the unlikely orange

for your saturday song, i bring you one of my wife's favorite songs, "stars" by grace potter and the nocturnals. it is a powerful song, sung by a powerful voice, in hopes that you have a powerful saturday.  peace.

over the last several months i've been reading the entire chronicles of narnia by c.s. lewis to my oldest son at bedtime.  we started with the lion , the witch, and the wardrobe, and finished just two nights ago with the last battle, and while i have read them all before, it was so much better to read them with my son, to see his reactions, and to experience them as a child myself.  what a great joy.  the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe might just be my favorite, only because it is where i first walked through that wardrobe and felt the fur turning to pine needles.  it is where i was first struck by the sight of that lampost there in the woods, and mr. tumnus walking by with his arms full of packages.  no other discovery  in the series had quite the magical impact as that one.  plus, no other book in the series inspired a full-length album by a band called "the second chapter of acts" which still gets play on my turntable to this very day! (wa...

      being a protestant pastor of a church that worships on sunday mornings about four hours from pittsburgh doesn't lend itself to getting to go to heinz field for a steelers game very often.    which is why i'm basically a tv-watching steelers fan.    except for this week.  actually, i've been to a handful of steelers games now, (six now, in total).  an evening game provides me an opportunity to drive to the best city in the world and sit in that great yellow coliseum, and it is an opportunity i took advantage of this week, even though my bears fan buddy bailed on me.    and so i left church, ate lunch with the family, and headed for the 'burgh, feeling my anticipation grow with each passing mile marker.  i have some sort of inner radar that senses my distance from pittsburgh at all times.  and i can feel the needle climbing the dial as i drive west.  finally, i made it down the parkway east a...

i love this story.  we should all be so neighborly.  good work, toby.  keep dreaming big.  for your saturday song, i offer you this wonderful little cover of the cantina song from mos eisley in star wars.  everyone knows it.  it plays its catchy little melody over and over while we see if ben and luke can get a ship.  a little duo from kansas city called victor and penny have filled out the song a bit, and perform it live here.  enjoy!  unless you're a droid....we don't serve your kind here.

it looks like one of the huts finally found han solo and had him frozen in carbonite (again).  how do we know this?  NASA has found him.  on mercury.  you can read about it .  also, if you're having trouble concentrating, you need more of the color orange in your life.  seriously.  further research has shown that if you are having trouble dealing with the awful beginning to the football season by the steelers, or the way the pirates are laying an egg againt the padres, or the sad last desperate moments of the yankees season, you need more agentorange in your life.  agent orange records, that is.  where we never stop.  we keep on hoping.  we never give up.  we die trying.  oh, and we change our name.  that's right.  i am getting rid of the agentorangerecords moniker.  it is long overdue.  it is too closely associated with a chemical and war and terrible cost to life, and i am no longer w...

 i was all prepared to get on here this morning and write a post about even though it stinks to watch your favorite team lose, i was feeling wise and mature, and had the perspective that i was blessed just to get to watch the steelers play at all. i enjoy seeing them come out onto the field....i enjoy seeing my favorite team compete...i enjoy the energy and adrenaline.  i was going to say that, while the loss is really bad, i am in a really positive place and just enjoying it as it occurs; after all, there is nothing i can do about it anyway, right?   but then i went and googled an image for this post, and that picture popped up, and all my positive energy got thrown violently to the turf.   it was brutal.  it was not fun. it was heinous. and i am tempted to go and get a thesaurus so i can tell you how many other shades of awful it was.   yikes. it's going to be a long year.  and i'm going to enjoy it, dang it!

  we are in the middle of yet another series at our church ( catawissa avenue umc ) about hope.  hope has been our major theme over the last two years, as we have come to see that our vision is to be a people of hope, sharing the hope of Christ with our neighbors .  and since we see it as our calling to have hope be the defining characteristic of our church's personality, we continue to grow in understanding of what it means to be full of hope.  yesterday in worship we talked about the power of hope to help us persevere through the difficult seasons in our lives.  there are a variety of ways that hope can do this, but we talked about two ways in particular: history and energy.  first, history .  our hope is not just wishful thinking.  it isn't just a vague belief that "everything will work out alright in the end because that's how all my favorite movies end."  no, hope is based on something.  ultimately, as Christ-followers, our ...