rob’s place

Remember this photo from the Vietnam War? That girl was 9-year old Kim Phuc moments after napalm was dropped on her village.

Ever wonder what her story is? NPR published her essay:

I was 9 years old but I still remember my thoughts at that moment: I would be ugly and people would treat me in a different way. My picture was taken in that moment on Road No. 1 from Saigon to Phnom Penh. After a soldier gave me some drink and poured water over my body, I lost my consciousness.

Several days after, I realized that I was in the hospital, where I spent 14 months and had 17 operations.

But there is a happy ending. You can listen or read her essay on NPR.

Once before a flight a flight attendant was asking for volunteers to allow someone to swap seats with someone else. A voice a few rows behind us volunteered saying, “I will! I can’t be around children.”

Another time on a flight there was an extremely overweight man sitting a few rows before me and across the aisle. The guy in front of him reclined to take a nap. The man took his forearm and angrily pushed the seat upright. He also exchanged angry words with the guy in front of him.

In the Nairobi, Kenya airport, our flight was scheduled to leave just before midnight. After several delays because of mechanical reasons, the flight was canceled around 2 in the morning. We were put up in a hotel and told we’d all be rebooked in the morning. One father complained bitterly and loudly to the messenger. She didn’t make any decisions about the flight. Finally he yelled, “Think of the children! They are sleepy! What are they supposed to do?’

One day while taking photos at Disney for people, a father wanted his tired and bashful 2-year-old daughter to smile for the picture. She didn’t want to and was a bit winy. He said to her sternly, “If you don’t smile…” then he turned his head and whispered something into her ear. After that instead of smiling, she shrieked and cried.

But the worst of them all are we who think we are better than all of these people. We’re not. A dose of humility never hurt any of us.

Due to the ‘bump’ last night, I’m reposting some posts that were missing. I’m compiling many of them to make it easier though I’m going to lose the old links. oh well. whatever.

These are two posts on LOST that were missing…

Today Patricia and I are announcing our official retirement from Campus Crusade.

Some have asked about the word ‘retirement’. The way we see it is there are many different words to describe “not working for someone anymore”. We have these different words to describe motivation, context, and emotion. We decided this was the best word to describe it.

Check out our family blog for the details.

As you know by now, both my wife and I are retiring from our service with Campus Crusade. Though I don’t post a lot here about that part of our life, I thought you might at least be mildly interested in what our time has been like there. So we put together Our Staff Career Slideshow.

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Our next-door neighbors rock (especially after they started paying for lawn service)!

We’ve gotten to know them over the years and watch their kids grow up. And now the oldest, Logan, wants to go to Africa with his dad:

My name is Logan and I live in Orlando, FL and I’m 9 years old. I love seeing the videos of the children in Africa when my Dad goes on his trips to Kenya. I would like to go to Africa to tell African kids about God, to help Hope Academy and the kids there, and to help my Dad with his videos. I am raising money to be able to go to Kenya in July 2008, and any donations will go to help me reach my goal. Thanks for your help!

Before you pass all this off, I must ask you to at least take a minute to check out the video on his site. I’ve seen it a few times and it is just awesome.

There are a lot of books, reading plans, and online resources to help you read through the Bible in a year. Many of them move you back and forth between reading parts from the Old Testament and parts from the New Testament. I’m not really a fan of those because I feel like I’m missing the bigger story.

One of the things that almost every plan has is a checklist for every day (read this today, read this tomorrow). Though I’m a box checker, when it comes to reading just about any book, I can’t do it that way.

So I have my own plan by reading it, not cover-to-cover, but in chronological order with no check boxes! My reading the Bible chronologically plan (PDF) is one I found and tweaked a bit many years ago. I’ve made it available so you can print and fold the paper in half and use it as a bookmark…or for notes.

The idea is not to check boxes every day, but give yourself plenty of grace reading what you can when you can. However, to do it in a year you need to average 3-4 chapters a day (that’s just the math of it all).

I’ve only done it once many years ago but it was great. I’m planning to do it again in 2008. Here’s some tips to doing this:

1. Read a translation of the Bible that is easy to read. My favorite for this is the New Living Translation because it’s accurate and easy to read. You can read any version but the point here is to not make it hard on yourself (for me that would exclude the KJV (too hard) and The Message (a paraphrased book)).
2. Give yourself plenty of grace as you work through it. Some days I didn’t read, other days I read a lot. I never gave myself a hard time about it and ended up finishing it in about 10 months.
3. Read for the story, not the details. You’ll find a lot of details as you go, but the advantage of going in this order is you see the overall story. Read for that — more like a novel.
4. The most common complaint about something like this is reading books like Leviticus. Well, here’s my advice: read from a higher level. Don’t get bogged down into the details of the text. See the overall picture of how God wants to take care of His people.

So I’m going to give it another shot in 2008. Anyone want to join me? Just download and print the reading the Bible chronologically plan (PDF) and read along.

This 6-minute clip is actually very, very good. Enjoy.

YouTube - Little Drummer Warners

Last night I was on a Wikipedia Rabbit Trail. You ever been on one of those? You look up one thing then as you read you click on something else and before you know it you’re off on all sorts of tangents.

