I have a lot to say right now, but don't really feel like typing it all out. So, instead, I present you with Brooke Demetz' Theories and Postulates.

Oh the fun times as a college freshman. She probably doesn't know that page still exists, so let's keep this between you and me, eh?

One of the most regular members of my LIFE Group is a special guy named Jonathan. At first glance, what you see is a guy confined to a wheelchair, can't see, and is a little bit slow. His cerebral palsy, blindness, and slight mental handicap hold him back on some things, but what rushes ahead of him always is a tremendous heart and and ambitious mind. He co-DJs at a local radio station and has become the front man for several causes over the years.

Right now there is a promo playing on a local radio station and I want you to hear it.

Click here.

Also, click here to see what the Texas House of Representatives has to say about him.

Jonathan's bio at 99.7 KBCY Abilene.

I'm feeling good about the MACM degree again. I wonder how long this will last. I also wonder how long I will be tucked in my room typing out endless words about the evolutionary Pauline eschatological theories between 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians. Only to have Dr. Willis feed it through his shredder, as he does with all papers. Five weeks of sitting in a tiny room sucking reprocessed air and staring at a computer screen, just to be fed to the dogs. Every time I think about the MACM now I have that "Christmas Story" type of vision with big heads of people I know with evil looks moving in and out in front of me muttering words of warning. Instead "you'll shoot your eye out" it's "you'll shoot your career dead." Really? I feel like Ralphie - I just want people to understand what I am really after and the wonder of it. I often wonder if I chose the right path to get there. Only time will tell, I suppose.

One of my college roommates and co-interns at Sooners for Christ is interviewing for the co-campus minister position at Oklahoma State University. God bless him. I hope he gets it. The OSU University Center, Texas A&M Aggies for Christ, and the Auburn Christian Student Center are the three most active state school campus ministries in Churches of Christ. That's good company.

Jessica becomes an American again April 10. I suppose there is one shining glimmer of hope right now.

I've hit the jackpot. While pretending to write a paper today, I wandered down the street to check my mail. Inside was a strange looking envelope that held a special letter.
GOD'S HOLY BLESSING POWER IS IN THE ENCLOSED ANOINTED PRAYER RUG WE ARE LOANING YOU TO USE!!!

People - this is the ticket. The really generous folks at Saint Matthews Churches ("55 Years Old!!") have loaned me a holy blessed prayer rug that will score me a new car, loads of money, and a new house, I think complete with a low fixed-rate mortgage.


The rug itself is nice. It's made out of a thin, lightweight material that is almost exactly like paper.
If you are having doubts, just look at the testimonies.

This lady got $10,700 last Saturday after kneeling on the rug.

After God gave them the money, he went out and bought them a new car. I imagine God is a pretty good negotiator and scored a nice deal with low payments.

So, since I have been specially selected for this privilege, I figure I should take advantage of it. $32 Billion sounds about right. But - I don't want to get greedy about that so my request is going to be for an annual payment of roughly $1.06 Billion/year for 30 years. You have to remember that the feds will take at least 40% of that. Unless I pray about that too.....

For all you RSS-crazy blog-o-maniacs, Discount Bananas is finally equipped with real live RSS. Firefox users, simply click on the orange square at the end of your address bar and add the feed wherever you like. Others, copy the link of the orange rectangle to the left into your reader of choice.

Three entries in a day. You can tell it's paper-writing time.

The sister of a friend of mine commented recently on the idea of circumlocution, which is defined as "The use of many words to express an idea that might be expressed by few; indirect or roundabout language."

The big-headed scholarly world I live in pretty much lives by this idea. Therefore, by necessity of survival I have to employ this skill or I would have to actually write twenty pages of real ideas for every paper. But, unfortunately for many it goes beyond a "getting assignments done" activity and actually becomes a part of how they function, especially for many scholars who write for academic journals. Here is a snippet from the introduction of an article I am using for research at the moment:

"To begin this study, I will delineate the term eschatology and will indicate how this word is used herein. I will then turn to consider the aforementioned eschatological texts in their canonical sequence."

What would make as much sense and read much better? "I'll start by talking about what the word eschatology means, and then explain these verses in order."

The only problem is that if academic theologians actually said what they mean, the practice would virtually eliminate itself and the ones left wouldn't have much to do. Most scholarly journals would become about 1/4 as long and many would disappear altogether.

