Book Review: Total Church

I have been trying to read more books in 2010 so you may see me posting my brief thoughts about what I've read. The book "Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community" is an interesting book that proposes a simple model: "Christians are called to a dual fidelity: fidelity to the core content of the gospel and fidelity to the primary context of a believing community." The book was written by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis who are two pastors in the UK. I found the book very intriguing both from a intellectual and practical perspective. The simplicity of their perspective is backed up with biblical teaching and the authors go to great lengths to detail how the principles of gospel and community should permeate all of church life. I was challenged many times in this book to be more gospel- and community-centered in my everyday life and in my ministry roles. In the practical section of the book, I found many specific takeaways that I could reflect on for the church I'm a part of. One limitation of the book is that all of their practical examples are in the context of their specific church in the UK; it doesn't take-away from the book but I would be interested in reading their analysis of other churches applying their principles. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who is part of a local church and is open to being challenged in the way they do church.

Here are some quotations that were especially inspiring/challenging to me:

"Church is not a meeting you attend or a place you enter. It is an identity that is ours in Christ."

"Church is not another ball for me to juggle but that which defines who I am and gives Christlike shape to my life."

"[The church] is at the very heart of God's purposes. Jesus came to create a people who would model what it means to live under his rule. It would be a glorious outpost of the kingdom of God, an embassy of heaven. This is where the world can see what it means to be truly human."

"All theology must be missionary in its orientation. We need the same reorientation as churches. We are in a missionary situation, and all that we do must be missionary. Church planting is the best way for this to happen, as it inevitably and naturally shifts the church into missionary mode."

"Being word-centered is more than how you teach and disciple people. It means governing church life by God's word. It means every decision, formal and informal, is explored through explicit reference to God's word."

"Theology is also the task of the church because the only theology that matters and is worthy of the name is practical theology. Theology is the stuff of life...Meaningful theology needs to take place primarily in the routine life of the people of God."

"The key to successful youth work is the Bible."

Thankful Thursday: Meadowbrook Park

This is Pennyrile's best male blogger, Matt, taking the reins for Thankful Thursday. This week I'm going to give thanks to God for my favorite park in the area: Meadowbrook Park. I frequent the park throughout the year to take walks on the nature trails. I enjoy spending some quality time enjoying God's creations on the numerous paths that aren't heavily trafficked. There are also a few weird sculptures in the park that I tend to ignore mainly because I don't understand them.

To state my political perspective: I have no problem that a portion of my tax money goes to support this park. Well done, local government. Well done.

Kindle Case

My sister came to visit today and we had quite a time trying to make cases for our Kindles. She told me she was going to bring fabric to work on a project during Grace's afternoon nap. So, after Grace was settled down and sleeping soundly by 1:30 we embarked on a sewing project that was supposed to be done by 3:00 and we sort of finished at 8:15pm. And by sort of I mean although the project looks cute it doesn't really serve it's purpose.

After realizing Laura's original design for the case was a bit too small and a few ideas needed some tweaking we headed to the fabric store to buy more supplies. We returned home, got back to work, entertained Grace, had dinner, put Grace to bed and tweaked our project. After the original design turned out to be a little too small we very carefully measured and fit the Kindle perfectly into the new pouches. Everything was perfect until....THE ZIPPER. The way we added the zipper caused the opening to the case to shorten by about 3/4 of and inch. And the Kindle ceased to fit into the bag. It was unfortunate. Now I just have to find something that I want to read to carry around in my reading case.

10 Months Old

Grace is now 10 months old! Only 2 months until her 1st birthday.

Teething: This has been a month of teeth. Grace has been working on cutting 3 more teeth all month long. She now has almost 7 teeth. She still has to completely cut one more to get to 7 but it is so close.

Sleeping: Grace is still on the same schedule. Naps at 9 and 1 and bedtime from 7-7. I don't think her naps have been going as smoothly this month. She sometimes talks and plays for an hour or even 2 before falling asleep on a few occasions. I honestly don't believe she is ready to go down to 1 nap but it is a little trying to deal with these weird naps. I know she is going through so much growth and development right now that it might just be hard for her to fall asleep so I firmly believe in giving her the chance to nap twice. I feel pretty confident teething has been a factor in her napping too.

Nursing: I'm still nursing Grace 4 times a day. This month we have had to deal with the issue of biting. Another factor of so much teething? I guess I won't ever know for sure but it isn't fun. I have quickly taught her that biting is not acceptable and things have greatly improved over the last week and a half since it started.

Eating: I can happily say again Grace still has not met a food she doesn't like. She is still eating finger foods for lunch and pureed foods for breakfast. Dinner we kind of switch back and forth depending on what and when we are eating. This month we have tried lots of meat. Pork chops, chicken, turkey, meatballs to name a few. I also have been better about giving Grace food off of my plate and she loves it. She had homemade pizza a couple weeks ago and this weekend she had Monical's. She couldn't stop eating it. I think we may have found her new favorite food.

