Writing blog entries is sort of like talking to a room full of people with the lights out: you don't know who's listening until they reply. On the other hand, emails can be like one-on-one conversations, or a group, depending on who you sent it to.
So who's in this room? If you're stopping by to read this, reply and say hi.
This past weekend I went down to the Four Bridges Arts Festival here in Chattanooga. Pete Vaughn, a friend of mine who's also my sister-in-law's cousin, was selected as one of the emerging artists, and he had some of his work on display. His pieces were wood with passages from the Greek New Testament woodburned onto them, sometimes filling the entire area, sometimes just in a small rectangle of text. Most of the text was from Jesus' upper room discourse with his disciples, before he died and came back to life.
I bought one of his works. Its a two panel piece, the left panel is blank, and the right panel has a passage from John 14, in a vertical rectangular area on the right. I've got a photograph of it and a few of the others, but I've got to get my film developed and the pictures scanned to share them with you.
Walking the aisles at the festival was an incredible reminder of how creative people can be. A variety of arts, from painting to sculpture, photography to cabinet-making, provided objects for perusing. One furniture artist had made an end table with a wooden bulge under one side of it, and a leather belt across the bottom of the bulge. That table was title, "Too much beer".
All that creativity in one place made me very happy, and very thankful for the creative wisdom God gave to all those people.
I had dinner at a Korean restaurant with Pete and his wife Joanna after the festival Saturday night, and my seafood soup had squid, octapus, clams, shrimp, scallops, noodles, and veggies... quite spicy, and quite yummy.
I've just put together the list of Easter hymns we'll sing at church tomorrow, for a half hour prior to our morning worship service. Since we have a breakfast Easter Sunday morning, this hymn sing of some Easter hymns not sung later in the worship service takes the place of Sunday School.
Nine hymns, arranged chronologically by text from the 6th century to 1986.
If you want to see the list yourself, click here.
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At the last minute I revised the list, removing "Worship Christ, the Risen King," which was the 1986 text with a mid-nineteenth century tune, and added "In Christ Alone" as the final hymn, written in 2001 with music from 2001. While not just an Easter hymn, In Christ Alone reflects on the significance of what the resurrection means for us as believers, and it seemed to be a really appropriate hymn to end with.
We had extra time, so I also threw in "Jesus Live and So Shall I." Good stuff.
Tonight was good.
After work, I drove down to UTC for their Senior Exhibition at the Cress Gallery, where Pete Vaughn was one of eight art students displaying their art. His were beautiful woodburned Greek passages from the New Testament, on wood 'canvases'. The other student's art covered a wide variety of styles, media, and themes, and I enjoyed the exhibition.
When the gallery closed a concert was beginning in which Hackenbizzl was playing the cellizl, and to my delight they played Shostakovich's 2nd piano concerto. It was an incredibly fun piece of music, which I'd never heard before but would love to hear again.
Then when I got home, I finally ate dinner, and closed the meal with a Staropramen beer from Prague, in the Czech Republic: its a good beer.
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On the blog-template front, I've had no time to finish my blog, so its still a work in progress. If you find my slow pace of change here irritating, tell me and perhaps that will spur me to complete the changes.
So I've been watching 24, season 2, but unintentially started with season 2 instead of season 1. I don't have any good reason for that, and I understand that by starting with season 2 I spoiled one of the key things about season one - I know which character is bad who isn't known as bad in the first season. Oh well, I've still enjoyed watching them so far.
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Hopefully this weekend, I'll have a chance to finish updating my fonts and margins so that this blog looks better. Thanks for your input, folks.
A friend just asked me for copies of my notes from two conferences I attended in February, so here they are:
Kaleo Conference on Gender and the Church, held at Covenant College, and
L'Abri: Living in a Brave New World, held in Rochester, Minnesota.
Keep in mind that both sets of notes are totally unedited--I typed rapidly, so there are bound to be typos and other operator error. If you care to download the source code and correct errors you find, the sources are here: Kaleo and L'Abri, but you'll need to know how to use LaTeX if you want to make it look good.
In Minnesota the high temperature the first day of the conference was something like 8 degrees Fahrenheit. Brrr...