But, circumlocution is alive and well, which keeps our libraries bulging and our scholars and grad students busy.

Angela now has a great blog entry about Colorado. (Yes, Ruth, it's "great.")

And now, some random tidbits to snack on.
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Earlier today I found out that a high school acquaintance is actually making it big. Josh Henderson was chosen for a boy band a few years ago and has since become an actor and model, and actually dated Ashlee Simpson for a couple of years, and appeared with her on the first month of her TV show. He's now one of the leads on the show Over There. Interesting. On that note, my old friend Michael Lasker is the executive producer of the upcoming movie The Pilot, being released by Paramound Pictures.
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Communication fascinates me sometimes. I am often especially perplexed by the highly complex interplays between women. For instance, I was at the hospital yesterday waiting for an elevator to the seventh floor. A young woman was waiting in front of me. When the elevator arrived, the doors opened and an older woman stepped off and subtley glanced to her right and left. The younger woman, not missing a beat, pointed down the hall and said "The restroom is right down that way." The older woman's reply: "Oh thank you thank you!"

Whaaa??????
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Kudos to Randy Harris for his prophetic words in Grad Chapel yesterday. I could feel every academic theologian squirming in their seats as Randy very pointedly exposed the blantant disconnect between the institutional world of theology and spiritual yearning of those who seek ministry. I clapped. In Grad Chapel. Just briefly.

I have to admit. I was wrong. I was told by my faculty mentor that going to Colorado was a really bad idea and that Spring Break for graduate students is not a break and should be used to catch up on schoolwork, and that if I go I am only going to stress myself out more.

I admit. I started to believe him.

I was wrong.

Instead, I just experienced a week of rejuvination that I could have never truly planned. Because of a week in God's country with God's people, living a real life and growing even closer to "my Abilene people," my stress level is about 5% of what it was and I now have the energy and perspective to face the next four weeks with confidence. Days of snow-shoeing in the natural quiet of a snow-covered forest, flying down hills on a sled, walking the sidewalks of a quaint mountain town, throwing snow at each other, praying together, praising God together, pushing cars out of ditches together, cooking together, and the alone times of walking the quiet road in the mornings all combined to recharge a soul that was about to explode with the frustration of the artificial life. Hanging out with the elk was cool too.

Plus, not only was it a week of quality time with my Abilene "family," I got a delicious dessert of Alabama folks on Saturday. This, my friends, was a great week.



P.S.: Ruth has a great blog entry about the trip.

I'm talking about a place where it's warm... a place where the beer flows like wine... a place where the women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano... I'm talking about a little place called... ESTES PARK, COLORADO.

So tomorrow we hit the road before the sun does for the long-anticipated adventure to the Rockies. There are several things about this that I am really looking forward to:

1. Having quality time with some quality friends. This is an awesome group, although a bit frenetic at times. This week will either finding us becoming an even closer "family," or murdering each other and hiding the bodies.


2. Having quality time with some old friends. We were given the opportunity to stay at Estes Park, which is really close to Ft. Collins, where David and Sarah Greer, two of the most amazing people I know, now live. They were two people who became an indespensable part of my life in Alabama, and who taught me many lessons about powerful love for God and love for each other. Some other friends from Alabama will be arriving there on Friday and Saturday, so hopefully I'll at least get to see them as well.


3. A change of scenery. Don't get me wrong, Abilene is a good place, but there is a whole lot of nothing to look at here. You have to really appreciate the people in a place like this. The snow-capped vistas of the Rocky Mountain National Park will be a welcome sight. I'll have my new Kodak in hand as well.


4. A week of not stressing. This is going to be the hardest one to acheive, because it will be completely a matter of will power, because my work load right now makes doing something like going to Colorado for a week look like academic suicide. But it will all work out. It always does.

It's great to be blessed with a life that allows me to do things like this. I constantly am reminded of the incredible circumstances I am consistently placed within, and the blessings of that. God has allowed me into a life that includes things like this, and, even though this next week is just a vacation, I want to use it to the praise of God. I'm sure the awesomeness of the Rockies will help inspire those kinds of thoughts.

Before I moved to Abilene, I did my first real stint inside of a cubicle farm for a few months. I have held a number of jobs since my teenage years, both inside and outside of offices, but my employment with United States Investigative Services was the first time I had to walk into a sea of grey sameness day in and day out. That's when I came to view the movie Office Space not as a light-hearted comedy but a morbid documentary.

