the unlikely orange

i'm sorry if you don't like sports posts, but THE YANKEES CLINCHED A PLAYOFF BERTH THIS WEEK, BABY! oh yeah, the yanks are in the second season for the 13th season in a row. i always say that your main goal during the regular season just has to be getting into the postseason anyway that you can, because anything can happen in those little 5 and 7 game series. usually, it isn't necessarily the better team that wins, but the hotter one. that being said, i feel good about the yankees because they are pretty hot right now. only 3 games of the regular season left. its october, baby! as homer says, "woo-hoo!" greg.

the tips of the tines of the fork gently scrape across the plate; its a kind of ringing scraping sound. the incessant and restless jaw, chewing and tearing the food, a rumbling and rather animal kind of noise. the internal hiccup of swallowing. the clang of the silverware on the table. the faint hum of the air conditioner in the background. the give and take of a rational, intelligent dialogue. these are all sounds that are associated with dinner. perhaps you know this, though. i forget that not everyone has a two-year old at home. but, you see, i do. i do have a two-year old at home. and i had also forgotten that these were noises associated with dinner. well, until this week. when we left central pa on saturday we left something behind, in the form of a small, independent, overly sensitive, and, above all, loud little human being named jack. we left him with his neenah, as he calls her, his pappy, and his aunt shay and uncle butter (don't ask. actually, do ask i...

i don't want september to pass by without acknowledging the passing of one of the great writers of our time. on september 6th, madeleine l'engle died at the age of 88. most of the world knows her as the author of the children's classic "A Wrinkle in Time," but many others know her as a woman who inspired them in their faith journey. l'engle wrote beautifully but honestly, gracefully pulling back the layers of pretense and facade that we so often live behind and, by exposing her true self, allowed us to see ourselves again in new ways. she reminded us that sometimes we need to just 'be.' she wrote beautiful poetry (which i have used in worship several times!). she was known for making fascinating connections between faith and science in a way and at a time that very few christians dared not. madeleine l'engle was known for all of this, and more. but, to me, she was even more. i referred to it in a post back in february, but if it were not ...

tgim. i love mondays. once again the steelers dominated an average team in the nfl, and continued their efforts to communicate to the nfl that they are indeed a force to be reckoned with. next week will bring ken whisenhunt's arizona cardinals to the table, which should be an interesting matchup, but it is clear that the steelers are one of the elite teams in the nfl, and are benefitting from a relatively easy start to their schedule. it is also clear that the rooneys knew what they were doing in hiring tomlin. and then we have the yankees, who are playing so well and have just about clinched a wild card berth, and are still very much in the running to steal the division from the idiot sox. there is only one more week of regular season baseball. its getting exciting! man i love mondays! greg.

even though it is my day off i am sitting in my office at the church. shannon needed some time without kids to get some of her graphic design work done (she does have her own business, after all, on paper designs ), so i took them here to my office. jack is watching madagascar on a portable dvd player (and by "watching" i mean that he is stomping around my office roaring into a styrofoam cup). cade is sleeping peacefully, ignoring the ferocious lion of a toddler on the other side of the door, and i am sitting at the computer. i thought i would throw a quick post up here since i'm going to be out of pocket for a couple of days. we are traveling to central pa for some family birthdays (neice and nephew), and i won't have access to a computer. so here is what is bouncing around my brain today: -the yankees are now only 1.5 games behind the red sox in the american least, with a magic number of 5 to win the wild card. the playoffs almost seem like a lock right now, and wi...

what do you think of my new profile pic?

this is my pillowcase. it is much whiter now than it was only a few weeks ago. but i am telling the end of the story already. let me go back a little... i am a very tidy person, for the most part. i feel quite strongly that everything should be put in its proper place, and should be neat and orderly. but not necessarily clean. some (annoying) people say that cleanliness is next to godliness, but i prefer to say that cleanliness is next to wastefulness. it wastes time. it wastes energy. it wastes water. it wastes space. and it wastes good ol' dead skin cells. seriously. i mean that. i, for one, like me. self-loathing has rarely been an issue for me, and that is more than simply psychological - it is downright physical: i like my smell. you know what i mean. each one of us has a smell - the combination of our cells falling off, our souls oozing through our own pores, and our very essence, our life-breath, filling the space around us. yes, we each have our smell, and ...

for many americans, the drug of choice these days is caffeine. or nicotine. or some prescription that helps them make sense of everything and function on a day-to-day basis. i've got a drug, too. a couple of them, actually. and they both came through for me this weekend, which would explain why i am sailing through this monday with nary a worry. ahh yes, one of my drugs is the new york yankees. they are making me sweat this year, and it looks like this will be the first time in a long time that they won't win the division. but it doesn't even matter to me right now because last night was an incredibly gratifying night for a yankee fan: jeter beat the schilling and the sox by rocking a 3-run homer over the stupid green monster. jeter is so clutch. and then mariano teased the sox in the bottom of the ninth, allowing the bases to get loaded with big papi at the plate, and got him to pop out. that was sweet. and i got the munchies. but the first high of the day ca...

