A Psalm 148 Christmas

Here’s that sermon note I mentioned in a previous post. I’ll leave it to you to make sense of these notes. Again, they made perfect sense to me when I wrote them and preached from them. Reading over this again today, I think I oversimplified the descent/ascent categories of things created. The great sea creatures of the deep occurring prior to forces of nature strikes me today as interesting. I don’t think I noticed it when I made these notes. Of course Zechariah’s statement connects the psalm to the Christ in 148:14. The last shall be first.

Metaphor

Metaphor

Apparently someone named William Nicholson wrote, “We read to know we’re not alone.” Supposedly the remark is from a play about the life of C.S. Lewis, Shadowlands, and I probably first heard it in the film of the same name.  Then I forgot where I heard it until I looked it up late morning today before writing all this.

About a hundred years ago, when I was a small child living with my younger brother and my mom in a 1920’s cut-rate, smallish Mission Revival style bungalow on 18th Street below Mesa in San Pedro, California in the days before area codes.  That’s when I first began to read – to bend my mind in earnest to read.  

We were my father’s second family (or, who knows, possibly his third or fourth – he was capable of living double and triple lives if it suited him).  Dad came to the door and I crowded beside my mother at the door impulsively the way little kids respond to anything like a telephone bell or a knock on the door.  My dad was excited in a happy way.  He held up a stack of papers for me to examine, pointed to some words about midway down, and asked, “What does that say?”

What he’d pointed to was his name on the title page of his doctoral dissertation.  I couldn’t read his name and tried to sound it out, couldn’t, felt ashamed.  I remember that.  

Dad flipped out and started yelling at my mom, cursing.  The gist of what he said was, “What are they teaching him at that school” – a parochial school where my mom taught to offset tuition.  Dad used profanity.  Mom started crying and pleading with Dad to understand that I’d only recently started 1st Grade (we’d been out of the country during the year I would have been in Kindergarten). 

And I can still recall wondering why it was that I started crying as soon as my mother started crying.  Dad wasn’t angry with me and I didn’t feel sad.  I remember wondering about that strange circumstance and connection and feeling dissatisfied with it.

I read because my father programmed me to read using the trauma method of child training.  I didn’t know that’s what had happened. I was only consciously aware of the strange connection-with-my-mom thing.  I read to make my father happy and keep my mother from crying.

Different

I was a different kind of child – I spoke my first sentence at about nine months.  “Look Mommy, doggy eat eat all up.”  That sentence is recorded in a scrapbook documenting my first year of life.

Years later, during elementary school, I was subjected to an intelligence test.  I have a freakishly high intelligence quotient.  The kind of I.Q. based on actual calculations of the sort that doesn’t factor in leftist fantasies about correcting for whiteness or ‘privilege’. Several standard deviations above the mean, within the standard error of measure.

I wish my dad had come unglued about a math problem because if he had, I’d probably have become a math prodigy of some sort and mind-numbingly rich due to having weaponized human consciousness or something easier like Tesla’s electric-power-out-of-the-air or perpetual motion underwater drives or how to travel faster than the speed of light.  I have worked out some basis for understanding the nature of time and human experience of and function within same.  Etc. But my point is, the ability to read.  The ability to comprehend pretty much anything another human mind can devise and put into words.  Big whoop, right?

Another problem with high intelligence is that you tend to think everyone’s like you, and when they don’t understand what’s obvious to you, or what you think is simple, straightforward communication, it’s damnably frustrating.  It’s easy to become embittered against people who are just being the people they are and genuinely aren’t able to grasp what seems simple to you.  More difficult but right is finding a way to show kindness toward them, and a lot of the time that involves wishing them well from a safe distance.

Watching TV and Reading

When I was young, I had asthma, severe allergies. Those conditions imposed limitations upon my activities.  I remember frequent trips to the local emergency room and “adrenaline shots.”  Additionally, I was sick a lot. The kind of sickness that results in feeling weak and barfing.  I spent a lot of time indoors and home from school due to illness.  

