Holiday Update

***Sorry about the delay of this post. I have been experiencing this Christmas Season more than reflecting on it. ***

On Christmas Adam

We had an exhilarating Sunday morning worship service at Lakeview. We read Scripture from throughout the bible relating to Christ (from Genesis 3 to Revelation 1) and then told the nativity story through the use of candles, with the various characters of the story (Mary, Joe, Jesus, Shepherds, Angels, and Wise Men) being represented by candles. As the Luke 2 and Matthew 2 texts were read, the candles corresponding to those characters would be lit. Then, except for the Jesus candle, each of the others were extinguished.

We then had the Lord's Supper. Three tables stood at the head of each section of pews and we came up family by family to take the Supper. It was a special time. Following the Lord's Supper, the deacons each lit a candle from the Jesus candle and lit the candle of the church members on the first row. They then lit the other member's candles until all the candles in the church were lit. We then had a benediction and departed while singing Silent Night. On the way out, Mrs. Emogene said to me (with a twinkle in her eye) "That's the most beautiful Christmas Service I've ever been a part of, and I'm seventy-two years old!"


On Christmas Eve

Since the kids were with Mom and Dad, my brothers and sister-in-law assembled at our house to cook and to set up the trampoline. It was a beautiful day to set it up, in the 50’s but bright and sunny. Kadie picked up the kids from their grandparents and we ended the evening by watching one of our favorite Christmas movies after the kids went to bed. In this picture, Bartolo and I practice levitating on the trampoline.

On Christmas morning

The kids got up and maintained a holding pattern until we had the video camera set up and running. Like last year, we used the Fischer-Price nativity scene to follow along with the Christmas story. Strangely (though appropriately perhaps) Joseph is now missing from the scene. The kids loved all their gifts, and demonstrated the crass commercial greed that has made kids wide-eyed for generations.

Their favorite gift was the trampoline. As they realized what it was, they shrieked with glee and Squealer stripped out of his footy-pajamas on the spot and went streaking as a naked flash through the house toward his room and his jumping clothes. Fortunately I got all this on tape and will embarrass him in front of future girlfriends in another decade or so.

They’ve loved the trampoline and the netting saved Squealer’s life about 5 times in the first 3 minutes he was on it getting double bounced by his big sisters.

On Christmas Day

My parents and in-laws, brothers and wife/girlfriend all came over for lunch. I am reminded yet again of the importance of family. The day ended with an empty house, all the kids worn out from jumping all day and Kadie and I resting on the couch with only the Christmas tree lights and the fire snapping in the fireplace. We related our bleswsings and went to bed. A perfect Christmas day if there ever was one.


Unto Us a Son is Given

The day after Christmas, the newest addition to our family was born. Kadie’s younger sister (known around here as PT Girl) gave birth to a baby boy Arthur. Although he’s three weeks early, Arthur is in excellent health. Kadie went over to spend the rest of the week with her in the hospital and only returned home today. Kadie was missed, but the kids survived.


Over the next few days I’ll post my favorite links (both mine and others) from the last year...
Happy Holidays to all!

And to all a good night...

Happy FESTIVUS Everyone!!!!!

PSC Etiquette

I have a couple of Pastor Search Committee etiquette questions:

First, what would you think of a candidate who was a reference for another candidate, sending in his own resume while we were still considering his friend? Let me explain. No, there is too much, let me sum up.

Brother Bob sent us his resume through the Associational office. As a part of his resume, he included three references, one of whom was a friend, Brother Jim. As a part of our process of checking out his references, one of our committee members called Brother Jim to tell us about Brother Bob.

As we talked with him, Brother Jim then began to ask our committee member about Lakeview, what our situation is and how the church is doing. None of these questions were too invasive and seemed to be motivated by nothing more than curiosity.

About a week later we received a resume from Brother Jim! In a subsequent phone call with him, Brother Jim acknowledged hearing about our search for the first time from our committee memebhr who called about his friend.

Brother Jim’s reaction hits me wrong. It seems unprofessional and also unethical to me to agree to serve as a friend’s reference and then to apply for the same position.

Your thoughts?

(Back to main Pastor Search Committee Menu)

The Artistic Temperment

Due to forgotten departmental turf wars waged decades past, Religious Studies was somehow stuffed into the same department as Fine Arts. As a consequence of that decision, I've spent part of my time as Chair interacting with and getting to know artists. This is my first prolonged exposure to the artistic temperament and it’s been an interesting education. One of the more memorable encounters I had occurred a few years ago.

