Kids' Story

Kadie and I checked the kids out of school early today and took them to the Toy Story double feature. When Toy Story came out in 1995, Scooter had not quite been born and Skeeter was still a couple of years away. (Squealer was almost a decade away!) So watching the films today was the first time any of the kids had seen them on the big screen. I remembered enjoying the films, but not connecting to them in the same way I did this afternoon.

Both Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are each stories about the tremendous brevity of childhood. The key plot elements of both films involve the affections of children being transferred from childlike things to more grownup things. Apparently this will even be moreso the case in Toy Story 3 as Andy goes off to college.

As I watched our three kids watch the movie, complete with their matching 3-D glasses, I was reminded again of the tremendous blessing that each of them are. And how quickly the days pass.

Anyone still out there??

With all apologies to Peter King’s Monday Morning Quarterback, here’s 10 things I think I think.

I think I’ve been a bit lax in blogging as of late. Time has a way of getting occupied. I plan to remedy this oversight.

I think that I’m continuing the intentional interim work at Pecan Grove Baptist. Work has gone slowly, but we had a breakthrough service a few Wednesday nights ago. Well worth its own blog entry. But the three hours on the road every Sunday is starting to wear a bit thin.

I think I haven’t been watching enough movies. The last movie I saw was Rocky which I introduced the girls to. Many comments about life in the mid-1970’s.

I think the family has struggled health-wise a bit. Scooter came down with the swine flu this week, so our house has been in lock down mode. Kadie thinks that she and I have already had it. (We both had some respiratory issues this week).

I think that the university is dealing with record enrollment (no doubt do to the economic downturn), but fortunately, we’ve faced severe budget cuts so we’ve had far less faculty to teach all the new students.

I’ve been doing some fiction reading lately, catching up on the Patrick O’Brien novels. There’s 21 of them and I’m down one with 20 left to go.

I think I like my iPhone. Right now I’m taking advantage of a new audiobook rental program of my local library. I think after a few weeks it disappears from your iPod…or something. I’m listening to The Accidental Billionaires about the founding of Facebook.

I think Tony Romo’s best days may be behind him. Fortunately the Rangers provided a distraction by playing meaningful games into September for the first time in a decade.

I think I’ve been using Facebook and email to communicate with church members moreso than ever before.

I think I am in desperate need of a ski vacation in a couple of months.

Blessed are the Peace Makers

This would be one of the more offensive Bumper Stickers I've ever seen It was on a truck I passed right down the street from our house.

Church Minutes

Statistics, as they say, are a lot like bikinis. What they show is important, and what they hide is even more important.

The same could be said for church minutes.

I’ve spent a great deal of time in the last few weeks working through the minutes from the past nine years of business meetings at Pecan Grove. They show the barest outline of the conflicts and confrontations which have shaped the community of faith during this decade.

Reading church minutes is up there with reading food labels and graduate papers as pastimes that induce narcolepsy. But going through the minutes with the Transition Team has added a lot of background and color and texture to the minutes. (As well as filling in the gaps!).

The record of the minutes don’t lie. They allow us to pinpoint different times when various conflicts began. Reading through the minutes, we’ve seen the missteps emerge in black and white. What also tend to emerge are patterns for dealing with conflict and disagreements. At times these patterns play out and repeat over decades.

So reading minutes are a dull, dreary process…but a process that can be quite revealing.

...Summer Daze...

I’ve been watching a lot of baseball lately, due no doubt to the impressive pitching performance of the Rangers this season. Skeeter has been watching a lot with me and learning a bit about the game. And it can be a confusing game. Recently, after a Ranger scored from third, she asked “Was that a Death Run?” I was stunned for a few seconds before remembering a previous conversation. “No, it’s called a suicide squeeze.”

We took a five day vacation to San Antonio and traveled with two other couples. We had much fun, but I was outvoted on two significant issues. We didn’t have a single Mexican meal there and we didn’t go see the Alamo. It reminded me again why we normally vacation alone.

I signed up for extra classes this summer. The result was that I taught classes all summer and thus reduced my days off to about two weeks over the summer break. Part of the reason I got into teaching was to get summers off. Of course that was before kids’ college funds.

