piercings

i now have a hole in my nose. an extra hole, that is.

This video with Eugene Cho and Soong Chan Rah is great. Talking about the Evangelical movement in America that's been shifting away from the dominant culture and how churches within marginalized cultures have been flourishing.

Interview: Soong Chan Rah from Eugene Cho on Vimeo.

Kids are amazing

Go read this. And then go check out PS22 on youtube.

Seriously.

Sigh

Hrmm. I have a really hard time with people not giving two weeks notice at their jobs. Now, I know that I have made some really stupid decisions in the past with regards to quitting jobs. However, I would like to think that I've learned from my mistakes. And its just frustrating when you end up screwed because someone else was bored and decided to just leave.
Are we all really such commitment-phobes?
And whatever happened to "doing all things as unto the Lord"?
Why is walking out on something, anything, celebrated these days?
Are we just bringing up a whole batch of people that quit whenever things get boring or tough?
And what about submitting to authority?

I am seriously disappointed.

Happy Easter!

Welp, its been a long while since I've blogged. Oops. Nothing very exciting has happened, except for these last two weeks.

So, an update. I went to London with Ashby and met her friend, Simone (don't get too confused, yet). We went to play called Three Days of Rain, definitely good. Uh, James MacAvoy was in it, kind of the best part. Otherwise we had all been to London multiple times before so we just wandered about. It was quite lovely.

I left them after two nights and traveled by bus up to Edinburgh. I love that city. I don't much care for London, but I adore Edinburgh, reminds me a lot of Seattle and Portland. Anyway, went to St. Columba's for Palm Sunday, that was lovely. Very simple. 

Ah, the interesting part of Edinburgh, if you've never had the pleasure of a visit, is that you basically can't get lost. Between the castle on the hill, the dozens of church spires and the huge valley in the middle of town, you pretty much always know where you are and how to get where you're going, in a general sense. Well, I got lost the first night trying to find my hostel. I made a slight miscalculation about its location and ended up wandering the streets extremely frustrated for an hour. Dragging my luggage. Did I mention the eight hour bus ride? Anyway, I pretty much just hung out in Edinburgh, wandered around. Went up to the castle at night, that was really pretty. 

So again, after two nights I left by train to Inverness. I could really really live forever in Inverness. Or actually, just outside of it on a small farm. I am in love with that place. The river Ness runs through the middle, and grass grows all the way down the bank and there are daffodils blooming along the shore! It couldn't be more idyllic. And the river is clean. Its beautiful. 

I somehow got a single room at the hostel in Inverness which was really nice since I was spending three nights there and was getting tired of strange people. It was really good to have a little hole in which to hide at times. So one day I wandered the town and took pictures. I discovered that the Episcopalian church there was built by some distant relative, back in the 1830's. Also, the castle there was continually under siege and this latest castle was only built in 1833-1836. Its on a hill, but there's another hill right next to it, so not very defensible with the invention of catapults and trebuchet's. 

The following day I went up on a tour of Loch Ness, got to see and wander about Urquhart castle and then went to the Loch Ness Experience Center. Urquhart castle is really cool. Its all run down and falling apart because it was abandoned and partially destroyed during the raids of the MacDonalds, and rather than have it fall into the MacDonald's power, the gate house was destroyed. Anyway, its an interesting bit of Scottish Highland history. 

After my three nights at Inverness, I went by train to Manchester. Never ever go to Manchester. Its a horrible, sad, decaying city. It was once a prosperous city during the Industrial Revolution, but now, with most industry having moved into developing countries Manchester is declining. And really, the architecture isn't even very pretty, so there's not much of a redeeming quality. Lots of their museums are free, but as it was Good Friday, they were closed. Except the museum of science and industry. So I spent my morning there exploring and then just staying in the hostel. Sad, but there really wasn't much to do. 

After a boring two nights, I almost missed my bus because I again, made a miscalculation as to where I was going, but made it just in time and traveled to Oxford. Where I now sit in my sister's (Samone) room. She's napping and so I'm updating my blog. 

Yesterday we wandered about the city, she showed me the highlights and I followed along. And this morning we went to Easter Matins at Christ Church. Wow. That cathedral is amazing. On a side note, the stairs where the first years wait in the first Harry Potter are in Christ Church, and the huge dining hall. There will be pictures.

In conclusion, I love England and Scotland, Easter, slight drizzles and relaxing.

Linds, still haven't seen your beloved. I'll let you know if I do.

The End.

Tardy-Pants

I'm sure my orthopedist was well intentioned, but he still tried to break my shoulder in half. Also. I shall have an MRI once tardy-pants Workman's Comp approves it. And my shoulder seriously hurts. And it almost made me cry. And I didn't cry when I initially dislocated it. I think my orthopedist thinks I'm a pansy. Except maybe he needed to use his listening ears when I said it gets stuck and it hurts.

Sigh. This is actually almost as bad as that first week.

A Rose Blooms on the First of December

I was knitting this morning, listening to a little Ten Shekel Shirt and looking out into our backyard, when I realized that we had a stubborn little rose bush, blooming.
It got me thinking about our conversations last night about hope, and I began to see how God often gives us the hope we will need to get through the winters of our lives before the winter even arrives. Its hard because we can often lose sight of the hope given to us, and we often don't see the way God was working until long after our next spring. But I can see that truth in my own life, that God supplied the hope I would need to survive the winter of my life thus far, and that now, sometime in the spring or summer of my life, things have become more clear. I couldn't see it during the winter (that's the thing about winter, it's blinding) but several years later, I can see how I needed to go through that time, I can see how God was pruning me. Changed metaphors, oops!
Its just interesting to me that God would give us hope before we even knew we needed it. But I guess that's just how He works, supplying our needs long before we know what we need.