That Was Sloppy and I Didn’t See It Coming

Several months ago1 at my church we sang a new to me song. The song made mention of a “sloppy wet kiss” and I thought that was interesting but didn’t have time to think much about it since the next line was already being sung.

Heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss

A week or three later we sang the song again, only this time the sloppy wet kiss went missing, and I thought that was even more interesting. It was interesting enough I spent the rest of the song hitting the Internet to find out what the deal was.

Nifty Fifty

Fifty years seems like a long time until you’ve been alive that long. By the time you’ve been married that long, it seems even shorter, or so I’ve been told. In the case of Bob and Lyndy (aka Lynda; we’re still looking into whether there was some legal trouble that caused her to change her name) Beams, it seems like only a week, or so the pictures would appear to indicate.

Someone asked why the invitation to their 50th celebration showed a picture of Lyndy with her son — it turned out to be a picture of Lyndy with Bob from their youth, but she hasn’t changed a lick.

Learning about ourselves…

… from the Inside Out.

The last ten to fifteen years has been hard on a movie lover in America. Michael Bay became a thing. Judd Apatow became a thing. Sequelitis became an even bigger thing than it already was, and sequels, as we all know, aren’t as good as the original, which is bad when the original wasn’t very good in the first place.

So, these days, I wait for two things — Christopher Nolan and Pixar.

Pickin’ & Grinnin’

There’s an old joke that goes something like, “You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your family.” Or maybe I made that middle part up. Anyway, the point is supposed to be that you don’t really have a choice about who your family is.

But that’s not always true.

Thirty years ago, I looked around in our church’s vestibule (that our church had a vestibule tells you a lot, and that we called it a vestibule tells you even more) and saw the prettiest three-year-old I’d ever laid eyes on. We toss the word “breathtaking” around a bit too much (“You keep usin’ that word…”, Inigo would tell us), but she truly was.

The Last Step

On our visit to Cambodia a couple of months ago to see the WCG (don’t worry, we saw his parents and our other kids in Cambodia, too), we went to a magnificent, magical, and mystical place for kids. No, Disney Cambodia isn’t (yet?) a reality, this place is called Kids City.

Kids City is ten-stories of fun. Laser tag, go-karts, bumper cars, playgrounds, science galleries, and plenty of other thrills for kids of all ages. And… clip-and-climb.

Clip-and-climb is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a climbing gym with all manner of different climbing stations. The climber puts on a harness, clips onto an auto-tightening rope at the chosen station, and heads for the clouds.

Reborn

As a nation, we tend to be lovers of second chances, especially when it comes to talented athletes that play for our team. But it extends to the business world, too — Apple’s rise from being thirty days away from bankruptcy to the  company with the largest capitalization in the world in just a few years, or GM’s rise from the brink (with a little government help).

In the spiritual realm, Jesus called our ultimate second chance “being reborn” or being “born again” (John 3:3), and said it was the only way to the kingdom of God. Nicodemus wasn’t sure what He meant, and I’m not sure many of us do, either. 

In the context of this post, “reborn” refers to what’s happening to the blog formerly known as The Rice Paddy Two.