Hilarious

The Onion: Age-Progression Technology Helps Find Runaways

In the News

Martin made our local news! Click here to view it.

If You Aren't Reading...

...Stuff Christians Like, you are missing out.

Jon's post today was incredibly awesome, and as always, the comments to the post were even better.

Check it out. I'm not going to cite any of it here, because you need to go to his website. Read one post and you'll be hooked.

Bookmark SCL and read it daily. You'll always get a good laugh, but sometimes you'll get so much more.

Best Headline

Man with mullet sought in dog's shooting

The Whole Thing

OK, I've mentioned this blog before, but today's post was so good I'm copying the whole thing over here for you to read.

#212. Shrinking God.

We make God small sometimes. We don't mean to. I mean in our heads we know He is big and massive. We know He created the Rockies and Switzerland and the manatee. We know His power and grace stretches across the fabric of history but we still find ways to shrink Him down.

It happens for a lot of reasons, but one is because doubt is easier than faith. Doubt springs forth with natural momentum, faith takes effort. Even when good things happen to me, I immediately start waiting for the other shoe to drop. I treat good things like teenagers treat quiet scenes in horror movies. I walk into the good and say, "Hello, is anyone there? It's good in here, too good." And then I wait for something horrible to come back into the picture. Because I doubt God can sustain the good in my life. He is not big enough. I do it constantly with this site. When friends ask me about it or the book I always say, "It's going well but we'll see." The phrase "we'll see" is my way of saying, "good things don't last. God is not big enough to do the things I would like to do. He is small."

But then something happened.

An MIT professor made God bigger for me. That wasn’t his intention. He was trying to stretch the Bose brand. They make Wave Radios and other stereo equipment. He was frustrated that writers like me were not taking any chances with the advertising. He was disappointed that we were not taking any risks and the writing we created was flat, lifeless and boring.

His biggest issue was that we were making his brand, the very soul of his company, very, very small. And he decided to explain the problem in a simple way that ultimately changed how I look at God.

Dr. Bose said that his brand was like a soccer field. It was big and wide, with large expanses for us to creatively play around in. And he wanted us to. He wanted us to explore every inch of that large field. But, when he communicated his vision to his second in command, that person got a little scared. They didn’t want to go out of bounds, to stumble passed the boundaries and get in trouble with Dr. Bose, so they drew the lines for the soccer field a few feet smaller than Dr. Bose had. That way, if they went over their own lines, they were still a few feet from Dr. Bose’s. And when the third in command got his instructions from the second in command, she was afraid to step over the second in command’s boundaries, so she drew the lines a little smaller. And then the fourth in command drew them smaller. And the fifth in command did the same thing and so on and so on until the brand finally got to me.

By the time I got it, the brand had been whittled to about the size of a postage stamp, which left me very little room to be creative. What I would end up writing was a disappointment to Dr. Bose because I clearly hadn’t explored his whole soccer field. I was stuck in a little one foot by one foot tuft of grass trying my best, but suffocating nonetheless under the rules and regulations that had been layered on by each person that had touched the brand.

I don’t think it’s crazy to draw a parallel with the way we treat God sometimes. I think that it’s easy to read the Bible, get a little nervous and pull the reins in on life. I think sometimes the picture we hand to people of God’s love and forgiveness has been downsized by our concern to stay within the bounds, versus play within the field. Our pastor gets a small field from his seminary professor who got a small field from their Board of Directors who got a small field from the Board of Trustees who got a small field from someone else and by the time you get it on a Sunday morning during service, God is microscopic.

It’s easy to do, and you can see it with things like the verse that says “Nothing can separate us from God’s love.” We start to think that he didn’t really mean nothing. I mean "nothing" is so huge. We should rein that in a little so that we don’t mess up. So let’s add some conditions to nothing. And all sins are equal but are they really? We should probably put some small conditions around that one too. Now that I think of it, 10 commandments was a good start, but it's not enough. Let's add a few. Let's follow the 30 commandments. And the whole, "love God, love yourself, love your neighbor" thing can't really be the most important things we need to do. That sounds too simple. Let's expand that a little.

And on and on until we’ve shrunk God with conditions and expectations. We’ve taken his grandness and washed him in the hot water of fear and logic until he’s manageable and wee.

