Even so Lord Jesus, come!

But the day of the Lord will come as unexpectedly as a thief. Then the heavens will pass away with a terrible noise, and everything in them will disappear in fire, and the earth and everything on it will be exposed to judgment and burned up.

2 Peter 3:10

There, I'm insane now...

Where do we go from here?

How can culture possibly become more morally insane than to excuse people for killing their own children?

Betcha didn't know...

"Stewardesses" is the longest word typed with only the left hand and "lollipop" with your right.

Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.

No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.

"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".

Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.

The sentence: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the alphabet.

The words 'racecar,' 'kayak' and 'level' are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left .

There are only four words in the English language which end in "dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: "abstemious" and "facetious."

TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.

A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.

A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.

A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.

A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.

A snail can sleep for three years.

Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.

Almonds are a member of the peach family.

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.

February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.

In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.

If the population of China walked past you, 8 abreast, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.

Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.

On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament building is an American flag.

Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite!

Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.

The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing.

The cruise liner, QE 2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.

The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.

The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.

There are more chickens than people in the world.

Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

Church Shopping Hill Style

How about a little pop culture perspective on church shopping and the ever-popular mega-church? Check out this clip of the Hill family going church shopping on King of the Hill.

LLLLLLLLLLLLets get ready to rumble!!!!!!!

Well, while the temperature heats up here in Vancouver, and all over North America, the conflict in Lebanon - Israel is heating up even more (if that was possible!). It is/will be common prayer fodder this weekend in churches, everywhere. But is peace what we should be praying for? Or should we ask God to help one side effectively wipe out the other? I mean seriously people, how long has this conflict raged!! It's built into the contract of the middle east. Abraham saw to that! When he couldn't fight the feeling any longer, with the help of his wife (!), he did the deed with the servant girl...and the rest is bombs and terrorism. When I worked at a large urban church and was assigned the 'Pastoral Prayer' responsibilities, I would find myself exasperated with yet another conflict or war where I had to be politically correct (or is that spiritually correct) and pray for 'peace' and 'calm' and 'understanding' and blah blah blah! Maybe we should be praying with Joseph Farah and imploring God to 'let em go!' so Israel can kick some Hezbollah ASS! (just a thought)

I hope Pat Buchanan and Kofi Annan are feeling good about themselves today.

They agree with each on what needs to be done to resolve the Middle East conflict.

What do these two men have in common that brings them together in this unusual way?

For whatever reasons, they fail to grasp the root cause of the Arab-Israeli struggle – that Hezbollah, Hamas and much of the Arab and Muslim world want more than anything else in the world to destroy the Jewish state. It's that simple.

Just as there can be no compromise between the United States and Osama bin Laden because al-Qaida seeks the destruction of America, there can be no diplomatic resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict as long as the goal of one side remains the annihilation of the other.

But Buchanan and

Annan, two guys who seldom agree, don't get it.

Buchanan calls Israel's measured, restrained act of self-defense a "rampage against a defenseless Lebanon." He claims Israel's action in Lebanon was a "pre-planned attack to make the Lebanese people suffer."

He asks: "Where are the Christians? Why is Pope Benedict virtually alone among Christian leaders to have spoken out against what is being done to Lebanese Christians and Muslims?"

Let me answer that question – as a Christian of both Lebanese and Syrian heritage: We are with Israel! We are in favor of destroying Hezbollah once and for all. If anything, we are wondering what took so long. We are hoping and praying that Israel does not abort this campaign against the evil terrorists allied with al-Qaida and sponsored by the mullahs of Iran.

We are sick and tired of seeing groups like Hezbollah hide behind the skirts of innocent Christians, occupying their towns and daring Israel to come after them. We are sick and tired of the wholesale persecution of Christian believers in Lebanon – a jihadist religious cleansing that has sent millions of Lebanese Christians into a worldwide diaspora.

