BigCat’s Blog of DOOM

The weekend was good. Lauren and I spent most of it by ourselves, which was good because I’ve been a little overloaded with people lately.

On Friday night we spent the early part of the evening alone and ate dinner at her place, then we went over to Jeff’s for a while and watched Star Wars: Empire Kicks Ass for a while and drank some wine that I thought didn’t suck, which was a first for me and wine.

Saturday we did our shopping. We went to Sam’s, Walmart, Berean (sp?) Bookstore, and I took her out to eat at Outback (which means we’ll be going somewhere cheaper then that for Valentines Day…..maybe I’ll cook something really nice…I’ll have to work on that) then we rented Italian Job and went back to my place. We watched the movie with Rob, Squirrel and the Squirrel friend, and that was a good time. Also, I got Lauren to try this Cranberry Sam Adams stuff that I didn’t like (tastes like a strong hootch if you ask me), but I know woman like the fruity tasting stuff and she actually dug it for a while. This is a small victory for me because she has hated every sip of beer she has every tried, but now I have my way of turning her to the dark side….mwahahaha.

Sunday, we went to church. I ate a muffin, and drank my chocolate milk this time instead of just the milk, so I had a more complete breakfast then normal. Church was good. They echoed some thoughts I’ve had about the church suppressing sex, and making taboo to talk about. Even in the young adult groups where we talk about it more then the average church, it still slides under the carpet a little, but for different reasons. The young married couples don’t want to make the single people feel jealous or uncomfortable so they only talk about it if you ask them. This is OK, but all in all, I think sex is good and I don’t mind hearing about other people having sex…..except my parents….but that is just weird, so I’ll move on. I think that if anything I can learn a lot by hearing about different peoples mistakes and victories, or just to know that people enjoy their sex lives is more then the church usually will embrace. I mean I don’t want to have bad sex, or no sex all of my married life, and if it isn’t really bad or non-existent I’m probably gonna want to talk about it at least a little bit, just so people know that I’m doing alright. But we may see that change because Lauren might veto me ever talking about it, so we’ll just have to wait and see. Also this got me thinking more about the spiritual side of sex. I really think that there has to be a spiritual component of it. I have theorized in the past that sometimes…not all the time….that you reach beyond just physical ecstasy and possibly past the emotional side of it. It is like you loose all track of yourself, you forget that there are two people involved in this and reach beyond the normal high to something more spiritual…almost like a holy spirit high mixed with the normal physical high of things. I know this probably sounds like a lot of crap, and I know that it is really bad to have high expectations for my sex life early in my marriage because there is a learning curve. (can you tell I’ve had a lot of lectures from a lot of people lately….including my Dad while I was home….thats right he made sure to get a very frank sex talk in before he went under the knife) But something has always been in the back of my mind about being with the exact person that God intended you to be with, the perfect emotional, physical, and spiritual match for me. How that could make everything just a little different. So when Happy Leman (the senior pastor) said that you should invite God into your sex life…I thought “Duh, who isn’t doing that” because it has always seemed like a given for me. But at any rate I’ve railed on about my theories about sex long enough, and Lauren will probably be really mad that I’m expressing thoughts like this even though they are my own, but I’m sure she’ll figure out a way to be embarrassed by them anyway. (read this quick because I might get an email telling me to take them down soon)

After church we went out for some Taco Hell, which is always good. We had a good time chatting with the gang. It was nice to eat out with Bob and Kelley because I like talking to them from time to time and miss doing stuff with just them since they left the small group to me….I hope I get a chance to talk to Chris off and on after I pass the group to him and Dirk (I’m not worried about seeing Dirk, cuz I live with the guy). Then I went home and worked on the wedding page for a bit. I got a little to caught up in working on the “three colum” design and making it flexible. So I worked on it for a longer time then I had meant to. And I will mention now that CSS support accross browsers sucks. If you aren’t using something badass like Mozilla or some mozilla based browser like netscape or firebird then you might not be able to see the page as I intended it to look. (Note: James, it should be fine in Opera too, but I’m not sure and I can’t test that, so you’ll have to let me know) Right now the page has some info on it about the wedding and a countdown. After we get engagement pictures taken and announcements printed I’ll post those on there. Also, I’m gonna steal some fancified graphics from somewhere to throw up there at some point.

