Church

For the second day in a row, I'm at Firestone Tires on Lake Murray Boulevard having work done on a car. In this case, it's routine work on Tonya's van before her parents arrive. As I'm waiting, the two front desk workers get in a verbal shouting match about how to schedule appointments. One of them is the manager and she is giving as good as she is receiving. The ironic thing is that myself and another customer are less than ten feet away. The lady next to me can hear them over the music playing on her iPod.The best part is when the phone rings and the employee picks it up and answers in a sweet voice. Then goes back to shouting.

This morning a commercial for Kaiser caught me eye. The tag line was "be your own cause" and was designed to encourage people to take responsibility for their health and wellbeing. But the phrase made me think of how often our culture encourages us to be our own cause ... look out for yourself ... do what makes you happy ... it's all about you.Yet it's not that bad of a tag line. There are times when we do need to see our lives as part of something significant -- a cause that extends us beyond ourself. The trouble comes when all of our causes extend no further than the shadow we cast.

By now, you’ve surely seen some of the coverage about the shootings at Virginia Tech. I was stunned as the news went from one shooting to a mass murder. My heart still aches when I think about the deep trauma suffered by those who lost a loved one and those whose lives were spared.Dramatic stories are beginning to come out about what happened. Liviu Librescu was an aeronautics engineer and teacher at VTU. The 76-year-old gentleman was also a survivor of the Holocaust. The professor blocked the door with his body while telling his students to jump out the window. He was eventually shot and killed.There are already critics and finger-pointers looking to place blame. There will certainly be a time to reflect and inspect – but hopefully we will move beyond the immediate cast of characters and look at the deeper issues.Issues like why we live in a culture…

We had a good morning at church -- the full band was back and was rocking. Doug has added a steel guitar to his reportoire and it's really cool. After church, we went over to some friend's house and had a BBQ. A bunch of people from church was there and it was really fun to just hang out and talk.

You have to love Microsoft's auto correct / auto fill-in features. As I was typing an email tonight, I typed "it would allow me more time for pastoring." Only Outlook changed it to "it would allow me more time for pasturing."How did they know!