Prophetic Musings

Starting in a couple of weeks, I'm going to be leading a full blown youth group. I'm excited, anxious, a little scared, but extremely hopeful of what can happen. Here in our small town, I feel that there are a lot of kids who can and need to be reached with the Gospel. Sunday morning just wasn't doing it. So, off we go into a new chapter of the youth ministry at our church. We'll probably start out really small, and I mean REALLY small, but here's hoping we grow the Kingdom first, and our group second. All of you out there who read here please pray for all of us as we start this new venture. We really feel like this is what God has been calling us to all along and we can't be more happy.

We took advantage of what looks to be the last nice day around here for quite a while and finally got out the new bikes we bought for each of us for Christmas. After riding around the park for a while, we came home and spent the entire day just kind of hanging around the house. Fun times. Tomorrow should be pretty good too, other than the homework I've got due tomorrow night. No big deal though, I'll get it done.

I'm sure most of you have never heard of Dr. Heidi Cullen. She hosts a show on The Weather Channel called The Climate Code which basically talks about how horrible we are to the planet and how bad global warming is. She made a comment on her blog the other day about how the American Meteorological Society should revoke the credentials of any meteorologist who doesn't toe the line on global warming. I'm not going to rehash the whole thing here, because you know how I feel about it. Anyway, Cox & Forkum jumped on it and it's pretty funny.

 

From here. 

I think I've got the comment issues fixed, but since I've probably lost all my traffic anyway, it doesn't really matter. If anyone reads this and wants to comment, go ahead and try it. If it doesn't work, please send an email to clay (at) claywginn.com.

Dan Edelen at the Cerulean Sanctum posted this article and there are a lot of good points in it. I'll hit some highlights, but really you should read it all.

I've been in Christian circles all my life, so I've witnessed the myriad ways we respond to God and to other Christians. I've seen that thrill of experiencing God's will.

But I've also seen what happens when His will appears to us to go "awry." I've seen how we Christians respond to failure, and I've concluded that more than just about anything, we need a Gospel that speaks to failure.

You won't hear much about failure in the American Church. In Evangelicalism in particular, failure gets held at arm's length, as if people who fail do so because they've acquired a disease. We've made failure into some kind of plague. "Don't come too close! I might catch your failure and it will ruin my perfect little world!"

This is especially true inside of some more modern circles. I remember when I was about 15 or 16, a Christian musician named Michael English was discovered to have had an affair with another musician. The day after winning several Dove awards, he gave them all back because he said he couldn't accept them with a clear conscience. What did the Christian community do? Pulled all his albums from the shelves and shunned him completely. Why? Couldn't we accept that he was just as human as the rest of us? The only difference was that his was on a much more public, much larger scale. Sin is still sin, no matter how big we perceive it to be. Failure is still failure

When blessings come, they come solely by grace. We don't truly merit blessings. God offers them to us out of the grace and riches of His heart. Or so we say. But what happens to our view of God's sovereignty when failure strikes? What becomes of His grace when someone's life winds up in the toilet?

What a great point! We give God all the glory when something goes right, but we view it as personal failure when something goes wrong. I've been attempting to start a business for several years, but every time I think I'm getting close it falls apart. I've finally come to the conclusion that I'm not going to have a business right now, but just focus on family, work, church, and school and let whatever happens happen. Does God want me to do this? I'm relatively certain He's been sending signals for years, but I haven't been listening.

Two more quick points on this.

Yes, some failure clearly stems from sin and a lack of faith. We all understand this. Our problem becomes one of ALWAYS applying that standard to every case of failure we encounter. Case in point: what was Job's sin?

A veritable gold mine here. I'm not sure what else I can add to it.

Notice that many of my failure examples so far in this post have dealt with money. In America, success equates to money. Sadly, the American Church has bought this lie. As a result, our standard for spiritual success and maturity automatically means passing the wealth test.

Too accusatory? Well, consider this. Your church is looking for new elders. Which of these two 40-year old men has a better chance of becoming an elder, the self-made man who runs his own company OR the fellow who works the night shift as a convenience store clerk? In the split second (Blink!) you thought about that pair, did class distinction enter into your assessment? Has anything been said about the spiritual maturity of those men? Don't we assume that one is more spiritually mature simply because he runs a successful business, while the other only makes $8/hr.?

I think Dan makes a direct hit on this as well. We are so tied up in money and we equate success and having it together to money. We don't dig into the spiritual side of life for success. That guy who makes $8/hr at the convenience store may be running a street mission during his off hours. The guy running the successful business may not have enough hours left in the day to even pray or read. Yet in the church we see the person who has Earthly success and comes to church as the one who is more spiritually mature. It's a crazy idea, but it's true.