I watched a lot of TV.  I read all the time and also drew pictures pretty much constantly.

I still read and sometimes still draw.  If you look, you can find some of my drawings in various posts on this blog.  

Over the past 10 plus years have watched TV shows by the season on various subscription services.  I watched a couple of seasons of The Pretender TV series.  More than once, I wish I’d been sold to a research institute and raised to fulfill my intellectual potential.  The renowned Karen Horney famously opined that the first evil children perceive is parental indifference and I think she was right.  To this day, I have no idea to what purpose my parents “raised” me.  

Back when I had a Facebook page, in the About section, I described myself as the “product of a Cold War era eugenics experiment that went unreported in the major scientific journals of the day.”   That’s a metaphor, right?  I use metaphor to cope with life as I experience life, to help explain and make tolerable that experience.

Right now, I’m reading a Karen Traviss novel entitled “Going Grey” about the product of military industrial biological experiment that was carried to full term and allowed to live.  Odd it strikes me that someone’s written a novel about something similar to what I in dark good humor wrote about myself.  Or maybe it’s pretty common to feel that way.  Possibly there’re a lot of us who feel we may as well have been grown in a tank. 

Complaining

Because at one point in my life – 25 to 30 years ago – I got tired of hearing myself whine about “I never chose to be born into this family” and “Why should I have to suffer because of (whatever I wanted to believe was someone else’s fault goes here)?”  Because of that, and my complaining was constant enough it broke through to my conscious awareness as an irritant, I found a way to stop it.  I asked God to provide me exactly the circumstances I found so objectionable – parents, family situation, life circumstances.  And I invited the Almighty to join me, to experience all that with me.  

Emotions are Shit

recently heard a preacher declare that worship equals an amalgam of emotion and truth, but I don’t think emotion is necessarily a component of worship.  I think human beings likely apprehend and respond to the majesty and glory of God in a variety of ways.  Worship is transformative and elevating.

Emotions are the byproduct of neurobiological functioning that involves awareness and the ability to know one is having an experience – like feces and urine are material byproduct of the way we, as organisms acquire/process nutrients through feeding and digesting.  We live and experience and produce emotions just like we eat and process nutrients and are left with waste matter.  Emotions are a variety of waste.

Maybe not in every instance are emotions of no value.  Sometimes in the moment we experience an emotion that tells us that something in the circumstances we inhabit is problematic or is okay or is better than okay.  But the emotions we’re left with after an experience versus those we experience in the moment are pretty much shit.  Offload it discretely, clean up, and move on.   

If you’ve read this far, maybe you’re not the only one of your species on this planet regardless of what it feels like to be you.

Three Nahum Sermon Notes/Outlines

What Was I Thinking?

About a hundred years ago when I attended a Southern Baptist seminary, I remember thinking, while sitting in James Nogalski’s Old Testament survey class, “What’s the deal with this judgment against Nineveh/Assyria?” Then I remembered the Jonah narrative and reckoned Nahum only made sense in light of Jonah.

I remember asking up about this in class and getting no good response from Dr. Nogalski that I can now recall. The discussion that ensued briefly among my classmates, however, I recall pretty well. Most of those who spoke up simply made the usual thoughtless remarks about all people in all places at all times owing God fealty and worship. True but not sufficient to make sense of Nahum. As if the scribes were incapable of applying their minds and making rational sense as they recorded and organized prophecies and history.

Of course the prophets and the written narratives of their work and utterances have their origins in the mind of God and have value in a standalone sense but they have been organized and exist in history and in the canon of scripture in relationship to one another. However, to leave off thought and query out of a devotionalistic failure to apply mind to the obvious relationships between concepts, events, prophetic statements found in scripture is a kind of false worship and perceptual diminution of the mind and work of God.

So, why would YHWH judge so harshly the people of Nineveh and the nation ruled from that locale any more than any other Gentile nation? Because years before, the people of Nineveh repented and turned to YHWH at the preaching of Jonah. A different relationship had been established by YHWH with the people of Nineveh through preaching of Jonah versus, say, the Cimmerians or the Ethiopians.

What is this stuff?

The first of these is obviously an introductory outline. I don’t know where the other two fell in my series. The one entitled The Problem with the Church @ Nineveh may have been a segue between my series on Jonah and that on Nahum. The third, brief note or outline? Possibly early in the series? Dunno.

About that introductory outline – I remember saying stuff like, “We’ve got a lot material to get through, so let’s get started.” Very inspirational delivery.

I haven’t line by line gone back over these notes. That said, I know everything I wrote made perfect sense to me when I wrote it and made at least okay if maybe complicated sense when I preached from it to the congregation. Whether this will make a lick of sense to anyone reading this blog or have any beneficial effect in the lives of that population, I have no idea.

Some introductory material

Relevant to a discussion of how a congregation Gentile converts to YHWH at Nineveh posed a problem to the religious establishment at Jerusalem

From the series on Nahum

Sermon Notes

Working and Coping

Since about mid-march, I’ve been working from home. There’re some pros and cons, I’ve found, associated with the arrangement. To the good it’s easy to get to the gym every morning, workout, get back to the house and ready for work on time. I’ve been doing gym workouts six or seven days a week since the gym reopened several months ago. Lunchtime bike rides are easy to manage, but usually less than four miles.

My reason for buying that grandmotherly green 2008 Prius has been mooted. I don’t have to drive anywhere, much. Still, the car’s cheap to operate and pleasant if not very interesting to drive.

Working from home becomes a grind. Very little variety relative to daily experience gets old. Going to the gym every day gets old. Riding around Burnt Down Plantation Estates gets old. Wearing a Dickie’s T-shirt, cargo shorts and Keen sandals with socks every day gets old. I have no reason to wear anything else and it would feel stupid to dress differently to stay home.

We’ve still got stuff in boxes in the spare bedroom, sunroom and garage from my mom’s estate. The clutter is annoying and renders whole portions of the house nonfunctional. We’ve rearranged things in the house to incorporate some of Mom’s furniture into our living space. Before Mom died, we’d planned to have some remodeling done, and clearing space for that’s been stuck at the partway mark for months.

Sermon Notes

While clearing out the computer hutch that’s now become Caution-Lady’s craft hutch in the spare bedroom, I found a stack of about six or seven outlines I’d written for a series of sermons I preached a few years ago.

Update – I found the notes and they are mostly related to my series on Nahum. One’s for a sermon on Psalm 148 – it’s a Christmas message. And there’re a couple of pages of scrawled thoughts about similarities between Jesus and Jonah. Another’s a page of notes for a sermon on the nature of reality that I think’s already posted here.

This is not Hell

I think they’re from a too lengthy series on Jonah, then addressing Nahum because you can’t make sense Nahum without Jonah. All of that was to necessary to understand that Paul’s ministry is that Jonah in reverse. And here lately I think I’ve begun to understand that part of what was wrong with Jonah or Jonah’s “bad” is that he wanted the ministry of Christ – wanted to usurp the role of the Messiah.

If you pay attention while reading the Gospels or if you just read them through times enough to notice – Christ makes mention of Jonah repeatedly and also lives out some of the events of Jonah’s life. For instance, falling asleep in the boat while a storm threatens to overwhelm it and the crew, afraid, awakens Jesus and demands he does something to make it stop. Elvis Costello reckons Heaven is Hell in reverse, but he was mistaken. Theological patterns don’t always occur in binary symmetry.

I’ll see if I can get the notes scanned and posted here this weekend.

Two Years

Two years without formal ministry or mission. I yammer about this and related matters as follows:

Around two years ago, I stepped away from formal Christian ministry. Ours was a micro-church and our congregation focused on exegesis of Scripture, our theology Reformed. Since that time, we’ve regularly attended worship services with first one congregation and now another, closer to where we live. Regarding congregational commitment, I’m committed to worshiping with other believers who evidence a Reformed understanding of Scripture.