That's why this story is very telling. The inventor of the cubicle, Robert Propst, now regrets what his creation came to be and now labels it a "monolithic insanity."

Reviled by workers, demonized by designers, disowned by its very creator, it still claims the largest share of office furniture sales--$3 billion or so a year--and has outlived every "office of the future" meant to replace it. It is the Fidel Castro of office furniture.

I don't know if it is directly a function of cubicles themselves, but the environment in which they typically exist is very dehumanizing. Before USIS I trained for a few weeks with a telephone tech support company, which was even more oppressive in its cubicle culture, in that you didn't even get your own. I got the heck out of there.

So, here's a bit of perspective. The people around me tend to hear some earfuls of my critique about the graduate school system and culture in which I am currently living. But the fact is that I would not ever trade my current daily life for the drone-like existence of the Office Space world for anything. Despite the incredible amount of pressure I am under due to academic demands and other stresses, the fact is that I live moment by moment under an incredible amount of freedom, and I wake up every day making my own choices and my own schedule. I choose where I go and what I do at any moment. I choose the people that are around me and with whom I associate. In other words, no day is the same as the one before it. When I worked in Office Space, I found that my daily life was becoming a rubber stamp of itself, and the system could care less if you cared. I could barely stand it for five months, and I worked with people who had been doing this for 25 years. I'm convinced that some had literally had their souls eroded right out of them.

But, on the bright side, some of the people I worked around were really fun and we had a good time. They were the only thing that kept me sane. You can see some shots of them here. Click on 'Last Day in Office Space'.

Something reminded me of Krispy Kreme donuts earlier today (the closest of which is 135 miles away in Ft. Worth), and since I should be writing twenty pages about Paul's opponents in Galatia, I will tell of my first encounter with the KK phenomenon.

The first place I ever set foot into one of these aromatic bakeries was, oddly enough, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I had gone there in August of 2001 to the National Campus Ministries Seminar at the University of Alabama (I had no idea at the time I would end up working there).

As ignorant as I was about the necessity of ordering the regular glazed variety off the assembly line, I, in my stupidity, asked for a cake donut out of the glass case. Of course, it was good, and I was eventually able to taste the glory of the glaze.

But my first experience was not all good. In fact, the more I think back on it, the more traumatic my memory becomes. My friends and I chose a seat that sat right next to the large window that overlooked the donut assembly line. I was impressed with this because we were right next to the "glaze waterfall" that all the donuts pass under on their way to the stomachs of overweight America. This was a fascinating process to watch and I realized that this was a huge part of the mystique of Krispy Kreme - freshly made right in front of you.

But then it happened. A single donut, riding in the shoulder lane of the donut highway, hit one of the uprights that supported the waterfall. It stuck in place while the others glided underneath. "Uh oh," I said. Everyone turned to look. The coming pileup was already in the making. Soon another pastry slammed full speed into the first disabled ring, jamming itself under the falling glaze. The carnage only continued from there, as other donuts had no other option but to ramp the second, third and fourth donuts, forming a golden dam that quickly disabled all traffic under the glaze bridge. By this time several of us pressed against the glass, staring in horror as the stream of pastricity innocently on their way to their cardboard homes were faced with sudden and certain death. Many chose suicide, hurling themselves over the side into the tiled abyss below. Some tried to desperately climb over the mass of doughy bodies to seek survival. It was all in vain. The carnage that lay before them, and the total helplessness on our part, created a tragedy of traumatic proportions. By the time it was all over, dozens of classic Krispy Kremes destined for certain glory and appreciation had met a horrific, premature end, never even realizing their calling as America's Favorite Donut. It was all so senseless. The horror. The horror.

I've had some professional counseling since then, but there are nights when I wake up in a cold sweat, the terrorizing vision of a donut screaming to his death, having not even seen his glaze yet, sweeping through my mind.

The only fitting thing I can think of is to honor their sacrifice by bringing a Krispy Kreme to Abilene.

Every now and then I feel like my head pops out of this strange and foreign world I'm living in right now and suddenly remembers with clarity all the fresh simplicity of things that are real. Maybe that's what happens at 2:45am? Perhaps Ruth is on to something.