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Not to be too much of a Scrooge, but it is interesting to look at the Christmas Carols many of us can sing from memory and compare the details of those early songs to the Biblical and Theological history from which they derive. I thought this was an interesting article looking at the "Top Eight Historically Incorrect Christmas Songs."
Right now it's 4:00 AM on a Texas Tuesday morning, 2 days before Christmas. I've been up most of the night sick. And this isn't just a minor cold, or tummy ache. This is the gruesome, explosive kind of sick that only shows up once in 2 or 3 years, and forces you to the bathroom in regular 15 minute intervals.
How did this happen? It's my own stupid fault. Last night, in an effort to ward off what felt like an impending cold, I went grazing through my parent's medicine cabinet to find some kind of cold medicine. There in the corner of the cabinet was "Airborne." Airborne became popular a few years ago, and people I know swore by it's powers of cold prevention. It's a little tablet that you drop in a glass of water like an alka seltzer, it fizzles, and you drink it. It's supposed to have Vitamin C in it or something, and so if your timing is right, you can take it before the start of a cold turns into a full blown cold (or so they say).
So I took the airborne late last night. This morning, I woke up with a bit of a sore throat so I took another. When I got home this afternoon I took a 3rd to try to finish off whatever remained of my cold-- which seemed to have vanished. However, by that point I had begun to notice a knot developing in my stomach. I'd noticed it in the afternoon, and I even noticed it late last night. And as I was chugging my 3rd Airborne concoction, there it was again! Finally, my Sherlock Holmes-esque powers of deductive reasoning kicked in as I wondered to myself, "Hmmmm. I wonder if there's a connection between this queezy feeling I have in my stomach and the Airborne I've been downing?" Low and behold, when I checked the expiration date on the box, there was my answer: October 2007. For you math whizzes, that means those 3 tablets of airborne I had taken were over a year past expiration.
I'd learned in a previous genius moment that taking expired medicine is a bad idea. Side effects can include projectile vomiting and explosive diarreah. So as I stared at that box of Airborne, I knew I was probably in for a long night. Unfortunately, I was right.
Found this hilarious newspaper clip floating around online. You mught be a redneck if . . .
I discovered this website (The Big Picture, from Bostom.com) the other day, which posts AMAZING photography taken at a variety of locations around the world. It's all National Geographics type stuff, but the pictures are breath taking. I've subscribed to their feed, and I find myself in eager anticipation every time their feed updates every couple of days.
I just read a Christianity Today article about giving among American Christians, and it's VERY interesting. I've heard some of these statistics before and speculated that others were true, but consider this very interesting piece of data:
"About 5 percent of American Christians provide 60 percent of the money churches and religious groups use to operate."
Really? Only 5%? Why the lack of generosity? Here's one reason:
"American families are repeating their churches' examples. Relatively little donated money actually moves much of a distance away from the contributors . . . The money given by the people in the pews, it turns out, is largely spent on the people in the pews. Only about 3 percent of money donated to churches and ministries went to aiding or ministering to non-Christians."
Of course that's not the only reason people don't often contribute to church offerings, and the article gives several other suggestions such as increasing debt, lack of trust in religious institutions etc., but this was the first time I ever heard someone suggest that a church organization's lack of generosity may be a contributing factor to a church attender's lack of generosity. People follow the financial example of their spiritual leaders, whether that example is one of greed or charity.
Do you want to know what the dullest blog in the world is? It's a blog entitled "The Dullest Blog In The World." It's so bad, it's actually kind of funny. Of course it hasn't been updated since 2006, but here is one sample entry:
"I was standing at a central point in the room. The walls were all at approximately the same distance from me. I continued to stand there for a few moments."
or this gem . . .
"I was doing some things. After a while I decided to stop doing them and take a short break. At the end of the break I started doing the things again."
Enjoy!
On the plane ride to Texas over Thanksgiving, I had the opportunity to finish reading the wildly entertaining, sometimes offensive, but usually enlghtening book, Rapture Ready: Adventures In the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture. It is a book by a guy named Daniel Radosh who describes himself as a "liberal New York Jew," who took it upon himself to spend a few months trying to better understand the subculture of evangelical Christianity. He talked to popular Christian authors, visited a Christian theme park, went to Christian concerts, music festivals, raves, visited Christian bookstores, entered "Hell Houses" on halloween and attended Christian WWE style wrestling matches in the south. Radosh wrote about his experiences, the things he saw, the conversations he had, and the impressions that were left on him.
As an evangelical, I appreciated the book. . .