The fellow who preached at the first congregation had a Reformed theology and an approach to preaching that was similar to my own –

A passage of scripture is like a room and the preacher’s job is to talk about what’s in the room and if something’s left out of that description, the job’s not done. The congregation, guided by the Holy Spirit, figures out for itself what, if anything, to do with what’s in the room. It’s a good idea, if you have the ability, to go so far as to talk about where the fabric on the drapes was sourced and about the pattern on the rug – it’s derivation and meaning. Exhaustive is good. Superficial is bad.

There might not be an obvious or attenuated application that preacher can make clear in a sermon. What matters is that the passage of Scripture is an expression of the mind of God and listening to it, reading it, getting hung up on what it’s saying is transformative to the believer. Might also be transformative to the reprobate by turning such away from the things of God.

That made for some long sermons, and the guy at the first congregation usually started his off with a 10 minute re-cap of the previous week’s sermon. That was my only complaint about his sermons. The re-cap. He and his family returned to the mission field – we never became friends, but I liked them and have prayed for them since they left.

The congregation we’ve been worshiping with the past several months has a preacher who’s also Reformed and does exegetical, to a degree, preaching. His messages tend to be heavy on application. The second guy seems like a decent sort – a normal, non-self-aggrandizing individual. What I like about his work is that he uses Scripture to interpret Scripture. His sermons start on time and end on time – I like that, too, although it’s not super important to me. Regarding sermon time – it takes however long it takes to deliver the message.

Regarding my own life sans formal ministry or mission, I’m okay with it. I never was fully convinced that I met scriptural qualifications for elder. In the grossly problematic category, I find:

1. Do I manage my own home well? Not as well as I ought to – I procrastinate too much.
2. Is my child an unruly heathen? Yeah, sometimes I really wonder whether the kid’s numbered among the elect. I have explained the Gospel to him and taught him to search the Scripture, to pray without ceasing and call upon the name of the Lord.
3. Am I the husband of one wife? Dunno. About a hundred years ago, in California, I lived with a young woman for a couple of years. We were never formally married, but we lived together and expected the same level of commitment each from the other in terms of fidelity that’s expected of spouses. But we never pretended to be married. We stayed friends for a long time afterward and there’s more to the story but not for the telling here.
4. Am I pugnacious? Sometimes I flare up and express anger in a way that could lead to fisticuffs although I have no interest in forcing submission to my will or views.

I remember when I left government work – nothing important, but work that vested me with the authority of the state in some instances – I felt naked without identification in that employment. That cloak of authority.

Leaving formal ministry was a little like that only when I did, I knew I wasn’t walking away from the faith or the obligation of service to my eternal sovereign. That said, I think I’m unlikely to formally join another congregation or to engage in a formal “ministry” w/in any such conceptual structure.

In some respects, I think I’m unreachable by what passes for air-quote Christianity as so much of what that entails is irrelevant to me and my family. Sometimes I wish there was some relevance or that I had some sense of belonging in a congregational group, but I’m not willing shelve my discernment and freedom in Christ.

Life Since June

As my June 2019 post indicated, I’ve been focused much more on living life than photographing or writing about it.

Did I mention it here?  In June, for my wife’s birthday, I got it into my head to bake her a cake.  She requested a cherry chip cake made from scratch.  I ended up more assisting her than making it myself, but she was pleased.  It was good enough to eat.

Frosting also from scratch

Turned out the cake was edible

In July, my family and I motored north to my wife’s family farm in Indiana (I always hate writing ‘in Indiana’ but this time will not find another way to present that data) where my wife was briefly reabsorbed by her family, I spent a lot of time bicycling, and our son hung out with and bonded with his cousins.  I crashed or fell off my bike twice in the same day injuring a different shoulder each time and am still feeling the residual effects of one of the injuries.  Both falls were stupid and each was my own fault – while annoying, that truth actually does help me accept the ongoing pain.   Rode to Muncie, Prairie Creek Reservoir, small municipalities thereabouts.  I saw what looked like a heroes’-gate shrine of some sort.  No hero this writer, I didn’t walk through the gate although I found it open.

