Date: 1/1/12

Church: Delmar Full Gospel Church

Pastor: David Gericke

Time Spent: 10am – 12:45pm (includes coffee and bagels after service)

Overall Impression: Good.

Type: this church is an independent one, however the pastor is affiliated with MFI (go look that up)

Format: Service opens with musical praise/worship, then a sermon, then prayer with people available to pray with/for you

Thoughts: I was really nervous to start my project. I didn’t know how people would receive my notion of exploring all the area churches. I shouldn’t have been worried, as most of them simply offered to pray that God would lead me. I take that as a complement and a nonjudgmental way of offering support to me even though I was clearly not  clamoring for membership.  I was mildly surprised by the pastor who warned/advised me that I wouldn’t find a real connection the way I was going about it. Everyone else seemed cool with the idea, and I wasn’t feeling pressured.

I was greeted no less than six times on my way in and inside. Some asked questions about me, others just said ‘Happy New Year’. The praise portion of the service  was easy to follow and words to all songs were displayed on screens at the front of the church. There was a very small amount of singing/speaking in tongues. I’ve been exposed to that before and it was very unobtrusive and didn’t bother me. The sermon was about fasting, which is a project this particular church is doing all week long. The pastor suggested fasting food as much as we are called to by  God, but to consider other fasts as well. Examples being: Facebook, TV, sarcasm, video games, or texting. In each case we should use the time freed to us to spend with God. He also cautioned that fasting is not meant to entice God to speak or more readily grant our prayers. It is more for us to change our ways and let us experience God through this change. He told a story of a woman called to fast of her criticisms. After the sermon, I talked with a couple more people who came up to greet me, but my best conversation was with a woman who I happened to sit down next to. She was new to this church by several months and considered it home. She spoke about something she has struggled with that sounded major, and she seemed to feel difficulty from this, but it sounds like things are improving. Her manner was really frank and I felt comfortable speaking with her. I said I didn’t know what I’d find with my project but was hoping it would turn out really beneficial to me. We spoke briefly about grace vs. works (one of my favorite topics) and she said she was coming from a place where the focus was on works and she felt grace was left out of the picture. She came newly to the church and wanted to jump in and get going helping out but was told by a member to take it easy for a while and let grace come to her and let the church be for her. I can remember a time I attended a church that needed its members to volunteer and keep doing and doing and I sorely needed a break which was not given to me. I also know that through works we share the goodness that we have and it isn’t good to refrain from works all the time. I guess what I’m saying is that you need both, and it may take effort to remember both. To me grace means- pay attention! God loves you and doesn’t need you to achieve a specific number of good things to earn that love. And works means- It really helps others when you do good things for them, so try to do that if you are able.

Overall Feelings: I felt good after this service. Kind of energized and ready to explore some more. It’s really freeing to not have the burden of others expecting me back again and wondering what to say to them if I return after many months absence. I tend to struggle with guilt on a lot of different levels and aspects of my life, and it’s nice to think I may be able to go into a place and honestly say I won’t be back and feel fine with that. The one negative I see already is that I probably won’t remember most of these people’s names if I do get to see them again.

Here’s The Project:

I plan to visit all churches in my immediate area of any Christian variety. I will visit each church just once (for now) doing just one church per Sunday as I am able. I’ve decided to restrict myself to services on Sunday morning as those at other times can sometimes have a slightly different aim, and also because Sunday morning is generally the easiest time for me to attend. I will work outwards from my house starting with the church closest to me and ending with the farthest church, in distance order as well as I can figure. At this time I’m limiting my outward spiral to a ten mile radius (so far my calculations suggest this will take over a year, perhaps over two). After that I will decide how to proceed, if I still want to. I won’t leave any church out, even if I’ve been to it before and I won’t repeat any churches for this project. I will record my immpressions from the visit on paper and later in this blog. This will be an overview of the faith communities in my area. It is not meant to be a review of each church, because I do not think a single visit would be enough to properly judge the merits or problems of a particular church.

Why:

I’ve been depressed for some time regarding my lack of spiritual connection with others. I’m not currently attending a church, something I may or may not explain later. At times I’ve tried searching for a ‘spiritual home’, but with my changing views and the swapping of pastors that happens in every church I’ve ever been to, I’m starting to wonder if that’s something I could realistically find.
Maybe the answer is more dynamic than that. Perhaps I don’t need to limit myself with a connection to just one church when it’s possible to connect with several. I don’t expect a project like this to find me a spiritual home. I guess I really think my spiritual home is inside me. But this project may give me more of what I crave: connection with faith that involves other people. Or, it could just inform me about the communities in my area without anything deeper happening for me. I’m not sure what to expect, and I know I’m potentially exposing myself to some really unfamiliar territory, which is scary. But I’m going to give it a try. If it works well I’d like to devote a blog specifically to this journey and even open it up to comments from anyone interested.