It was a busy day, to be sure, but most days are. I was sitting in my office working on ways to slake the thirst of our Administration for various reports, rubrics and requisition approvals. There is a never ending shuffle of papers from Liberal Arts to the Admin building and I often feel like I’m just barely keeping up with it all. I was pulling out small amounts of my remaining hair follicles when Pat walked into my office unannounced.

Pat looks just like Jesus. Or at lest the way Jesus would’ve looked had he lived into his mid-forties. Pat’s brown hair is shoulder length and provides a striking contrast with his piercing blue eyes. Pat has taught painting as an adjunct for us for the last decade or so, predating even my own arrival on campus.

He’s also a sweet, nice guy. Pat's exceptionally well mannered, sometimes frustratingly so. I’ve known him for four or five years as faculty, but he continues to address me as Dr. Taran, despite my constant reminder that we are colleagues. His life is very simple. He paints, lives in a small apartment over someone’s garage, and makes very little money as an adjunct. My predecessor helped him to open his first checking account so that he could deposit his first semester’s paycheck. He also helped him with the process of buying his first car, even though Pat was in his thirties at the time. As the Colonel once described him “Pat is like a duck, every morning is a brand new day.”

Pat came into the office and waited for me to look up from my stacks of papers. Then he softly said “Dr. Taran, you need to come to my class for a minute.” I felt my heart rate increase slightly at his statement. Whenever a faculty member calls me out of my office and to their class, it’s usually for a pretty big reason. A part of my time at work is spent trouble shooting, something I enjoy a lot. But statements like that get the adrenaline pumping.

As we walked out of our building, Pat deflected my attempts to find out what the problem in his class was. Then he surprised me when we walked not to the art lab, but rather to a small grove of trees near our building. There are several benches in the area and several of his students were sitting there with their sketchboards drawing out pencil sketchings of the trees, squirrels and other elements of nature. They were working on outdoor scenes and I didn’t see a crisis in sight.

I started to ask Pat what the problem was, but he was already back into instructor mode. He had walked over to one of the seated students and was offering some constructive criticism of their work. Since Pat was busy, I (somewhat awkwardly) waited in silence. The day was warm, but not hot. The students were all quietly working on their drawings. I stood there for a moment and enjoyed the peaceful tranquility. There was no telephone ring or email chime. No secretaries were in sight. Things could be worse than standing outside, surrounded by nature, and teaching students. Finally, I sat down myself and enjoyed the warm afternoon.

I continued to wait while he finished up with the student. As he started to walk to another of his students, I quickly stood up and reached out for his arm.

“Pat, what’s wrong?” I asked.

He looked mystified at my question.

“Nothing.” he replied.

Somewhat surreally, I said “But you told me I needed to come to your class.”

His confused expression broke into a grin and he said “Dr. Taran, I told you that you needed to my class because I saw you in your office and you looked like you NEEDED to come outside.” He then turned away from me and went back to his students.

Somewhat surprised by his response, I thought for a few seconds before I realized that he was right. Then I sat down on the bench and enjoyed the rest of the class period watching the squirrels and students.

PSC Covenant

With the semester winding down, I hope to pick up the blogging pace a bit. We've had some various things occur with our Pastor Search Committee and I'd love to get some feedback. But tonight I'll simply post our Pastor Search Committee Covenant. The idea of a covenant is to nail down some expectations for the committee and for the church. We hammered these out over our first several meetings and then we read them to the church:

Pastor Search Committee Covenant

Lakeview Baptist Church

This covenant commits the Lakeview Baptist Church Pastor Search Committee as partners together to bring God’s man to our pulpit. We merely serve as the representatives of the Lakeview congregation in this process.

We covenant first to keep all of our thinking and reflecting bathed in prayer. Because this is God’s church, not our church, we will seek God’s man, not our man. We will be obedient to God’s direction, and sensitive to the Holy Spirit, knowing that God looks not at a man’s outward appearance, but upon his heart. The only way we can stay attuned to our Lord’s direction is through ongoing, persistent, prayer.

We will act as a unified body. We will wait as one body and we will move as one body. We trust that God will reveal His will to us in His own time. We will not tarry unnecessarily, but we also will not hurry through this process. We will make a unanimous recommendation of God’s man to the church.

We recognize that openness is the key to trust. As such, we will communicate clearly and often with the church body. Communication of course is a two-part effort that involves listening as much as it involves speaking. Our goal will be to listen to the Lord as well as to the congregation as we undertake this search process.

Lastly we understand well the importance of confidentiality. We are dealing with the very heart of this church as we search for our next pastor. But we are also dealing with men of God in other places of ministry. We want to honor and respect even those whom we do not call. In order to maintain confidentiality and sober judgment, we will not individually speak about where we are in the search process or about any specific candidates outside of our pastoral search committee meetings except during public discussions with the church.

