whales like you've never seen them

So a whale exploded in Taiwan. Cool. Here's a before pic and an after pic. Neato.

I ran into Relevant while I was at Cornerstone this past summer. It's a pretty nifty magazine for twentysomethings. I had a bit of a billing hiccup with them but all is back in order now and I should be getting my magazines again. You should check it out. I am generally against things that appear to try so hard to be, well, relevant...but I can't come up with many other reasons to not like the mag so you should check it out and get a trial issue or something.

I need to buy slippers.

Strangely addicting. Nate should like that game, seeing as how it involves penguins. He may not appreciate the role they have. But they look like they're having fun! Most of the people I game with online have scores above 300 but I have yet to break 270. I just can't get the sweet spot on the bat I guess.

EDIT: Found it! 322.9 is as far as I can get. Actually, I did it once and am content not to try to repeat it. Um, yeah.

Tonight I called into a radio talk show for the first time in my life. I don't do that sort of thing, I'm not that sort of person. But I put on kfax on my way home because it occasionally has good programs but this time a show called Lifeline was on. I usually don't listen to this show because I am often annoyed by the typical judgmental self-righteous Christianese noise that comes from it. Well today I made the mistake of listening and I couldn't turn it off. They were talking about a Carl's Jr. ad including Hugh Hefner with the tagline "because some men don't like the same thing every night."

I listened for about ten minutes of the hosts talking about this commercial with one ditto caller after another talking about how awful it was and how they would boycott Carl's Jr. and I was thinking about calling in. The whole tone was negative and they kept talking about the decline of our nation and how people will go out and sleep with the neighbor's wife because of these ads. What was probably the sealer for me was the fact that they actually laughed when a caller made a connection between mad cow disease being bad, promiscuity being bad, and "eternal flames" being bad. So these hosts of a Christian talkshow are laughing about people going to hell.

I called up and said that while the commercial is of dubious moral character, and CJ's shouldn't try to deny it's talking about sex with different women, they should have better things to talk about. They should maybe talk about why the commercial appeals to men or how we as Christians can contribute in a positive way to changing the environment. I said if I weren't a Christian and I happened upon the show I would be pretty upset at the fact that Christians are sitting there talking crap about CJ's moral failings and laughing at the fact they believe I am going to hell.

They let me talk, and then talked about how it's important to engage culture, and they're helping to start watercooler conversations where people can witness to their friends. Hopefully they'll speak in an encouraging way rather than simply condemning their friends for this moral bankruptcy. Hopefully they'll leave out the part about eternal separation from God being funny. (Although the radio hosts did try to say they weren't laughing about someone going to hell, so at least they don't think it's okay to do so. Good thing they cleared that up.)

Sometimes the modern Christian culture really bugs me.

This stinks. I liked Mora Jr. as our defensive coordinator much better than Erickson as our coach. Erickson sucks. And if Mora takes those assistant coaches? Blah. Things aren't going great for the Niners these days.

Once again I feel like changing this blog from using blogger to using Movable Type. The problem is, Movable Type is more difficult to use than Blogger, and I don't really need to do it. I think I just get periodically discontent with the status quo and desire change. Hopefully it'll pass...I have much better things to do than fiddle with MT.

If you have the time, this is pretty cool. Pseudo-fictional autobiographical account of a man growing up Christian, losing his faith in a hospital chaplaincy, and how he kept it. It appears to be part of a larger blog that has achieved some degree of notoriety: the author has a book deal. So I may have to check him out.

slide back in

I feel like I haven't been in the normal swing of things for about a month now. December was a hectic month, and Janelle was in town which further increased its lack of normalcy as a time frame. oneeighty was quickly followed by the youth group taking over church services...and then on the 31st I hopped down to San Diego to spend more time with my fiancee. Crazy times.

But now I'm home and things will ostensibly be returning to the "normal" swing. School's back in session and I can sub again, no particular holidays to mess with youth ministry scheduling, oneeighty's in like two weeks...so yeah, it's back to life. But I feel like life is good. I have a great life actually. Sometimes when I sit back and contemplate the myriad ways God has blessed me I am overcome, or overwhelmed, or something. I can't really explain it.

This past week I read a book by A.W. Tozer called The Pursuit of God. I really appreciated it, you should check it out. There are online versions available even. A few of my favorite quotes include...

"To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too easily satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart."

"The man who has God for his treasure has all things in one."

"God wills that we should push on into His presence and live our whole life there. This is to be known to us in conscious experience. It is more than a doctrine to be held; it is a life to be enjoyed every moment of every day."

"...for millions of Christians...God is no more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle."

"While we are looking at God we do not see ourselves--blessed riddance. The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering with his soul and looks away to the perfect One."

"Social religion is perfected when private religion is purified."

"...the only thinkable relation between us is one of full Lordship on His part and complete submission on ours. We owe Him every honor that is in our power to give him. Our everlasting grief lies in giving Him anything less."

"We must of necessity be servant to someone, either to God or to sin."

"The labor of self-love is a heavy one indeed...As long as you set yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal there will be those who will delight to offer affront to your idol. How then can you hope to have inward peace?"

"...now you feel hurt because the world is saying about you the very things you have been saying about yourself? Only yesterday you were telling God that you were nothing, a mere worm of the dust. Where is your consistency?"

"One of the greatest hindrances to internal peace which the Christian encounters is the common habit of dividing our lives into two areas - the sacred and the secular."

"It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it."

Okay so that was a lot of quotes. Read through 'em, they're great. And read the book. It's a challenging and refreshing book for those pursuing God.