President Obama Picks a Church- Chaplain is a Southern Baptist and graduate of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

I found this news to be interesting for a couple of reasons: 1. Obama is choosing to worship under a military Chaplain, and 2. the CH is a Southern Baptist and a graduate of the institution I am currently attending, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The article, originally published in Time, uses the opportunity to take a swipe at Southern Baptists, but it is still an interesting story and should provide some good fodder for conversation in Baptist circles. Here is an excerpt from the article and the full text can be found here:

For the past five months, White House aides and friends of the Obamas have been quietly visiting local churches and vetting the sermons of prospective first ministers in a search for a new – and uncontroversial – church home. Obama has even sampled a few himself, attending services at 19th Street Baptist on the weekend before his inauguration and celebrating Easter at St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Now, in an unexpected move, Obama has told White House aides that instead of joining a congregation in Washington, D.C., he will follow in George W. Bush’s footsteps and make his primary place of worship Evergreen Chapel, the nondenominational church at Camp David.

Camp David’s current chaplain, Lieut. Carey Cash, leads the services at Evergreen. If the White House had custom-ordered a pastor to be the polar opposite of Jeremiah Wright, they could not have come as close as Cash. (As it is, the White House had no hand in selecting Cash. The Navy rotates chaplains through Camp David every three years; Cash began his tour this past January.) The 38-year-old Memphis native is a graduate of the Citadel and the great-nephew of Johnny Cash. He served a tour as chaplain with a Marine battalion in Iraq and baptized nearly 60 Marines during that time. Cash earned his theology degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth – and, yes, that means Obama’s new pastor is a Southern Baptist

.

Traditional vs. Personal Wedding Vows

I was laying in bed last night flipping through the ‘Opinion’ section of the Wall Street Journal app on my Ipod Touch when I stumbled upon a very well written and thought out commentary on marriage vows. I think the article is definitely worth spending a few minutes reading over. It will give you some food for thought for the day.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

• OPINION: HOUSES OF WORSHIP
• JUNE 19, 2009

For Better or for Worse: When Marriage Vows Get Creative

By DAVID LAPP

It’s the end of spring, and that means engaged couples are putting the last touches on their summer wedding celebrations. Should the cake have three tiers or four? Do the chairs for guests need bows? And, finally, what will they say in their vows?

This wasn’t always a problem, of course. Until recently, everyone just used the words provided by his or her church or synagogue. In recent years, however, more and more couples have decided to write their own vows. This departure from tradition has become so common that some couples now choose to buy the words that will bind them together for a lifetime — online.

In the world-wide Web of wedding options, instantvows.com offers a competitive “Instant Vows Wedding Package” ($17, limited time offer). Ghostwriters Central promises vows “that capture your personal voice while encompassing the appropriate etiquette and emotion” — with “the added advantage” of being written by professionals. You send the site a brief description and some memories of you and your beloved and it will send you the vows (for $125).

In this custom-made vows market there is plenty of opportunity for mockery, although it is also easy to dismiss the writing of one’s own wedding vows — or farming them out to professionals — as a harmless exercise, just another way for a couple to personalize their love for each other. As one online seller puts it: “There is no better way to express your true feelings for your partner than to put together the perfect words for that unforgettable moment.”

Brides.com, a popular wedding guide, agrees. After noting how momentous the words are, it suggests that personalizing your own vows makes them “all the more meaningful.” Innocent enough, right? Maybe not, for it goes on to suggest that a bride try the question-phrase “Will you promise to be honest in your relationship, and give him support and strength?” over the more traditional “Will you love and honor him, comfort and cherish him, and forsaking all others, be faithful to him?” The traditional vows insist on exclusive faithfulness. In this revised vow, all that’s required is honesty and “support and strength.”

To be fair, though, many couples want to express the kind of commitment enshrined in the traditional vows — they just want to personalize it. This is exactly what my fiancée and I had in mind when we recently sat down with our pastor for premarital counseling. I told him that we planned to write our own vows. He dismissed my idea and directed us to the Book of Common Prayer (published in 1549) for the vows he thought we should exchange. The vows there are more formal, and hardly original: “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.” My sensibilities were offended. “Don’t you know this is our wedding?”