Indiana chip and seal road

Nazarene church parking lot where I crashed the first time.  Don’t ask.

Muncie Chic-Fil-A.  I eat there every year.

Only one graffiti snapshot.  Grassroots Christianity is an interesting phenomenon.

Patriotic display in a poor community.  I really liked it.

Heroes’ gate

Sometime during the intervening months, my car hit 222,222 miles, but I snapped the odometer photo at 222,223 – missed it by that much.

Missed it by that much…

Last month, my son and I finally painted the mailbox’s weathered, white wooden post.  My mother has averted her eyes in shame the past 5 – 6 years when she’s come over to the house to visit due to the deficient pride in ownership that neglect has evidenced.  The month before, I finally finished sanding out the damage perpetrated by our yard’s squirrels upon three of my 2005 Pouch RZ96’s cockpit ribs.  I’d left the kayak assembled outdoors and neglected it during a dark period in my life when I worked in an agency maybe best described as the unfortunate-kid-from-the-dysfunctional-family-down-the-street of law enforcement.  About three weeks ago, I re-varnished the squirrel damaged ribs.

I’ve been writing out my thoughts and ideas – working on a conceptualization of a variety of human interaction I refer to as “Shit Room Theory.”  It’s not ready for publication yet and I’m trying to figure out how to manage a lecture on the subject for my YouTube channel.  That said, in its embryonic form, the theory’s been of help to two or three individuals facing a variety of unpleasantness.

After having been in my “new” office since March of this year, I finally last month admitted to myself I was unable to make sense of the room’s shape, its space, for the purposes of hanging my stack of artwork and arranging my furniture.  Once I’d done that, I asked a family friend if she could help me out with the office and within the space of about 4.5 hours, she’d corrected and made sense of my office’s decor – I simply followed instructions and moved things, sorted clutter.  The woman’s a genius.  If it wasn’t a breach of my company’s rules, I’d post a couple of photos to prove it.

Within a couple of days of that, a family very dear to us relocated to Helena, Montana.  Theodore Zachariades has taken a position preaching at a Reformed Baptist congregation not far from that capitol as well as working with a Christian polemics website, Pulpit & Pen.  Although I haven’t had much contact with the Theodore and his family in the past year and a half, my world feels emptier with them hundreds of miles distant.  Not gone, as the Expanded Universe Mandos have it, just marching far away.

Yesterday morning, I assembled the RZ96 and with my son’s help loaded it onto my Volvo’s roof-racks and drove to a nearby slough with a put-in at a rural city park.  I gave the boy the good water shoes and wore a many year’s old pair from Wal-Mart that tore up while we were lining the boat through shallows.  This was his first time in a kayak, and he’d been nervous because he supposed the behemoth unstable.  By day’s end, however, he was comfortable enough to stand while underway to better view the scenery.  I hope you have all been well and that you enjoy the photos.

My son saw what he referred to as a “bees’ nest.” We steered well clear of this hazard.

Second lunch stop.  Dunno whether these were piers from bygone footbridge or part of an equally past-tense dam of some sort.

In the shallows.  That’s a Klepper paddle probably my age.  We did some umbrella sailing early on.  My son didn’t think it would work and was amazed when it did.

This is how I look when I’m smiling.  Obligatory selfie.

Church-Hopping

My wife says she thinks we will get a reputation for church-hopping.  We’ve recently left a congregation we’d associated with for about the past nine years and where I’d served as a Sunday School teacher, elder and sort of co-pastor, and where my wife had played keyboard.  Before that, we’d been part of another congregation where my wife and I had both taught Sunday School and where I’d served as a deacon.  Dunno, maybe anything shy of 20 years with the same congregation indicates instability vis-a-vis ability to build and maintain relationships with other members of a congregation as well as relative to congregational authority and government.  I can see a case for that.

On the other hand, there’s discernment and a freedom, within the Body of Christ, to exercise discernment in regard to leadership trends and changes in what’s considered acceptable.  Also, there’re choices mandated by conscience as one develops biblical categories to make sense of behaviors, statements, trends, and other circumstances or conceptual “currents” that may push against and enswirl Christians in a local congregation.

