stumbling toward divinity

friday five, almost on time

1. So how did you come up with your blogging name? And/or the name of your blog? Well, when I first started blogging I was a seminary student about to embark on my internship, not really thinking about whether or not I should be anonymous or not.  It never occurred to me that people might read my blog, including people that could someday/some how impact my ability to get/sustain a pastoral call.  So, back in those days my blog title was very biblical, but a play on words with my last name.  Nowadays, it's inspired by a Sarah Maclachlan song (Fumbling Towards Ecstasy), but also kind of a play on the whole journey towards my Master of Divinity degree at seminary, as well as the lifelong journey of faith and trying to understand my relationship with God.  Unfortunately, I've found that my blog title is much more theologically profound than I am able to get on even my best days.
My blog name "church nerd" is an affectionate title that many of my friends and I have taken to calling ourselves.  Being up to date and interested in all things church related - so being a nerd about church.  Although I often call myself "Mark." too, and there's a definite possibility that it might be my actual name.  Or, it might not.  Who knows?

2. Are there any code names or secret identities in your blog? Any stories there? Yes!  There is El Capitan, my senior pastor.  As well as the Awesomes, a family from seminary who, to this day, remain some of my closest and dearest friends.  There are the Too Cools, a family from church who I have grown quite close to and very fond of.  There are J and A, friends from seminary who, at least until recently, both lived relatively close to me.  There's Nate Dawg, a dear, dear friend from seminary who I still try to maintain a close relationship with.  C-Dubbs is another seminary friend who, until recently, lived close by.  There are plenty of others, but right now I'm having trouble remembering all of them.

3. What are some blog titles that you just love? For their cleverness, drama, or sheer, crazy fun?
I have to admit, I've always been a big fan of mine!! :) :) :)  "New!  Now in Lutheran Flavor" is definitely a good one. 

4. What three blogs are you devoted to? Other than the RevGalBlogPals of course!
Nachfolge and Confessions of a Lutheran Husker are two that I try to keep up with, because they are two friends from my church camp counselor days and I have spent time with them and know them and am interested in what is going on in their lives.
Post Secret is another one, because it is interesting, sometimes moving and always thought provoking.
And there are several others I always keep up with, even though I'm not usually a very good commenter.

5. Who introduced you to the world of blogging and why? I don't really remember on in particular.  I do remember sitting in my dorm room at seminary and surfing the internet and coming across several blogs.  They were extremely varied in their scope.  One was the experience of a pregnant mother, and some others were dealing with extremely random things.  And I remember thinking that a blog about the experience of a seminarian (at that time) might not be all that bad.  And it wasn't long after that decision that I came across several others.  I think Polar Bear over at the Ice Floe was one of the first that I came across.  As well as RevStacey at the Almond Branch.

Bonus question: Have you ever met any of your blogging friends? Where are some of the places you've met these fun folks? Besides those that started blogging after I already knew them, the only one that I've really met after I started reading their blog is RevStacey.  Ross over at In Lay Terms and I have hung out, and I'm not sure if we met before I started reading his blog.  I know that we've gotten to know each other and spent more time together in person after having been blog-friends, but I think we actually met in person before we started blogging.

camping friday five

Well, it's most definitely not Friday, but I just noticed that over at RevGalBlogPals their Friday Five from last Friday was about camp.  I can't believe I missed it (I've been having a serious camp withdrawal this summer, but I've refrained from posting about it...)  So I figured better late than never, and here it is:

1. Did you go to sleep away camp, or day camp, as a child? Wish you could?  One summer, I think it was after 5th grade, my friends Mike and Josh and I went to Camp Rock.  Which is now the title of a Disney movie, but it's not about the camp I went to.  It was church camp, but really I don't remember doing much of anything churchy there.  I remember play foosball, and archery, and when a camper would get mail they'd have to do something silly to get it.  And then there was the night where they had the big bonfire and we were invited to dedicate our lives to the Lord.  I felt moved to do that, and so I did, and look where it got me.  I got home and was so excited to tell my dad about it, since he's a pastor, and he said, "You didn't really need to do that again, since you already did it when you were baptized."  I went to another camp after my 8th grade year with my church.  It was confirmation camp, and was a great experience.