These things we covenant with God, with the congregation, and with one another.

(Back to main Pastor Search Committee Menu)

12 Days of Christmas--Straight Up

Since we're around twelve days from Christmas, I thought you'd enjoy this...

Fed-Ex Stinks!!!

We ordered an exciting gift for the kids, one of the larger and pricier Christmas gifts we’ve given. Of course, it is delivered to the house mere moments after Kadie leaves to go pick up Skeeter from school and mere moments before she returns. When the Fed Ex truck pulled up to the house, Scooter looked outside into the car port to see the Fed Ex guy dropping off two large packages. According to our neighbor (who was walking by at the time), the following conversation took place:

Idiot FedEx Guy: “Oh, I’ll just leave these here in the carport.”

Scooter: “What are they?”

Idiot FedEx Guy: “I can’t tell you that, they might be your Christmas present.”

Scooter: “Oh.”

Scooter then starts to close the door.

Idiot FedEx Guy: “Just kidding, it’s a trampoline.”

Scooter “Are you sure you delivered it to the right house?”

Idiot FedEx Guy: “Yep, this is the correct address.”

Then as the Idiot FedEx Guy started to get in his van, he sees my neighbor and comments “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.”

Words fail me.

The Golden What?

While it's nice to see a certain film snorkeling under 50% at Rotten Tomatoes, there is an upcoming film that the Taran kids are giddy with excitement over...

Random Notes From the End of the Semester

This is our last week of classes, with finals beginning on Monday. The Fall semester is "complicated" by its correspondence with the holiday season.This weekend Kadie and I have two holiday parties (at the school) and two Christmas parties while our kids have one party and a children's musical. Life accelerates during the Yuletide.

**I tried something a little different this semester and taught an introductory course in Hebrew. It went well, though it has taken a lot more preparation than a usual class. I ended up with a class of thirteen, pretty good for a state school where it was only offered as an elective. Our foreign language faculty have approved it for fulfilling a foreign language requirement in future semesters, so I'll be teaching Hebrew II next semester. This afternoon we had our final class meeting and, since our home is located near the campus, I had them over for a potluck lunch.

Since almost all of the students will be returning for the second class next semester, I wanted an opportunity to build community in the class as we go forward. Common meals are a significant way of doing that. We had a good time, with only a pop quiz interrupting the general good will.
The best line of the meal was when Kadie returned home from picking up Squealer from pre-school and one of the students said "So, is this the kid who's afraid of squirrels?"

**I dig a Christmas pin out of mothballs and wear it every year. It has an green L on it with the international "Not symbol"(the red slash) through it. It reads No-L or of course, Noel. So I get some interesting responses from others when I wear it. One student said "No Losers? Are you against losers?" My favorite responses though are people who come up and read "No L? What does No L mean? No L No L?

But today I had a colleague come up and say come up and say (rather seriously) "Why do you hate gays?" I was stunned and could only respond "Why do you think I hate gays?" "Because your pin says that you are against Lesbians, the L word."

It's the most wonderful time of the year.

**Public schools are turning our kids into sales staff as PTAs and school administrators seek monies through various fundraisers. But they hold out trinkets and trash for students who sell a lot of stuff. Scooter sold several subscriptions to Reader's Digest and proudly announced to all who would listen that she could get a mini-slide phone with hands free operation (see here). Which she took to mean a cell phone. There were pictures of a girl, happily talking into the phone with her friends. I tried to tell her that I didn't think it was a real cell phone, but she was captivated with the thought of the wonderful free gift that would make her the envy of all of her seventh grade friends. But when it arrived, it wasn't a cell phone at all, but a cheap plastic piece of equipment with a phone jack in the bottom. You must plug it into the wall for it to work.

She was disappointed, but I recognized the learning experience immediately. Like Ralphie's Secret Orphan Annie's decoder ring, I too had suffered disappointment as a kid. For me it was Sea Monkeys. Apparently it is a rite of passage to get your hopes up as a kid for some mail order gift.

#3

Baylor has just hired Art Briles as a new football coach. He was hired after they interviewed Mike Singeltary (former Baylor great) and unsuccessfully wooed Houston Nutt (the new Ole Miss coach). Baylor then hired their third choice in Coach Briles. I have no idea if Briles is going to bring a successful football team to the Brazos, but I like his attitude.

He was asked how he liked the idea of being Baylor's #3 choice for the new job.

His answer was "I might not have been my wife's No. 1 choice," Briles said. "But she's put up with me 29 years and fixin' to be 30."