 

Notes:

If there is a choice, I plan to attend the later service on Sunday, mostly because I work a second shift job and do not get to bed until late.

I will wear comfortable clothing that is not particularly dressy. I think that if any church has a real problem with me dressed casually, they don’t want me, just my clothes, and I’m not down with that. I don’t anticipate a problem with this. I hope I’m not surprised.

I will not give anything to the offering at each church. I thought about this for a while, but finally made up my mind because: 1) I  donate money outside of church to causes I feel are worthwhile. 2) Some churches do not expect money from those who aren’t regular members. 3) I have no way of knowing how much the church might expect or need or what percentage goes to fund what. I would want to give an appropriate amount and the mental stuff I’d have to do to decide on a case by case basis is already hurting my brain. and 4) As with the clothing thing, I’d want to think the members of each church would welcome me regardless of how much money I might bring in with me.

Updated in part 1/6/12

My life is like an endless pitcher of water being poured into glasses and glasses, day after day. All alike and always the same. Water that is plain and ordinary, cool and vague, without taste. Water that, added to more water, is just the same- endless and forever. Where does one glass begin and the next end? Water into water is water and there is no difference anywhere in all of it. Does it taste good or bad? No, it doesn’t taste at all, so it doesn’t taste bad at the very least. I could live a life of water for a long time. Or a death of water, it is exactly the same. A life of water is like death, so I’ve found the perfect solution everyone can be happy with. My life will be water, and no one has to leave or get lost.

BTW, this will get in your head I swear it. I’m good with that, but you might want to stop here if you are worried.

 

This song by Hot Chelle Rae has been all up in my head. I liked it so much I put it on a CD mix. I had a particularly stressful string of days and was driving home one night and listening to this song when things began to strike me about it. I wondered if the song was really as upbeat as it sounds melodically. Here is approximately how my thoughts and the song went as I drove:

 

(music –
It’s been a really really messed up week
Seven days of torture, seven days of bitter)

sounds like my week

(And my girlfriend went and cheated on me
She’s a California dime but it’s time for me to quit her)

Yeah that sucks. I wonder how close she was to this dude. Is he heartbroken?

(La la la, whatever, la la la, it doesn’t matter, la la la, oh well, la la la)

La la la la I’m not listening. Go away world you bother me.

(We’re going at it tonight tonight
There’s a party on the rooftop top of the world
Tonight tonight and we’re dancing on the edge of the Hollywood sign)

Good stress relief. Party. Drink. Get wasted, forget about things.

(I don’t know if I’ll make it but watch how good I’ll fake it)

Woah, this guy can’t handle things either. He doesn’t even know if the party will make him feel better. But he sure as hell knows he’ll pretend for all he’s worth.

(It’s all right, all right, tonight, tonight)

Why the repetition? Who is he trying to convince? Himself?

(I woke up with a strange tattoo
Not sure how I got it, not a dollar in my pocket
And it kinda looks just like you
Mixed with Zach Galifianakis
La la la, whatever, la la la, it doesn’t matter, la la la, oh well, la la la)

It doesn’t matter, no nothing matters to him now, just try and make it to this party later this evening.

(We’re going at it tonight tonight
There’s a party on the rooftop top of the world
Tonight tonight and we’re dancing on the edge of the Hollywood sign)

Be careful so high up on that sign.

(I don’t know if I’ll make it but watch how good I’ll fake it)

Is he thinking about jumping?

(It’s all right, all right, tonight, tonight)

Keep telling yourself that, maybe it can be.

(You got me singing like
Woah, come on, ohh, it doesn’t matter, woah, everybody now, ohh
Just don’t stop let’s keep the beat pumpin’
Keep the beat up, let’s drop the beat down)

Well he’s still singing. That’s a good sign, maybe he will make it after all.

(It’s my party dance if I want to
We can get crazy let it all out)

Let it all out, just party until it feels better.

(Just don’t stop let’s keep the beat pumpin’)

Just don’t stop. Who knows what might happen to your state of mind if you let up for an instant?

