the smell of warmth and other random notes...

love this time of year. love watching football, wearing a jacket, using blankets at night and it being too cold to get up in the morning. carved pumpkins the other day, that's pretty fun with a 2, 4 and 5 year old. drove through a bunch of dead leaves flying around on hillsborough street today. monday when I got to the building i turned the heat on for the first time this season and the building smelled like a giant, old space heater for a few hours. i love that smell.

also monday, i took matthew to pick up michael from school and we sat at krispy kreme for 45 minutes and watched the donuts on the conveyer belt. they were making the donut holes, so we watched them go through the whole process. this doesn't sound like fun until you do it with 4 and 5 year old boys. some of the donut holes get crushed in the conveyor belt and fall into the oblivion of the frosting vat. it's a rather darwinian process. the next day when i picked michael up from school, he spent 5 minutes, in the carpool lane, recounting the whole epic saga of the donut holes to the teacher who was helping him get in the car.

finally, i found this quote in a book this week. it was written by a harvard economist in the 1920's. it'll probably make the message sunday:

"There is no reason for believing that more leisure would ever increase the desire for goods. it is quite possible that the leisure would be spent in the cultivation of the arts and graces of life; in visiting museums, libraries and art galleries, or hikes, games, and inexpensive amusements... it would decrease the desire for material goods. if it should result in more gardening, more work around the home in making or repairing furniture, painting and repairing the house and other useful avocations, it would cut down the demand for the products of our wage paying industries."

translation: we don't dare give people free time to enjoy life or they might develop their brains and realize they don't need stuff to make them happy and the economy would go in the tank...

updated jonathan pics

here are a few newer pics of jonathan...

a follow-up from yesterday

we finished a series on our vision as a church yesterday by talking about the importance of spiritual authority in our lives. you can listen here. i talked about the source of our problem with authority, the reason it's good and necessary for our lives, and how God meant for it to work.

anyways, i made the case that we all have problems with authority and used the example of going to see the dead sea scrolls downtown last week. they have the fragments enclosed in humidity-controlled glass and they tell you not to touch them because there are alarms on the glass. this, of course, led to a low level tension the whole time i was looking at them because i really, really wanted to touch the glass and find out what would happen.

so today i go volunteer at my kids school. at lunch, the kindergartners and the 2nd graders eat together and it's as loud as you would imagine a room full of kindergartners and 2nd graders to be. so they installed a stoplight that stays green when the noise level is acceptable, turns yellow when it gets a little too loud, and turns red when the noise level is unacceptable. the assistant principle starts explaining how this works to the kids and i lean over to one of the other parents and say, 'this could backfire in a big way on her'. sure enough, the rest of the lunch period kids are staring at the stoplight, screaming to see if they can get the red light to come on. perfect... but just one day too late to make my sermon... rats.

on a side note, they just had fall break and one of these 5 year old's told me she went on a cruise to gibralter, italy, spain and morroco over break. how does a five year old remember gibralter? and is it right for me to be so jealous of a 5 year old? seriously, that's my life-long dream vacation and you're 5...