2. How about camping out? Dream vacation, nightmare, or somewhere in between?
Dream vacation.  Especially if it's with fun people.  But only if my campsite isn't invaded by evil raccoons.

3. Have you ever worked as a camp counselor, or been to a camp for your denomination for either work or pleasure? Yes.  I worked several summers as a camp counselor, then I had a summer job in seminary where I travelled to six different outdoor ministries for my denomination to talk about vocation, and now I've taken two groups of confirmation kids to camp (this year and last year).

4. Most dramatic memory of camp, or camping out? I have so many!  There was an entire week of drama when I had Little B as a camper.  He had quite a few special needs that I wasn't prepared for, and wasn't that good at dealing with.  Quite a bit of my time was spent putting up with him screaming at me, calling me names, and trying to get him to take a shower while he screamed at me, called me names, pinched me, hit me and tried to bite me.  Or there was the time I had to go out to the lake to rescue 3 or 4 canoes of elementary aged campers that got stuck on the far shore of the lake.  I ended up getting out of the canoe in chest deep water to pull them away from the shore.  I was a hero that day!  Or there was the week I had a camper poop his pants, and I had to deal with that.  It's quite the story...  There are plenty more, but I should save some of them for another day.

5. What is your favorite camp song or songs? Bonus points if you link to a recording or video.  I'd say the one that tugs at my heart strings the most is our camp theme song, set to the tune of "Mrs. Brown" by Herman's Hermits.  It's a great song, one we'd sing at the end of every week.  When I sing it now, I still get a bit emotional.  Also, one summer, the song we'd sing at the end of every week (before our camp theme) was "What Can I Give" by Cross the Sky Ministries.  Unfortunately, they don't have the lyrics or audio on their site, they do have several others of their songs.  But here are the lyrics for your enjoyment:

What can I give, as we both turn away?
What can I leave with you, to take along the way?
What can I do, to show you how I feel?
What can I say to you to make it real?

chorus:  Let love flow through you like a river of mercy
Let love lead you on to follow and obey
Let love shine through you, let love show you the way
Until we meet again on another day.

Remember these times, don't let them slip away.
Remember the tears and the laughter, the struggles along the way.
Remember to pray, keep Jesus in your sights.
Remember the prize set before us, press on with all your might.

repeat chorus

So follow your heart, and take hold of God's hand
Follow the Spirit's leading into another land
Follow the Savior, the words of Jesus Christ
Follow God's path of mercy through the darkest night.

repeat chorus

i love social networking sites, or i should have at least two posts on my blog in march

I was taking a break from sermon writing this morning, and decided to surf on over to facebook to see if I had any messages or posts on my wall or if it was my turn in any of the games of scrabulous that I'm playing. 

It was then that I saw a new feature on the righthand side of the site that suggested various people that I might know.  Apparently, facebook has done the work of finding people that I share several friends with and who I am not currently friends with on facebook, and then put them in a list of people I could potentially know.

So I clicked on the link to go and look at this list.  And, while I didn't know any of the people on that list (though one name did strike me as a bit familiar) there was an additional link to look up people that you graduated high school with.  So I thought I'd go and see if anybody I went to school with had set up facebook pages.

Now, I moved a few times in my youth and so I had several schools to look up.  But I decided to try the school I attended for most of my elementary school years and the brief beginnings of my junior high years (although when I moved I had to go back to elementary school due to differing grade separations in the school systems).  And, wouldn't you know it, not only did I immediately recognize three of the four people who had listed that school and year of graduation in their profiles (I might know the fourth... she could have gotten married and received a new last name) but two of them happened to be my very best friends from those years.