(Keep the beat up, let’s drop the beat down
It’s my party dance if I want to
We can get crazy let it all out
It’s you and me and we’re runnin this town
And it’s me and you and we’re shakin the ground)

That’s right you don’t let anyone push you around

(And ain’t nobody gonna tell us to go cause this is our show)

At least you have that.

(Everybody
Woah, come on, ohh, all you animals
Woah, let me hear you now, ohh
Tonight tonight there’s a party on the rooftop top of the world
Tonight tonight and we’re dancing on the edge of the Hollywood sign
I don’t know if I’ll make it but watch how good I’ll fake it
It’s all right, all right, tonight, tonight
It’s all right, all right, tonight, tonight
Yeah it’s all right, all right, tonight, tonight)

Over and over, I wonder has it worked? Is this guy gonna be ok? Did he convince himself? Or is he just hanging onto the words until they are gone. Will he be alright?

(Just singing like
Woah, come on, ohh, all you party people
Woah, all you singletons, ohh, even the white kids
Just don’t stop let’s keep the beat pumpin’
Keep the beat up, let’s drop the beat down
It’s my party dance if I want to
We can get crazy let it all out
Just don’t stop)

Just don’t stop, just don’t stop.

(let’s keep the beat pumpin’
Keep the beat up, let’s drop the beat down
It’s my party dance if I want to
We can get crazy let it all out…)

*           *           *           *           *           *           *           *           *           *           *           *

In case you were wondering, I’m doing ok.

We’ve been wondering since moving in here when the large dead branch off oak tree number two would fall. Our concern was that it might land on someone tending a fire in our fire pit. Well, good news; it fell today while the hurricane winds were hitting us. Also took the entire tree with it. So, more good news! It’s probably sunny enough on the side yard now to put in a pool next summer. I’m marking down today as all awesome.

It’s not a joke. I really did find tick number four of the summer stuck on my neck. I go outside and they just find me! I am now officially paranoid about the outdoors.

I couldn’t remember how to determine the number of combinations of a series of groups of items, so I did trial and error and retaught myself combinatorics and factorials. I guess I could have asked one of the J’s. But I’m both smart and stubborn so I did it on my own.

The muggy weather may be triggering migraines for me, so I think it’s back to the meds again. Which have suddenly become ridiculous expensive since for some reason my insurance won’t help. Seriously, Insurance, be a pal and pay for something!

*A few more leftovers I meant to post*

Why I don’t think hate is all bad:
Thought I’d get into what I consider a positive aspect of hate. Not that any situation involving hate is really all that good. It’s more a lesser of two evils type thing. Hate helped me get out of a bad relationship back in college. I couldn’t seem to find a reason good enough to leave it as long as I felt I loved this guy. So eventually I started to hate him, then it made total sense to forget all about him. So it sucks that I hated someone for a while, but it was really the only way for me to remove myself from the situation mentally followed by physically. Hating him drove me to make some change and find other things to focus on in my life besides this guy. Once you hate something you really don’t want to think about it anymore. And that’s what I think hate is good for.

Cliches

Least favorite cliche for now:
I deserve another chance.
Runner up:
Time heals all wounds.
Also should be dead:
You’re still searching, that’s OK. (religious)

It’s so hot its Cliche!

It is so hot in my house the microwave oven fan activated itself, presumably because it thinks we are cooking on the stove. Smart technology is so weird.

Not Cliche at all!

me- Violence is never the answer.
Dan- Unless you’re trying to find a word that rhymes with silence.
me- Guess you got me there.

My sister was in a production of The Drowsy Chaperone. It’s a musical that on the surface, is a flimsy story about a wedding day that almost doesn’t happen due to a series of misunderstandings. The story, set in the 1920’s, features a slightly stupid pair of lovers and an entourage of their friends and business acquaintances who bumble around trying to either get the two together or pull them apart for various reasons, usually achieving the exact opposite of what they mean to. And of course there is the play’s namesake, the drowsy chaperone. Her only job is to look after the bride and make sure she doesn’t bring bad luck on the day by letting the groom see her before the ceremony. The story being mainly an excuse to perform a bunch of songs and dialogue, the musical itself would be a poor example of musical theater. Luckily the musical isn’t the only thing going on here. From the beginning of the show we are guided by a man who owns the record of the musical. He serves as narrator/emcee/commentator/audience member. As such, he is always present in the background enjoying the show, despising the deplorable characters, singing along with the production numbers, or pausing the record here and there to explain something. At first quiet and helpful, he intrudes increasingly on the action with his own opinions and lifestory. By the end of the show we realize it is really his story we have seen. Alone in his small apartment, his records serve to take him beyond his four walls to all the places and times available to the imagination. We see it all as he sees it, all the glamour and action in the very midst of his living room. In the thinness of the story he finds wings for his own imagination. In the hesitancy of the bride he sees all the pros and cons of love and love lost. In one garbled line of advice from the Chaperone he sees all hopes and fears of the future. Should we love while we can or leave while we can? He finds eventual hope in the final happy ending that all can be well, no matter what life’s ups and downs. Like a work of art that lets us dream what we like into its abstraction, this musical shows us what we can dream, what is possible, and the power of the imagination to captivate and take us where we want to go.

