Bible Study

The One Where…

VinceLeave a comment

Last Thursday and Friday was the annual Global Leadership Summit put on by Willowcreek. This is my sixteenth time to attend, and it’s still two of my favorite days of the year. In honor of GLS, let’s talk about … well, let’s just talk and maybe we’ll see at the end what we talked about.

Today we’re going to look at a couple of episodes in the life of a man named Peter. Or Simon. Or Cephas. He had a lot of names (he wasn’t in witness protection as far as we know), but we’ll call him Peter from here on out.

Movies

Both Sides Now1

VinceLeave a comment

My wife and I have been working our way through a several-year-old TV show on Netflix, the place where old TV shows go to die. This particular show titles all of it’s episodes “The <something> Job,” and last night was “The Rashomon Job”. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Oooh, the Rashomon job.

Her: What’s Rashomon?

Me: Oh my. Honey, I have clearly failed you. Akira Kurosawa?

Her: Who?

Me: Oh my.

Music / Spiritual Journey

That Was Sloppy and I Didn’t See It Coming

Vince1 Comment

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.

Random

Nifty Fifty

Vince1 Comment

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.

Movies

Learning about ourselves…

VinceLeave a comment

… 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.

Family

Pickin’ & Grinnin’

VinceLeave a comment

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.