Sunday Night Mind Sweeping

Miscellaneous thoughts that have been bumping into one another in my brain lately...

Deb is asleep in bed and I'm checking the blogs of family and friends. I'm thinking, "How did I unwind after Sundays of bearing my soul to my people in preaching in those early years of pastoring when the Internet didn't even exist?" Of course I have always enjoyed reading for leisure. Today I've been reading for hours and hours...even skipped my normal Sunday afternoon nap... I've been rotating between several volumes...a book on the planets filled with scientific babble about evolutionary forces and the big bang and all that nonsense, but interesting enough to sift through the misinformation to marvel at God's creation...a book on the Panama Canal written by one of my favorite history authors, David McCullough...a book about the prophet Elijah written by one of my favorite devotional authors, Chuck Swindoll...and a book about a guy who read through the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Yeah, reading is a great way to detox the mind. But so too is writing. That's why I like blogging.

Today we ate lunch after church at a Mexican restaurant with a few friends from the church. Eating with folks from the church after Sunday worship is normal. Today a friend was showing Deb and me her new phone. She took a picture of me and I looked at it and was amazed at how I thought I resembled my grandfather Atwood. I had my hair cut shorter this past week and its starting to get more gray in it, but that wasn't the thing. It was how my chin seemed to be poking out more than I'd ever noticed before. Grandpa Atwood had a kind of a pointed chin. Maybe mine just looked more pointed on the screen of her phone, because when she sent it to our home computer it didn't stand out as much. What a relief. I loved my grandpa but he was a "codger" (used affectionately to refer to an eccentric but amusing old man).

For only the third time in my life I've had an allergic reaction to poison ivy. I thought at first I got it from cleaning out some brush beside a thrift store at which I volunteer. But another guy in the church who was helping me with stump removal (see my earlier blog, "The Stump") said today after worship that he had some poison ivy too. So that may be how I picked it up. Anyway it's an aggravation. I would laugh at my two older brothers when they had allergic reactions to it growing up. I guess the chickens have come home to roost. I have a small spot on my left arm, and on my left shin. But I have scratched around my eyes so much that my face is puffy. Deb got me some medicine this afternoon. It makes it not itch for an hour or two but then...I'm scratching like a hen in a barnyard. Poison ivy must be part of the curse from the fall of man in the Garden of Eden.

Started the series, "No Perfect Families Allowed" today. Like any church, Pathway has struggling families, stressed families, and good families striving to be even better...but we don't have any perfect families. Deb and I will celebrate 31 years of marriage this month and we have a great family - but we have not been perfect even though our kids are more perfect than their dad and mom. In this series we're looking at some of the families in the Bible and how we can make imperfect human relationships work by God's grace. Today I spoke on "Surviving Family Flaws." The message was on the first family - Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel. Several people commented afterwards that God showed them some important stuff.

Wanted to go see the movie "Ironman" this weekend but Deb and I are saving our nickels and dimes to go to Spain for the birth of our twin granchildren late fall or winter. Several guys in the church who saw it (one saw it twice) said it was awesome. Hmmm... can I hold out when "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" comes out? Sure. I've seen plenty of movies before.