After working on the webpage I went to church and there was some amazing stuff going on there. Some people gave amazing testimonies and then there was a baptism of about 11 people at first and then 2 more came up later. The testimonies really touched me. Especially Rachael Cox’s, just because I knew her family when I was growing up, but never got to know her because they moved away before she started high school. I went to high school with two of her brothers, one of which I really looked up too for a while, and joined her Dads churches youth group (he was the methodist pastor in Gibson City while my Dad was in Melvin) when Melvin didn’t have enough high school aged kids to have one on our own. That youth group, coupled with my Sunday school class in Melvin were the only two things that interested me spiritually. And to be honest the Sunday school class was more about the intellectual side of things, theology, history, and things like that. I felt like once a year I went on a mission trip with the Gibson City youth group and had a battery recharge that lasted for a month or so before I got caught up again football and school. So it is odd how someone that I never knew well personally could touch me like that just because I had proximity relationships and started out with similar circumstances in terms of family situations. (there are actual funny stories that relate our families in other ways….like for example my Dad dated her Mom for a little while in high school, and her Dad was a youth pastor at one of my Grandfathers churches for a while….in fact I think that is where her parents met, but I’m not sure so don’t hold me to that) But all the testimonies were amazing, and things were just so cool, and they started up a second worship set for a while just because things were going so amazing all around us. Then I had to head home, so I took a friend of Laurens (Sarah) back to Mohmet and hung out with her family for a little while there. It was really cool to talk to them. They were really neat people.

Now, I’m at home, it’s Monday morning. I have a lot of stuff I need to hash out with God today, so I skipped some classes, I’m writing a little (mostly this) and I’m going to work on prepping small group and try to fast for the first time ever in my life (if you don’t count wrestling season in high school). This is my plea to my small group…please come for the next two weeks because I have some stuff planned that I want everyone there to hear and to express their thoughts about, and I want to pray for everyone before we multiply the group. By Thursday I should have some things worked out with Lauren and James in terms of the timeline for multiplying the group, and I should know what exactly we are going to discuss and some things that I know we need to pray about as a group. Also, if there are any problems that you would normally come to me and talk to me about please hold them for a week or go talk with someone else (unless it is about multiplying the group). This is just because I’ve just gone from being loaded with family stuff like heart surgeries, to being loaded with issues surrounding my starting my first ever small group from scratch and leaving my old one, to the homework starting to pile on. So I took this weekend and spent it away from people and I’m going to try to do that more this week also, and use the time that I usually spend with people to spend by myself with God and with the other leaders involved in multiplying the small group. Don’t worry, I still want to talk to all of you and spend time doing cool stuff like always, but I just need a little more me time then I had expected….I think maybe I was at home too long and it is hard to keep my stubborn Dad from doing things he isn’t supposed to before and after his surgery.

So anyway, I’m going back to figure out if I’m going to go to work or not, it is hard for me to get up and move around much because it makes me hungry, so I don’t know yet what I’m going to do. And I’m sorry this is long….I guess I had more to write then I thought…Oh well….forgive me if I clog up your LJ friends page, but I have no cutting ability. I will talk to you all later, have a good day.

So I just watched “American Wedding” and I have to say that while this probably isn’t the best movie to get you thinking about your own wedding, I did come out of it with some thoughts on my wedding. First, I really liked the vows that the character Michelle said to Jim, and I got to thinking, “do I want to write my own vows?” Because I generally like the traditional vows, and the less I have to speak from memory or read the better I’m thinking. Also, I know something will go wrong, but I just hope it isn’t anything major. Finally, it is kinda funny that my super talented drama / singing family is doing nothing like that and it is Lauren’s aunt who will be singing a song. I can’t remember the name of the song, but if I remember correctly it is by Micheal W. Smith (Lauren if you read this, post what the song is so I can find it if I ever forget agian). Let it be known that I’m not complaining that my family isn’t doing anything like singing or whatever, when your two parents are doing the ceremony they are already doing enough. I am saying that it is amusing that no one in my family is playing an instrument or singing a song (if we only had one of my two parents do the ceremony it would probably be Dad, and I would probably have had Mom play the piano or organ). I mean when your Mother double majored in Piano and Voice in college it is usually assumed she would do something. But I just get a kick out of thinking about that. It is kinda calming because my family isn’t the focus on the stage more then Lauren and I are at any point in this whole deal. I do kinda think that Aaron is bummed I haven’t asked him to do anything terribly special. I am asking him to be a groomsman, but ever since I told him that he wasn’t goning to be the best man he has sorta flipped. He is always muttering something about what he could be doing. Whenever I mention Laurens aunt singing he asks what she is singing, and says something about not feeling imporant because he is JUST a groomsman. He once told me that he wanted to have me as his best man, but now he says something about having his friend Chris (if he ever gets married….which if you know him he says all the time, which makes everyone else know that when he falls he’ll fall that much harder then the rest of us) so I figure he must feel pretty unimportant because being a groomsman isn’t a small thing. I have lots of really good friends, and I didn’t have to pick my brothers as my groomsman, I did because they are important in my life. I mean, right now I have to think of one more guy to pick and I’m having a hell of a time trying to decide. So they should be honored that they were the easy ones, not complaining about not getting to do anything “cool” at my wedding. I mean David is cool, he just is so laid back that he could care less. He stood up at my cousins wedding and just rolled with it, and so did Aaron, but I guess Aaron assumes being a groomsman is no big deal. Oh well, not much I can do about it at this point.