so, i know i've written effusively about this little band called over the rhine at least one other time on this blog, so i don't want to sound like a 14-year old girl here who thinks she wants to have justin timberlake's babies. all i really want to say in this post is that i am thankful to the God of the universe that linford detweiler and karin berquist found each other, got married, and continue to make music that inspires, confuses, excites, moves, challenges, silences, and otherwise affects me. i will now find other ways to say what i have just now told you. that is what a writer does, i guess. for me, at its best, writing is less pragmatic and more poetic. it has its function, of course, but it is also art. the same is true for music. and, in my opinion, the art that spins off the cds of over the rhine is the very best kind of art. and they have once again put word and music together in a collection of songs; their new album is called the trumpet child and ca...

"six years later" paper collage on cardboard panel gregory a. milinovich last night, after living through yet another september 11th, i thought i might do some of my reflecting by cutting up bits of paper and gluing them together. as you know, i love words, and i do a great deal of my reflecting-my processing of this amazing life-by way of words. but sometimes i need to get away from the words for awhile and use a different corner of my brain, a different edge of my person. september 11th has always been a big deal for me. i can't even begin to say it all or deal with it all here in this post today, so i will pretty much steer clear of the whole thing except to say that i was forever changed that day. recently, when anyone has mentioned 9/11, i have had this image in my head, this violent and inescapable image of a huge flying machine about to collide with an enormous building. it should be a surreal image. but it is not. it is very real. just to make sure i was remembe...

sweet, sweet football. you have returned to us. oh, how we have missed you. those silly exhibition games which put together comprise something called the preseason are only a terrible tease. but now you have truly emerged from your hibernation. the steelers destroyed the browns sunday, but i don't think that it was a particularly helpful tool in evaluating the steelers. my take on it is that most high school teams would have beat the browns sunday. still, a win is a win, and the steelers are 1-0 to start this season. we have buffalo coming up next, which will be a fun game. football feels great. standing in poop soup? this does not feel so great. that's right. this weekend i moved the old bowels. not something we talk about much in the course of our polite conversations, but something most of us do regularly, nonetheless. following the ritual cleansing, i flushed the toilet only to realize that it had been previously clogged ("dang it, shannon! i thought to myse...

i realize that today is the first day of the 2007 nfl season and i should be writing about football, but something important happened in major league baseball yesterday that i didn't want to let pass by without mentioning. yesterday was roberto clemente day. now what that means for major league baseball is that each team awarded one of their players with a nomination for the roberto clemente award . by the world series, one of those nominees will receive the award. "it is an award given annually to a player who demonstrates the values clemente displayed in his commitment to community and understanding the value of helping others." that is what roberto clemente day means to major league baseball. but to fans of the man around the world, it means much more. i had the opportunity to read this biography this summer. and it was really good. i wish i had the time to tell you the story of his life here, and i wish even more that i had the words to adequately describe the grace ...

image from servicioskoinonia.org so this last sunday i preached on luke 14:1-14, where jesus is invited to a party. i was particularly interested in verses 12-14 where Jesus says that when we throw parties we shouldn't just invite friends, relatives and rich neighbors. 'instead,' he says, 'invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind.' i have preached most every week that i've been here in clinton, which is 14 months now. but no sermon i have preached has resulted in so much discussion and feedback as this. i'm not exactly sure why it struck such a chord, but it did, and i've been doing some reflecting on this. the basic thrust of my sermon wasn't exactly a revolutionary point; it is a fairly constant theme in Jesus' message: include the outsider. i began my sermon by trying to get the congregation to imagine with me what it might look like if Jesus was a dinner guest at our own home. i was hoping to help people understand that, in this ...

caedmon charles 4 months smile, its the last weekend of summer. labor day is here, which is a holiday that is supposed to remind us of something important, but i can never remember what it is. only that it makes me think of labor, which is something that shannon has done twice while i stood next to her and cried. actually, labor day, for me, is more significant as a signal of the end of summer and a re-entry into the schedule of the fall. college football started this week. the pros start this coming week. school has begun. and life, for better or for worse, is back to its normal rhythm. and so today i stand and salute the summer. thank you, dear season, for your long days and (sometimes unbearable) heat. thank you for vacations and road trips. thank you for so much baseball. thank you for hamburgers and hot dogs. thank you for the way you shun routine. thank you for thunderstorms and fireworks. and now, goodbye. until next year when we will await your coming to us with great expectat...