Preaching, church dinner, American Museum of Natural History

November 23rd, 2005


Whew! Been a little while since I updated this thing. But I assure you, whoever you are, that I've been keeping busy.

I preached Sunday morning (from Colossians 1:12-13) on a theme of giving thanks. The service went well; at least no one threw turkey gizzards at me while I preached. No, it went well and was well received. Of course, messages about how good God is are often better received than those that talk a little more about how bad we are.

Following the service, we had our annual Thanksgiving dinner. That also went well, though attendance was a little lower than in previous years (this Sunday the attendance was on the high side of average for a Sunday morning; some years, the Sunday before Thanksgiving is the first or second highest attended service of the year, right up there with Easter.) We discovered a new talent in the church; a man who has been coming for several months brought some food. Let's just say that he didn't have to take any home with him. That had to have been some of the best lasagna I have ever tasted (and by the time I got to it, there wasn't much more than a taste of it left!) And he made some kind of blueberry cheesecake ladyfinger thing for desert. It was fairly large, by church fellowship desert standards. And I was lucky to get a bite off the sliver my wife managed to get. Incredible. Turns out the guy's dad owned a small restaurant chain, and his mom was one of those cookin' lovin' Italian ladies. The apple didn't fall far from the tree, let me tell you. There were actually people offering to pay this guy to cook things for them for Christmas. For a couple of weeks, Paul Funchess and I have been talking about doing some kind of evangelistic dinner, like the Campus Church Steakout. If we do it, I think we've discovered our lead chef. Wow.

My wife has been a little glum about not getting out of the house much lately, and this turns out to be a slow work week for me. So Monday, we took the day and went into Manhattan to see the American Museum of Natural History. And it's pretty much all it's cracked up to be. Anna had a blast; her favorite thing about the place was a little model of T-Rex that walked. The whole place was saturated with evolutionary propaganda (and I use the term deliberately, because that's what a lot of it was). The big new exhibit on dinosaurs played fast and loose with the facts, and tended to give the most sensational possible interpretation of things, even when the scientific community hasn't arrived at those conclusions yet. But all that didn't stop the exhibits from being downright impressive. Wenonah and I thought the butterfly room was great; they have a climate controlled room simulating a South American rainforest, in which there are hundreds, probably thousands of butterflies fluttering around the place, all around you. If you're lucky, one might land on you, or sip some orange juice (which the workers provide) from your hand. Really neat. The planetarium was cool, as all planetariums are, but the one recently built by Pensacola Christian College was probably better built (though I think the optics at the one up here are better). As it turned out, we didn't have time to see all the exhibits. The place is enormous, and seems even bigger on the inside than the outside. But it was a fun little trip.

As for the NaNo novel, I'm still slogging along, but have managed to slip behind a fair ways. I now have 32,888 words, which means that I have to write an average of 2,139 words each day for the rest of the month to finish on time.

Well, this is kind of a long entry. I'll try to post another time or two this week, in hopes of keeping the posts shorter and the updates more frequent. Toodle-loo!