God is bigger than we can grasp. He has a soccer field the size of the universe for us to explore. He wants us to play. I want us to play. I want run through every inch of his soccer field. I hope you want to run too.

Next time someone tries to make him small, remember the lesson from Dr. Bose and refuse to accept a postage stamp God.

Check out more hilarity and occasional deepness at Stuff Christians Like.

Niiiiiiiice

Have you seen this?

Flowers on Alki

And a couple other random shots...

Is It Just Me?

Am I the only one who...

• Can't seem to get those comment verifiers on the first try? You know, it's one of these:
  
  And those aren't even the hard ones with the letters all merged together with an overlaid grid!
  
  
• Uses Google to spell-check? I love the "Did you mean..." feature!
  
  
• Hates any embedded video that doesn't allow you to pause it until it's fully loaded? Nothing ruins a funny video more than pausing every 2.3 seconds for buffering.
  
  
• Uses Wikipedia as a culture guide or to "get the joke"? Anytime I ask myself, "what's the deal with (whatever)?" I just look it up on wikipedia.org. The best and most informative ones so far have been "badger badger badger" and "Flying Spaghetti Monster". The only time it's failed me is when it offered no insight into the crazy Scientology brain of Tom Cruise and his many acronyms.
  
  
• Goes to snopes.com (or other websites that combat spam email and urban legends) to verify what's in a forward BEFORE I send it to 85 of my closest friends? (I know I'm the only one who does a "Reply to All" with the snopes.com entry... but we've got to stop the insanity!)
  
  On a related note, I found this page the other day and will be sending it when appropriate.
  
  
• Is confused, baffled and bothered by the prevalent use of an apostrophe to pluralize a word? (For example: "All entree's come with a side of rice" or "I put my photo's and video's online" and the more common 80's or CD's.) Why do people do this? Can anyone explain?
  
  
• Plays a song 100 times in a row when I love it? For instance, that Michael Bublé video I posted the other day... I played it about 15 times in a row.
  
  
• Doesn't think it's a huge deal when someone sings a 'Christian' song on American Idol? The New Girl was in ecstasy two weeks in a row because someone sang 'This Little Light of Mine' and then 'Shout to the Lord'. Heathens have been singing gospel music for years.
  

Just checkin'.

Side note: check out my newest gig! (Thanks, Terri, for the referral.) Those are my designs. I'm working with a realty photographer to design templates with his photos. Very cool.

Soapbox

Have you seen this guy? If not, click on his face.

And then forward it to everyone you know.

Turn That Off!

But THIS... this, I will listen to over and over.

How My Week Has Been...

How about you?

It's A-MAZE-ing

As I mentioned a couple months ago, I worked with a farmer in Texas to design a corn maze. Well, it's now in the ground and ready for people to wander through!
How cool is that?

^The corn maze
My final design >>>
(We removed the face from the moon and obviously a lot of the small details were lost in translation...)

We used this image and this image as a starting point, and then added details to fill the space.

So, a bird walks into a store...

My brother sent this to me today... I'd never seen it before, and it really cracked me up!

Click on the picture for the story of what's going on.

Do you notice a similarity between these songs?
Kelly Clarkson: Addicted (Starting at 02:40/01:20 - depending which way the counter is running)

Veggie Tales: The Bunny (Starting at 01:12/00:48)
This is the wrong video, but the song is right.

Seriously, if you open two windows and start them both at those points, they're exact for about 20 seconds. Weird.

Oh. My. God.

You Are Unique, Just Like Everyone Else

Do you need a little encouragement? You can do it! http://your.name.here.youaremighty.com

Just type in your name in the URL... for instance, mine is http://betsy.leeuwner.youaremighty.com.

Go ahead... do it!

Make Your Own Fortune Cookie

Also includes links to every imaginable generator.

Very Distracted...

This week, I've been distracted.

I've been on myspace about every 3 minutes, and I started a facebook account because my brother is on there. (Anyone else on facebook? Seriously, what does it mean to "poke" someone?)

So, sorry for the lack of posts. If you're on any of the other sites, or Flickr, add me as a friend! I am a social butterfly.


And belated congrats to Scott & Amanda:
Welcome, Alex!

If I haven't already sent you one of these this morning... these cards are hilarious!*
*Some contain crude language, so watch out!

Someone's been nominated for Hottest Mommy Blogger!

Vote now.

(You have to register to vote, but we have to support our girl!)