Pride comes before the fall

I'm pretty sure I've used this title before on a post (which maybe means I have a pride problem), but I'm going to use it again anyway because it fits. I know, a title that fits what I'm going to type about -- crazy, but work with me.

This story takes place on Sunday, March 32*, 2008 (*some dates have been changed to protect their identity). It was much like any other day of any other week, except it was Sunday, I was on camera duty, the Benishes (Rach and Bekah) were over, we'd had a late night solving Rubik's cubes, etc. As I walked up to church and thought about how tired I was, I also had a brief moment of pride. You see, I somehow thought that being part of the camera team and dedicated to getting to church early (and volunteering for other stuff at church) somehow gave me something to be proud of. I'm not sure why my pride chose this moment to hit, but it did, and there you have it: the pride that came before the fall.

Now onto the fall, which is really the more exciting part of the story.


Most of the time when I'm running one of the cameras for church, I stand the whole time. That's just the way it goes, and I was used to it. But lo and behold, I showed up this time and there were stools! It was pretty exciting. So we plugged everything in, did our white balance settings, figured out that some cables were reversed and switched them, and we were ready to go. Up to this point, I had not used the stool because we were walking around and changing things and moving far too much to be sitting down and getting up. Well, I decided it was high time to test out this stool idea, so I sat down.

So far so good.

Then I wiggled around a little. Still good.

Then I decided I was far too close to my camera. Don't want to be bumping it during the service, right? So I moved myself and my stool back... Not so good. You see, the platform that my stool was sitting on is not very big, and as it turns out, the stool was already at the back edge of the platform and didn't have that extra inch or two or six that I tried to move it.

I tried to fall gracefully... hahaha. Yeah, not so much on the gracefulness. I crashed into the sound booth. The good news is that this was all before the service AND I didn't bring the camera down with me. Well really it's all good nows... I didn't hurt myself (or anyone else), maybe just my pride, but we all know that needs to be hurt every once in a while anyway. I had about 50 billion people (or at least 5) rush over and ask if I was ok or needed a trip to the hospital.

So yeah. Got pride? Be prepared to fall... maybe literally.

In other news, I've recently come up with 3 principles to good living:

1. If you've just eaten and have your dish in your hand, you might as well just stick it in the dishwasher instead of piling dishes in the sink until the stack is too big to even wash your hands anymore. You might be thinking that this is an obvious thing to do, and I'd say, "you're right" but some of us need to think about things like this for a while before it becomes quite so obvious. Apparently my brain sometimes thinks that the sink is going to load the dishwasher if I just feed it the dishes, but this is a myth. NOT TRUE.

2. If someone didn't do something for you that you hoped they would do and you're starting to get upset, just remember that if they weren't around, you'd have to do it for yourself anyway so there's no point in being mad. I get this way a lot about dumb things like cleaning the bathroom. I don't mind cleaning the bathroom every once in a while, but there are times when I think to myself, "wouldn't it be just as easy for my roommate to be cleaning the bathroom? in fact, didn't she have all kinds of free time this week that she could have used to clean the bathroom?" And then I think to myself that if she weren't around, the bathroom would probably be just about as dirty and I'd be just about the only one there to clean it (I say "just about" because, well, there's always Wafs... just kidding), so then I grab a rag and some scrubbing bubbles and get to work. It's amazing how such little logic can clear up my perspective! And it's amazing how nice it is when the bathroom's clean! :)

3. There should always be 3 points, but I didn't have any more epiphanies about principles of good living, so that's about it.

Peace.

One more thing....!

With minor cheating by looking at a web site (or two)... ok, major cheating... I was able to solve my rubik's cube, twice! Thanks for the inspiration, Chris.

Row, row, row your boat

My dad was picking on me for my blog titles never making sense, so this one is going to tie in (somehow) to this post. I'm not quite sure how yet, but we'll get there.

First of all, happy Easter! Or Happy Resurrection Day as some like to say, because, well Jesus resurrected! Because he's cool like that.

We had a Good Friday prayer retreat on (Good) Friday and, well, I really liked it. Basically it was just spending a couple hours by ourselves with God, reading the bible, praying, meditating, listening to music, whatever, mostly focused around the Good Friday/Easter story. I took my iPod(izzle) this year and listened to a few tunes while reading the crucifixion story in the gospels. Sometimes it amazes me how things can work out "coincidentally" -- like I "coincidentally" downloaded the songs "Beautiful Scandalous Night" and "Sweetly Broken" and put them on Podizzle the night before. It was actually for purposes of reminiscing about songs I hadn't heard/sung in a while, but well, have you ever heard the song Beautiful Scandalous Night? It's my new favorite Good Friday song. I'm going to post some lyrics here:

"Go on up to the mountain of mercy
To the crimson perpetual tide
Kneel down on the shore
Be thirsty no more
Go under and be purified

Follow Christ to the holy mountain
Sinner sorry and wrecked by the fall
Cleanse your heart and your soul
In the fountain that flowed
For you and for me and for all

CHORUS:
At the wonderful, tragic, mysterious tree
On that beautiful, scandalous night you and me
Were atoned by His blood and forever washed white
On that beautiful, scandalous night

On the hillside, you will be delivered
At the foot of the cross justified
And your spirit restored
By the river that poured
From our blessed Savior's side"

Pretty cool, eh? And then there's Sweetly Broken, which I won't copy all the lyrics for but basically talks about coming to the cross sweetly broken, recognizing our sin and realizing what life we've been given through Jesus' death. Speaking of that, Mark Driscoll has a cool little 3 sentence thing that sums up what Jesus did for us:

He lived the life we couldn't live (a sinless one).
He died the death we should have died (because of our sin).
He gave the gift we don't deserve (eternal life with him).