One of them I ran into during college, very briefly.  A classmate of mine had a high school friend at the State University who was in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.  So we drove out to see her perform.  But then, they said they were having a brief word from their student director before the play started.  And the student directory just happened to be one of my best friends from elementary school.  We needed to get back to college, so I only had a brief chance to talk to him afterwards, but we exchanged e-mails and wrote back and forth a bit before fizzling out again.

The other friend I have been searching for over the past several years.  I was always curious what happened to him.  We belonged to a pretty close knit group of friends, who did a lot together, and I had received word from several of those others that he was never quite the same after I moved away.  He drifted from the group or something like that.  I'd never had much success finding him, though there were a couple times I thought I might be getting close.  But apparently my internet sleuthing abilities are not as good as they could be.

But there he was today.  His picture looking back at me.  The name he goes by now is a different varitation of his first name then he used when I knew him, but I was fairly positive it was him.

So I sent friend requests to both of them, including a very short message to the second friend saying something like, "Is this really [his name] from [town we lived in together]?"

And then, around an hour later, I received a confirmation AND a wall posting from the second friend, who chronologically was my first friend in that new school since he was the very first classmate I met on my very first day of school, and our teacher gave him the task of taking me outside to introduce me to people, which was kind of a mistake because he was a bit socially awkward and not connected with a lot of the kids in our class.  But from that day on we were best friends, spent nights at each other's houses, drew pictures and wrote stories together, and played games in our front yard (one which resulted in him running into a tree while wearing a blindfold). 

And now we've moved into the next stage of our friendship as official facebook friends.  I'm excited!!!

several things

• On Palm/Passion Sunday we sang the song "Were You There."  I think I've shared my feelings for this song before, but I'm going to repeat it, anyway...  I was in elementary school and a part of our youth choir.  I was definitely not a confident soloist, but they wanted several of us to each sing a verse of this song on our own.  Somehow I ended up either volunteering or being volunteered to sing the third verse.  So it got to be my turn, I moved from my spot in the back of the choir (where the tall kids stood) and walked to the front (where the soloists stood) and I bravely began to sing.  And this is what I sang:  Were you there when they laid him in the tomb?  Were you there when they laid him in the tomb?  Oh-oh-oh-ohhhh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.  Were you there when they crucified my L-" and that's when I realized I was singing the ending to verse one and not verse three.  Instead of tactfully finishing the verse as if nothing happened, I immediately stopped singing, burst into tears and quickly walked back to my spot in back.  Several people were kind afterwards, saying the didn't notice anything wrong, or sharing some of their own embarrassing stories.  So, it wasn't the end of the world, but I still have mixed feelings about this song.
• In my pseudo-home office (read room meant to be a home office but currently filled with boxes and totes of things, and not in any sort of orderly fashion) I came across an envelope of pictures.  I'm a sucker for pictures and looking at them and reminiscing.  I can do that for hours.  So I picked it up and looked at the pictures, and they were from my summer as part of the Two By Two program.  This was a joint venture between all eight ELCA seminaries, where four teams of two seminarians would travel to various outdoor ministries to talk about vocation and discernment and vocational discernment.  My teammate and I happened to get the coveted western route (which is what began my love affair with Holden Village, which was one of our stops) which took us out to Colorado and western Montana and Washington.  So, there were a lot of mountains.  And, as I was looking through these pictures I, of course, got reminiscent about camp, but it also made me really want to go spend time in some mountains.  I like mountains.
• Today is Saint Patrick's Day.  But I'm pretty much all German.  However, that hasn't kept me from celebrating this holiday, and it won't.  I'm all about celebrating.
• It's the beginning of Holy Week.  I have three sermons to write for Friday alone.  Although a couple of them are meant to be shorter, and I think are considered to be more meditations than sermons.  But it still seems like a lot of sermon writing for one person for one day.  Although this is where the benefits of being an associate pastor come into play, as those are the only sermons/meditations/homilies/messages I have to write this weekend.  El Capitan is taking Maundy Thursday and Easter Sunday.
• It is taking all of my willpower to not go to the nearest REI store and buy all sorts of fleeces and other assorted outdoor wear.  I think the whole jonesing for the mountains/all things summer camp has sparked this desire.
• I am excited for later today because some friends from the Mothership are coming to the City and we are going to a concert of a fairly well known Irish/Celtic band.  I think it will be good music, but I'm mainly excited to see friends.  Yay!!!!
• A few days last week the temperature almost got up to 50 degrees.  But then the weather dipped back down again.  I'm not a big fan of this whole weather teasing.  I'd be ok if they reorganized the days and flip flopped the early warm days with the later cold days, so we would just endure the cold a little bit longer and then were allowed to enjoy the extended warmth.  But, apparently, I'm not in charge of the weather nor do they consult me about these things.

