Time Travel, Kids, and VBS

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 “Always end the name of your child with a vowel…so that when you yell, the name will carry.”                    -Bill Cosby

The VBS Time Machine!

So I have been on a bit of a kid kick the past few posts, what with the turtle story and the rant about the park shooting and whatnot. In hindsight, I think it was all subconscious preparation for the week that started yesterday: Vacation Bible School – “Time Travel with Moses and Miriam”.

What every kid lies in bed dreaming about when school ends for the summer; where every parent can’t wait to drop their kids off so they can go golfing or to the spa; what every college graduate volunteers at in their spare time. Ok, maybe it’s only the graduates who work nights and have no lives during the day. Regardless, I get to lead thirty sugar-ridden 4 – 10 year olds in singing songs about Moses and Miriam during the campus chapel’s VBS this week. We’re using time machines to talk to ancient Hebrews, taking nature walks, making clay baskets for Baby Moses – the whole sha-bang. And after the first two days, I am invigorated. Continue reading →

Because You’re Never Too Old for Story Time

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I thought I would try something different today. If anyone is good at drawing, it definitely needs some more illustrations:

A real turtle that I saw the day after I originally published this post!

Once upon a time, there was a Turtle. He was born on a foggy, rainy day. When he poked his head out of the shell that had been his home for so many weeks, he felt a cool mist breeze over his little turtle body. He looked around at his brothers and sisters who were still in their eggs, and he decided to go exploring – after all, he was hungry!

What he didn’t know was that his mother had built the nest just a few feet away from a steep slope high above a stream. Continue reading →

Turn the News Back On

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In the movie Blood Diamond, Leonardo DeCaprio plays a diamond smuggler in the bloody, war-torn terrain of Sierra Leone. When his American journalist/romantic interest counterpart asks how and why so much unconscionable violence – rape of women, mutilation of children, abduction of children as child soldiers – can arise in this part of the world, Leo coolly responds, “T.I.A. This Is Africa.”

That’s the attitude: Don’t try and figure it out, just accept it and move on. Continue reading →

Good Jokes and Bad Timing

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I’m reading a book right now by Mark Twain called How to Tell a Story and Other Essays. In the course of explaining the importance of “the pause” and not laughing at your own punch line, he gives an example from a storyteller named Artemus Ward:

He [Ward] would say eagerly, excitedly, “I once knew a man in New Zealand who hadn’t a tooth in his head” –here his animation would die out; a silent, reflective pause would follow, then he would say dreamily, and as if to himself, “and yet that man could beat a drum better than any man I ever saw.”

As I read it, I so wanted to chuckle to myself and revel in this high humor from an American literary legend. The thing is, I don’t get it. Continue reading →

Suffer The Little Children?

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Just before sundown this past Wednesday, a few friends and I went to the first of Nashville’s popular Movies in the Park summer series. The film was 500 Days of Summer, featuring the inconsolably intoxicating Zooey Deschanele and the ever suave Joseph Gordon-Levitt. No matter how many times I see it, I still wish I could pull off a vest with half of the panache that seems to comes so naturally to him.

What’s been on my mind, though, is what happened shortly after we left. Continue reading →

Denominations (What Are They Good For?)

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As I continue planning the next year, one question keeps popping up: Why do we have denominations? Why Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist churches? And why the divisions within them? Southern Baptist, Cooperative Baptist, National Baptist, PCUSA, PCA, United Methodist, Evangelical Methodist, African Methodist Episcopal, and on and on. If you are not a member of one of these churches, you probably have not heard of half of these. It’s kind of like how you only know the difference between Death Cab for Cutie and Postal Service if you wear skinny jeans and vintage non-prescription glasses (I’m looking at you, Belmont). Continue reading →

Welcome…Now What?

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Here I am.

It’s 7 o’clock on a Thursday evening, and I am sitting in the same coffee shop I arrived at for lunch. I have been tirelessly tracking down churches that might host me for one month of next year. To be precise, I am looking for 11 churches, of 11 denominations, in 11 cities, from New York to Texas, and Birmingham to Seattle. I have five of them set in stone, and now it is just a matter of filling in the gaps. This is what my next year holds in store, and as I sit in the dim lighting of this Sumatra-infused room, authoring what feels like the hundredth letter to a prospective church, I fight to fend off the cold sweat of uncertainty. How did I get here? Well, it all started in July of 2010: Continue reading →