Something I try to teach those of my clients who are more artistically minded is this:

• If you’re going to color inside the lines, try to ensure
• they’re lines you’ve drawn, yourself, or
• they’re lines that make rational sense to you.

Too often within a religious context we fail to exercise our competence to make sense of what we see, what we hear and what we experience.  The “wolves” the scriptures warn about take advantage of that tendency and often succeed in bringing the local congregation under their own authority creating categories of behavior and contribution to the wolf’s own well-being that are substituted for scripturally grounded Christian faith and practice.  That, in spite of the fact that the scriptures of Old and New Testament never once adjure the elect to pretend about anything.  It was Christ who said, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

Back to the Christov-Tenn church-hopping family – during the past several weeks, we’ve visited with four different congregations.  One of them, last week, I attended solo as my wife and son were out of town.  My wife told me, “You can visit that one by yourself.”  Turns out she was right about that one.  Today, we plan to return to a nearby church we’ve already been to and see what their Sunday School classes are like.  After this congregation, we’ve got one other we plan to visit with.  And who knows?  Maybe we will become aware of some others we should also visit.

Friends Far Away

This morning, I got up early so I could get to the gym before first light.  Another weekend with crap weather – rain.  We’ve had A LOT of rain here in Southern Middle Tennessee this year.  Last week – Monday through Friday – was mostly sunny with temperatures not super cold.  But most weekends, we’ve had rain.  That’s what is expected again this weekend – more rain.

I didn’t make it to the gym this morning, though.  After paying a bill online, I checked my email and read an email update from the Gibello family.  I’ve mentioned them before on this site.  My son still asks about them and remembers their visit and their camper trailer, which he thought was pretty cool.  My wife and I agreed to make what for us is a fairly large, one-time donation (in addition to our small monthly commitment) because while we’re looking for a congregation to worship with, we’re not doing regular local-church giving.

Friends from the Chattanooga area are coming up to visit this afternoon and when my son woke up this morning, he talked about the Gibello family, confusing them with the family that’s actually spending the afternoon with us.  Odd, huh?  I hadn’t mentioned that I’d just been reading Melissa’s blog posts from her journal.  My son enjoyed looking at the photos of life in PNG, thought the stilt house was cool, thought using a leaf-hut outhouse might be problematic, and he thought having a large river near the house would be “kind of creepy, actually.”

Better Motivation, Thanksgiving, Living an Ordinary Life in an Ordinary Way.

Motivation

For about the past three or four weeks, on weekends, I’ve been consistently getting up around 4:00 am and either riding my bike or driving to the gym Saturdays and Sundays.  Been a little hit or miss before that.  No idea why I’ve had better motivation recently than formerly.  My doctor told me about a year ago I should concentrate on strengthening my back and rotator-cuffs to alleviate bilateral shoulder pain he attributed, in part, to having overdeveloped my pectorals.  But to look at me, you wouldn’t think so.   Still, I’ve complied with his advice and my posture has improved as well as, a little bit, that shoulder pain.

My workouts have lasted about an hour and a half, and I incorporate legs and abs, some tricep and chest, with my primary lat, back, and bicep work.  Am I a glorious specimen of beautiful middle-aged masculinity?  Not so much, although I feel better – it’s good to feel strong.   I’m gaining weight, but my clothes still fit, so some of that must be muscle.

Thanksgiving

This was our year to spend Thanksgiving with my wife’s family but we stayed home for the holiday because of my work schedule.  We spent a really pleasant day with my family, instead.  Friday, my wife finished decorating the house for Christmas and my son and I went for a bike ride around the neighborhoods.  We stopped by and visited my godparents and then rode home when the boy looked like he was about to fall asleep.  He’s not ridden much over the past couple of months, so he had a hard time riding back up hill.