Basically Jesus was (and is) super cool and possesses (well, he IS) some kind of love that I can only hope to reflect a small bit of to the people around me. Josh and I were talking about how sometimes you just have to come to the realization that we can't necessarily love these people around us that drive us crazy, but God can, and sometimes God wants to love people through us.

I'd like to end quoting one last song:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily
Live is but a dream

See? I told you I'd tie it in this time...

A man must learn to sail in all winds.

We (meaning myself and other people, not just myself and my multiple personalities) were discussing wisdom teeth over the weekend. There was a slight disagreement about the significance of the number of wisdom teeth a person has. Do wisdom teeth point to a lack of wisdom that is then provided by the wisdom teeth? Or an excess of wisdom that shows itself through wisdom teeth? I lean toward the former since I only have two wisdom teeth, meaning I was so wise I didn't need all four. Everyone else went with the latter since they all had all four (at least at one point) and wanted it to be an outflow of their abundance of wisdom. What's your vote?

I also found some random stuff leftover from our mission trip to Belize back in 2002, including some postcards and papers and my encouragement notebook. Wow, I really think we should have encouragement notebooks all through life, not just on mission trips! For those of you who don't know what an encouragement notebook is, let me explain. It's basically a little notebook with your name on the front, and during a mission trip (or whatever period of time you specify), people can write encouraging things in it. For example, say you worked hard on the work site that day and someone noticed -- they may comment in your notebook. Or maybe you did an excellent job teaching someone the puppet choreography -- they may thank you in your encouragement notebook. In my case after looking back at my Belize notebook, here are some of my favorites:

"You smell... way to go!"
"Good tortilla thingies"
"Hey Mud Queen!..."
"You're so cool, I wish I could be just like you!" (A note I wrote to myself)
"Well in you I may have found someone almost as strange as me, that really impresses me."
"While admiring the hand-crafted Belizian pen I have in my hand I ponder the past events of our trip..." (can anyone guess who wrote that one?)
"P.S. Thanks for helping me floss!"

So you see? These notebooks are at least good for some laughs. I actually laughed (and cried!) while reading through mine the other day. Good memories.

Today at TNT we were reading in our green booklets ("In Our Joy" -- John Piper), and the chapter was about it being hard to follow Jesus. One thing that struck me was when it referenced Jesus calling the disciples, for example in Mark 1:17-18:

"'Come, follow me,' Jesus said, 'and I will make you fishers of men.' At once they left their nets and followed him"

What struck me is what it takes *me* to follow Jesus sometimes. I certainly don't often just drop everything I'm doing to follow Jesus. Granted, I don't get to see Jesus in human form beckoning to me, but what if I were one of those disciples? Would I have dropped everything I ever knew to follow a random dude who came up to me and told me he'd make me a fisher of men? Or would I (more likely) be like the ones who said "just let me finish what I'm doing" or "hey, I'm hanging out with the fam, maybe I'll follow when they die" or "can't you see i'm eating!" or something equally lame like that. Anyway, just something that got me thinking.

I talked to one of my contacts at New Tribes about some more of the details of going to Guinea. I think the plan for now will be to go for about a year and decide from there if God's calling me to stay another year. I still don't really have a timeline for when I'll be leaving -- basically sometime after June training when I've gotten my support raised. I just watched my "Friend Raising" video and have yet to read the book, but it's got good points about finding people who will partner with me rather than just writing a check. People who will be passionate about what's going on in Guinea, who will care when I'm over there fixing computers, who will want to be updated on God's work in the hearts of the people. Pretty cool. Now I just have to get going on that support letter/presentation.

I also found out that the last tech person to go over to Guinea ended up dating and marrying another missionary there and staying in the country. Hmmm.

Oh yeah, I started learning some tae kwon do on Wednesday! I'm pretty horrible, but it was fun. I may even go back.

Ok, I think that's all for now. Happy Resurrection Day coming up!

Every song's the beginning of a new dance

The 50-lb challenge ended this week. At first I was pretty pumped about this, and I still am in some ways, but really, what changes for me? I will still eat the same way as I ate thru the whole challenge since I pretty much cut nothing out of my diet. I will continue to work out because, well, it turns out I like to go to the gym every once in a while. Basically the only thing that's different is a weigh-in on Thursday mornings. Now I just won't know how much I weigh when I eat a lot. Basically I take this whole thing to mean I'm pretty healthy. I mean, if this 50-lb challenge was all about being healthy, and I will continue doing the same things I did during the 50-lb challenge, it basically means I'm healthy right? And that it's ok to eat lots of m&ms?

