I am a meteorologist and a former youth leader at church…I have a lot to say on both subjects…and then some
I’ll start off saying sorry to all of those who read my stuff. I have been so busy that I haven’t had a chance until now to sit down and write what it going on…
Fire weather is spinning up for the season and I was planning the annual spring meeting as well as putting together a talk for the MI – DNR. I still have work to do in this area, but the main thing is done.
I get a little side tracked (in a good way) with my current state of relationship bliss. Mary and I are doing well with the blooming relationship that God has given us. We just past the 4 month mark a few days ago (March 8th), which I keep telling people is like some kind of a record (Actually, I think 6 months is the all time record for me.). So You’ll probably hear me crowing about that in two more months.
I just go finished with mids yesterday (March 10). It is so good that they only come around every 7 weeks. I now have to get the rest of my leave requests in for the summer so that I can go on the Senior high’s mission trip and The Alive festival (we usually do Ichthus, but do to scheduling conflicts, we found a good substitute.).
I’m also beginning the preliminary work, for our church’s website (with the help of others).
I have also gotten the revelation/bug/inspiration to create more Sunday School/Youth group/Church instruction curriculum. The inspiration came in the form of the NOOMA videos. They are a series of short films that teach about the Bible. Mary and I have watched the 10 that are currently available and have written out notes. Paul Block (our youth pastor) and his wife, Lisa, currently have them and will be doing the same. I will compile and edit the notes into a study guide for us to use. Mary and I are quite excited about this.
I’m also listening to podcasts, this should make the radio networks and possibly the TV networks, if they are paying attention (there are v-blogs) nervous as this grows. There will always be room for radio and TV, but the way it is programmed, I think is about to be totally remade, as the internet and the growing ways to send information over the internet, show how amateurs and niche performers will find their way into the mainstream. (Can you tell I’m excited?)
Also, my new PDA is working wonderfully, and shortly, I’ll have a new keyboard for it as well. I won’t be slaved to the desktop to type up these blogs entries.
Hopefully, on Monday, I will work a little on my website and revamp some of it. Until we get the church website going, I’m going to start posting the mp3’s of our church services as well. Hopefully, I’ve got a good line on how to set up the RSS feed for it so that we can podcast it.
Mom, Dad, and Rosebud are on a long trip out west in their RV. Dad has been able to blog from time to time (some KOAs have wifi!) while on the road. They’re a good read.
So, I guess I should slow down…nah.
This came from Reuters. A piece on global warming that finally acknowledges that there is no smoking gun. But as I have said before, we need to take care of the planet and we do a poor job at it and stop making the excuse that it isn’t economically feasible.
I have to laugh (good naturedly) at Cleveland, OH. After they fired Bill Belachek, he went on to New England and has now won 3 Super Bowls. I guess that’s why the T-shirt that I would love to own shows a sign along an interstate highway in Cleveland and says:
PITTSBURGH, 143 MILES.
Underneath that sign, the words: THE ONLY SIGN OF LIFE IN CLEVELAND
Can you see where my sports loyalty lies? 🙂
I’ve been rushing around the last few weeks, that I sometimes forget to stop and “smell the roses” as it were. As I put into my last post, just yesterday, I was busy with the Emmaus Walk the last two weeks. Now I have been doing very little and enjoying the beautiful weather.
Okay, I would enjoy more snow so that I could go skiing, but today with blue sky and the bright sunshine, I was almost in my March mode of wishing the snow away. I would like to get the snow out of my driveway and off of the roof of my house, though. Otherwise, Yesterday and today were great to just sit back and relax.
We all need to sit back and relax a bit though. I’ve gotten out of the practice of some of my comtemplative practices that I used to do, because of busyness. That’s not good, because it’s those practices that helped me slow down and be aware of God’s presence and how He is moving in my life. So, during this week of evenings, when I can wake up late and relax before going into work, I’m going to get back to my practices and make sure that I look to see and listen to what God has in mind for me.
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…
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