book meme

My friend T, over at Praying on the Prairie, tagged me for this meme.  So here goes:

Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.

Well, folks, to be honest I have two books that are equally close - stacked one on top of the other.  So, rather than pick one, I'm going to do both.  Is that ok?  Well, who cares if it isn't.  This is MY blog!

Book #1
"A Quaker Book of Wisdom" by Robert Lawrence Smith
"This deep-seated distrust extends to our consumer culture.  In earlier years proprieters who offered quality merchandise at fair prices gained a reputation for reliability, and their customers rewarded them with loyalty.  We look back wistfully at the small shoe stores, independent drugstores, local haberdasheries, whose owners and salespeople were highly regarded in the community."

Book #2
"A Long Obedience in the Same Direction" by Eugene H. Peterson
[Ok, now this one is a bit tougher, because in the edition that I have, pg 123 is the beginning of the chapter and only has Psalm 129 quoted on it, and there are only three sentences.  Page 124 is a quote from someone else (Paul Goodman),and if you count the 3 sentences from pg 123, and add two more from page 124 then that leaves only two lines in the quote.  And the chapter doesn't actually start until page 125.  So I've decided to count the two quotes as the first five lines, and then we'll start with the first 3 lines of the actual chapter.  Cheating?  I don't care!]
"Stick-to-itiveness is one of the more inelegant words in the English language, but I have a special fondness for it.  I heard the word a great deal when I was young, mostly, as I recall, from my mother.  I was a creature of sudden but short-lived enthusiasms."

So there are my answers for the two books that were closest.  I just got them in the mail today and they are on my list of books to read.  I'm actually really excited to read both of them, but there are a few other books on my list that are ahead of them.  But it was fun to get this "sneak peak" at them!!!

tarot

I can't say I give a lot of stock to this sort of thing, but I think this quiz was interesting.  So I thought I'd share the results:

You are The Star

Hope, expectation, Bright promises.

The Star is one of the great cards of faith, dreams realised

The Star is a card that looks to the future. It does not predict any immediate or powerful change, but it does predict hope and healing. This card suggests clarity of vision, spiritual insight. And, most importantly, that unexpected help will be coming, with water to quench your thirst, with a guiding light to the future. They might say you're a dreamer, but you're not the only one.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

year end meme

Wow...  almost two weeks into the new year and I'm off to a great start on my blog...  Yeah, not so much.

Anyway, I've seen this particular meme floating around out there, where you take the first sentence of your first post for each month of the previous year.  I thought maybe that would get me out of this no writing slump, or at least be a post on my blog.   So, here it goes:

January:
So, I've been to a couple of the junior high boys basketball games.

February:
I have a meeting tonight, for our youth ministry committee, and then I'm headed up to the city to spend the night because I need to be at the airport at the butt crack of dawn.

March:
I was getting ready for bed and decided, at the last minute, to check my e-mail to make sure that no one had actually e-mailed me.

April:
When I was at seminary, there was a friend and classmate of mine who nicknamed me "The Pied Piper" or the seminary.

May:
GOD BLESS OUR MOMMIES!!

June:
So, last week I got to go to camp.

July:
Going on extended bike rides, with no iPod or walkman or anything like that, really gives me a lot of time to think.

