Comedian Jim Gaffiganlikes a lot of the same thing I do:
• Sleep
• Hammocks
• Breakfast in Bed (because it combines sleeping and eating)
• Bacon
• Talking about funny things the whole family can enjoy together
But, unlike Jim, I really enjoy camping.
It’s not because it’s comfortable. Jim’s right–it’s hardly that.
No, I like camping because I can get to seem like I’m getting out of my neighborhood for a legit reason instead of looking like I’m trying to run away. Camping helps me not feel guilty about about leaving to live somewhere else for a while.
Every single time, 3-4 days of camping is preceded by spending a 3-4 days of packing, just so I can go to another location and start feeling too hot, too cold, bug bites, a continual film of filth on my entire body, the wrenching pain of back spasms from the popup camper mattress I like to call “The Devastator”, and all towels feeling damp no matter what, I still have to talk myself into coming home again. (Then it’s 1-2 days of cleaning things, washing clothes, and unpacking.)
Nevertheless, Jim is correct, camping, as a concept where you pay actual money to leave your home and feel less comfortable, is admittedly quite odd.
Jim’s reflections on this and the other topics in this video made me laugh out loud. Enjoy!
Me and my Dad, 1991 Every father’s day I miss my dad terribly. I lost him was I was 20 (he was 44). I say “I lost him”, not because we had a mix up, and misplaced him in the Amazon jungle. I say “lost” because he suffered a sudden stroke and stayed comatose for over a decade. It was a bad loss. It happened in December, when I was away at college, and I hadn’t seen him since August. He was my biggest ally, and we had grown very close.
If you still have your dad, I hope you do something nice for him this Sunday.
Gwyneth Paltrow lost her father a few months before mine left for the next world after his long fight, at age 54. She has got in the habit of sending me email. Well, I admit we’re not super close, since she named her daughter Apple against my advice. Still, I get her GOOP newsletter, and it’s nice. So, in this month’s GOOP newsletter she features one of her foodie father’s recipes included in her cookbook My Father’s Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness. Maybe you can make them for your dad.
Bruce Paltrow’s World Famous Pancakes
Total Preparation Time: 20 minutes + overnight resting
3 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon plus 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons fine salt
3 cups buttermilk
6 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled, plus more butter for cooking
6 organic large eggs
Up to 1 cup milk, as needed to thin batter
Real Vermont maple syrup, warmed.
Whisk the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Whisk together the buttermilk, butter and eggs together in another bowl. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ones whisking just enough to combine (small lumps are okay). Let the batter sit, covered, overnight. The next morning, heat up your griddle or favorite nonstick pan and slick it with a little butter. Add enough milk to the batter to thin it to the right consistency—the thicker the batter, the thicker and heavier your pancakes; the thinner the batter, the more delicate your pancakes—neither is wrong. Cook the pancakes on the griddle, flipping them after bubbles appear on the surface of the uncooked side. Let cook 2-3 minutes more, then remove, and eat with lots of warm maple syrup.
Have you ever made your dad breakfast in bed? What is one of your dad’s favorite foods?
Alphonse Mucha's work here reminds me of Redeemed Humanity, the Bride of God's Only Son
Sometimes going to church doesn’t seem worth it. For heaven’s sake, wouldn’t it be better to just have breakfast with some family or friends, and forego irritating people, scheduling problems, overblown or petty dramas de jour, personality conflicts, politics, dodgy doctrinal positioning, and the rest of machine the local church can be? Is the Cracker Barrel growing a bit more more alluring each Sunday morning?
Seems like a no brainer, right?
If this is kind of thing is happening for you, in your local church, maybe church shopping is around the bend? Well, wait just a minute.Here are 5 Mistakes you can make (or have made) regarding your local church.
1. Making theological judgements for what are personal preferences.
2. Mistaking the “local church” for The Bride of Christ.
3. Misunderstanding the idea of “community.”
4. Implementing a consumer approach with the spiritual and transcendent.
5. Overlooking what is happening in the sacraments.
Being from a more independent faith tradition, I grew up with the sense that church, in the local setting, was mainly about worship and fellowship. Well, it is, but not in the small sense I understood it to be. Now a bigger view of Church guides my life, and my relationship with my God and Savior.
Simply put: Church is hardly about “the local church” or about any human individual.
Jesus saved humankind through his Bride the Church. That means our preferences have very little to do with what God is doing, and the workings of Church.
