Presby-Musings

Today is my 17th wedding anniversary. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a cold day, just like today. The sky was the kind of blue that it gets when there are no clouds and the sun is shining just so. It was perfect. Early that morning, I snuck out of my parent's house where I happened to be living at the time in order to meet her at the Scotty's parking lot we had established as our rendezvous point. I am not sure why I was sneaking, to be honest. I was twenty-three years old at that point, and my parents didn't really care where I went. I had moved home (stated reason, anyway) because I wanted to save money for my impending marriage. My wife and I had been engaged or a month or so, and it seemed like the smart thing to do. But when the wedding plans became too cumbersome and we grew weary of having to please everyone else, we decided to take matters into our own hands and elope. You'd think that something like that would be easy to do--eloping. I...

I know why I got baptized when I was a kid. I belonged to a faith community that valued baptism as part of a person’s assurance of salvation. They wouldn’t really tell you that to your face, mind you, but essentially that’s what they believed. The unspoken theology behind their baptismal fervor told the true story. The way I understood it, you might verbally give your heart to Jesus, but it wasn’t truly his until you got dunked. I was officially “saved” when I was six, and I was baptized when I was ten. I think that I was cut some slack because I was a child, and there was this theological leap that people made to “allow” children into heaven---at least in the fundamentalist circles where I spent my formative years. They didn’t have the same rules for everyone, but kids seemed to receive more grace than other people. Funny. A kid who was constantly surrounded by God-talk and who by the age of six had heard the plan of salvation about a hundred times was given a free pass,...

Recently, I found this website:  www.43things.com.  It's a strange kind of site where you list things (up to 43) that you want to accomplish in life.  It also lists how many people on the site are trying to accomplish the same task.  I have 24 things listed so far.  For some of my goals there are literally thousands of people with the same goal in mind, but for most of them there is only one---me.  Every once in a while I will add something new, or revise one of the things,  but I have not visited the site that often in recent weeks.  It's kind of daunting, to be honest, and my track record with keeping resolutions is spotty at best.  You can check out my 43 Things site if you want to... Just click here .   If you traveled over there out of curiosity and managed to find your way back, perhaps you can commiserate with me a bit on how daunting our resolutions, goals and yet-to-be-fulfilled dreams can be when you place them on a list like the one on 43 Things.  I decided to sket...