Blog Archive for September 2006
Store Up Your Treasures In Heaven
For me, this weekend is one huge celebration of life. Many of my brothers and sisters in Christ are coming to town for the People of Praise covenent making. Myself and a handful of people are making the covenant, many of which I know well. It's going to be great to have many special people in town to celebrate, including my sister. It's so exciting to have many great friends who I am going to live the rest of my life with.
Also, packed into this weekend is also a wedding of a couple friends from the high school days. I hope it's a great celebration, and if you have a chance, pray for Ryan and Anne because they have been sick for the last couple days. It wouldn't be fun to have a wedding when feeling under the weather. Ohh, and praying for good weather is always a good idea too for a wedding.
Learn A New Way To Move
Apparently MetroTransit found some money because there are a handful of new features on the web. The first is a fun new Flash site entitled "Learn A New Way To Move" and located at bustrainrideshare.org. Interesting.
The deisgn is fun and nicely enhanced with Flash. It looks like a well-worn booklet with lots of fun stuff wrote in the margins and hand-written tabs. Fun stuff, and fairly well-deisgned although it could use a non-Flash version.
The other interesting move is a promotion of their busier routes. Routes that come more often then every 15 minutes will be marked as "hi-frequency" routes. The promotional blurbs say that you won't have to check the schedule because you know the bus is coming soon. Of course, thoes doesn't actually reflect any changes in the system, just a promotion of their better-traveled routes. Hopefully it will follow that more routes will be moved up to "hi-frequency" status.
Good Monsters and Community
Today's readings from the Roman Catholic liturgy brought home something I've been thinking about for the past couple days. Here's what Jesus said in Matthew 7:
Hear me, all of you, and understand. Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.
From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. All these evils come from within and they defile.
It reminds me of what Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay said about Tuesday's release, Good Monsters. For the cover story of CCM, he explained:
[Good Monsters is about the process of] maturing in a person's life, coming to grips with incredible good and incredible evil in the same body and being willing to share the bad parts and the good parts with others in the community.
This rings true in my life because the world of Christian community is exactly what I am joining. The past couple days we have been moving into a brand new house. With this move, we have about thirty people living within a block of each other. We're working on bringing "a new way to live" to the University of Minnesota campus. Central to our life is large amounts of common space and having as many daily meals as possible together. We have morning prayer and evening prayer. And we try to keep our lives on a common schedule.
This, I suppose, is a very radical form of community because we keep almost everything in common. But in a couple weeks, I will be joining a larger community. In two weeks I will be giving my life to Christian community. I will say that I love the people in the People of Praise so much that I am willing to bind my life with theirs. There is no fear that I will no like it or not want to be a part of it later in life; its exciting to be a part of the move of God's spirit.
Is there risks? Yes. Is it going to be easy? No. But all of us are "good monsters", are not perfect, but are still OK with that. The editor of CCM said in response to Dan's comments, "I'm certainly not mature enough to intentionally live my life out in community with the kind of humility, gentleness, and risk Dan's talking about. But I aspire to it." I'm not mature in many ways, but I'm deciding to live my life with others for good and bad.