But let’s imagine for a moment that, instead of reciting the oath that his 43 predecessors have taken, President Barack Obama had insisted at his inauguration on personalizing it, perhaps replacing “I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States” with the more flexible “I will try as hard as possible to do the job of president of the United States.” That sounds a little more natural and honest, he might have argued: How does he know if he’ll always be able to live up to his word? Besides, he might have stated, “The traditional oath is what every other president has said. I want mine to be original.”

We, the people, would have been outraged — and rightly so. The very specific words our Constitution requires the president to recite demonstrate the gravity of the obligations he assumes. They can’t be reduced to the whims of one person.

Like the presidential oath, the traditional marriage vows — whether Catholic, Jewish or Protestant — typically ask a marrying couple to make specific pledges: as the Catholic marriage ceremony puts it, “I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health.” And for how long? “I will love and honor you all the days of my life.” The words of religious marriage vows are direct and uncompromisingly clear.

Why? Because when one enters marriage, one steps into an institution bigger than oneself: It includes another person, the community and future children. Acts of this magnitude warrant precise and time-tested words. And as my pastor said: “A church acts like family: We share in the couple’s vows as we witness the vows being made, as we pray for them, support them, and even keep them accountable to those vows during difficult times.”

In 1943, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to a young bride and groom, reminding them that “it is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.” In the traditional vows, the institution — marriage — makes and forms the couple; the vows set out what marriage is and what it requires. In today’s write-your-own or instant-download vows, the couple picks and chooses the promises they make to each other — they make their own definition. The more casual attitudes toward the vows are probably a symptom of our more casual attitude toward marriage.

The good news is that young people generally take marriage seriously. A recent report from the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University finds that 71% of high-school senior boys and 82% of high-school senior girls believe that having a good marriage and family life is “extremely important.” But when the same group is asked whether it is “very likely” that they will stay married to the same person for life, only 63% of girls and 57% of boys think so. So our young people value marriage — but they find it difficult to believe that marriage can last. Unfortunately, many of the wedding ceremonies they watch — or listen to — won’t convince them otherwise.

Mr. Lapp is a research assistant at the Institute for American Values in New York.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W13

Newsweek Critical of Overly Evangelical Chaplains

Wow. I could not believe the incredibly broad strokes that Kathryn Joyce, author of Newsweek article “Christian Soldiers,” used to paint evangelicals in the military chaplaincy. Let’s examine some of the issues that jumped out at me.

-Please note that my comments in this article are based on the Army Chaplaincy, I cannot speak for differences among the various branches.

1. The title of the article, “Christian Soldiers,” is designed to immediately throw up images in the readers mind of the Crusades and a modern American military that is bent on some sort of religious domination of other people within its ranks and other cultures. The title leads to patently false assumptions about the military and sets the stage for the rest of the article which a bash-fest on evangelical Chaplains.

2. The effort is an example of what critics call a growing culture of militarized Christianity in the armed forces. It is influenced in part by changes in outlook among the various branches’ 2,900 chaplains, who are sworn to serve all soldiers, regardless of religion, with a respectful, religiously pluralistic approach. However, with an estimated two thirds of all current chaplains affiliated with evangelical and Pentecostal denominations, which often prioritize conversion and evangelizing, and a marked decline in chaplains from Catholic and mainstream Protestant churches, this ideal is suffering.

Where do I start with this statement. It seems that the author of the article did very little research into the mission of a Chaplain. A Chaplain is supposed to “perform and provide” religious services for soldiers of all religious groups. A lot of misunderstanding about Chaplains stems from a misunderstanding of that phrase.

A Chaplain is expected to “perform” religious services in keeping with the traditions of his/her endorsing agency. A Protestant CH will perform religious services in line with their endorser in the same way that a Catholic CH will perform religious services in line with their endorser. The above statement from the article does not elaborate on that fact and makes it appear that the only thing a CH can and should do is provide some type of generic religious support.