Scooter has had a time consuming job this summer and it’s wearing on her. She baby sat one of Squealer’s friends for eight hours every day all summer long and is worn out from chasing them all around. I’m secretly (and not so secretly) amused every time the Girl or Squealer says to her “I’m bored.”

Pecan Grove continues with Transition Team meetings on a weekly basis. It’s going well, I think, but slowly. Many conversations, many different points of view. We continue to pray for breakthroughs in some of these unresolved issues.

FPU is going well at Pecan Grove. Recently one guy (who’s in financial difficulty) roared out of the church parking lot in his 08 fire engine red Mustang. One of the coordinators for the class said in his slow southern drawl. “Dave’ll tell him to sell the car.” Indeed.

A triple wammy next week as Scooter starts High School, Skeeter Middle School, and Squealer begins the first grade. I took Scooter to her high school orientation (at my own alma mater) this week and found the rising nostalgia a bit overwhelming. I can’t believe my daughter is entering her freshman year of high school.

Facebook has taken over more of my life and crowding out a bit of blog time. Perhaps that will change as we start school on the 24th. We’ll see.

Dirty Words and Squealer

Squealer: “Dad, is butt lick a bad word?”

I sat frozen as I considered my six year old’s query. We’re pretty old school (read “legalistic”) with profanity in our household. The word “butt” is verboten (verbutten?) in our home, even moreso if you append it to the term “lick” (or any other verb for that matter).

Me: “Son, where did you hear that word?”

Squealer: “I don’t know.”

Me: “Did you hear it at school?” (“Objection, your honor. The prosecution is leading the witness!”)

Squealer: “I don’t know. I think I heard it at school.”

I think he affirmed school as the origin because it’s the middle of summer and that’s a pretty safe place for the blame to rest. I was puzzling this through when he repeated his question.

“Daaaaad! IS BUTTLICK A BAD WORD?!” he slowly, and forcefully repeated.

Me: “Yes, son, you know it is. We don’t say the word butt, we certainly don’t say it as a combination with another word. Butt is a bad word, so we don’t say words that have butt in them.”

Squeaer: (after thinking for a few seconds) “We can’t say the word butler?” he asked incredulously.

FPU Explosion

We’ve had a bit of an explosion at Pecan Grove, and I couldn’t be happier.

In one of our listening groups from a couple of months ago, A church member mentioned a quote often associated with Dave Ramsey. (As you may recall, our family has benefitted from following his financial program). This church member indicated that Ramsey’s Financial Peace University (FPU) had greatly blessed their family and he had been interested in getting it started at the church. In fact, he had received a bonus recently and would be happy to purchase the Leader’s Kit and donate it to the church.

I asked him if he would like to teach it and he replied that he’d never taught anything in the church before. But after a few weeks of thought and prayer, he consented. In the overall scheme of things, I thought that this would be another Bible study that might reach a dozen people or so. I brought it up with the church council and suggested that the church pay a scholarship of $50 to help defray the $100 charge for those who wished to participate in the study. They quickly agreed and we set a day for Financial Peace University to start.

And then it exploded.

We moved the study to Sunday evening because not many could participate on Wednesday nights. First 10 couples signed up, then 20, then 30. And now we’re ordering more kits to get us up to 40. Each kit represents a family unit; that is, either a couple or a single. So we have about 70 people in the church going through it. In addition, we’ve had a half dozen families from the community choose to participate. Almost three fourths of our Sunday School attendance will be taking the class. We were going to run it concurrent to our evening worship service, but only 2 people who normally attend were NOT going to be taking FPU. So were are running it during the evening service and the two agreed to help with child care.

The credit crisis and general anxiety about the economy are no doubt factors in its popularity. We’ve had a couple of business plants in our community shut down and several church members are jobless. The chance to pay off debt and to establish an emergency fund looks pretty attractive right now. All in all, the church is excited about this opportunity to be engaged in a common task, and to offer something for the community.

Our transition team discussed the FPU class this past Sunday and think that it could be an important opportunity for the church to work together on a focused financial goal without conflict. That would be an important accomplishment and something that the church has struggled with achieving before.

(photo above was taken last night during FPU)