Daley Ponderings

We cooked bacon and pancakes (I found a nifty plastic pint jug in Walmart or somewhere that you simply pour water into the jug, shake it up, and pour it on the griddle) for breakfast, and then packed up and planned to meet for lunch at Great Falls, 15 miles away. Heather went back to... (More)

So, after thinking about it for a while, we decided to go ahead and purchase a new bike.  The reason it took some thinking is that it isn't a regular old bike with one seat, but has three seats, with room for three adults, or with the added child conversion kits, Noah and Jonathan can fit... (More)

From me: Greetings, I beseech you in the name of the fair gravel god Macadam . The town crier has informed us, the royal court, that some of you minions scoffed at my prior references to the presumed conflict between the bipedaled beasts and steel plated goblins, and so we hereby... (More)

From me: Oh Great Stout Hearted One and Less Admired Comrades:         At this moment, that is to say, this present instance in time, I and my accompanying attendants find the highly esteemed, large and otherwise great price of the rougher,... (More)

The authors quote some statistics of how many children leave the church never to come back, and particularly notes some examples of where churches had "junior church" for the kids, and while it was fun and entertaining when they were young, when the kids were old enough to attend... (More)

I am not sure what I think about this chapter.  The authors argue for Christian pastoral care within a communal setting, as opposed to the "professional" counseling.  I have heard of a couple stories of people violently against that idea, though I haven't seen anything bad... (More)

Again, probably showing my bias, I didn't get a whole lot out of the "World Mission" chapter, so I am going to combine two chapters into one post. The gospel word is a word for the present about the future.  Hope is integral to our message.  Non-Christians... (More)

So, as most of you know, in March I went on my first ever short-term mission trip to Hato Mayor in the Dominican Republic with college students from Penn State, University of Pittsburgh and a handful from other places. It is almost a month later, and I've been meaning to write down... (More)

I am not sure of the original source, but I received this via Jack Ganssle in his Embedded Muse . Mother taught the IF ... THEN ... ELSE structure: "If it's snowing, then put your boots on before you go to school; otherwise just wear your shoes." For years I... (More)

Jonathan has been wanting our family to put on a Star Wars play ever since he started reading his Syar Wars book.  I keep telling him, "You write the script first, and then we can figure out more details."  So he finally decided to write the script, based on the movie Star... (More)

"Francis of Assisi is alleged to have said, 'Preach the gospel always; if necessary use words.'  That may be a great medieval sound bite, but it falls short of what the Bible teaches about evangelism." I used to like that quote, and the evangelism models it leads... (More)

I won't do a whole review, as I probably wouldn't do all that good of a job, but I'm re-reading it because a friend from church asked to borrow it, and I thought I would read through it again before I loaned it to him, so I could better recommend it appropriately. Dave Skiles... (More)

It's definitely a telling commentary on my life that the first chapter of Total Church , "Why Gospel?" was less exciting to me than the following chapter, "Why Community?".  I think the former is in my head only, where the latter is in my head and heart.... (More)

There is a bizarre issue with AT&T and their latest phone - the tech support folks (even the second level) haven't ever seen one, and the scripts they have are made for the original Tilt, and AT&T somehow hasn't realized that while it probably is possible to do it the "old"... (More)

In continuing my tv watching and catching up on the news from the last year, I see that Verizon has been doing lots of ads about network speeds and comparing them to AT&T.  And I found out that AT&T rates lowest on consumer satisfaction surveys, etc.  My brother said he has... (More)