August:
When you go to seminary, one of the things you sign on for (though you might not realize it at the time) is to say a lot of good byes.

September:
It kind of came and went uneventfully.

October:
Back in the day (read a couple of years ago) there was this show on VH1 called "Motormouth."

November:
So, anyone who pays attention to anything has probably heard the news by now that JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, announced that Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts the school of witchcraft and wizardry, is/was gay.

December:
I saw this meme floating around out there, thought I'd take a moment of my lunch break to do it:

So, how is that for an exercise in self-indulgence?  Really doesn't contribute much to the substance of my blog, other than to point you at a bunch of the other things I've written. 

And with that, I'm going to go to bed, I think.  Perhaps I'll be motivated to write about something of some substance in the next couple of days.  But I'm not guaranteeing anything.

my celtic horoscope

I've seen this floating out there, so I thought I'd take a spin:

You Are A Fig Tree

You are very independent and strong minded. A hard worker when you want to be, you play hard too. You are honest and loyal. You hate contradiction or arguments. You love life, and you live for your friends, children, and animals. A great sense of humor, artistic talent, and intelligence are all gifts you possess.

What's Your Celtic Horoscope?

on a lighter note

I saw this meme floating around out there, thought I'd take a moment of my lunch break to do it:

Mug Meme

Tell us about seven mugs in your cupboards.

Here are mine:

1. a handthrown coffee mug from Holden Village, picked for its uniqueness and quirky imperfections

2. a dark blue mug emblazoned with the logo and name of the camp that we take our kids to and, for which, I will soon be on the Board of Directors, although I'm not exactly happy with this mug right now because I knocked it over spilling coffee all over the end table.  And it's the mugs fault, you know...

3. a large mug gorgeously hand-painted with a forest scene, and a vibrant shade of orange on the inside.  I painted it myself with some good friends from camp several years ago.

4. a taller, skinnier mug that I got as a "welcome" package from the Vet when I took Pogo there the first time.  It has the name and logo of the Vet Clinic in town on it

5. This brown mug that has a handle that you can really only fit a finger through.  It's shorter and maybe a little wider, and it's a darker brown with a lighter brown rim.  I found it (and another one just like it that I also took) in one of the old houses at the Mothership where they were storing stuff.  I think I wasn't really supposed to be in the house, but I found these mugs in a box of stuff and they are exactly like some mugs my parents used to have while I was growing up.  So I was sure that the Mothership wouldn't mind if I took two of them, for sentimental reasons.

6. a pair of mugs, one dark blue and the other green, from my internship congregation.  Everytime I drink out of them they remind me of that year and those people

7. a massive mug emblazoned with the ELCA logo on one side and the logo of the 2006 National Youth Gathering on the other.  I got it for being a volunteer at the National Youth Gathering.  It's a very big mug.

There were so many others I wanted to share!  I have a thing for coffee mugs and travel mugs...  I seem to collect them.  Also, my friend Weepy was just in Holden Village and she bought me one (or two or three) more pottery mugs, and I know she has an eye for the unique and quirky ones, too, so I'm excited to see what they look like!!!

I feel like I should tag Pastor Scott because he mentions being a big fan of morning coffee in his blog, so I would think that he has some fun mugs.  But, really, anyone who wants to share about their mugs can feel free to blog about them!  Drop me a note in my comments if you do, so I can go read about your mugs!!!

it's spicy!

Your Score: Saffron

You scored 75% intoxication, 50% hotness, 75% complexity, and 50% craziness!

You are Saffron! Those other spices have nothing on you! You're warm, smart, and you make people feel really good (and with no side-effects!). You can be difficult to get to know and require a lot of those who try, but you're so totally worth it. *Sigh*

Link: The Which Spice Are You Test written by jodiesattva on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

wow...  i think this test makes me sound a lot cooler and intriguing than i actually am... but we're gonna go with it!!!!

and a hat tip to the polar bear for finding this test.