A Chaplain is expected to “provide” religious suppotrt by ensuring that soldiers who have different practices or different faiths have time, tools, and proper personnel to meet their religious needs. That means that Protestant Chaplains take into account their Catholic soldiers and make sure that they have an apportunity to conduct mass. The Protestant CH will not conduct mass himself, but will do his best to see that the religious needs of his soldiers are met. The same thing applies to all denominations and religions (i.e. a Jewish CH will not be expected to lead a Christian worship service but will make sure that his Christian soldiers have the time and tools to meet and conduct services).

It seems that many people would like to completely emasculate the Chaplaincy (or at least evangelicals) and turn Chaplains into some sort of generic religious leader. That desire is complete folly because it would mean that no ones religious needs would be adequately met.

3. Weinstein, an Air Force veteran who founded MRFF in 2005 after both he and his sons say they encountered anti-Semitic harassment and proselytizing in the service, has waged legal battles against what he sees as an improper mingling of church and state in the military, including a current lawsuit against the Department of Defense alleging service members’ compulsory attendance at military functions that include sectarian Christian prayers and a broader “pattern and practice of constitutionally impermissible promotions of religious beliefs within the Department of Defense and the United States Army.” Weinstein says MRFF hears from 400 to 500 service members monthly—including Jews, atheists and religious minorities, but mostly nonevangelical Christians—who claim religious discrimination in the military, often from chaplains or officers implying that they aren’t Christian enough. “The vast majority of chaplains now see the military as a mission field with a lot of low-hanging fruit,” says Weinstein.

Let’s start with “sectarian Christian prayers” shall we? It is a tradition in the Army to have a CH offer a prayer at such things as a change of command ceremony. Typically, such prayers consist of thanking God for the outgoing leaders and prayers for guidance in his/her new post and asking for widom for the incoming leader. What usually ends up getting reported is if a Chaplain has the gall to pray (gasp) in Jesus’ name. Fortunately, a simple phrase by the CH offering the prayer can eliminate many of the perceived “problems” with such a prayer. A CH, recognizing that a change of command is a mandatory event and that people from other denominations and faiths will be present, can choose to say before his prayer, “Please join me by praying in your tradition as I pray in mine.” That phrase recognizes that other religions might be present and welcomes people of other faith groups to pray in their own tradition.

Finally, the Newsweek article carries throughout it a tone of hostility to anyone (specifically evangelical Christians) who would dare to share their faith or spread anything but generic religious gobbledygoop. Heaven forbid that a CH actually have a calling to his/her field and see it as a mission field! Heaven forbid a CH ever see a single soldier converted! I will grant that there are a handful of CH’s (and they are the ones who always make the headlines) who occasionally take things too far. They are in the minority. The Chaplains that I know recognize that they can’t go hold a mandatory big tent revival in the middle of a parade field. The Chaplains I know also recognize that they can’t go and beat people up over theological or religious differences and demand that they repent or face THE FIRES OF HELLLLLL! No, instead they go about their day mingling with soldiers, counseling soldiers, and being a source of hope and good cheer for all soldiers of all religious beliefs.

It is also important to note for those who may not realize it, chapel services are completely voluntary. Within the confines of a protestant chapel service a CH can preach, have altar calls, and say the name of Jesus as many times as he/she wants. Why? No one was forced to go.

Please note, that this next section will describe my personal philosophy of how I minister to soldiers who come to me seeking help.

If a soldier comes to me seeking counseling about a specific issue, I always try to help them resolve their specific issue by offering sound advice. Sometimes the soldier will ask very specific questions that pertain to something I hold religious convictions about. If that is the case, I share with them what I believe about the issue from my understanding of Scripture. Sometimes a door will be open to talk about matters of faith and other times it will not. However, my Christian faith will always inform any kind of counseling that I do. Some might call that proseletysing but I call it being true to your beliefs and I would expect nothing less if I was receiving counsel from a Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, or Jewish CH.

The point of all this is basically this, if a soldier comes to me and says they are scared of dying because they don’t know what will happen to them, no CH (of any denomination or religious background) worth his salt is going to beat around the bush. I am going to immediately pull out my Bible and start sharing with them the only hope that I know. The thing to recognize is that the soldier came to me and likely because of a previous relationship that I had built with the soldier by providing a “ministry of presence.” Everything that I do as a CH is a ministry that builds relationships and repertoire so that when soldiers are facing issues and have questions they know they can come to me. Then, when that soldier does come to me seeking answers about the questions of life, I will offer counsel if that is all they seek, but if they want more I will happily share with them about the sacrifice of my Savior and the true peace that can only be found in Him.

