This past weekend, I led a group of seniors at my church, Champion Forest for their yearly disciple-now (called Freedom Weekend). The weekend was great (more to come…), and we were placed at a very nice house, to be succinct. The weighs in around 30,000 sq. ft. and sits on several acres within the city. The architecture is simple and tasteful; you could easily find it overlooking the Mediterranean in Spain.
The house is nicely decorated, with lots of natural hues. The floors are wood, stone, and a plush carpet. The doors are something of beauty–oversized for the human scale, but gracefully matching the scale of each space. The house has no gold-leaf overlays, and is not filled with gaudy paintings and artwork. The center courtyard is large but intimate. The pool glistens with a deep blue color that invites you to dive right in.
Elegant. Tasteful. But not overly extravagant.
And yet I’ve never heard so much about a house before I arrived. Rumors flew about their library, their house (houses in some cases), landscaping, and parties. Every description was chocked full of envious slop–a porridge that would make even the most content jealous of this family’s immense wealth.
In fact, many people commented on how lucky I was to be spending the weekend at their house. I’ll be honest: I said the same things… things like, “I will suffer through the weekend” or “Can you believe it, they’re going to be catering food for us.” I was the same as everyone else. And I secretly yearned for that very same wealth when I joked, “I’ll be studying for the LSAT starting this week…” (He is a very successful lawyer.) I was chasing a siren…
We were all entranced by this wealth. By this money. By the prestige, I suppose. The thoughts of acres of land. And the thought of your very own racquetball court.
But sadly, the descriptions and gossip failed to mention the generosity (opening their house, for example), graciousness (not being arrogant to any of us), or ability to communicate freely with us supposedly “regular” people. They were simply steeped in a greedy and jealous admiration of the family’s wealth.
I feel badly for the way people treat them. People see them as a huge pile of cash; eagerly waiting to see how they spend the next bag. And I guess they (we) all secretly hope that some of that money will make it their way.
And that makes me sad. Why can’t we be happy for the people who have done well financially? Why do we need to make so many comments about something that has so little bearing on our lives? It seems we live vicariously though others, and this is no exception.
Monthly Archives: February 2006
Thursday Musings
I was thumbing through Micah’s European Vacation Pictures tonight (it’s about time he got them up, eh)…and it reminded me of the beauty of Italy. Paris was nice, but Italy was amazing. Every time I see photos from places we went, I get this strange nostalgic feeling, and I’m ready to return. It’s a great place with so much beauty and charm… If you ever have a chance, spend a few weeks in Italy. You can join me during the summer (in a few years, that is).
Some other shots of his that you should check out: here, here, here, and here.
Other Notes
This weekend is Freedom Weekend at the church. It’s the disciple now for the student ministry. I’ve been paired with the senior guys at a pretty nice house. I’m looking forward to it, and I expect it will be fun. If it’s great, I’ll post on Sunday. Well, maybe…I may not post at all if I get lazy!
The Olympics
The Olympics have saturated television once again. It’s a biannual celebration of athletes and waste.
When I was a kid–I loved the Olympics…particularly the Winter ones. Between skiiing and bobsleading (who didn’t like Cool Runnings?), I enjoyed watching these highly trained athletes risk their all to win at these races.
However, in my mind the commercial aspect of the games has destroyed them. The athletes are billed as amateurs–except they’re not. They are highly sponsored athletes, and some this is only a second gig–think of all of the hockey, basketball and baseball players who are invited to join the olympic teams.
Half of the “sports” aren’t even sports. Ice dancing? Come on…ice dancing isn’t a sport. It’s a dance. I’m not saying it’s not difficult, but it’s not a sport. Ice skating… also not a sport. The outcomes are scored by a set of men and women who have proved themselves to be quite biased in the past–remember what happened at the last winter olympics? Yea, the French judge who sold her vote.
And I wonder about all of the companies (Bank of America, Home Depot) that drop millions of dollars supporting the games. Does it actually help their marketing efforts? I know BOA is reconsidering their olympic support following the 2006 games.
I guess at the end of the day, I see the whole olympic scene as a farse. The IOC is a biased, political body who look out for themselves more than anything else. The advertisers waste their money. NBC wasted billions for the tv rights for two weeks of programming. And the athletes have spent their entire lives training to win one race–only to be forgotten the second they step off the platform.
Sneaky Sneaky
Today we took the Student Ministry to the studio for a little recording and photography. The back-story is that I’m working on a flash animation for camp this summer, and I like to include some fun things to lighten it up a bit. So, we are at the studio today.
I conspired with Brent, our media minister, a few days earlier to setup a camera in the studio. It would face toward the recording room and catch all of their motions and sounds unaware.
We all get to the studio and Chris put the tape in the camera and turned it on with everyone in the room. They proceed to talk and good around like normal, except this time, they’re on tape–forty minutes of tape! During this time, they said some of the funniest things I’ve heard in quite a while, and a couple times I was on the verge of crying–paritally because it was funny and partially because I knew how funny the video would be.
