Presby-Musings

I have to confess that I haven't really watched the Winter Olympics .  I watch SportsCenter, which tells me everything I need to know about the Olympics without having to watch Bob Costas --or whoever is replacing Bob Costas since he got pink eye (probably from his hotel room--I hear the Russians really spared every expense this go round).  I do check to see if the U.S.A. is winning in the medal count, though.  THAT matters to me.  I like to win. I may not like to watch ice dancing, but I am glad that we won that event.  USA-USA-USA! Speaking of ice dancing... ice skaters are pretty graceful, wouldn't you say?  On the rare occasions when I have watched skating, I have always thought the skaters to be graceful people.  I also get that it's extremely hard to do the things they do, balanced as they are on ice--held up by two little metal blades.  I saw the Will Ferrell movie Blades of Glory , too.  So I guess I'm kind of an expert on the g...

It's confession time this Sunday. From time to time, I just feel the need to share some of my deepest secrets and for some unknown reason I often feel compelled to share them publicly... at church... in front of hundreds of people. If you do this on a regular basis, you are either insane, or a pastor--or perhaps both, which appears to be the case with me. So here's the thing... and I know that this may not be that much of a surprise to most of the people who know me even a little... but I am a rather huge Def Leppard fan. Def Leppard is a band. From the 80's. They sold like a zillion albums. Nothing? Some of you are feeling me, I know. When I was fifteen years old, the thing I wanted most in life was to look like Joe Elliott, the lead singer of Def Leppard. I figured I could make this happen if I listened to their album Pyromania enough times, grew my hair, became better looking and learned how to sing. None of these things was going to happen, but a boy coul...

In 1998 I landed my very first job in a church--as a part time youth director for a tiny 80-member church in Tallahassee, Florida .  The pay was less than part time, if we're being honest--but the hours weren't.  You can't really do part time youth ministry--at least not very well. There was this kid that found us one year.  I think someone invited him at some point, and before too long he was permanent fixture at just about every youth event we had.  He lived with his disabled mom in a small apartment that smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and dog fur. He would call me sometimes and ask if I could give him a ride to one thing or another--to the store, to Walgreens...  If he couldn't get a hold of me, he would try one of the kids who could drive--but mostly he got a hold of me.  Sometimes our excursions would take several hours--hours I didn't have with a wife and small child at home, and a mountain of school work to complete so I could finish college....

There are lots of legends that surround Chuck Yaeger , the jet pilot who broke the sound barrier in 1947, but one in particular speaks to his singular ability to defy convention, push down fear and accomplish what had been thought impossible. Almost every pilot who had attempted to break the sound barrier before him had perished in the process. Legend has it Yaeger discovered the controls of the jet would act differently as the plane approached the speed required to break the sound barrier, so much so that they were very nearly reversed.  Only by treating them as if they were upside down, so to speak, would the plane operate under the extreme conditions imposed upon it by exceeding Mach 1.   It's a legend, to be sure, but an interesting one.  And it begs an interesting question... How many of us would be willing to trust that the controls of the jet we were piloting at supersonic speed would actually work the opposite  of how we've been told  they were...