It's A Sad, Sad Night

Tonight is the midnight breakfast at Redeemer. For the past 7 years I attended this event - both semesters. I feel sad I will miss bacon and breastfest tonight. This is truly the end of an era.

Lunch Time Posting On Sober Realities

The past couple of days I have noticed a lot of traffic passing by my building. The traffic is people of a 'younger' nature and they are mostly on foot. Some are on bicycles. I was confused as to why there would be so many kids mucking about in the middle of the day. Then it hit me - a very sobering thought - there is a high school very close to my building and across the street from my building is a convenience store and a pizza joint - these kids are not just out for physical fitness, they're on lunch hour from...sigh... SUMMER SCHOOL. I feel so deeply for these teens. I have done the summer school thing. Once in high school and one summer course for my undergrad.

I know some of these kids have made their own beds by messing around during the regular school year and now they have to lay in them..lie in them? Whatever. But some, like just suck at certain subjects. I failed gr 11 advanced math twice and to get my gr 11 math credit, I took gr 11 general math in summer school. I actually got a great mark, somewhere in the 80s or 90s. My teacher was awesome and very straight forward. He would teach during the morning and then those who only needed a half credit or something would leave. Then he would allow the rest of us to do our homework in class for the afternoon. If we needed help, he would give it. He also told us sometimes terrible stories from his days at Trent or living in Toronto. We small town kids were deliciously scandalized! He had a great format for testing too. Every morning we would have a quiz. The quiz would consist of 10 questions picked at random from the previous day's homework. At the end of each week we would have a test and the test contained questions picked at random from each day's quizzes. Then at the end of the course the exam was questions picked at random from the tests. So if you did your homework, and kept it corrected and corrected your quizzes and tests you were fine. And I was.

That's my story.

G-Riggity

Vell, I and 14 other worship leadery type students are trickling down to GR for the Calvin Worship Symposium. I'm driving a van full of students leaving tomorrow afternoon. Now I have heard some people not be too excited about this event, because they say that after you go to it for a few years there is nothing new for you to learn, etc, etc. These people are all musicians, and maybe its true if you only go to sessions on how to make your praise band better and how to write praise music. But I am SO diggity dang excited to be going. This is my second time going and seriously I feel like each time is a weekend of professional development for me.

Since I'm sure my parents are curious, I thought I'd copy in the descriptions of all the sessions I'm registered for -

Worship Through Visual and Interactive Arts: How to Develop, How to Begin—Steven Caton
Most, if not all, eagerly support the idea of worship through art and the senses. But it still seems to be an elusive worship component in many churches. How is art created for worship? How do you generate ideas for art? How do you get people involved? How do you ensure art supports the greater scope of the sermon or ministry? How do you plan for such items? How do you end up not doing it all yourself and burning out?! Our congregational team has been on a long journey of finding answers to these questions; getting worshipers involved through participation and the senses. Come hear the philosophy behind such a ministry and get some practical ideas and resources for follow-through back home.

Redeeming Ritual: Lessons from Iona—Doug Gay
Doug Gay, an Associate Member of the Iona Community, will reflect on the ambivalence towards ritual in Reformed/low church traditions and how we might move beyond this. He takes two key rituals from the weekly worship cycle of Iona Abbey in Scotland: the Act of Healing and the Act of Commitment, reflecting on how they work and arguing that many churches—traditional and emerging—could benefit from incorporating them as regular elements in their worshiping life.

Lament in the Context of Corporate Worship—Michael Card and Calvin Seerveld
In this session, you will have an opportunity to witness the remarkable relationship between Michael Card and Calvin Seerveld as together they provide some concrete and creative examples—spoken and musical—of incorporating lament into worship.


An Introduction to the Principles and Practice of Liturgical Dance—Shelley Marinus
In this session, we will learn the purpose of liturgical dance and some basic elements of choreography for worship. We will also be exploring the Psalms through movement.

The Holy Spirit and Worship—Mariano Avila
We will explore the biblical teaching on the central role that the Holy Spirit plays in worship. Dependence and freedom, order and spontaneity, reverent silence and joyful noise will be some of the paradoxes we will explore in the framework of Scripture. Our purpose is to inform some of our present-day worship practices and enrich, challenge, and transform them for the glory of the Lord we worship.

Panel Discussion on Church Galleries, moderated by Betsy Steele Halstead with Makoto Fujimura, Bern Lewis, Kelly Sisson, Vange Van Huesen, and Michael Winters
There continues to be a growing interest in church visual art galleries, exhibitions, and educational opportunities related to art within our churches. In this session we will be joined by church leaders who have well-established programs and those who have just begun organizing a visual arts ministry. Hear how these ministries have come to be a catalyst for outreach, a way of enriching the congregation’s preparation for worship, a building block of their educational ministries, and a unique way of encouraging intergenerational fellowship.