It was awesome!
Fusion
Yes, I know my week of “Happy Posts” didn’t really come to fruition. Perhaps I didn’t have as many “happy” things to post about as I had suspected. But mainly I got busy with other things and forgot about writing. So I return…
I am pleased to announce the launch of the brand new Fusion Student Ministry Website. Fusion is the student ministry at First Baptist Texarkana. The site is standards-compliant (whatever that means, right?) and is cross-browser compatible.
The site has the cleanest code I’ve ever written is certainly the easiest to update that I’ve ever created. It combines a poll system, calendar system, and photo gallery system while maintaining the same appearance throughout the site. And of course, it contains the style switcher to accomodate different background colors.
But the happy part is that it’s done! And so you should go check it out.
10 Things You Should Know
This is great entry by Kim Meyer : 10 Things You Should Know About People … if you want them to hear what you’re saying. [Via]
Free Things to Make You Happy
These are my favorite (and free) web programs. They make my life so much better, and I think they can make your life better too.
1) Firefox
Firefox is a great browser and the tabbed browsing beats IE to a pulp. Add in AdBlock and a few other extensions, and you have quite a package.
2) Bloglines
Do you read a lot of blogs? Then Bloglines will save you tons of time (actually, you will spend more time reading blogs in the future becuase it makes it so easy). It automatically aggragates the blogs in one convenient location.
3) Backpack
Do you like lists? Do you use more than one computer? Backpack makes life easy by allowing you to create lists (up to 5 for free) and access them from any location. Plus, you can allow friends to access and edit those lists.
4) Flickr
Want to put pictures online? And do you want it to be easy, simple, and beautiful. Flickr’s it.
5) Del.icio.us
Social bookmarking at it’s best. This allows me to carry all my favorites between work and home, plus their search allows me to find good sites from other people’s lists.
6) Facebook
Are you tired of IM? Then Facebook is one of the world’s greatest wastes of time. You can search through people and find out how you really are connected to the whole stinkin’ world.
7 + Happy
After a series of dry, boring and semi-depressing posts, I am entering into a week of happy posts. Tonight is day one. (Starting with the next post, of course)…
Kick back, relax and enjoy the good times.
Up and Down
This is the story of life: up and down.
When we start life, we’re completely helpless. We can’t walk. We can’t communicate. We can’t feed ourselves. But as we grow we start to learn new things. We:
crawl
mumble
walk
speak
get teeth
grow
learn
potty-trained.
Then we get to Junior High, where we’re all awkward…just figuring out how to deal with these big bodies and wierd hormones. We gain
responsiblity
knowledge
respect.
Then we start to drive and soon we leave home. We can vote, smoke, go to class (college) when we want to, and even, at 21, legally drink. We graduate and get a job.
We get married and have kids. And we raise them. And of course, they go through the same process we did.
They graduate, get married and start having kids. And at some point, we reach the pinnacle of our lives, and start to fade back to into what we were.
We quit our jobs in the name of retirement. And we start sleeping in every day (of course, at this stage of life “sleeping in” means going to bed at 9:00p). Our bodies start to fall apart, and the doctors tell you not to drink anymore. Pretty soon, you’ve sideswiped a pedestrian, and your children take your car away.
Your knowledge decreases…and you lose respect. You no longer cook your meals. And you’re back to using all your limbs to walk. Of course, you have an extension in the form of a walker or a cane.
Your teeth fall out, but you don’t have any others ready to come in. Your body doesn’t really work–at least there’s disconnect between your mind and your body. Your forget people’s names, and maybe their faces.
You stop moving around, living in your recliner. And they give you devices with big buttons so that you can use them. And you’re back to diapers (see the body not working thing).
And that’s it. From what you were, so shall you be again.
I intended this post to be whimsical, but it didn’t turn out that way. I guess this is why most baby-boomers don’t really believe they’ll ever get old.
Capacity
I was driving home the other night, and I noticed how great it is to drive at night. The roads are empty, the stoplights are short (and more likely to be green), and the cops are fewer.
And I started to think: what if you could take all of the cars that travel one stretch of road, and average them out over the course of the entire day? Instead of having two hours of crazy traffic every day, you had 24 hours of steady even traffic. By that standard, even the busiest roads would still be under their capacity.
Of course this scenario isn’t feasible, but it’s an interesting thought.
I think our lives are the same way as traffic. Every day we have several hours of extreme busyness–busyness to the point of not really getting much done, just like we sit in traffic every morning and evening. And our capacity is woefully underused.
We have the capacity to do so much, but because of poor time management and bad lifestyle choices, we waste so much time. Instead of doing something productive, I can find myself on my couch for several hours in a night. And what do I do when I’m sitting on the couch? Well, I watch some sitcom of course.
By its nature Watching television isn’t bad, but if you spend too much time watching tv, you are wasting your natural capacity.