Spring Break

It's been a couple of weeks now since I wrote anything on this new blog of mine. I really don't mean to start it only to drop it after a month like I've done with other interests, and it's not like I haven't had anything to share, but... well, I don't know really why I haven't written anything. This is going to be more of photoblog about my spring break, so you who read this (which is probably Dad and Zach) can have a little look into my life this last week.

The picture up top is of me and N T Wright. David Richmond and I went up to Chicago last Friday to hear him give a couple of lectures on the sacrements. I'll probably post some ideas that I had from that time in another blog, but for now I'll just say that it was very stimulating. After the lectures we went to this bar in the city, The Map Room , which had a selection of 200 beers. It was all around a great short trip. I also took the train for the first time in the US on my way back which was conciderably less exciting than any of my train rides in Europe. I think a lot of that had to do with it going from Chicago to St Louis rather than Aix to Florence.

I had some great meals with friends throughout the week. This is Monday night with the Bechtels and Cheneys chez moi. I really love these guys. I also had dinner over at the Cheneys on Wednesday night, where I once again appreciated Deana's mad cooking skills. Afterward we watched a few episodes of Arrested Developement which is certainly the best television show to ever be taken off the tele before it should have been.


This is a picture of Gusto at Kaldi's that proves that I did do some studying. No, it doesn't prove that I did any studying, it proves that Gustavo did some studying. You'll jsut have to take my word that I did too because he was studying rather than playing with my camera and talking pictures of me. I really like this picture.

This is another picture from our time at Kaldi's when I found out from playing with my camera that I can change the shutter speed.


One of the neighbor houses hosted a nice breakfast Thursday morning to which I brought my camera but I don't think that any of the pictures are worth sharing. That's what happens when you're still trying to figure out how to use your camera after over a year, you end up taking a bunch of photos that don't turn out so well.






Rocky V on Vimeo

This is a song by Owen, not Rocky. I went to a Rocky Votolato concert Tuesday night and this was one of the dudes opening for Rocky. About half way through you can hear me and Karen Morton talking. The video stinks but if you can hear the song the guitar is pretty sweet.






Rocky Votolato on Vimeo

This is Rocky playing "She Was Only in it For the Rain". I took these clips on my camera but unfortunately the memory stick that I bought a year ago now from Costco has never come through for me, so there's little glitches throughout these clips. I hope you enjoy these because these are the first videos I've put up on the internet. Ok, so these aren't working too well. I'm going to try to figure it out tomorrow. Ifigured it out. But now there's a larger gap than I would like between the videos and the writing underneath them. I'm still trying to work out how to do all these nifty blogging things.

Saturday night the Mortons hosted a little wine and cheese party which are two of my favorite things to consume, so I went. No, I went 'cause the Mortons rock. It was also a surprise birthday party of sorts for Luke whose birthday was the day of the concert that we were all at. This a picture of Luke and Keifer.

Sunday afternoon was spent with some of my roommates out on our deck. It was a great time of just hangin' out, grilling, playing some music and all around just enjoying one another's company. This is Pat, Justin, Jeremy and Luke.

So, with getting to do all of these fun things, getting some studying in, working in some people's yard for a few mornings, I had a great break. Now I'm just looking forward to Easter Break when I'll be going down to Chattanooga.

Baxter on Going to Battle

"Satan will not be charmed out of his possession: we must lay siege to the souls of sinners, which are his garrison, and find out where his chief strength lieth, and lay the battery of God's ordnance against it, and ply it close, til a breach is made; and then suffer them not by their shifts to repair it again"

- Richard Baxter

Just a note:

Thinking through how God is redeeming all of his creation, which means our physical as well as as our spiritual bodies (as though those can be seperated), when I read the puritans and their spiritual offspring I always wish that they would use a different term than "soul". But I have to always remind myself that they did not pit the soul against the body. Or at least they didn't in the same way we moderns often do. The best of them thought that the testing grounds of theology is praxis, life lived. They wanted to live, like Death Cab for Cutie, where soul meets body.

Death and Resurrection

A week and a day ago one of my uncles died. We saw it comming. In many ways this was one of those wierd deaths that give you more relief than sadness. Don't get me wrong, we were all sad. But his body had been giving him mortal trouble for the past two years, and it had failed him so much that, as my dad mentined to me after he went and visited him two weeks ago, Bill Webster was no longer Bill Webster. I've kind of felt this last week that my emotions against death should be stronger, that I should hate it more and more. One of the emphases here at Covenant is the teaching that God's creation was glorious, but that now its a gloirious ruin needing to be put to rights. This is were the mixed emotions that Christian death brings can maybe make a little sense.

Check this out:

But someone will ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?" You foolish person! (yes, that's in the Bible) What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of what or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body... So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable.

-1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42

Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and dies it bears no fruit. Untill Christ returns, unless our bodies give way we will not experience the imperishable bodies.

Now what kind of body does my uncle have? With what kind of body does he come? He comes with one that can be hugged and one that can go fishing like it used to love to do.

The other night I read an essay by Chesterton in which he says, writing against Marry Baker Eddy and the idea that there can be any purely spiritual religion (a heresy unfortunetly that the Church has found herself a part of at times), "Hope has not been thought of as something light and fanciful, but as something wrought in iron and fixed in rock."

Jesus was the firstborn among the dead. His resurrection is our hope. He rose with a physical body and for that reason Christian death is a bag of emotions. We are going to be raised in glorious bodies to a glorious physical new creation that is as solid and real as iron and rock. But in order to be raised in glory we have to suffer in death.

This helps me understand the strangness of Lenten Lord's Days. They're somber and joyous at the same time as we wait for easter.

Mount Rainier National Park Turns 108 Years Old

One of the most regular sights of my life (when it hasn't been cloudy) is Mount Rainier. Today is the 108th aniversary of the National Park and so I thought that I would share a few photos. Of course photos don't do it justice - though pretty close, so anyone who hasn't seen it will have to go to the beautiful state of Washington and check it out. While your there run over to Vashon Island, you'll be glad you did.

235,625 acres

1,173,897 visitors a year

14,410-feet high

25 glaciers

Here are two of the main dudes who helped establish the conservation of our national parks, President Teddy Rosevelt and John Muir. By the way this is at Yosemite, not Mount Rainier. A shame, I know.

A few photos to delight in

First, the "mundane":













This is my little brother Ethan. I really hope the ability to do his hair like this is duly appreciated 'cause not all of us can do this anymore.


And for the extraordinary:




This is from Annabelle Mauss' baptism party when Trevor decided to start a new tradition. When his kids get baptized (woot woot!) the other kids will get to spray him with silly string. I think this is a briliant idea and one that I will probably knock off. Because AB was the one baptized and because she's can't hold a silly string can yet we who are going to be blessed by participating in the nurturing of AB in the ways of the Lord who were hanging out chez Mauss' Sunday afternoon got to spray daddy.

Here's Nate and Charlie goin' at it with Kriten and AB in the backgroound.


By the way, the extraodrinary aspect of this is not the silly string but baptism.