Well I do it sometimes and it’s kinda fun. I run across all sorts of interesting things as I piece together a bigger picture.

Last night it was about Christmas. Actually it started with ‘xmas’. I was looking for confirmation of my memory that it’s actually a ‘normal’ way to do it since X is our English version of the Greek letter chi which is the first letter in the word Christ. So X-mas is really shorthand for “Christ’s Mass” or the celebration/festival/service for Christ…and xians have been writing it like that for centuries!

Then I read about Yule. It’s the ‘pagan festival’ that Christmas ‘adopted’. In the Scandinavian area after the harvest was done and the days were short, they picked a time to have a winter festival usually starting around December 25. They started by burning a huge log and when the fire burnt out, the festival stopped. Often it took 12 days. During that time they exchanged gifts, sang, danced, decorated pine trees and used other evergreens like holly and mistletoe as decorations. When Christian missionaries went to the area, instead of telling them to stop the celebrations, they instead used the traditions as illustrations to tell the story of Jesus.

Something else I found interesting is how international our western Christmas traditions are. The Christmas tree is German, Santa Claus is Turkish (well, St. Nick was a Turk), Poinsettias are Mexican, and mistletoe is Scandinavian (though I think we came up with the Grinch).

It was the German, Martin Luther who first put candles on a Christmas tree (really, what was he thinking putting fire on a dead, dry tree?!?!). But protestants at the time didn’t celebrate Christmas much. They thought it was too Catholic. The Puritans in England took it to the extreme and so when they came to the New World in the 1600’s, they banned Christmas in Boston among other places. In fact, Christmas in both the Colonies and in England started to decline in popularity and it really wasn’t until two pieces of literature published in the early to late 1800s brought Christmas up out of the doldrums: the book A Christmas Carol and the poem Twas The Night Before Christmas.

I purposefully didn’t provide any links in this post. It’s all from memory from what I learned clicking around Wikipedia.

Try out your own Wikipedia Rabbit Trail. If you do, blog what you learn and track it back here.

Wikipedia Rabbit Trails can be fun!

BREAKING NEWS: Indonesia Sentences 41 Christian To Five Years Imprisonment, report | Indonesia | Asia/Pacific

An Indonesian court has sentenced 41 Christian leaders to five years imprisonment on charges of blasphemy because they openly prayed that Muslims “come to know Christ”…Criticizing Islam, and especially evangelism, are sensitive issues in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation. Almost 9 percent of its roughly 235 million people, are Christians, the rest mainly Muslims.

Yup. I did it this morning. 4 mm titanium ball.

The inevitable question is ‘why did you pierce your ear?’ so I thought I’d try and spell it out for you.

1. Just because. I’ve wanted to for a long time. You know, just ’cause.

2. I have to feed my rebellious side occasionally.

3. I want to begin my dream of becoming more bionic.

4. It reminds me of my commitment to God.

Maybe that sounds weird but there really is some truth to it. Hear me out…

Before today I only wore one piece of jewelry. It’s a gold ring that I wear on my left “ring finger”. I wear it because it’s a reminder of my commitment to my wife.

Starting today I am wearing a new piece of jewelry. It’s a titanium ball on my left ear lobe. I wear it because it’s a reminder of my commitment to my God.

When I see it, many thoughts go through my mind, but one of them is that reminder of my commitment to continually pursue God’s best for me.

There is a bit of a precedent too. In early Hebrew culture, slavery was a way of life. After six years slaves were allowed to leave. But if the slave gave up his freedom and wanted to stay a slave to his master, the master was to pierce his ear as a mark of that commitment and sacrifice given.

I recognize some of the cultural nuisances that it has even dating back to very early human civilizations. But I’m okay with that. Cultural mores change and adjust.

So this morning Patricia and I went to get it done at Claire’s. It really didn’t hurt at all. No blood either.

It didn’t bother me at all until she showed me how to clean it. Once I started wiggling it around I started to feel flush and so I stretched out on the floor for a few minutes.

Tough guy image out the door.

But there you go. That’s the story. Truth be told it’s been several years in the making.

I plan for it to stay there indefinitely. I guess until my body rejects the titanium or I wake up one day and think ‘that’s a stupid way to show your commitment to anything!’

So there you have it.

Reaction? Discuss.

YouTube - Doll Face

What does God think about breakfast? Well, let’s find out…

What to drink? Coffee…black:

Isaiah 5:20 (NASB)
Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!

In case you missed it, he’s saying that it’s evil to make dark things light by adding milk to coffee, and also adding sweet sugar to bitter coffee. It’s just supposed to be black.

And what to eat? Grits…salted with butter (oil):

Leviticus 2:13-16 (NASB)
Every grain offering of yours…you shall season with salt…you shall bring fresh…grits…for the grain offering of your early ripened things. You shall then put oil on it…The priest shall offer… its grits and its oil…as an offering by fire to the LORD.

Moral of the story? You should drink your coffee black and since God likes his grits with salt and oil (and what better oil for grits is there than butter?), you should have them that way also.

Oh, the other moral? Don’t take verses out of context. You can come up with all sorts of crazy things like this!