At any rate, that is my rant for the moment while reflecting on really silly stuff about weddings, so I’ll go on looking for some lyrics to a song I heard on the soundtrack of “American Wedding” and then go to bed. So….

Thank you, and Goodnight.

Edit:This is the first time EVER, that the spell checker found no errors before posting…..my spelling is improving, and so is my typing apparently. HOORAY FOR ME!!!! THIS LITTLE BOY IS ALL GROWNZ UP NOW!!!!!!!

Edit 2: I take that back, I think the spell checker is just broken |:(

Dad came home today. He is feeling good, his scar looks good, and he is getting around the house really well. Even having a pretty easy time going up and down the stairs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the way the one year Bible is laid out, and I think it might be good to combine old testament and new readings every day. This will mean more reading since I was going to read it front to back and only read a few chapters a night, but it might make the reading better through some of the boring stuff in the old testament and some of the repetitive stuff in Paul’s epistles.

Also, Dirk got me thinking about materialism more last night, which I had already been thinking about a little because I was reading about monastic orders in my church history book. I think that I like having stuff a little too much. Sometimes it becomes a focus in my life over what good things I can do with the stuff for other people. I like entertaining people, and entertaining myself. Now I personally think that being materialistic is about placing the value of the things you have and want over the value of people and your relationship with God. I’m not a man of extremes. And I think that holding the tension between the charsimatic and conservative evangelical has become an important part of my life, and finding that balance in other things is also important. Having nice things and not valuing that stuff above the things that are actually important in life (people and loving God) is some of that tension. There is a lot of stuff that I think it is important to find a balance in. I’ve been studying more free will ideas too lately, and I’ve come to the conclusion that to think that Arminianism is the extreme opposite of calvinism is folley. James Harmens attempted to correct what he saw as flaws in an extremist doctorine that he had originally accepted, and created a middle ground between the idea the the universe is floating free of any meddling from God and the idea that God moves us around like puppets playing out a cosmic scene for his enjoyment. I was drawn to re-read some things written last year on the messageboard and I realized that there is some misconceptions held about calivinism by some and arminianism by others, and I thougth that to be interesting. The reason I bring this up is because reacting in an extreme nature to anything (whether it be a practical application of something…like materialism, or just a theoretical assumption about the Bible like calvin makes) screams agianst my being. I know that much of Christianity is about taking an extreme position, but when not directly called to it seems to distance me unnecessiarily from non-christians and thus minimizes my ability to witness in many ways. Monks are a good exmple of this. The first monks lived alone…hermits who were of the utmost faith, but who ignored the call to community in the Bible, and thus became powerful witnesses to some of the faith, but to others just appeared as crazies. I think that God blesses us with material things for the sole purpose of allowing us to bless others with that, including the church. I do think that God does sometimes call people to rid themselves of their possesions, and the monks/priests/and anyone else who does take a vow of poverty feels that is what God is calling us to do. But just dumping all of my stuff at once would seem extreme to me. More of being willing to give my unnecessary possesions to someone who needed it more is what I see as avoiding materialism. This is because just selling those things would cause me to have means to buy more crap and fall back into the same trap that God is attempting to deliver from. I think I’m going to itemize some of my stuff and see what I wouldn’t be willing to give away for free if God asked me to. Then I’m gonna spend some time praying about how important those things should be too me…..because I don’t have the resources to replace my things that I need, but God does, and I need to learn to trust that.

That went on way too long, but anyway, I’ll stop now.

Thank you, and Goodnight.