Playing: Grace has done a few cute new things this month. She likes putting things away or in other things. She loves to put her Little People in her teacups. She loves to put clothes in the dryer or laundry baskets. She even loves to put her toys away. Unfortunately she loves to dump her toys out right after we pick them up. Grace has gotten really good at cruising and now goes everywhere. She also has a push toy she motors around the house and gets mad if she runs into doors or walls, which happens a ton.

Communicating: Grace definitely knows that I am Mama now. She says mama and points at me. Much to Dada's chagrin she has yet to identify him. She also says "du" for her rubber ducky. We have worked on the sign for all done and she does that pretty well. I started to work on a sign for drink or milk because I'm not a huge fan of the point and whine at her cup. I think that she has that sign down pretty well. This month I think I want to teach her more. Other than that I don't plan to do much more extensive signing. But maybe I'll change my mind. We shall see. I also know that she is understanding more words. She has learned to identify her eyes when asked. She also has shown me her mouth and ears just not as consistently as eyes.

Thankful Thursday

Today I am thankful for...



THE OLYMPICS!!

I love watching the Olympics and am just so glad someone invented them. Thanks people who invented the Olympics.

Valentine's Day Weekend

We had a great weekend in the Chicago area this past weekend so I'm going to tell you faithful readers about it. To start I was super excited that we got our new GPS earlier in the week because we had 7 locations to get to that we would have had to look up directions for without the GPS. So it was a perfect time to buy one. As a side note, we got a refurbished Garmin off of Amazon. I would highly recommend going the refurbished route because technology is so much cheaper that way and most of the time things like GPS, ipods, etc. are returned because the previous owner just never figured out how to use it. So back to the weekend. We had 4 major events that I will summarize below.

Event #1: Teresa's Baby Shower

We have a picture of Teresa with her hand on my belly from when I was pregnant so we had to reverse recreate the picture.

I'm very excited to welcome Teresa's baby girl into the world in just about a month. Teresa and I have known each other since high school, are both 1st borns and obviously are both girls. It will be fun to have 1st born daughters close in age. Our friend Sonya hosted a wonderful lunch shower for her and it was lots of fun!

Event #2: Chinese New Year Dinner

Grace's red envelope from Jared and Yvonne.

My BIL and SIL, Jared and Yvonne, invited us to celebrate Chinese New Year with them this year by taking us and Matt's parents out for dinner at a yummy Chinese restaurant. Yvonne's family is Chinese and this holiday is very important in their culture so it was really special to be able to celebrate with her. Jared and Yvonne picked out all the food and we ate family style which was delicious. They also initiated Grace into the Chinese tradition of giving a red envelope with money in it to unmarried family members that are younger than them. At least I think that was the stipulation but I may be wrong. They also have to give her an even amount of dollars for luck. It was really cool for them to include Grace in that tradition.

Event #3: Mark and Julie's Wedding

Me, Mark (the groom) and Matt at the wedding reception.

On Valentine's Day we attended the wedding of our good friend Mark and Julie. We have only met Julie once but from what I could tell Mark chose very well. Mark went to college with Matt so several of his college friends were there as well as some of my high school friends who also went to college with Matt. It was nice to catch up with people and celebrate a marriage on Valentine's Day. The wedding and reception were in Chicago so of course I was a little shocked and overwhelmed by the amount of traffic. I am just not a city girl!

Event #4: Leaving Grace for several hours

Jenna, Josh, and Grace all at Grandma and Grandpa's house while their mommies and daddies went to a wedding.

Another big thing that happened for me this weekend is I left Grace for longer than I ever have before. Yes, she will be 10 months old in a couple days but I have never left her for more than 4 hours. This weekend we left before 2 and didn't get back until close to 9 so I was away from her for 7 hours. Matt's parents watched her and I completely trust them so that made things 100 times easier but it was still hard. She had to take 2 bottles which she has never done before and she did ok. When she is done nursing in a couple months I think I will feel a lot more ease about leaving her because this Sunday went well. Maybe Matt and I will take and all day date sometime in the spring.

Comma Usage in a List

Almost 20 years ago, I was sitting in grade school learning about the comma when my teacher explained to me how a comma is used to iterate a series of items. However, she then explained that a comma was optional to separate the last two items of the list. I objected, saying there had to be a right way. I told her that a comma should separate the last two items in the list since it separates all the other items in the list. But she said it wasn't necessary and I didn't understand.

Well, I can acknowledge today that I finally understand. After living my life in complete support of full usage of the serial comma, I see the potential ambiguity of it (see Wikipedia reference below). There are cases where having the comma separate the last two items can lead to a misunderstanding. So I was wrong in my assertion in grade school about always putting a comma to separate the last two items in a list.