The Church is something universal, invisible AND visible, international, and local. It is bound by culture and history, and yet handily transcends them both. It may exist in a location temporarily, but exists eternally in every location. Yes, it’s bigger, in every way than you think, or have the ability to imagine.
We apprend it in such tiny ways at times…
Perhaps, we get caught up or annoyed by such things a personalities, worship styles, programs, or issues related to our doctrinal formulations, opinion, or personal preference.
We may go “church shopping” and miss the point completely.
How correct to say, “Church is not about me.”
It’s about WE.
In the sacraments, the community of God (Trinity) intertwines with the community of man (humanity). We receive divine grace. God is with us. God is with his Bride, the Church. Locally the church celebrates what the collection of Christians, past, present, and future is enacting, together.
Each Sunday, worldwide, Christ’s Bride gathers, and meets together. The church is with “him”, as it has done from the beginning.
Even as the earth spins, the variances in time zones cause prayer without ceasing, and the fellowship and communion of the saints occur, globally.
And with Christ, Father, and Spirit, we celebrate the reality of koinwnia (koinonia) with the Divine. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “the Eucharist is the sacrament of the unity of the Church, which results from the fact that many are one in Christ.”[7] (Eucharist means thanksgiving.) Koinwnia is what Christ exercised divinely with humanity, by grace, through his work in his ministry, on the cross, and in his resurrection. It is how we commune with each other, and worship God in Spirit and Truth.
Through a local church body, we live out, and enact the Gospel and participate the actual in-breaking of the Kingdom of God here on earth. The local church is people, and people are flawed. What God has done, is doing, and will continue to do, is not.
This whole concept is all summed up nicely in the Apostles Creed, in which followers of Christ unite in spirit and truth. Many of us may not know the creeds, or declare them together with other Christians. But, this particular creed, well-established in the 300s A.D. (C.E.), and is the/a manifesto (see ref. link) of the Bride. It is a speak-act and agreement of followers of the divine Father, Son, and Spirit, for a way of living and being; and understanding the world.
To take this creed fully to heart will expand your idea of church, unify you with Christians of the last 2,000+ years, and may even help you forebear with the frailties of local church you attend, here and now.
From the Book of Common Prayer –
I believe in God the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth:
And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
Born of the Virgin Mary,
Suffered under Pontius Pilate,
Was crucified, dead, and buried:
He descended into hell;
The third day he rose again from the dead;
He ascended into heaven,
And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost;
The holy Catholick Church;
The Communion of Saints;
The Forgiveness of sins;
The Resurrection of the body,
And the Life everlasting.
Amen.
Quaker Oatmeal has a new tag. I have to say, I love it. It just excites me. It probably won’t prompt me buy their oatmeal… I’d eighty-six porridge for eggs or coffee cake any day.
Nevertheless, I felt a sense of well-being just watching the Quaker Oats commercial. A rugged construction man, sits back, high upon a skyscraper girder. From a thermos, he peacefully enjoys his heavily textured cooked oats . The voiceover asks, Does your breakfast make you amazing? (The build up to that was the scripted: “Rome wasn’t built in a day; and it wasn’t built on a coffee and a danish.”) Well, I think Rome was built on mead, or sambuca, but whatever.
In keeping with pop Evangelicalism, I’ll do the obvious. I’ll do the proverbial. I’ll take this inspiring tag line, and do a Christian parallel. (Isn’t it some sort of moral duty to take catch phrases, or witty wording, pilfer it, and spiritualised the thing ad nuaseam, in the name of edification, of course? I think the Biblical backing for this comes from II Leviticus 2:1, “Thou shalt copy they neighbors clever word-smithage. I am the LORD.”
Is it an epidemic religious and cultural kleptomania? Um. Yep.
And, right now, me fingerz feelz sticky, too.
So, here we go: “Does your God make you Amazing?”
Of course, this is a wildly self-centered question. I don’t even want Christians to “go there.” This is a preemptive, cut-Christian copy cats off at the pass, post. It’s meant to subvert a horrible Christian propensity, or worse, an ill-advised “evangelizing tactic”
I’m making an executive decision. I’m going to hijack the hijacking of, at least, this tagline.
Are you surprised?
BOOM. Amazing!
A basic truth: We like to be inspired to be amazing. Oh. Yes. We. Do. We either think we’re pretty amazing already, or wish we were.
So, what about that?
AND–What breakfast, or attribute of God (or both) propels you towards “AMAZING”?
Comedian Jim Gaffigan likes a lot of the same thing I do:
