the unlikely orange

yesterday was our english bulldog's 9th birthday.  his name is max.  well, it's actually maximus drake milinovich.  but you can call him max.  hard to believe he's been enriching our lives for so long.  we love you max!  even though you snore and track mud in the house, and like the smell of your own pee, and slobber everywhere and cost us a fortune in vet bills and shed like it's your job.  we love you anyway.  no matter what. 

in the midst of shoveling the equivalent of 35 jobba the huts in snow yesterday, i found a few minutes to make a mini-snowman with cade.  he named him apple (i guess caedmon's a huge coldplay fan).  here he is: and now i'm tired, like a toyota mechanic.  but the snow is stopped, and (i kept thinking as i launched shovel-loads of heavy duty industrial-strength snow) at least i have a driveway to shovel - a driveway which leads to a nice warm house that protects me from all these inches of snow and howling winds.  i am blessed indeed, so no complaints from me.  even if my muscles feel worse than lindsey vonn's. 

wow.  just wow.  its been snowing for more than 24 hours now, without much of a stop at all.  i can't tell how much we have right now because it is so windy that the drifts are pretty high, but i can tell that its still snowing with an arctic fury.   i have seen estimates from 12 to 24 inches.  who knows?  all i know is that it's been a crazy winter.  maybe hell has frozen over?  at least i'm not sick.  that's right: everyone in my family was diagnosed with strep throat, and i never got it.  the reason for the world dominance of my immune system?  my propensity for eating things that have fallen on the floor.  as i type this, it occurs to me that i might not have shared this with some of you.  if you've known me for a long time, you can probably skip to the next paragraph - you already know this stuff.  but if you only know me as your pastor whom you see on sundays and other occasions, you might want to prepare...

anyone who knows me well knows that i would make a terrible doctor.  i dont do well with physical discomfort of any kind, let alone bodily fluids like mucus and vomit, to name a few.  so, anyone who knows me would find it humorous that i've been forced into the role of doctor in my house this week.  shannon has strep throat.  the boys might have it too (i'm waiting on a call back from the pediatrician).  so, needless to say, i've been doing a lot of nurse-related activity the last couple of days, which is not my forte.  all of that to say: please pray for my family because it is unlikely in the entire history of sickness that any family has had a less capable nurse attending to them.  for example, i find it difficult to get someone (my wife) a few ibuprofin without wondering aloud (and with so little amount of agitation) what is the difference between aspirin and ibuprofin and acetaminophen.  "why does it have to be so confusing?" i shout to the...

my birthday is officially one week away.  please do NOT buy me this: but you can, if you feel so led, buy me this:

as a pastor, i get several people asking me about what i've given up for lent (i joked in the pulpit yesterday that i gave up short sermons for lent).  i have mixed feelings about giving things up for lent, which should be a topic for another post altogether, but what i have decided to for this lent is not to quit anything, but to do something .  i decided to continue the discipline of connecting my faith with my art (which so often ends up being little more than a hobby), by working each week to create a collage that goes along with what we are focusing on in worship that week.  at church this lent we are focusing on simon peter, the brash and impulsive disciple who left a fishing career to follow Jesus.  we started this week by focusing on his first interaction with Jesus as recorded in the first chapter of the gospel of john.  when his brother andrew brings him to Jesus, Jesus looks at him intently and says, "you are simon, son of john, but you shall be cep...

i shared my playlist from israel yesterday, and so today i thought i would go back to an old tradition i had of providing a saturday song.  this one is from jack's mannequin, which is the project of andrew mcmahon (who you may also know as the frontman in the band 'something corporate').  right before jack's mannequin's first album releasted, mcmahon was diagnosed with a kind of leukemia.  he was able to fight the disease and survive and their second album, the glass passenger deals with some of the themes of a survivor.  one of the songs is called swim, and i just find it to be a very powerful song for encouraging us to keep going when we feel like throwing in the towel.  it reminds me of galatians 6:9 - so let us not grow weary in doing good, and at the right time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.