escapingbabylon.com

On recent weather.

Luckily, though it hit triple digit tempreatures here today (in Minnesota, sigh), this should mark the end of our heat wave.

So I have the opportunity (and this time it really does feel like an opportunity, but that’s another story) to do some on-campus work through InterVarsity. At the same time, Family Night is starting back up and there was mention of the possibility of me being a Sunday School teacher. Even though all of these things would be great individually, together, combined with the increased workload at my dayjob sets off warning flags in my mind. I tend towards overloading myself, and I’m already pretty burdened. I think I’ll need to say no to something. I’m not sure what though, so if you have any advice, and definitely if you have prayers please feel free to share them.

I’ve been using Open Office on my laptop for a while, and while the word processing and the spreadsheet sections of it are great. It’s database software really does not work for me (ie it sucks). And in order to work from home and to do my fundraising effectively, what I really need is a good database program. I’ve ordered Microsoft Office Professional, the matrix has me.

We are getting cubicles today. I’m glad that I get to keep my desk with the window, but part of me still dies with this development.

It’s been a busy week. I haven’t had the strength to blog as I thought I would, and yet I’m not as drained at the end of it as I thought it would be. So looking back at VBS what can I say.

First of all let me get it out of the way. We had record numbers this year. I know numbers aren’t necessarily a sign of health, but they can talk about the breadth of our outreach.

This year’s VBS felt like we got more done with less people. Although this may not have been exactly true. I think what happened is that we started the process off with fewer people, and there was definitely a couple of people with administrative gifts within that group that was there earlier. To be honest, we were pretty worried for a while about recruiting enough volunteer staff to do VBS this year, but people really came together in the end.

We had a larger than usual young adult class, which was really and education for me both directly as far as what was taught as well as indirectly as far as how to teach. I like to see things that are completely different from the way I would do things, but I could see how they work. And that was awesome. I’ll see if I can post more stories/pictures later. but for now I’m going to bed.

I’m having a hard time painting a cohesive picture of the day. Though to be honest, it all started on Saturday. Saturday was our semi-final decoration day for VBS, and practice day for the skits. And if there is one thing I need to do better for future years is to better control what happens in this rehearsal. With the flurry of preparation that goes on, there were a lot of people in the church, and a lot of them brought their kids who really did not have anything better to do than to sit, watch and sometimes heckle our rehearsal. Suffice it to say that we didn’t have a very good one on Saturday. I had confidence in the actors, even if they didn’t, and today my confidence was not misplaced. It went really well.

Outside of that, a lot of the opening ceremony was ad-libbed. I was a little bit stressed because one of our actors didn’t arrive until about 10 minutes before we were due to go on stage. Our director was wonderful. Very energetic and engaging, and I think we did most of what we wanted to do without getting too off schedule. We had 190 people (adults and kids) there tonight. It was a fun and exhausting evening, and we’ve got to do it all over again tomorrow.

P.S. I’m sorry I don’t have pictures, I completely forgot to take them. I’ll try to have some tomorrow.

I watched The Muppet Movie last night. It surprisingly holds up wonderfully to my childhood memories (g-force, another childhood favorite of mine sadly did not). If you haven’t seen it in a while you should take a look.

I love how inspirational and how unswervingly idealistic it is. The idea that if you have a dream, and if it is a good dream, then you should follow this dream, and nothing should, or will, stand in your way.

I’ll admit that I’m a complete sap for those kinds of movies. Plus this movie was one of the funniest things ever. From a writing standpoint, it’s amazing how they balanced such a large cast. They do rely a little bit on your familiarity with the characters, but they are very efficient about introducing the characters and hitting those character moments. The point being, if I say a couple of unusual things over the next week, or use my Kermit voice more often than usual, this is the reason why.

So I’m in charge of the skits for Vacation Bible School (VBS). You’ve seen the types of skits that are common at VBS, a decent helping of cheese, but usually pretty fun for the actors (In this case mostly late middle to early high school students) and the audience. They are an easy target for the cynical, but usually work pretty well as illustrators/discussion starters. The skits in the program we are using have 4 main characters, and is based around a Treasure Island theme. Yesterday I lost one of the actors. I’m not going to post too much specifics about the situation, but he’s no longer going to be a part of the skits. This bothers me on two levels.

The first is that it throws a pretty large monkey wrench into the planning and preparation piece. VBS begins on July 17th. What’s going to have to happen is that I’m going to have to learn his part and see if I can step in for him. It’s not a long time to learn the lines. Also, my plan this year was to skip acting so that I can concentrate on the behind the scenes stuff, and make sure that all goes well. I’ve never been a great organizer, particularly when I don’t have a lot of time to sit and create a plan beforehand. This year I was going to make an effort at organizing and delegating. Even though Im doing a better job than I did last year, there’s a lot of room for me to improve, and it shows when things like this happen and how effectively I can cope with it.

The second, and probably more important level is that it temporarily removes this person from my sphere of influence. If you are involved in youth ministry, more often than not your hope is that you can form relationships with the kids/youth/students and hopefully influence them for the better. Building these relationships is hard, and the opportunities for such relationships are rare and diminishing. I was hoping that working together on these skits would be one such opportunity. It’s not a death knell for that relationship, it just means that I’m going to have to work harder at it.

And in particular, the Superman/Lois relationship.

” Superman and Lois Lane has traditionally been regarded as one of the great, timeless superhero love stories.”

-Comics Should Be Good 

Comics Should Be Good is one of the smarter comic blogs out there, and in this particular entry he looks at the various incarnations of the Superman-Lois Romance, particularly the difference between the Lois and Clark take and the Superman returns take. Since my review of Supes Returns did talk a bit about the difference between those two takes on the Superman mythos, I thought this would be relevant.

Ok, so now that I have my own domain name and all that jazz, I almost feel the obligation to use it for more serious posts than my usual “this thought just crossed my mind” type of posting. I’m not exactly sure what for though. I’ll see if I can make a conscientous effort to substantial blogging. So with that in mind I’m going to try to plan some of my posts. So here’s three things that I’m going to post on over the next 2 weeks or so.

• Singing in church for the first time since graduation: You all know how much singing means to me, so it may surprise some of you that I haven’t really done any formal singing (ie in a group, or on a stage, or in front of an audience) since graduation. Well I’m going back into it, and it’s an interesting experience.
• VBS Blogging: Our Vacation Bible School is starting on the 17th, and I’ve been caught up in the frenzy of preparations for it. It’s a huge deal in our church, because it’s usually a time where we reach/connect/serve a lot of kids who aren’t a part of our normal church community and who may fit the profile of ‘at-risk’ kids. It’s also a big production, so for those who’ve never seen what goes into those summer kid’s church programs or for those who are curious about what it’s like at Pilgrim, then this should be interesting for you. I’m also going to try to get tons of photos of it as well.
• Silence: Something I read in GQ recently (yeah I read it, so what ) spoke about silence and monasteries and it really seemed to speak to where my life was at recently, so there’s probably going to be a post about that
• More sketches: I still have a couple of moleskine sketches. I’m also probably going to post some development sketches for either the graphic novel idea that I have going, or for the webcomic/serial comic idea that I have going.

So stay tuned, same babylon time, same babylon channel.