Evangelical Chaplains in the military are a big target because there are a lot of them. The truth is, the vast majority do an outstanding job providing religious support. Occasionally there will be one who causes a ruckus, but they are the minority. What you will never see in Newsweek is an article about how a soldiers life was changed after kneeling for a tearful prayer on the dirty floor of a chapel tent after a service in the field. You will be hard pressed to find an article about the marriage that was saved after a series of counseling sessions with a CH. Try to find a story about the CH who got up in the middle of the night to counsel a soldier who was contemplating suicide and because of that counseling the soldier not only did not commit suicide but found a new reason for living because of eternal hope the CH offered. Try telling the CH who works in a hospital on the frontlines in Iraq or Afghanistan that he can’t share with dying soldiers about a concrete hope they can have as they stare death in the eye. Try to find the story about the CH who gets up in the middle of the night, puts on his dress uniform, and drives for hours to deliver a death notification. You see, our job is very important because we provide a service no one else can and very few would even want to. To try and muzzle a particular group is to weaken the entire Chaplain Corps and thus the value of all the vital services we provide will be significantly dminished. Because whether or not Newsweek wants to admit it, being a CH is a calling and often soldiers come to us seeking not just advice about life but also advice about faith. How can we not share with them our faith when they ask?

note- If you read the entire Newsweek article, you will find that a large portion of it is about a specific endorser. I chose to address the issues in the article that pertained to the Chaplaincy and Chaplains as a whole and not the parts dealing with the specific endorser.

Buying a Car With Cash (Take 2)

It’s kinda weird when you stop and think about it. How many American’s actually own their cars? Most people slowly purchase ownership in their cars month after month as they make payments. By the time the car is paid for 3-6 years later, the car is worth a fraction of what they just finished paying for it. Vehicles are probably the second largest purchase that we make in our lives next to buying homes. They are also the biggest purchases that we make that lose value so rapidly.

This makes the idea of a paid for vehicle incredibly appealing. Not only do you completely own your car, but you free up a big extra chunk of income that you can put towards every day living. So why is it that so many of us feel mired in an endless cycle of car payments when driving a paid for vehicle makes so much more sense?

Two weeks ago, my wife and I bought a car. Yes, we BOUGHT it. We decided that it was time to move from having two very small cars to one very small car and one medium sized car to make hauling people and stuff easier. Here are the basic steps we followed so that we could pay cash for the car.

1. Both of our vehicles were paid for. We have had no car payments for some time now and that has freed up our income so that we have more money going into our bank accounts each month. That means once we paid off our two vehicles, we effectively gave ourselves a $600/month raise. That $600 gets divided up between spending, investing, and saving. Part of that saving is to have the cash on hand when the time comes to buy another vehicle.

2. Know exactly what kind of vehicle you want. My wife and I had a specific type of vehicle we wanted. It had to seat six-seven people and could not be a mini-van or hulking SUV. It had to be used and have fairly low miles. We are fortunate to live an area with a glut of cars of all shapes, sizes, and prices so even with our rather tight parameters, there were many options. Keeping your scope narrow will help you avoid the pitfall of “upselling.” Anyone who has done any type of selling knows what I am talking about and most of us have probably fallen victim to it in everything from restaurants to copy centers to car lots. At one dealership, a salesman tried to convince my wife and I that what we really needed was a mini-van instead of the vehicle we were on the lot to look at. Thankfully, we had already set in our minds what we wanted in a vehicle so the upselling tactics only resulted in the salesman getting dirty looks from my wife and I (I have to say, the man had guts to even suggest a van to a pair of twenty-somethings. People my age are notoriously anti mini-van).

3. Shop around. Autotrader.com is an excellent resource for finding a car because it lets you search in incredibly broad or incredibly focused parameters. The 2007 Honda Fit that we bought last spring was found as a result of a search on Autotrader that covered a 300 mile radius from our zipcode. If you are truly hunting a bargain, don’t be afraid to search far outside of your immediate area. A five or six hour drive to save a few grand is not a huge sacrifice to make in my book.

4. Shop your trade. With both of our vehicles paid for it meant we could trade in a vehicle and apply the entire value to the purchase of the new vehicle. It’s a good idea, before you walk onto the lot of the dealer who has a car that is likely to be the one you purchase, to have a quote from somewhere else (as well as the Blue Book value) just in case they try and low-ball your trade. My wife and I were fortunate in that the dealer we bought our vehicle from actually offered us more right off the bad than the quote I had received on the trade-in from another dealer.

5. DETAIL YOUR TRADE-IN. The day before we traded in our vehicle, I took it and paid fifty bucks to have a basic detail done to the outside and inside. We take good care of our vehicles, but sometimes apartment living is not conducive to keeping the inside and outside of the car sparkling. The detail made the car look great and revealed that we took good care of the vehicle. It can only help you if you show up on the lot with a clean trade-in and not one that smells like old Taco Bell gorditas and has moldy french fries under the seat.

6. Matain the power to backout of the deal if it is not going how you want. It is easy to get wrapped up in the process and before you know it, you are paying more for the vehicle than you intended. This is not nearly as big of an issue since you will be paying cash. You will know exactly how much money you have in your checking account and that tells you how much wiggle room you have to haggle. When my wife and I bought the car, we told the dealer what we were willing to pay in terms of the difference between the trade and the vehicle we were buying and then we let the salesman go back to the secret room that every dealership seems to have where he asked his manager if he could make the deal. The dealer ended up coming out on the high end of our comfort zone, but it was still within the parameters that we had set beforehand so we took the deal.

7. Pay attention to the details. When we bought the car we wanted to make sure the dealer included two keys. Buying an extra key FOB can be an expensive proposition. We also tested both the key FOBs and realized the batteries in both were dead so we had the dealer replace the batteries. Those are things that should be included in the purchase of the vehicle but that you might not notice until after you get the vehicle the home.

So there you have it. I’m sure advice on buying cars is a dime-a-dozen, but how many people do you know in there mid-twenties that have two (fairly new) paid for cars? For the first two years of our marriage, we dealt with car payments. Now that we have experienced life without them, we refuse to ever go back. I wish that more people could experience the freedom of not having a car payment. All it takes is the discipline to pay off the cars you currently have and then the discipline to only buy cars you can afford to pay cash for. With your paid for vehicles you will be a freak of Americna culture but secretly all your friends with the shiny new cars will go home at night and wish they knew your secret to not having any car payments. It’s cool being weird.

How to Budget -or- How to Create a Budget

Without a doubt the last 18 months have been tough for many people in terms of their financial situation. Personally, my wife and I have seen our investment protfolio lose a large chunk of its value and have felt the sting of see-sawing fuel prices and steady rise in food prices. Fortunately, we have not experienced a job loss.

My wife and I have long known the positives of creating a budget. We went through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University back in 2005 when we were engaged. My in-laws, seeing the wisdom of getting us off on firm financial footing, paid to put us through the class. Anyone who knows anything about Dave Ramsey knows that he is a huge proponent of budgeting. So why did we wait so long to do a budget “on paper, on purpose?” That’s mostly my fault, my thinking was if all the bills were getting paid and we were coming out in the black every month than we were doing fine. Well, my wife and I recently decided that it was time to put some more structure into our financial life and take control of our money.

The thought of creating a budget can seem intimidating at first. Expenses change from month to month and sometimes trying to figure up an average monthly budget for something like groceries or gifts can be daunting. I will spell out how we set up our budget and maybe if you are on the fence about taking the budgeting plunge, it will help you get started.

1. Figure up your average monthly (take home) income. If it varies a bit, I would err on the low side.

2. Now that you have figured out your average monthly income, you need to get ready to start subtracting your expenses until you have spent every dollar of your income on paper.

3. My wife and I have used Quicken to track our expenses for years. Quicken allows you to see an average of what you are spending in a particular category. For example, our twelve month average for groceries is $288/month. Using that number as a base, we decided to budget $300/month for groceries. If you do not have Quicken (I highly reccomend it) you will have to figure out your averages using some other method (i.e. keep a spreadsheet for a few months that tracks your monthly expenses in the categories you want to budget).

4. Budget your essentials first. This is especially important if you are on a tight income and have trouble making ends meet each month. Budget your food, clothing, shelter (rent/mortgage, power, water, gas, etc.), and transportation first. Once you have those worked out you can take what it left and spread it out among the rest of your expenses.

5. Budget to pay down debt. If you have car payments or are carrying a balance on credit cards, build your budget so that you are paying extra on those debts. Think of it like this: you have a $300/month car payment and you budget $400/month to pay towards the car payment. That means you will pay off your car more quickly AND once the car is paid off you have $400/month that you can redistribute to other categories in your budget.

6. Be detailed. The budget heading “entertainment” is incredibly broad. Break that down into subcategories (i.e. books, theatre, DVDs, video games) and set an amount for each subcategory. Being this specific helps keep you honest and build discipline. It keeps you from blowing your entire entertainment budget on a boxset of DVDs and all the sudden your wife doesn’t have any money left in the entertainment budget to go watch the movie she had been looking forward to for months.

7. Create a discretionary category. My wife and I each have a little bit of money each month that we can do with whatever we want. Sometimes, if we use all our “eating out” budget, we will use our discretionary category so that we can go have dinner with friends.

8. Decide which budget categories you want to roll over each month. Our grocery budget is static, it is $300/month and any extra does not roll over. The items under the entertainment category are not static and the remaining balance rolls over into the next month. This allows us to save up money in a particular category for a larger purchase than is budgeted for in a single month.

9. Budget saving/investing. Don’t forget to include this in your budget expenses. Even though the money is still yours, it takes a piece out of the income pie and if you don’t budget for it you will find it is much harder to save/invest in a regular and disciplined manner.

10. Don’t fret if your budget is not perfect. Every month will have some unforeseen events that you never thought to create a category for. That is where the disciplined saving plan comes in. If your car dieands  needs an expensive repair that is far beyond the amount you budget for auto maintenance each month, you won’t have to worry because you have been saving systematically and have enough money to cover emergency expenses like a major car repair.

These are just some suggestions that we have found helpful in our budgeting plunge. You will be amazed at how much it helps you to communicate with your spouse about money issues when you have a budget to help keep both of you accountable. If you are like many people, the thought of creating a budget is intimidating and you are not really sure where to start. We had the same problem until we discovered a website of incredibly helpful Excel spreadsheets with very detailed budgets. That is what we are currently using to keep track of our budget, and I think it would make a good starting point for most people.

Here is the spredsheet we use. We do a new one each month and save it after we make any changes:

Free Household Budget Worksheet

Finally, if you have an Ipod Touch or Iphone, I recommend the Spend app. My wife and I have it on our Ipods. We didn’t put our whole budget on it, but we did put certain categories like “groceries” and “eating out” so that we can take our budget with us wherever we go.

If you have been on the fence about budgeting, give it a try. You will be amazed at how much easier it makes managing your finances. Yes, it requires some work and discipline, but most good things do, and trust me, this is a good thing in these challenging financial times.

In Over My Head -or- Why Caleb needed a summer off

This has been a tough week for me, and it’s only Tuesday. Last week was my first week of summer classes. I was going to attempt to take Turbo/Suicide Hebrew over the summer term. That means I was going to do Elementary Hebrew I and II in roughly ten weeks. I needed to do this in order to graduate from seminary in May ‘10. Well, a week into Hebrew I realized that I was not going to be able to hack the accelerated pace or the teaching style of the professor. I am decidedly slow when it comes to learning languages. I am by no means a poor student, but let’s just say my GPA would significantly higher if not for Biblical language classes. Some people have a gift for them, I do not.

Deciding to drop the class was tough for me. It means that I have to put off going Active Duty in the Army another six months or so. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not much but it sure hurt to make the decision. Ultimately, the decision was good for my sanity. I have been going nonstop in school for two years. I have not had any significant amount of time off since the summer of 2007. I had reached a point of pure apathy in relation to school. The only things that have helped me maintain my sanity have been my wife and family and a handful of professors who have made the semesters bearable. I know for some people seminary is the time of their lives, but for me it has been the academic purgatory before the heaven of actual ministry. I greatly value the things that I learn, but so often they are taught in such a way that their usefulness is limited.

