In the last week Ellie has learned two important names. She now occasionally refers to Adelaine as “Andennn” instead of just “baby”. The other name is more important.. She now identifies a certain man in some of her books as “Jesus”. This is a name we pray she becomes very familiar with and says throughout eternity as her Savior!
Recently I was invited to tag along with the annual gym class curling trip so I could get some photos for the yearbook. We had to take the students over two days as we have almost 50 this year, but I got lots of action shots… mostly of people falling on the ice. It was fun.
This is Kate. She complained the other day that she hadn’t made it to my blog the other day. So here is a montage of Kate’s curling experience.
Now to be fair.. I could have easily filled this entire post with pictures of other people laying on the ice, but Kate did want to be here. And she was on the ice more than anyone else.
And then there was Dave. Dave has been gifted with the ability to crash stuff. He has had a number of incidents this year (lets just say he isn’t allowed near my van..), but he now has an added distinction of being the only person I know to break a curling rock. Well, the handle at least. He fell on top of it with his back. So here is insult to that injury.
There was more going on than people falling.. some curling happened too. This is Maressa. I don’t think they have curling in Brazil, but she was doing pretty good.
Eric was practising his ballerina skills while Marty the vampire curler cruised down the ice.
See! It is real curling happening here.
No major injuries and everyone had a great time.
Naomi is celebrating an undisclosed birthday today. So..
Happy birthday to my wonderful wife!
Coincidently… it is also my mother’s birthday. I’m not going to say which one it is.. I want to eat when I visit home next. So..
Happy birthday mom!
Definitely a day I can’t forget.
Some friends sent me a thought provoking article:
A man who ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing; he believes in anything.
– G.K. Chesterton, OrthodoxyThe apocalyptic vision of global warming serves a deep need of the environmentalist credo, the dominant pseudo-religious tendency of our age in the prosperous West.
For good or ill, human beings are constructed to believe, and faith has its demands.. Along with the concrete elements that demand belief (that fire burns and that it’s not wise to walk off cliffs, for example) there exists an apparent necessity for a belief in “the rock higher than I” – a belief in a superior entity that can inspire awe and gratitude, that can be turned to in hard times, that can act as witness to injustice and dispenser of mercy.
Despite the claims of our current crop of militant atheists such as Dawkins and Harris, this is not simply brain-dead foolishness. Religious belief is hard-wired into human beings, by what means and for what purposes we don’t yet understand.
When religious belief is subverted, it does not, as Chesterton implied, simply vanish. It is almost immediately replaced by another set of beliefs on a similar level of abstraction and serving the same purpose. Sometimes it’s an import, such as Buddhism or TM. Sometimes it’s a creed deliberately created to serve a political agenda, as we see in Nazism and Communism. Sometimes it’s the goofy SoCal syncretism currently expressed in Wicca and Neopaganism. (“If people seriously want to be pagans,” the late Joe Myers, a Christian brother of my acquaintance once said. “They’d become Roman Catholics.”) And sometimes they’re a combination, a weird melange of ideas picked up from various sources that (and usually not coincidentally) also serve a political purpose. Which brings us to environmentalism…
Read more at American Thinker: A Necessary Apocalypse
Certainly not a Christian work, but an interesting look at the history of environmentalism as a pseudo-religion, complete with it’s own series of end-times apocalyptic events. If you are old enough (and I barely am..) you may remember some of the previous dire warnings of the doomsday scientists: nuclear winter; over population and world-wide starvation (which led to b-movies like Soylent Green); the global cooling scare of the ’70s.
This morning I put a new promotional video for the Bible Institute up on YouTube. Check it out: