What happens when you eat 14 year old pizza crust from Betty Crocker? We found out.
On January 1, 2011, in a short series of unfortunate events, my husband prepared a Betty Crocker pizza crust from a mix. It turned out terribly. We couldn’t figure out why. It was paper thin, and stuck so badly to the pan that it seemed to only come off in stamp-sized pieces, not to mention being brittle and tasteless.
I forced it down, and after the kids bemoaned their meal, I, being a proper mom, I had them finish most of it–by decree. It was only after I saw the varying package design of some just-bought Betty Crocker pizza crust, did suspect something was amiss. That little wave of electric panic fear went around on my back. This could be a long night in the bathroom, I thought.
The thought was sickening, but oddly the meal wasn’t, in a true sense. We were all fine. No harm done.
4 Proposals: 1. Betty Crocker Pizza crust is not food.
2. God spared us (because sometimes he’s wacky like that.) 3. Pizza crust couldn’t hurt us, even if it was 50 years old…’cause that’s how p.c. rolls. 4. We’ve just realized we are the real life version of “No Ordinary Family”
Do you have any ideas?
It was a mysterious way to start the new year, and things have only gotten stranger since.
What the oldest thing you’ve eaten recently? Or…What’s the strangest thing that’s happened to you so far this year?
I’ve known Jon Acuff for few years now. We have had the same agent. And he even gave me an invitation to write on his blog. (Here’s the post). See, I was a fan of Stuff Christians Like long before Jon wrote his first book, called, well, not surprisingly: Stuff Christian Like. (Now, he has a HQ website for all things Acuff.) And I was reading his funnies, even long before he was selling ads to….what?! NBC… my goodness. And let’s not forget all those fox and CNN appearances. Before those. Oh! and even way back (sort of ) when he was using his …um…decoy name, or something, “Jon Christopher”… seemingly to throw weaker fans, or readers, off his scent (to no avail, of course!). Anyone remember that?
So, I can’t rival Jon’s awesomeness, or his blog of epic fame and legend. (Jon gets more comments to his blog post in two minutes than I get in visitors all week.) However, I enjoy the ironical, and so might you.
7 Reasons Why my Blog will make you cry LESS than Jon Acuff’s (humor) blog
Jon Acuff: Funny man. Serious man. Modern Legend.
1. Unlike Jon, I only rarely talk about orphans. Heck, for ages, “an orphan” was a thing that happens in typography, where a word unsuspecting word is just left by its lonesome at the end of a paragraph. Poor thing. Bad, graphic designer. Bad!
Right now, I’m tearing up just thinking about a person (specifically Jon) writing about orphans (the human kind). So, there you go. You need more proof, then click to read his orphan article here. Orphans break out the water works like nothing else can. The only thing worse for your tissue stockpile is an orphan with cancer. That cute bald head. The sweet bloated little belly. Horrible stuff. I’m changing the subject. ugh.
2. Jon can make plenty of us cry, sometimes by just being a tad more serious, on Serious Wednesdays. That’s skill folks. I’ll never do that to you. It just not in me. (I mean I don’t haz the skillz) For future notice, I happen to be sillier on Wednesday than Jon is, thereby making my ability to incite tears pale by comparison. So, in case you’re keeping track, that would be proof # 2.
3. Jon writes touching things about his kids, that are profound and can make your eyes as moist and irritated as rubbing a hot chili pepper on your iris. Go ahead get a chili pepper and see for yourself.
4. Jon raises money for orphans. So, you know, it’s not talk. It’s action. And needless to say, it’s frickin’ orphans, dude. If that’s not so sweet to be tear jerking, than you must be the Tin Man–pre-Emerald City–my friend.
5. When Jon cries, we cry. More proof here. Don’t miss the comments section. About 400 people admit to crying. I’m not joking. It’s Unbelievable. See, I never cried in an airport except when I’ve been with a TSA worker. You just won’t find a story like that here.
6. Jon loves his wife, and it shows. Witness this. Honestly, where the heck are my tissues, the ones with aloe? (I don’t know if people even know if I’m married-which I am. There I said it. Gosh.)
7. Jon is generous. He’s always helping out struggling writers, ahem, and plenty of other people. Plenty. It’s almost too good to be true. (I have NEVER given huge bundles of hard cash at a bookstore, or iPads, or iPod shuffles, or really any Apple products at all. I’m so lame, but unfortunately not lame enough to stir your tears of pity.)
Have I made my case?
P.S. If you are a blogger that offers fewer crying opportunities than Jon does, and you’d like some more blog traffic, share your blog link in the comments section, and we’ll stop by.
Welcome Schuylkill & Berks News readers (SBN- Facebook link). (Related to my column: If you have good traveling tips, please leave them in the comments section.)
Some of you have been wondering if you can “LIKE” me.
This is perfectly understandable.
You have a battle raging within…or maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about…or both…
Um. So.
We all like to be well-liked, but in this case, if you haven’t figured, I’m speaking about Facebook. It’s a so-called fan page. Even though I’m not my biggest fan, in a desperate attempt at self-actualization, I created my own fan page. Pathetic. I know. But wait.
If I could have changed the name to “Fun page” I would have. It’s really all Facebook’s fault. It’s not vanity. You would do the same thing, if you were backed into a corner. And what a corner…
What if, you’re Not on Facebook? very bad. Your punishment is to leave a comment explaining why. :)
OKAY! I just snapped, a little. Sorry ’bout that. (See why spiritual practices are indispensable? Imagine if I didn’t do them. Yes. We’d all be sorry.) Um. Yes. Where were we?
Right. The Page Facebook page called “Triple Dog Dare” is my way to connect with friends, fans, and the random person who likes to read something humorous.
(Image yourself holding a full pail of funny…See, you’ll love it.)
Click a photo below to get there; and remember, I love you, more than cheddar cheese, despite its power, and I mean that!
If you “Like” and “Share” to your FB page, I’ll leave you a witty quip on your Wall, and you’ll actually like it, (Help me know who you are, and/or confirm you did this, right here, or on my Facebook wall).
Okay, when you become wildly famous, rumors circulate, and some of them must be dispelled. I wouldn’t know much about that.
Just have some fun with this:
1. I invented Pop Tarts
Fiction. But I do like them.
2. I am an illegal alien of African descent.
Fiction. I was born in Puerto Rico, but the island is an American Territory. African descent? My Nana was a bit mum and shifty-eyed on that.
3. I’ve been hit by a bus.
Fact. I’m writing about that right now. Your appetite is now whetted, yeah?
4. Author Donald Miller wrote me a personal note.
Fact. It involved something about Paraguay and paper, but I don’t want to embarrass him too much at the moment.
5. I wrote Hebrews.
Fiction. But, It’d be great to write a book about my husband who makes me coffee each morning, and it could be called, He-brews: All about Hymns and Hers. (Okay, that’s but a working title) Also, I wrote a mediation in the Holy Bible: Mosaic. But, that’s not really the same thing, is it?
6. I’ve been shot out of a canon.
Fiction. But, I’ve both shot a Canon (camera), and written about the (biblical) canon.
7. I’m allergic to bananas.
Faction… half-in-half. Unripe bananas make the roof of my mouth feel like it’s sort of dry, splitting open, and raw. Ripe bananas? No problem.
8. I’m bilingual.
Let’s not get carried away.
9. My son can count cards, like Rainman.
Fiction. Nathan has autism, but his cool savant-type of qualities are limited to paper 3D models and legos. (So far, not all that marketable.)
10. I’ve stayed in Prague.
Fact. And I like to call it Praha.
Now you try.
1. List 1 fiction and 1 fact, and we’ll make a guess.
Today’s Featured Writer has something to say about the future of the church. But, he has an altogether different perspective, than our previous guest writer, John O’Keefe, and actually, most people. And this, in a nutshell, is Doug Jackson. But you could ever squeeze him into a nutshell, so never mind. He is a thoughtful and gifted thinker, a searching pilgrim, a devoted Christian, and a baking whiz. And, he’s topped with more than a modest dollop of wisecrackiness.
Please enjoy and interact with Doug’s contribution.
B.A. – English Literature, Grand Canyon College (1982)
The Church with a Future
-Doug Jackson
John O’Keefe is a futurist. I find that intimidating as heck. Personally, I’m a traditionalist. I can quantify the difference. Tramping through the jungle, a futurist and a traditionalist happen on some tiger tracks. “You track him,” suggests the traditionalist, “and find out where he’s going. I’ll backtrack and find out where he’s been.”
There isn’t even a cool name for the preferred direction for my arrow of time. “Futurist” conjures up images of, well, guys with shaven heads and soul patches. “Traditoinalist” calls up images of guys with bald heads (which is SO not the same thing) and no soul at all. This part I can at least work on. I think from now on instead of “traditionalist,” I’ll call myself a “past-er.”
So what can a past-er say to the church’s future? If there is, in the words of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, “time for a hundred visions and revisions” of the people of God in community, how much time do we have (and should we allow) for a rear-vision? Not too much, I don’t guess. Accordingly, I want to state a thesis and offer three theories. My thesis is that, whatever the church OF the future looks like, the church WITH a future will be the one with a past.
To speak of the church OF the future is simply to make a chronological observation. It means “the church that isn’t here yet.” It doesn’t tell us much about what this church will do or how long it will last. By the church WITH a future I mean the local community with staying power. And this church, I believe, has a future precisely because it has a past. Which leaves my three notions of what such a church looks like.
First, I believe that the church with a future cares less about the draft of its craft than the depth of its ocean. In his eightieth sonnet, Shakespeare admits to his chick that other poets can praise her better. So why should he keep scribbling? Then the bard continues:
But since your worth, wide as the ocean is,
The humble as the proudest sail doth bear,
My saucy bark inferior far to his
On your broad main doth willfully appear.
Your shallowest help will hold me up afloat,
Whilst he upon your soundless deep doth ride.
In other words, what matters is that her merit can bear the burden of grand praises and meager ones. I come from a generation of ministers who learned that good meant big so bigger meant better. I think the church with a future looks back on the mighty acts of God in history and realizes that the Queen Mary of the megachurch and the rowboat dinghy of the corner congregation all float on the vast sea of God’s greatness, and that plumbing this depth, not scaling our own impressive rigging, is what counts.
Second, I believe that the church with a future cares more about reading its story than writing its narrative. “Narrative” seems to be a big word in church these days. As far as I can tell, it has a lot to do with composing our own future in a compelling way that attaches single acts of worship or service to a greater purpose. I’m all for that, but I think it is important to remember that, at best, we’re writing one chapter in a very long book whose plot is already clearly laid out. This even works at the local church level. Eugene Peterson warns us in The Contemplative Pastor that, “the cure of souls takes time to read the minutes of the previous meeting, a meeting more likely than not at which I was not present.”
We find those minutes recorded in church history and church hymnals, two documents which have fallen from favor in my own denomination, where we seem to believe that the church poll-vaulted from Pentecost over several regrettable centuries until she landed safely in our own generation. That’s why we jettisoned a songbook that came to us polished by millennia of theological mulling on the part of the worldwide body of Christ and opted instead for toe-tappers and hand-clappers that can give us no idea of who we are.
I’m not knocking contemporary music, nor do I believe the Spirit quit inspiring songwriters somewhere around the time Fanny Crosby died. But because more recent music has not had the advantage of the filtering years, I would like to apply C. S. Lewis’ dictum about books to the business of congregational singing: “After (singing) a new (song), never allow yourself another new one till you have (sung) an old one in between. If that is too much, you should at least (sing) one old one to every three new ones.” (I should admit here that Lewis disliked ALL hymns because he thought the poetry was bad. He’s probably right, but to me it seems that their theology is rather good.)
Finally, I believe that the church with a future cares more about present faithfulness than future viability. Because the church of the future will be a mess. Do what we will (and I hope we will), she will remain a morass of carnality and littleness and arguments over service times and carpet samples for the new fellowship hall. And she will be the Body of Christ, the one institution Jesus ever promised to care about, and one which he said would sit on an unshakable foundation.
So the church with a future doesn’t spend too much time reading the chicken guts of the changing culture and dealing a Tarot deck of trends. She doesn’t cross with sliver the grasping palms of earringed “consultants” ensconced in dark tents of occult insider info.
Lewis’ Screwtape rightly warns his protégé Wormwood that the proper focus of human endeavor is the junction of Right Now and Forever which leads us to ask what we need to do in the former in order to serve the latter. But “the future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity.”
The beauty of futurists like John is that they won’t let us rest in Merlin’s tower forever gazing at some ecclesiastical zodiac; they keep demanding that we do something about this stuff. They refuse to let us fall into Screwtape’s trap of forgetting that the future is not (Screwtape again) “a promised land which favoured heroes attain,” but rather “something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”
In short, I should simply say that the Church is the church with a future. For two thousand years we have hijacked her with our high-handedness, betrayed, bureaucratized, bushwhacked and bamboozled her, tarted her up, sold her out, locked her in and dragged her down. We have made her impertinent, irrelevant, irreverent and irritating. We have used her to camouflage our carnality and let the slimming stripes of the martyrs’ scars hide the midriff bulge of our overfed carnality. “And for all this,” the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins reminds us (if I may take a large liberty), Christ’s church
. . . is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
10
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over Christ’s bent
(Bride) broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