So, I’m taking a summer off of school. I am going to relax, play a few video games, try and learn a bit of Hebrew vocabulary so I can have a jump on Hebrew I in the fall, and try to catch up on some reading that has literally been put off for 2 1/2 years (apologies to me mother-in-law, I have had her John Adams book for all of those years).

So that’s what’s up this summer. Probably not much and I’m okay with that. I hope to have a post soon about how I think seminary’s could imrpove the teaching of the Biblical languages for people like me who need more practical applications of the languages than the academic way it is usually taught.

Song of the Day- “Revelation Song”

Song- Revelation Song

Artist- Kari Jobe

This is one of my favorite worship songs right now. The song is incredibly powerful because it is about how completely powerful and worthy of praise God is.

Graduations and AT

In the last week and a half, I have attended three graduations. My sister graduated from high school and my two sister’s in law also graduated (one from HS and one from Oklahoma Baptist University, my alma mater). I am very proud of all of them and I hope to have some pictures to post when I get back from annual training.

I am currently doing my two weeks of AT with the Guard and things have been going pretty well. The first couple of days were spent at the range (I didn’t fire). The range was a good time because I got to see how things operate behind the scenes and I got to visit with soldiers from several different units.

I also got to spend a couple of days with my old unit last week. The unit I was a part of during my enlisted years is in the BN I am currently serving in with my assigned CH. He let me spend a couple of days in Ada. It was a nice visit getting to see many old and some new faces. My brother and sister in law live in Ada so I stayed with them and had a good time visiting with them as well. The highlight of the Ada visit was leading a worship service for the soldiers. I had 20-30 people attend and had the privilege of leading them in worship and teaching a short devotional.

Today we had an open house at the unit. It was a pretty laid back day and it was nice to see all the families of the soldiers. Often in the Guard we only see the soldiers and very rarely get to see their families. It is always good to get to meet the people who support the soldiers at home so that they know CH’s are not just for the soldiers, but also for their families.

So far, it’s been a slow but good AT. I am looking forward to getting back home to my wife (but not looking foward to starting my 9 hours of summer classes next month).

“Lie to Me”-or- When TV shows become unwatchable due to the blatant political bias and bigotry of the program

Earlier this year, when the Fox television program “Lie to Me” premiered, my wife and I were interested to see the program. Both of us have backgrounds in psychology so the idea of a show that was based on analysis of body language was intriguing. Well, we only lasted a handful of episodes before we had to turn the program off. I knew it wouldn’t go well when the show started painting conservative Christians as psychotic control freaks misled, in large part, due to their misguided adherence to an archaic and backwards religion.

This afternoon, I decided to give the show a final chance since I was curious about the season finale. I only made it through about half of the episode before I couldn’t take it any more. This time the show took great pleasure in pointing out the supposed inferiority of the previous presidential administration and the absolute superiority of the current one. Guess who gets painted as backwards and misguided? Yup, the conservative guy who is concerned with the national security of America. GASP!

I won’t say much more since I have been trying to avoid political commentary on this blog, but it really ticked me off. I’m not so naive to think that entertainment is going to be bias free, but “Lie to Me” takes it to unacceptable and absurd levels. There was no balance or nuance in the show’s view, it was straight up “conservative-republican-Christian” =bad and the source of many of the problems in the world. I gave “Lie to Me” two chances to win me over with it’s interesting plot idea, but the political bias and bigotry of the show have rendered it unwatchable.