Is Pat Buchanan kidding? Where are the Christians? Where has Pat Buchanan been as Christians have been slaughtered by the likes of Hezbollah and treated like dhimmi by his friends in Hamas and the Palestinian Authority?

And where has Buchanan's new buddy Kofi Annan been for the last 20 years? He, too, has been blaming Israel first for having the audacity to exercise self-preservation and self-defense against ruthless enemies sworn to one goal – the Jewish state's destruction.

Both Annan and Buchanan offer up a passing condemnation of Hezbollah's "provocative attack." But from there they launch into their predictable tirades against Israel for doing what every nation-state has the right to do – defend itself from attack.

Annan threatens to pull out his United Nations peacekeeping forces in southern Lebanon if Israel does not declare a unilateral and immediate cease-fire.

Can I ask an obvious question? What good have the U.N. peacekeepers done? Have they kept the peace? Have they prevented Hezbollah terrorists from raining thousands of rockets down on the civilian population of northern Israel? Have they prevented the transport of arms to the Lebanese-Israeli border?

If anything, the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel is proof-positive that the U.N. is completely ineffective, completely irrelevant – and so are the diplomatic "solutions" endlessly offered up by its busybody leaders.

Annan says Israel's response is "disproportionate."

I assume, by that, he means Israel should only give back what it has received. In other words, Israel should not utilize its strength – its modern military machine. Presumably it should use only the weapons employed against it – like katyusha and Qassam rockets.

It's insanity. By the same logic, should the U.S. use only box-cutters against al-Qaida?

The object of any military campaign should be to destroy the enemy, to prevail over them, to win victory.

That's the strategy I'm hoping Israel adopts in this war with Hezbollah and Hamas.

It's too HOT!!

The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

i KNEW it !!!!!!

This summer, savor the small pleasures: Grilled salmon, blowing cigar smoke at strangers and starting bar fights.

A summer night in paradise, supper in the backyard, and the neighbors' elderly cat who is on his last legs wanders over, smelling the salmon on our grill, walking as if his feet hurt. He's got the old-cat blues. He wakes up in the morning and everything tastes like turpentine; he feels like going down to the railroad line and letting the 4:19 pacify his troubled mind. My wife serves him a piece of salmon and he eats slowly, savoring the fish oil. He is 15 years old and this likely will be his last summer, and a fine one it is.

In Minnesota we look forward to these warm summer nights. That's what keeps us marching forward from February to June, the thought of eating supper outdoors in our shorts and bare feet. If this were Maui, where paradise is written into the contract, we would dread the thought of bliss interrupted, but here on the frozen tundra we accept July and August as our allotted ration of bliss. It's fabulous. We can't get over how wonderful it is. And then it's over.

It gives you a twinge to see an old cat on a paradise night who is about to croak. But I used up most of my anguish over mortality by the time I was 25. I was a poet, like everybody else, and wrote extensively about death and despair back then and pretty much wore out the subject. We poets went to parties where people chain-smoked and got bombed and listened to Janis Joplin screeching from the hi-fi speakers loud enough to cause cardiac arrest. Nobody imagined that Janis might someday come to Jesus and take up a life of regular exercise and good nutrition. She was determined to crash and burn. We, as it turned out, were not, but we were full of morbid gloom, a luxury of youth, trying to imagine death, the cessation of being, the emptiness of the world without us, the sliver of moon in the sky, the cry of the hoot owl, the railroad tracks stretching away to the west, et cetera.

Now my thoughts about death are mundane ones. I hope that when the cat croaks, he does it out in the open, or at least in the bushes, and doesn't try to crawl up under a porch where someone will have to reach in and extract him. People die in crevices in New York, brilliant loners who go to the city to find their niche only to get hooked on happy dust and wind up in a tiny apartment crammed with junk, and one dark day the neighbors detect an evil smell and call the cops and it's him, the tall gloomy man with the glasses, dead as a doornail. Keep in touch, tall gloomy men. Don't go in the cave. Leave that cocaine alone. Get outdoors more. Take long walks.

I've arrived at that delicate point in life where it gives me a twinge when the lady inside my computer says, "You are now disconnected." Or when the flight attendant refers to our "final destination" and says, "We will be on the ground shortly." Is that a nice way to talk? It suggests lying prostrate as uniformed personnel tear open your shirt and put the paddles on your chest. I don't want to be on the ground, I want to walk up the jetway and climb into a taxi and go to the hotel. Saunter into the bar, order a glass of gin neat with a twist of barbed wire, light up a stogie, look for the biggest guys in the room, walk over, blow smoke in their faces and say, "Which one of you fairies thinks he can take a 63-year-old newspaper columnist?"

"Oh," you say, "is that what you meant when you talked about living life boldly and lighting a candle in the darkness and daring to make a difference in your commencement speech at St. Raymond's lo these many years ago, when the president finally had to stand up and tap you on the shoulder and suggest that you wind it up?" Yes, of course, and just for that, you little twerp, I'm going to stop right now and not say what I was going to say about daring to be selfish and to enjoy your life without feeling obligated to share your hard-earned wisdom with your needy friends. Not another word from me. You figure it out for yourself.

Garrison Keillor, via Salon

Economical with the truth

Marketing sucks. The goal of said manipulation is to get you to think you have a need for the product or services being pushed. You may not ACTUALLY need the product, which doesn't really matter, the goal is to make you think you do. Most people I know hate being conned, and yet the very same people will not only understand but embrace the slogan; "the more you spend, the more you save!" Wha? Marketers rarely expose their social slight of hand. Poor feckless suckers. Truth in advertising, ...is that an oxymoron? Is that oil and water?

Caption this 6 ...

people I've known

Which are you?

Misrepresentation or Misogyny

Presuppositions, perspective, comfort. Are any of those challenged by this picture? What if? If Christianity (or Christ followers) is going to be respectable at all it must address gender. And for the most part it does. Generally. There is a big God here, all around us, who is crazy in love with us and who, by their own will created us male & female. Sex was Gods idea (both the state and the act!) This would indicate intimately that God tenderly values, respects, supports, understands, relates, acknowledges, highlights, smiles at us as we live up to our personhood. If Jesus was such a 'radical rabbi' then why didn't he recruit any women to be in his band of disciples?

What if?

Now granted Jesus was a male in a 1st century middle-eastern, Jewish context...he represented in human form (body) a God who is Spirit (no body). God is the ultimate 'am'. God deeply, deeply relates to us as male and female, because AM is neither, and is. Our body distinctions are a great idea, and it sucks. We wage war and we abuse. We discriminate and we are enraptured. We write music about our lover and we hire the more 'qualified' penis. We make distinctions instead of having the eternal sense of creation, the soul of the divine. The beauty in you as crafted by the master sculptor. I don't know first hand, but I can imagine that periods suck. It also sucks to be judged against the cultural expectation of living up to The Fast and the Furious.

What if?

Look at what you sing, what you read, what you recite. Where is God? If you want to make God laugh tell her your plans for the future. Be thou my wisdom and thou my true Word, I ever with thee and thou with me Lord, Thou my great Father and I thy true son. Where is God?
Does it seem odd? Do you wonder? The Spirit is in you- soul to soul.

What if?

We are created with a capacity to be in relationship with the creating, sustaining, loving, compassionate power of the universe. Whoa! At the most profound level of existence we are not alone; we have the potential to be in a relationship with God. The joy that seems boundless at the miracle of the birth of a child, the fragile nature of life that accompanies death or life-threatening illness of significant others, the overwhelming sense of gratitude that accompanies the sparing of one's life, and a myriad of other encounters that alter the rotation of the earths axis, are events during which human beings report an emotional depth that touches the profundity of life. A sense of being in the presence of God.

our gender fades into oblivion...

I AM