Highly Favored: The Virgin Mary in Visual Art—Bert Polman
This session will focus on the depiction of Mary, the mother of Christ, in historical and contemporary works of art. It will be held in conjunction with the Calvin College art gallery exhibit “Highly Favored: Contemporary Images of the Virgin Mary,” which is a CIVA-produced show of recent Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic Marian art.

Offering Our Neighbors’ Pain to Jesus Who Wept—Calvin Seerveld
Why did Jesus weep in John 11? Is it possible for us to sing comfort to those in pain, or not? We will examine a range of attempts from Psalms, Gregorian chant, Genevan tunes, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, African-American Blues, to current pop song.

Writing Exams Means...

• not showering
• forgetting what a balanced meal looks like
• feeling jet lag all the time
• suddenly everything, e v e r y t h i n g is your hobby, or at least your distraction
• bed sores from sitting so much
• leaving the house is a big deal
• a fleeting sense of care
• self diagnosed carpel tunnel syndrome
• rituals
• alsdkfjasldkfjasl;dkfja;sldkdkjffsldkkfjfjasldkfjfjasl;dkdfjsiufuweoijadnlaskmlskjeoiure
• you want Jesus to come back so you can stop studying, or if He wants to come back during the exam, thats ok too!
  

Craig

prayer.

Not the Life of Pi But the LIfe of Tea

I made tea before I left the house this morning. Peppermint tea. Yum. I tried to leave the house without the tea and had to go back in and get it. Then I put it on the roof of my car while I put my things in the car. As I was backing out the driveway I wondered what the strange rumbling noise was. It was my tea sliding along the roof of my car. So I stopped the car and got my tea off the roof. I arrived at the school with the thought in my head, "Don't forget the tea Stewart, don't forget the tea (very similar to don't take your guns to town Billy, don't take your guns to town)." I got out of my car and wandered into the school in search of a breakfast platter. While eating the breakfast platter I thought that tea might accompany it nicely. Then I remembered the tea that was sitting in my car. After finishing my breakfast I went out to my car and got the tea. I am now enjoying it in the cafeteria, in the sun, studying and writing. Its still hot. I like tea.

Tonight

Tonight will be my 12th Midnight (10:30) Breakfast. Or as someone might say, Midnight Breastfest. I am able to achieve this number by having gone to both the MBs during the year I was at Mohawk/working. So, being that I will still be a student at RUC next year I will be able to get that number up to 14! That my friends is a lot of Danishes and apple juice.

Reflections on MBs past:

• I love bacon. In my first year I ate a lot of it at the MB in my first semester. I also took a lot home. Those of age will remember that the food plan used to limit dorms to one meat per week or the "Meat of the Week". Therefore my bacon quotient was quite low. So between my boyfriend Dan and a number of friends, we went back for enough seconds of bacon to keep me eating it for days!
• Sausages or bacon - the debate! For a while there seemed to be some sort of alternating system - One semester bacon, the next breakfast sausages. Not a good system. Breakfast sausages are gross. Thankfully in the past year that system has been abolished and bacon has remained supreme. I pray that it stays that way.
• The omelet. The year the school got Williams it tried to 'class up' itself a bit at the same time. That year at one of the MBs instead of the usual scrambled eggs there was a beautiful broccoli mushroom omelet. I personally loved it. But there are many Dutch boys whose Mothers don't do that sort of thing and therefore feel that vegetables have no place next to their bacon. The omelet has never returned.
• The Danes are crying. The first few years of my MB attendance we had real Danishes - like the 4-5inch in diameter pastries with the fake fruit filling in the middle, yeah, that is the shiz. Now-a-days we get these strange narrow and then cut in half so it looks like there are more of them tiny tasteless pastries. Sadness. I long for the days of real Danishes and not whatever happened to be on sale at Bulk Frozen Breakfast Baking R Us.
• Ew, don 't do that. There is always a food fight or 17. They are all dumb and aside from being a diversion from so many Christian touching games, the only other thing they accomplish is making more work for the people who are already going to be there late cleaning up. No good. Don't do it.

Bring on the bacon, bring on the noise, bring on the funk!

Snow

I'm going to be sorely disappointed if we get this pile of snow and the only thing it does make me dig, shovel and leave early for everything. Jacob Ellens, if you read my blog - multiple snow days in a semester is not a bad thing, in fact, it will make you a living legend.

And School Has Started Again...