Sunday, July 29, 2007

Household Outing


We went out for ice cream as a household the other night and got this nice picture. (l to r: Annie, Amy, Angie, Gianna, Anna, myself.)

Harry Potter Book Release



Here we are at the Harry Potter book release party in the Mall of America. (l to r: Ally Pozarski as Hermione, Anna Hagans as Ginny Weasley, Patrick Gaffney as Harry; myself as Professor Trelawney; Joe Gleason as Tom Riddle)

Meet Norbert





This is Norbert. He is a 2006 Pontiac Vibe, and he has already proven himself an awesome division car. In the two months since I bought him, Norbert has transported three bookshelves, 75 pounds of pork (not including the beans that went with it) and 10 1-gallon ziploc bags of fruit, five people plus all of their swimming gear, a large cooler and a guitar, and several other things. I would also like to point out that Jeremiah Laust and Joe Bowar fit comfortably in the back seat at the same time.

Amy's squares - Corner pieces


This is part of a quilt we made as a household. Scroll down to see the rest...

Anne's square - Allendale Women's House

Maren's square - Parsonage

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Colleen's square - Allendale house with green porch

Angie's square - 1434

Anna's square - the Seitzes'

Gianna's square - 1027

Kathleen's square - Allendale Men's House

Hannah's square - The Annex

City Quilt



The 1027 Women's household worked on this quilt together over the 2006-07 school year. The center panel depicts a people gathering in the spirit under a city skyline, and the surrounding blocks are our houses in Allendale and Dinkytown as of early Fall 2006. We are planning on hanging it on the wall in the 1027 women's fun room.

Here are some pics of the whole completed quilt. Each household member worked on one of the squares, and I worked on the center panel. I am going to do this in several posts so that you can see each square individually.

Allendale College Women's Trip - May 2007








Sunday, April 15, 2007

The Universe Comes to a Point

"Have you ever noticed," said Dimble, "that the universe, and every little bit of the universe, is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point?"

His wife waited as those wait who know by long experience the mental processes of the person who is talking to them.

"I mean this," said Dimble in answer to the question she had not asked. "If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family - anything you like - at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp; and that there's going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder."

C.S. Lewis, from That Hideous Strength, Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1946

Contrast.

I've been thinking about our Father's plan for all of creation and where the People of Praise fits into it. (I'm going to presuppose some knowledge of the People of Praise here - for more information www.peopleofpraise.org.)

We've always been different. Committing yourself to spend two hours of every Sunday afternoon with a group of people who are not necessarily of your denomination, using an evening every week to build friendships with a few people you might not otherwise have been drawn to, submitting your prayer life, your finances and all your major decisions to someone who is not related to you and may not even have been chosen by you - these are not things it occurs to your average American to do as a matter of course.

But the Father wants us to be even more than that. We want to build real, physical cities that strangers walk into and know that they are in a different place. Our Father asks more and more and more of us for the People of Praise. He asks for our businesses, our work, our studies, our free time spent in homes that are ever closer together and more intertwined, our sleep, our eating habits, our creativity, our thinking, our 24/7, the clothes we wear, the people we love, and whether we like to keep the butter on the counter or in the fridge. He wants us all in. And every day, we see more and more clearly what the People of Praise always was as we become ever more what the Father has in mind for us; as the People of Praise becomes ever more itself.

This is only a small piece of the whole universe as it comes to a point. The day will come when all things are either of the united new creation, or of that which has chosen not to be the new creation. There will be no more fence-sitting; no more neutral ground. Everything will become clear. It is more clear now than it has ever been. The light of the Lord grows ever brighter.