended it the way Dickens did, with Ebeneezer accepting Jesus. Quite a concept, actually following what the writer intended. Okay, I’ll stop being sarcastic. Anyway, the play was quite good. While they were all amateur actors, they did a pretty good job and since they have a non-traditional church (i.e. no pews) it was easy to transform the snactuary into a playhouse. I enjoyed it quite a bit, though I am a bit biased since I knew several of the cast members, besides Mary.

Mary was one of the business women that were soliciting donations from Scrooge. She made a remark about how her costume reminded her of “little Bo Peep,” although I thought it looked pretty good and they did a good job with getting clothes that fit into the time period. You can read Mary’s take on the play here. Like I said, I really liked it.

Met & YM – Interstate 80 pile up

Winter time in western PA can have the same hazards that we find here in northern MI. Lake effect snow, when Arctic air moves over the relatively warm water of the Great Lakes, it causes, discreet bands of snow showers that can cause whiteout conditions. Back in the mid90s they had a large pile up of cars near Grayling, MI just south of the here. Now, in the area of where my parents are from comes this story that just happened a couple of days ago. The great thing is that when things get really bad, there are some that are willing to go the extra mile in helping those in need.

General – Podcasting

Since getting one of my birthday presents, an irock!, I have been finding “podcasts” to listen to. That may not be totally accurate, I learned about podcasting from an article in the Christian Science Monitor about the same time that I got my irock. The irock is a small FM transmitter that you plug into the headphone jack of your mp3 or CD player or iPod. It transmits whatever you have recorded to your radio, in stereo, for your listening pleasure.

Podcasting is downloading mp3s of content and listening to them at your leisure on your mp3 player. iPod are really good at doing this I guess. Since I don’t have an iPod, I use my Dell Axim x5 PDA. It plays mp3s so I use software that I got from ipodder.org to subscribe to content and download it for me. Then I transfer it into a compact flash card and voila! I can listen to it on my trucks radio while traveling or on my stereo at home (from my desktop).

Now that I think about it, I think my bro-in-law Brendon actually posted about it a couple of months ago on his blog as people were starting to do audio blogs. However, it has begun to explode into people doing their own radio shows and posting them to a blog interface for people to download. It has been fun so far experimenting with what is out there. I’ll probably post something on a few of them as I get some time and find some regular ones that I like. So far, The Miller Report is pretty good. He plays some local bands and has running commentary on his local (Grand Forks, ND) and world politics. I have also found ICM Raw (Independent Christian Music and News) which is pretty good as well and plays independent Christian bands from around the US.

So if you have ever had a hankering for having your own radio show, now’s your chance through podcasting to try your hand.

YM – There have been times that I have felt like this

Sometimes we all feel like this, but youth pastors can especially get hit with this. This is kind of related to what I was saying that Pastor Steve, at Mary’s church, was preaching on. Although, this has more to do with God dropping you little notes that you are heading in the right direction. I remember a few times, when after teaching the 7&8th grade class in Sunday school, or when I just didn’t feel that connected to the Senior High Youth group, asking myself if I was cut out for working in youth ministry. Then a kid or one of the parents would say something, like the note that this youth pastor got from one of his kids, and I would realize that I was on the right track. The momentary frustrations are worth it.

My thoughts on Iraq

Okay, so some might not agree with my rather simplistic approach to supporting US involvement in Iraq, but I view it the same way as involvement in Kosovo and others. The simplistic analogy I make is what would you do if you had a neighbor that was obviously beating their spouse? Do you report them to the police and risk getting involved? The beaten spouse might, usually from fear or a twisted sense of love, not press charges and return and the beating spouse comes after you for causing trouble. Or do you do nothing until one goes out in a body bag and the other in handcuffs?

I guess whether there were WMD’s or not is not the question. Saddam was biding his time for the sanctions to be lifted and put his plants back in production. However, to me that is irrelevant. He, his family, and henchmen were routinely beating torturing and killing people in their country. So the question is how long do you wait until you are sure that there is no other option? What level of involvement do you give to oust a dictator that doesn’t care about anything, but his own personal pleasure and is willing to gas his own people. Some claimed that the Shi’as or the Kurds should have rebelled, but both tried at one time or another. Right after the Persian Gulf war, of which I am a veteran, the shi’as were encouraged to rebel, only to not get any support from US and they got cut down. The Kurds would think about it and they got gassed. So the spouse would try to stand firm over being beaten only to be cowed in fear from the stronger spouse.

While I wasn’t a real supporter of Clinton, I was a supporter of his involvement in Kosovo. One of the few things that I thought he showed some fortitude to do what was right instead of what was politically expedient. Any of the Republicans who think that was a misadventure and supports Iraq are just as hypocritical as Democrats that supported Kosovo and didn’t or don’t support Iraq, at least in my view.

Now, with all of that said, I think that the Bush administration underestimated and did not prepare the country for what could happen. So we have ended up being the policeman who is dealing with the abusing spouse’s drinking buddies after the fact.

Now I said that the analogy was rather simplistic, but it all comes down to, at least in my mind, loving your neighbor as yourself. If you are being beaten down with little way to control what is happening to you, wouldn’t you want someone to get involved? There are some Iraqis that actually do appreciate us being there. So those are my thoughts.

My first Sunday at Mary’s Church

My first Sunday at Mary’s church(GCC) worked out pretty much as planned. I got to her place about 845 am and we (Mary, Karlie Mary’s youngest, and myself) drove up to her church for their first service at 900 am. We started out with some praise and worship for about 15 or 20 minutes and then celebrated communion and the offering. By the time Pastor Scheer began to preach, it was almost time to go so that I could make it to get with the choir for our 1030 am service. I felt bad that we had to leave early. He was preaching on recreation and taking the time to rest in God. This is important to me, because I do have a tendency to overschedule. Mary has stressed to me that we don’t have to try to spend all of our free time together if I’m going to get stressed out because I overscheduled (Have I said that I love this woman?).

We then went to FUMC and things went well there. Rev. Naile has been preaching on preparing for Christ, since we are in Advent season. A good sermon. I have the notes I took on my Dell PDA.

Later in the day, Mary had a short run through for a scene in GCC’s play that they are doing (the original version of Scrooge). While we were there, we saw Pastor Steve. I wanted to apologize for leaving early and explain to him what the two of us are doing. The thing that came was that he said that this Sunday he would be announcing a new schedule for the first service. Very cool, because if it is moved back even a half hour that would make the whole issue of leaving early a moot point. So we are waiting to see what the new schedule will be. Of course the two of us mentioned to each other how this is a God thing and how we took this as confirmation that we are on the right track with our vetting each other.

Some Ham Radio Fun

Currently, I am sitting in the NWS office that I work at doing a ham radio special event. We have this special event recognizing our ham radio severe weather spotters during the first weekend of December. It is a great way to have fun while going into sleep depravation. Although, I’m kind of immune from the sleep depravation this week as I just finished my round of midnights.

I brought my radio in that I can only use a bit as I’m only licensed for the VHF bands. I’m hoping that in the near future I can learn the code and upgrade to General and get on the HF Bands. I can only operate on HF when we do these special events, because there is a control operator who is a General or above in class.

We are making contacts with radio amatuers and many of the other NWS offices nationwide. It’s fun way to spend 24 hours.