Blogging with the tip cut off of my thumb has been a bit of an adventure, but I've managed to write a paragraph pretty quickly. I slipped with the knife while cutting an onion—part of yesterday's potato soup extravaganza—and lopped off the top end. It's mostly a superficial wound, but it's bled enough.
L has been on call this weekend, and so she's doing a bit of pseudo-napping while I write next to her. She almost had to drive two-and-a-half hours last night, but managed to persuade the doctor that it'd be okay for her to stay home. Even so it was a seven-hour day for her. By 12:30.
She made bibimbap (비빔밥) for dinner one night with some ingredients we bought at H-Mart after visiting with B&A:
We went to church with them to see Carl Trueman, who is not in cynical in person as he is on the Mortification of Spin podcast. Surprisingly, we ran into H, who had lately attended our local church—she's dating a Westminster student and goes to Trueman's church now instead.
L and I have lately been watching the vlogbrothers a good bit, and it's been putting me in the mood to write. I think probably it's partially because public navel-gazing tends to feed some of our narcissistic tendencies, but there's actually also plot developing in my head, which is kind of unusual during these brief spurts of inspiration.
Christmas cards are still in process. I did some seven of them after shoveling the remainder of the walk today. In many ways I've been glad for the extra time I've allowed myself. Writing's a bit of a mini-vacation, and stretching out Christmas has been a surprising treat.
My domestic fantasies generally all revolve around having a library, a secretary desk, great handwriting, and the free time to write and read all I ever wanted. While I'm unlikely to experience this completely, the process of hand-writing a lot of Christmas cards has satisfied some of my latent cravings.
The last discovery of note was finding some of Karl Haas' Adventures in Good Music on the Internet Archive. This venerable music-appreciation radio program was a constant companion (Freudian'ed "compainion" here, probably because most of my memories of classical music growing up are accompanied by profound feelings of ignorance and disappointing my father) as a child: Dad would play the programs on a regular basis.
One of the goals of my recent life has been to repurpose experiences and memories from the past, to reclaim them from sometimes-dusty corridors and turn them into something new. Theologically this probably first happened to me with Irenæus and Augustin, who served as my first introduction to the Church Fathers (well, second to Eusebius' History of the Church). There was more to them than the angry ultra-nationalist Russian Orthodox guy led me to believe—more than my pedantry about baptism and mis-characterizations to Sola Scriptura would allow.
While rooting around in the past isn't something I'd necessarily recommend as the best way to grow, finding babies after you've tossed out the bathwater is a good thing.
I remember being surprised in the last visit to Riverside that one of the people thought a new perspective at the church could be helpful: we were missing at least two-thirds of the rest of Christianity, and there was a lot to learn there.
Considering that most of my youth was dominated by the hyper-Calvinist (or at least nearly) theology of that church, hearing something different there was pleasant, and offered some hope for the future there, too. One of the joys of heaven, I think, will be meeting up with people you've not seen in so long and saying, "So that's what we were missing," or "So that's what you were learning," and rediscovering anew something of grace and truth.
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