A life less comfortable

The other night we were driving to Sam's indoor soccer game in Harrisburg.  While driving through the cold and dark landscape, our lights illuminated snowy patches roadside and spindly tree branches pricked the night sky as we listened to This American Life on the old tinny radio.  The story, " Batman " was an intriguing narrative about how the collective thoughts of a culture can profoundly affect what the blind believe they are capable of doing day to day.  This story is one in a series of stories called "Invisibilia" Latin for "all the invisible things" thus, delving into "the intangible forces that shape human behavior – things like ideas, beliefs, assumptions and emotions." - npr.org They interviewed a blind man, Daniel Kish, who can get around quite well by clicking his tongue and using those clicks as a way to navigate, bat-style, through the world.  He was raised without normal blind intervention and climbed trees and rode bikes in ...

One of the best things of being in the states this year is getting to go to our home church, York Alliance.  We started out at YAC in 2000 with Steve on staff in youth ministry and it since has become home.  Just the other week I had a religious experience in the pew during the sermon.  Our good friend and pastor, Brian Kannel, is preaching on a series called, "The God of Promise", a study of Genesis 12-35.  He was preaching specifically on Gen 31:1-32:21, I won't recap the whole sermon here but just highlight the part that hit me with a bona fide religious experience.  Jacob was fleeing Laban and God told him to return to the land of his fathers and God promised to be with him.  Jacob was fleeing one bad situation to find himself in the midst of another.  The schemer was being schemed and forced to return to the place of his birth, a place he fled years before after swindling his brother, Esau, out of his birth right. Brian points out a disturbing p...

Last night my daughter Megan watched the t.v. show "Lost"with two friends, one in Colorado and another in New York.  Olivia, the one in Co. had never watched Lost before so Meg and another friend watched on their own laptops with her and group texted together.  Oh the highs and lows of Lost!  Our family started watching Lost when we moved to France for language study.  Oh how we could relate to feeling lost in a new world filled challenges and a foreign landscape with "the others."  I think it was some kind of bizarre coping skill we developed where once a week we would download Lost and have Lost lunches in our little apartment in Albertville.  Lunch breaks are really long in France.  It was a bit jarring coming from the states where everything is fast paced, especially meal time.  We had 2 and 1/2 hour lunches everyday.  All of us would meet at our apartment from our three different schools and I would make us lunch.  It became an oa...