Movie Review: Star Trek

If there are levels of Trekkies, I’m probably somewhere in the middle. I don’t read the novels, go to the conventions, or collect the action figures (although I did have a sweet model Enterprise D when I was a kid). That said, I have been watching Star Trek for as long as I can remember. My Dad and I used to lay down on the floor in front of our family’s little thirteen inch TV that had chrome buttons on the front to change the channels. We would watch Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) when the series was still on the air. Occasionally, we would catch an episode of the the original series (TOS) which my Dad had watched as a kid. I never really got into Deep Space Nine (DS9) or Voyager (although I have enjoyed episodes of both). I also liked, for the most part, the short running “Enterprise” series that was set before TOS. I have also enjoyed the Star Trek movies from both the original cast and the TNG cast. My favorites from the original cast are 2,4, and 6 and I must confess to liking all of the TNG movies a lot (First Contact is my favorite, but I enjoy all the others too).

All that to say that I did not go into the latest incarnation of Star Trek without a fairly good background in the series. Without further ado, the movie review:

What worked:

1. I am very pleased with the casting. My two favorite casting choices were Karl Urban (”Bones” McCoy) and Simon Pegg (Scotty). Urban captured the dry wit and delivery of Deforest Kelly and was his chemistry with Kirk and Spock was perfect. Pegg worked well as Scotty because he captured how I felt Scotty would have been as a young man. He was smart, funny, and a genius about milking every last ounce of warp power out of the Enterprise to keep the ship from coming to an untimely death. Zachary Quinto did well as Spock. Leonard Nimoy is the gold standard for Vulcans and he is still the best, but Quinto gave a nuanced performance that shows a young Spock straggling to come to grips with his human and Vulcan sides. Chris Pine did a good job with the Kirk character, and while I was annoyed with the childishness of the character early on, it was gratifying to see him grow as a result of the events that take place in the movie. Eric Bana also did well as the menacing villain and came across as a genuinely dangerous genocidal maniac.

2. The f/x, editing, and action sequences were flawless. The movies grabs you in the first minute and does not let go until the end. Never before have the ships of Star Fleet been so beautifully rendered. I seriously wanted to put the movie in slow motion as the camera panned across the Enterprise. The detail was phenomenal. I also really liked how the bowels of the ship (i.e. engineering) were portrayed. It was very mechanical and industrial (more like the ship on the TV series “Enterprise” than the other variations of the engineerings section). To me it makes sense that the egineering section would be very mechanical and much dirtier looking than the rest of the ship. I also liked how big the interior of the ship felt. Several times we see the characters literally sprinting through the corridors of the ship. This gave the impression that they had a lot of ground to cover to get where they needed to go.

3. Finally, the story worked for me. I know that some people will see the time travel and thus the alternate history as a cop-out, but I think it was necessary and it worked well. The filmmakers were smart enough to realize that trying to fit their story into an already heavily developed finctional universe (through TV, movies, books, comics, etc.) and get everything to conform would be next to impossible. The time travel allowed them to take the same beloved characters and stick them into new circumstances without disrupting the Star Trek canon.

4. I loved how certain moments/ideas ingrained in Star Trek mythology were captured. Spock raising one eyebrow. Scotty shouting, “I’m giving her all she’s got cap’n.” Bone calling Spock a “green blooded hobgobblin.” Little things like that really made the movie for me, and I suspect they did the same for other Trek fans.

What didn’t work:

1. While most of the casting worked well, Chekov (Anton Yelchin) proved to be a bit much. His accent was played for comic relief, which was fine, but the joke got old. The actor did fine, but the writers should have stopped playing his accent for laughs earlier.

2. One of the things I like about Star Trek in general is the broad mix of actors. I have long appreciated that Star Trek was written for adults, not teenagers, and the age of the actors always reflected that. The reboot obviously required younger actors, but there was hardly a senior Star Fleet officer in sight for much of the film. I understand that the crew of the Enterprise was the best and the brightest, but some senior leadership (Captain Pike was out of the picture for most of the movie) would have been nice. I hope the writers remember that for the sequels that will undoubtedly come. Hopefully the writers will continue to let the characters grow and mature (which they did in this movie) and not feel that they need to make the characters ever youthful in both appearance and personality.

In conclusion, this movie will appeal to a broad audience. The writers succeeded in creating a movie that balanced the demands of long time fans with need to create a movie the reached out to a new audience. The movie has breathed new life into a franchise that had been unable to reach a new audience for some time. I welcome this new Star Trek movie to the growing canon, heartily recommend it, and can’t wait to add it to my personal movie collection.