deepbrew

take it!  –Yogi Berra

What to do next?  I have five minutes, an hour, a lunch break, an evening, 2 open evenings this week, a year, 2 years, maybe.  I have a lifetime, really.  So there, what am I going to do?

It’s great being an autonomous human being!  Don’t you agree?   We get to do stuff!  We get to make up our mind about what we want to do and then we get to do it!  For example, today for lunch I walked across the street to Food Lion and bought, among approximately 2 million other choices, a package of sliced turkey, a package of sliced Colby Jack, a fresh bag of plain bagels, a gallon of milk, and a bar of Hershey’s Extra Dark w/ Macadamia Nuts and Cranberries.  It really is that awesome!

Anyway, I’ve got a whole life ahead of me, and guess what? I get to decide what I’m going to do!  I’ve already decided to follow Jesus.  But I’m finding that he still leaves so much up to me.  “How shall I follow him I serve” is very much an alive question for me now, and I think always will be.  That’s a good thing, I am sure, though sometimes it gets wearisome, and sometimes scary.  However, Jesus’ instructions are sometimes very specific, and at those times our choice is simple: to obey or not to obey.

Life is very much a dance.  Now, how about some Extra Dark.

I hope to be a photographer par excellence, and snap photos like this. Anyone have any clues how he did that?  The colors are just too far out.
to capture in a moment the beauty that is everywhere is all I want to do.  Why is it so bloomin’ hard?

Yeah, the folks are gone for two weeks.  Eric and I have been tested to the limits of our combined culinary prowess.  The results?  Hey, at least it’s colorful!

We’re talking about a serious multi-tasker!  Go Hans!

and thank you carolita for this one..

Lately a lot of us (me, my friends, other Mennonites) have been talking about the conservative Mennonite / Anabaptist culture, and how that culture hinders us when we try to reach those outside the culture, and how we wish we could separate what is biblical from what is merely cultural. It’s easy to think that we are the only group that struggles with a culture that seems to separate us from those we want to reach with the gospel. But listen to this analysis of the typical American evangelical missionary.

“…who does the American evangelical look like? Does he or she resemble Jesus in his focus, values, and mission? Our analysis has concluded that Jesus is not the spiritual father of our Evangelical culture. Our Evangelical world is more about our peculiar culture values and what we like and dislike rather than a reflection of Jesus. If we take a hard, objective look at the Gospels, we will see a great deal of similarity between our Evangelical values and the values of the Pharisees rather than the values of Jesus.

The third issue is the logical outcome of the first two: we have a very bad case of cultural blindness. I don’t meant that we cannot distinguish cultural differences, but that we are blind to the differences between what we are as cultural Christians and what the Bible clearly articulates we should be.” (Fran Patt, Mission Frontiers, July-August 2006, p. 9)

Take the word Evangelical in the first paragraph and replace it with Anabaptist and it reads very nicely. This illustrates a tendency a lot of us, and people everywhere, have—we think our problems are unique to ourselves or to our group, and we don’t realize how common and how human our problems actually are.