Ordinary

By some miracle or fluke of predestination and providence, I turned out not to be a complete monster.  I’ve written in this space, at some time or other, that for me or someone like me, the great adventure is to live the ordinary life in an ordinary way.  You can probably not grasp how unimaginable an outcome that seemed for me when I was young or how much joy it brings me now.  It’s what I’m daily most thankful for – my wife, son, our health, meaningful work for both my wife and myself, a modest house in a modest neighborhood, self-directed recreational activities like cycling, paddling, strength training, reading, a small and extremely Calvinistic congregation where we are accepted and maybe for the most part liked and to which we contribute by participation, prayers, offerings.  Also my extended family – much more important to me now in middle age than it seemed when I was a young man.

I have a lot to be grateful for and I hope you do, too.

Early Mornings but Little Motivation

I got up around 4:00 a.m. this morning and yesterday morning planning to get a cup of coffee and ride my bike to the gym, but instead, both yesterday and today, I had my coffee and read the news.  This morning I think I will work out here at the house, but yesterday I engaged in no fitness activities whatsoever.  Did some other stuff like help out a neighbor and attend my son’s first soccer game of the season, then socialized with other parents afterward at the local Chic-fil-A restaurant.  I almost never socialize with anyone, but sort of enjoyed the time I spent with both my own family and others from the sportsfield group.

My wife, who earlier in the morning looked after her friend’s three young children d/t a family emergency, wanted me to check an email we received to determine whether we’d had our data compromised in the recent Equifax data breach and I got side-tracked deleting some 2200 emails from the family email account my wife uses.  There’re probably about that many more that need purged.  No, we didn’t get any Equifax notification.

Finally, I tore myself away from the computer and drove out to my mechanic’s garage on the off-chance that he’d be there working on a Saturday.  He often does work Saturdays and holidays, but doesn’t answer the phone on those days.  The car I’ve been driving since my green ’98 XC70 was totaled last summer by a young woman who had lterally gone off her meds a week or two prior to the wreck.

Apparently some previous owner had a mechanic (or did it himself) who hard-wired one of the low-been headlight bulbs.  Now, after seven years, it’s gone out.  I ordered some replacement bulbs to change them out, myself, but found yesterday morning the wired-in problem.  Hence the need for professional intervention.  I may drive out the garage again, today, because the place was closed up when I got there, yesterday.

On the way back to the house, I stopped at a produce stand and got my wife some tomatoes for BLT sandwiches.  Our backyard garden hasn’t produced much.  Three green tomatoes out there, now.  Not much else besides, although the various plants seem to be okay.  About a 30 mile round trip, but not completely wasted.  I hate driving around with a headlight out – it feels shameful not having something that basic tended to.

Did I mention I’ve been reading a lot, this year?  Mostly Star Wars “Legends” novels – way more entertaining than the lame SJW-inspired Disney sponsored novels that are now, supposedly, “canon.”  By “reading a lot” I mean wasting a lot of time reading novels like some people eat candy.  My mind is probably getting fat and lazy and my brain fit for maybe the glass-jar equivalent of soft, fast-food and ice-cream stained couch.  Did I mention I had a milk-shake yesterday at lunch.  See?  It’s not just my brain that’s deteriorating here.

My wife reports my son has complained that I’ve been spending too much time reading and not enough time playing with him – hunting each other with Nerf guns outside Son-on-Scooter versus Dad-on-Foot dodge-the-scooter driveway game; backyard target shooting with the Tippman 98 (ours has been modified for killing grackles); building with Lego blocks, etc.  So, late yesterday afternoon when my son was too worn out from a day playing soccer and running around outside with friends while watching other teams’ games, I got another Mojang account so he and I could multi-play Minecraft on our LAN.  THAT was pretty time-consuming.

Next week, I’m scheduled to preach at our congregation’s worship meeting.  I don’t think I’m very good at that kind of speaking.

I think part of what’s getting in the way of my preferred leisure activities is that I know I’ve got two or three responsibilities I’ve got to carry out and have been procrastinating about getting them done.  That’s weighing on me and obstructing the clarity of purpose and function that equals motivation I seem to’ve been lacking recently.  To the good, I haven’t been binge-watching series on Netflix.

That’s all for today.