Several morning in a row now, except today, I seem to have a song playing in my head as I awake. Here are some of them:

Lovefool
Hooked on a Feeling
Are You Gonna Be My Girl
Since You’ve Been Gone

Now I have another mish-mesh thing I do with one of these songs. Ok, sometimes I have a pair of songs or even three that remind me strongly of one another. It has even gone so far as to make me lose track of which song it is. So the song ‘Are You Gonna Be My Girl’ has a line “but you’re with another MAAA-AAN!”. I think that part sounds like an instrumental riff in ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. Now go listen to both! If you want to.

That overused but still good riff/ guess the song game:
There is a riff used at the beginning of at least three old songs making it hard to tell which one you are about to hear, if you’re listening to the radio. When I am with certain people who know this riff, we try to guess the song as it starts.
The songs:
Fun Fun Fun
Roll Over Beethoven
Johnny B Goode

I’m sure there is one more, but for now I can’t for the life of me figure it out.

* * * * * * *

Someone I work with has introduced some new idiomatic slips. V. is totally gonna be usurped as king of incorrectly spoken sayings.
“Where can I find wipe-out?” (the white correction fluid for errors in ink)

Also funny, someone else at work borrowed a solution from my bench:
C- I’m gonna borrow this.
me- Ok. Bring it back with a full tank of gas.
C- (without batting an eye) Ok.

* * * * * * *

A lot of little kids seem to have trouble expanding the idea of a mom beyond their own mom. My niece apparently claimed that my mommy was her mommy. (my mommy! my mommy!) She was too little to explain what she meant so I never figured out exactly what she was talking about. I suppose she meant one of two things. She may have been asserting that all moms belong to her in her status as a daughter. Or, maybe she simply was trying to state that my mom could not actually be a mommy since that was her mommy’s job already. I encountered this ‘one mommy’ concept in my cousin when he was young. My aunt was trying to explain that grandma is actually her mommy. Cousin cut her off telling her, “You can’t HAVE a mommy. You ARE a mommy.” Mommy is a very important person to a tiny kid. Maybe it’s like being God. You can’t HAVE a god if you ARE a god.

I didn’t really like much of Toy Story 3. It felt like a modified rehashing of Toy Story 2, only creepier. The theme of toys just wanting a kid to play with them has been well covered already. This movie had too much about psycho toys acting psycho for my taste and it felt very dark. The gags were nothing special- only a couple stood out. I did, however, really enjoy the trick they used to allow Mrs. Potato Head to lose an eye, enabling her to peek into the room where Andy is packing for college. Whoever thought of this, I’m impressed. The beginning and end of the movie are the lightest and I’m glad they finally did a little something with the way Buzz feels toward Jesse, which was obvious at the end of movie 2. All in all, I’m glad we didn’t see this in the theater.

I have a collection of things had by people and what they all mean:

Russells’s Teapot
To illustrate a point he was making about the existence of god, a dude named Russell said that there is a teapot in space between Mars and Earth which orbits the sun. It is too small to be detected by our best telescopes. Because it would be hard to prove wrong, do you believe him?

Occam’s Razor
Occam’s Razor is a way of looking at a problem with multiple solutions (or a question with multiple answers). It is the idea that the best explanation for something is the one that’s the least complicated, so that’s one we should be using until we get information that says otherwise. Doctors use this with patients, looking for the most obvious illness matching the symptoms, before testing for more uncommon problems.

Schroedinger’s Cat
Schroedinger’s Cat is trapped in a box with a mechanism to kill it. The mechanism may or may not have gone off yet, so the cat is both alive and dead. Schroedinger’s Cat is a metaphor for an electron in superposition. If the electron has an equally likely chance of being in either of two positions, it’s actually in both.

Godwin’s Law
Godwin’s Law is an idea that says- the longer a heated debate rages, the more likely a reference to Hitler will be used. This could also be stated that any argument gone long enough will eventually reference Hitler.