However, I do believe that there always is a correct usage of a comma for a given sentence (or a reasonable alternative to using a comma). So one cannot say that it is "optional" to use a comma to separate the last two items in a list, even if it leads to ambiguity. For a given sentence with a list, there always is a way to form it to allow a read full understanding.

I will sleep better tonight knowing this information.

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From Wikipedia:

"Commas are used to separate items in lists, as in They own a cat, a dog, two rabbits, and six mice. In English a comma may or may not be used before the final conjunction (and,or, nor) in a list of more than two elements. A comma used in such a position is called a serial comma or an Oxford or Harvard comma (after the Oxford University Press and Harvard University Press, both prominent advocates of this style). In some cases use or omission of such a comma may serve to avoid ambiguity:

Use of serial comma disambiguating:

• I spoke to the boys, Sam and Tom. - could be either the boys and Sam and Tom or the boys, who are Sam and Tom (I spoke to two people).
• I spoke to the boys, Sam, and Tom. - must be the boys and Sam and Tom.

Omission of serial comma disambiguating:

• I thank my mother, Anne Smith and Thomas. - The writer is thanking three people: the writer's mother, Anne Smith (who is not the writer's mother) and Thomas.
• I thank my mother, Anne Smith, and Thomas. - Could be either my mother and Anne Smith and Thomas or Thomas and my mother, who is Anne Smith.

If the individual items of a list are long, complex, affixed with description or themselves contain commas, semicolons may be preferred as separators, and sometimes the list may be introduced with a colon."

Buffalo Chicken Soup

Do you want to try a new easy, tasty, comfort soup? You have come to the right place. My friend Erica gave me this recipe and I was not really sure how much I would like it. But, I not only liked it, I loved it!

6 simple ingredients...

• 3 cans cream of chicken soup
• 5 cups milk
• 1/2 cups Frank's Wings Sauce (you could add more if you like it spicy)
• 1 rotisserie chicken (Tip: buy the chicken at the end of the day and get it for cheaper. Then pick it off the bone before you go to bed and the soup will be SUPER easy to assemble the next day. I guess you could cook your own too but that makes it a little less easy).
• Blue cheese crumbles
• Fresh cilantro
  

Put soup, milk, chicken and hot sauce in a crock-pot for 3-4 hours on low. OR put all the ingredients in a dutch oven on your stove and heat for 30 minutes or until the soup is hot.

Top with blue cheese and cilantro.

This recipe makes about 6 big bowls of soup.

The Bruised Ego Of Brett Favre

Brett Favre has been an interesting sports figure in my life over the last couple years as he has gone from hero to enemy as he retired from the Green Bay Packers and then played for the Minnesota Vikings this year. With that said, I do respect him as a football player but I must bring to light a recent event that I find disturbing.

An interesting story came out today regarding Brett Favre's injuries during the Vikings-Saints game last week, a game in which Favre threw a very costly interception at the end of regulation before the Vikings went on to lose in overtime to the Saints. Much was said of how the Saints got a lot of hits on Favre and today photos were released of Favre's injured ankle and hamstring.

The disturbing thing to me about the pictures is not the severe bruises and swelling (I can somewhat comprehend how intensely physical the game of football can be). What is disturbing to me is the fact that the photos were taken and released to the public. I have been an avid football fan for many years and I have never heard of a football star taking or releasing pictures of their injuries before. Football players get through bodies injured and damaged week in and week out, but they don't have slide shows of their injuries produced to garner sympathy.

To try to explain Favre, I'm going to propose three rational possible explanations of why these pictures of his injuries were put out:

1) Favre did not know that pictures were being released. Maybe a family member was having fun and snapped the pics and then leaked them. Fair enough, but I don't see this as likely.

2) Favre allowed the pictures to be released because the injuries he had were the worst of his career. Maybe the bruises were so bad that Favre felt compelled to have photos taken and given to the press? Or maybe NFL players have bruises this bad on a regular basis. Favre has played through many injuries and I can't believe this was the worst beating he has taken. Which means that only the 3rd option seems logical to me....

3) Favre allowed the pictures to be released in an attempt to defend himself after his horrible interception at the end of the game. Think about this. Favre has never before released pictures of his injuries. But now after a big game where he choked, it looks like he wants to throw attention off of his poor decision and onto his injury, to cast himself as the warrior victim who survived a battle.

I'm not trying to hit a guy when he's down. I just want Favre to be a man and admit his mistake and stand by it. He's still a great player, he still had a great season, and played well in the playoffs this year. Instead of moving on, he had to make an excuse to defend himself.

To conclude: I respect that Favre was roughed up during the game and played through pain, but I don't respect the fact that he allowed the pictures to surface. Bruised ankle and hamstring? Yes, definitely. But it looks like there's also a bruised ego in the picture.