So where do we go from here? We live Job's example and discover that God is in the blessings, but He's in the failures too. God had to allow Satan to take away everything that Job valued. Satan couldn't do it without God's permission. Maybe that happens more often than we think? Do we pass the test?

Collette and I just finished the first step of a major home improvement project. This weekend and evenings this week, we repainted our living room and put down wood laminate flooring in the living room, entry hall, and hallway. The flooring went down pretty easy, and we're extremely happy with the results. We also installed a new fireplace. It's electric, and it has brightness settings for the logs. We still need to put in the baseboards and crown molding, but this first step is done. We'll probably take a couple weeks off, get some school work done, then start up again.

One more thing. Our walls used to be red. VERY red. We painted over them with the light blue color you see below. We used KILZ paint from Wal-Mart and had them put the color straight into the paint. We bought five gallons because we figured we would need it to cover over all the red. It took one coat of paint and nothing is showing through. Thoroughly impressed with it.

 

Yes, he's watching Star Wars (actually, it's Empire Strikes Back, but who's being picky?)

 

 

Boy, are we tired!

 

So, I have my new weather station up. However, I'm not terribly pleased with the information I'm getting out of it. I think I may need to move it, because it's not tracking the wind speeds very well. I think I've got it too close to the roof and it's getting too much turbulence from the top of the house. If you look at the graph here, the wind direction is all over the place, which isn't correct. I might move it, as it's not put down in concrete yet.

School started on Monday, so now I have that to do again.

We're getting ready to replace the floors in our living room and front hall, and that will be fun.

I have a weather station to put up, but haven't found the time to do it yet. Grrrr.

 

This summer looks to be a big one at the movies. I was reading on another site about how the competition is going to be pretty thick this year, and looking at this list I think it will be. Here are the movies and what I think might result.

Spiderman 3, May 4 - I think this one will be pretty good, as the first two were well done, though not entirely faithful to the character. Venom will be a good addition to the movie universe, thought the Sandman might be lame. It will do well simply because it's the first big blockbuster of a season full of them, and it builds on an established franchise.

Shrek the Third, May 18 - Shrek was excellent, Shrek 2 was good, but I can't see where they can go from there. I'm sure it will be another big hit, but it had better get it's money the first weekend because it is being followed by....

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, May 25 - This seems to fall into a bit of a lull in the schedule as it comes directly after Shrek the Third, but it's at least three weeks before another big movie comes along. This is the final story in the Pirates trilogy, and will be huge. Especially huge after the teaser at the end of Dead Man's Chest. We should finally see the fates of Captain Jack Sparrow, Will Turner, Elizabeth Swan, Commodore Norrington, Captain Barbosa, and Davy Jones. Oh, and a drunk Keith Richards as Jack's dad. Good times.

Ocean's 13, June 8 - As with the Shrek movies, this had an excellent first movie (one of my all time favorites) and an OK second movie. I'm not even sure what the plot is supposed to be on this. As it comes out so close to Pirates I can't see it being a major hit.

Fantastic Four and the Silver Surfer, June 15 - The first FF movie was decent, but adding a dude in a silver bodysuit probably won't bring a lot of people back. Might be popular enough simply because it's in a good position.

Ratatouille, June 29 - The next Pixar movie, but it might become the lowest grossing of the lot. There are two more kid/family movies coming after it that would most likely take away any repeat viewings this might have received. Plus, it's about a rat. Not too much to be optimistic about.

Live Free or Die Hard, June 29 - Essentially Die Hard 4, it will be worth it just to have John McClane blow up something. "Yippie-ki-yay" to this one.

Transformers, July 4 - Independence Day was released on July 4 back in 1996 and was huge. They did a good job of not showing what the aliens in that movie looked like until it came out. They have tried to do a similar job with Transformers, but to much less success. Credit the intarweb with that. Can't keep a secret anymore these days. My opinion, and I'm a Transformers fan, but I think it will suck. Armageddon meets big robots. However, the main reason it won't do big business is....

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, July 13 - The fifth of the HP films, the longest of the books, and a pretty dark descent into the HP universe all adds up to big money at the box office. I predict that this will be one of the top two films of the year, behind Pirates of the Caribbean. The story is difficult to read, but I think it lends itself well to the big screen. I don't like Michael Gambon's Dumbledore, but Dumbledore doesn't play a huge role in this book, at least not one that the viewer will see. The next film will have Dumbledore in a crucial role. I'm looking forward to this one more than any of the rest of the films.

So there you have it. The claywginn.com 2007 film preview. One more note: Indiana Jones IV, May 2008. Good stuff.