Michelle and I busted out the "foam finger flyers" today. I was reminiscing about them the other day and the fun times at A#9er Christmas parties and the other maybe not quite as fun times pelting my brother Josh with them (and being pelted in return) from 3 feet away. I found the box in my closet this morning and Michelle and I used Waffles as target practice. Now he's freaked out by them. I'd say it's pretty good revenge for all the scratches we've gotten from him. It also gives me a good threat when he starts scratching at the walls and chipping off paint. So far -- very effective.

Bourne Identity has been finished! I finished at the gym today while pedaling furiously on one of the bikes. Apparently when I tell myself I need to read faster to finish before the gym closes, I interpret that as needing to pedal faster as well. It's hard to separate the two, I guess.

I need to go clean the explosion in my room from starting the cleaning process earlier today. I always say that it's sometimes gotta get worse before it gets better, and usually I'm right when it comes to cleaning my room.

Peace.

... like the mouse loves rice

FreeRice.com

Read the fine print under the bowl. :)

Banquet Room Available

I'm back from my blogging hiatus. I didn't actually mean to take a hiatus, but somehow I've been busy. And I keep thinking it's still February, which means that February 25th wasn't too long ago.

I got accepted by New Tribes to go to Guinea! After some initial confusion because it said I was going to Papua New Guinea, the New Tribes website (ntm.org) now has the correct information. It doesn't have much more than the country I'm going to for now, but I'm sure it will eventually. For now I'm pretty pumped and overwhelmed at the same time. There's a lot to do before I go, and I don't even know when I go yet, or where to start on all the stuff to be done. But yeah, when I push back the overwhelmed feeling, I'm mostly excited. :)

This weekend was a busy one, filled with lots of photo-worthy moments. I felt like my usual paparazzi self, while having quite a bit of fun at the same time. Friday was Sarah McDonald's surprise black & white birthday party. It was fun, I'm pretty sure she was at least semi-surprised, and so all-around it was an enjoyable night. Complete with a limo ride and Lumber Barons. Oh, and the naming of a panda. This was quite the ordeal, but I'm pretty sure we settled on Mona, short for Pandemonium, which Dylan wouldn't name the panda because it's not a real name. The other major contender was Kaylee... yeah, definitely not anywhere as cool as pandeMONAium.

Saturday was Bizzle's birthday (I'm sensing a birthday theme), so Sunshine and I met up for another surprise. We managed to pull into Minden City about 3 minutes apart (pretty impressive if you ask me), then caravaned from there to Bizzle's house where we got to see her shocked face through the window. I'm pretty sure she wasn't quite expecting to see Sunshine there all the way from Boston and me all the way from, well, Midland (ok, so not as impressive). We had a fun time hanging out with her and various members of her family including a niece and nephew. One of my favorite quotes from the night was this one, from Mama Tenbusch (to Jason, Bizzle's hyper nephew): "You can't talk with food in your mouth, so put some food in your mouth!" Another good quote was when we were going around the table to say prayers for the night, and it came to Jason who said, "I want to pray that my dad doesn't go to jail" which was followed by a lot of surprised faces and shock around the table. Someone asked him, "Why would your dad be going to jail?" to which he replied, "Well, he's been doing some speeding lately..." It was pretty hilarious the way he said it. We also got to meet up with Emily Holdwick, which was cool, and it made me think that I should put more effort into visiting her in Saginaw sometime. It's really not that far away.

Sunday was another fun day -- no birthdays (that I know of), just a really sweet concert and some fun friends. It was time for the annual Winter Jam concert, this time at the Breslin Center in East Lansing. Sarah, Jeff, and I drove over to Mt Pleasant, supposedly to meet up with my brother Josh, but Josh-o was rather on the sick side, so instead he just came to lunch with us at the Pita Pit (woot!) where we also met up with Eli. After some delicious pitas (and pictures... well, they might not be so delicious), we made our way to the land of shamrock shakes (otherwise known as mcdonald's), and got some more crazy pictures by the big arches, including some of Jeff stuck in the arch. The concert was cool -- Skillet was my favorite (they shot flames!) and BarlowGirl was also cool, because, well, they just are, and the rest were good as well. We stopped at Pizza Sam's (apparently that's a popular name) in Alma on the way home, where we had delicious pizza, and then I slept in the car a lot. It was a tiring weekend!

Anyway, all that to say I'd almost consider getting married to someone someday just for the sake of being able to adopt some kids and give them a good home. Turns out I like kids and there are a lot of kids out there that need families. I don't really know where that came from other than I got to hang out with kids and I also got to hear about adopting this weekend. Anyway, probably not a good idea to marry someone just to adopt kids, so I'm going to push that plan to the back burner for a while.

Time for sleep, something that didn't happen much this weekend.

Peace out.