My lovely wife and daughter are in Dallas this weekend, getting caught up with baby Drew. He’s making noises now! Chewing on his finger! What delights! What thrills! Wish I were there…

Anyway, here’s Sam and Melinda – they make a papa proud!

And here’s Joh and The L’il Guy!

Who’s having more fun here, really??

After our new piano arrived, I went to the sanctuary one evening to take some pix. It’s a beautiful place at night! These don’t really do justice to it, and these pix are just a touch blurry, but they give you the idea. Anybody wanna come sit here a while one evening and pray?

You know if you’ve been reading this blog, I’ve been reading Tim Keller’s book The Reason For God and found it quite clear and helpful. Keller’s forte is discussing the Christian faith with “cultured despisers” of Manhattan. I just downloaded a recent radio program on White Horse Inn where Keller discusses his book with Michael Horton and the other program hosts – well worth listening to. You can go directly to the WHI site, or download the program here. Or, you can see a quick video of Keller discussing this book here.

Gene Kramer, our 7th Grade Confirmation teacher, has uploaded 3 new pix of his class – and a great bunch of kids they are! Here’s one, taken after the “Trapped In Sin” exercise. To see the other two, go to St. Paul’s website (www.stpaulsfreeburg.org), click on the “Pictures” tab on the left, and follow the links.

This Youtube video has been around for a while, but it still makes me laugh. Maybe it just gives me hope for my geezer years – still driving Red, though…

One of the books I’ve been reading is Tim Keller’s The Reason for God, which led me to poking around the internet for more about and by him. I found the website for his church (Redeemer Presbyterian – click here) and read one of his articles there entitled “The Importance Of Hell” (clickhere). Here’s a quote that caught my attention:

“Fairly often I meet people who say, ‘I have a personal relationship with a loving God, and yet I don’t believe in Jesus Christ at all.’ Why, I ask? ‘My God is too loving to pour out infinite suffering on anyone for sin.’ But this shows a deep misunderstanding of both God and the cross. On the cross, God HIMSELF, incarnated as Jesus, took the punishment. He didn’t visit it on a third party, however willing.

So the question becomes: what did it cost your kind of god to love us and embrace us? What did he endure in order to receive us? Where did this god agonize, cry out, and where were his nails and thorns? The only answer is: ‘I don’t think that was necessary.’ But then ironically, in our effort to make God more loving, we have made him less loving. His love, in the end, needed to take no action. It was sentimentality, not love at all.”

I hadn’t thought about it that way before. The “loving god” of people I meet who deny the reality of hell or the cross, is actually a squishy god, unable or unwilling to bear the cost of love. In my own experience with my wife and children, I know that love costs. And the deeper the love, the more the cost. But this ‘loving god’ who makes no demands, pays no cost, bears no cross, endures no hell, is more the figment of my self-absorbed and self-affirming ego than the God of the Scripture.

Funny how important hell is to my happiness.

You may have noticed that I have a new header on my blog. No big significance here, just wanted a change. Originally I had used a pic of the stained glass window above St. Paul’s altar – Jesus in Gethsemane. It’s a lovely window and a focal point of our worship. But one of my other passions is driving my delightful Miata – particularly at Deal’s Gap NC. Each year I go there just to drive and enjoy some solitude and creation. And I take pics, lot of pics! So my new header for my blog is now a shot of one of the roads at Deal’s Gap, taken over the shoulder of Red, my car. Here, BTW, is the entire photo:I enjoy the curviness of the road – it’s not high speed (maybe 45 mph) but it’s enough to be pleasant, calling for enough attention to focus on the road, but not so much attention that you can’t enjoy the scenery. The road ahead is often hidden, but does not come up on you so fast that you’ll be taken off guard.

Here’s another one that I took last July, from my modest motel (you can see more of the curves in the second pic):Oh man, it makes me ache for the road! The motel is out of the 50’s – it’s got yer basic a/c and indoor plumbing, and a shop to pick up some drinks or a snack. But the whole point is not the motel itself, but the road, the drive.

I can wax eloquent on this stuff – the road of life. I wrote a sermon once about how I often get so involved in cleaning my car, waxing my car, detailing my car, accessorizing my car, that I forget to DRIVE the car. Kinda like faith, I think. It’s meant to be trusted and driven, not tweaked and admired. Though tweaking and admiring are good, they’re not the main good.

So the new header is somewhat spiritual after all. Brothers and sisters, start your engines! None of us knows how much road we have left, or when the next curve will be the last. Don’t wait. Drive!

Check out our new website – the address is still www.stpaulsfreeburg.org – but newly designed. Lemme know your thoughts – and we could use pics for our “Pic of the Week” section.

Colorado sheriff sees no hoax in balloon incident – Reuters, Fri Oct 16, 2009 5:45pm EDT

Balloon boy case a hoax, says sherrif; charges coming – Reuters, Sun Oct 18, 2009 7:50pm EDT

I was driving home from a hospital call last Thursday, and heard on the radio about the “balloon boy”. And not just on one station – they were all over it! Following the balloon, reporting moment by moment on what was happening (or what they thought was happening). When I got home I saw that several TV channels were carrying the “news”, again with live video so we could watch every single moment. And on the ‘Net, my news homepage was full of balloon boy “news”.

Now, it seems, it might well have been an intentional hoax. We still don’t know, and I suspect it will take some time to know.

And isn’t that the problem with the “news”? So quick to report, so slow to analyze. The emphasis is all on quantity (=fastest) rather than quality (=what is actually happening here?)

It takes time to know what things mean. I suspect a look at your own life will tell you that. You lost your job – ok, but what will that mean in the bigger picture of your life? OK, you won the lottery, but what will that mean? It takes time.

In the meantime, I think it’s very distracting to have a river of “look at that” and “watch this” passing before us. (I’ve noticed that my local news guy/gal will actually say “take a look at this”, like I might not have my eyes glued to the screen and need to have my attention called to the image on the TV rather than on my wife sitting next to me).

The media, it seems, is fixated on getting it first, not getting it right. If we don’t ignore that blather and take the longer view of what things actually mean, we’re going to be continually blown about by every of wind images, unrooted, unanchored, and helpless on the fast road to hell.

I’m hoping that St. Paul’s will have their new website set up by this Sunday, or shortly thereafter. It’s been an interesting process!

When our webmaster and choir director resigned, we found ourselves in the position of many churches –  at least, according to one excellent article that I read. According to this article, there have been many churches that had websites set up by creative, technologically oriented (“computer geek”) members. Those websites were creative and attention-getting, if not flashy. But those churches found that when their technogeeky members tired of the website, or otherwise moved on, they were left with a website no one knew how to maintain. Thus, the author of the article concluded, usability and maintainability are more important, in the long run, than technological dazzle.

So, when it came to developing a new website, I wanted something easy to maintain; something our church secretary or administrator could edit without having to learn HTML or other code. Something that was simple enough to be used regardless of change in personnel. And I found it.

Actually, Sandi Haege showed it to me. At Microsoft Office Live (click here) you can create your own website for free. Yep, free. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that “for fee” sites and software have. But it does the job quite nicely, in my book. Anyone who can use a word processor can use this site. Simple, easy, straightforward, basic. Kinda like our church, come to think of it!

So, God willing, our new site will be up soon. Our web address will be the same – www.stpaulsfreeburg.org – so I invite you to check it out and give us any feedback you have, good or bad.