Category: Religion

An Ode to Sheepdogs

sheepdog_001.jpgLet’s hear it for the sheepdogs among us. Watching the backs of the flock and keeping the wolves at bay is often a tedious, thankless task. This morning, I am thankful, and I praise God, for the many men and women the world over who manifest their love of neighbor, and in many cases, their love of God, by baring their fangs and aggressively pursuing and disabling those who resist the love of God and persist in hating their neighbor, even to the point of mass murder.

Perhaps these are the musings of a simpleton. If so, then call me stupid.… Read the rest

Loose Connections of My Own

Alabama.gifI’m starting to get all worked up about the upcoming college football season. Crisp fall air, golden brown leaves crunching underfoot, and college football on TV from Thursday through Saturday make for an intoxicating brew. I graduated from a college with only a moderately successful football team and have never experienced an honest-to-goodness campus “Game Day,” so I don’t have as much ego and money tied up in all this as some people do. But as a Virginia expatriate who has lived 17 years in Alabama, I wish to announce that I have finally chosen a side: I do hereby officially declare that I am always, and ever will be, pulling for the Crimson Tide.… Read the rest

An Eye is a Terrible Thing To Pluck

Sometimes object lessons go just a little too far.

Yesterday, our pulpit minister was preaching on purity and was reading Mark 9:47:

And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell,

To emphasize the point, he brought his hand to his eye to illustrate what “plucking” looked like and to drive home his point. I immediately sensed danger, and I leaned foward at the ready, my professional instincts suddenly on full, red-eye alert. We all watched in horrified fascination as he sharply thrust his fingers toward his orbit in pincer-like fashion.… Read the rest

More Real Sex on Casual Friday

If you’re like me, your workplace allows “Casual Friday,” a day of reprieve from those constricting ties and starchy dress shirts. However, as I sit here contemplating which polo shirt I’ll wear with my khakis today, these passages from Lauren Winner’s book Real Sex give me pause:

Casual Fridays, I think, capture some of our society’s confusion about clothes. Professional workplaces have dress codes in part because managers know that how we dress shapes our behavior. If we dress up, if we dress professionally, we are more likely to behave professionally, to treat others with respect and be treated likewise. A few years ago, when employers all over corporate America said employess could dress down on the last day of the work week, workers were thrilled.

… Read the rest

Real Sex is a Winner

winner.jpgNow that I have your attention, I wish to put in a good word for a book that I’m currently reading (consuming might be the better verb), Real Sex:The Naked Truth About Chastity by Lauren Winner.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Mike, shouldn’t you know what “real sex” is by now?

Well, yes and no. Yes, I know some things about what sex is, should be, and can be, but no, it doesn’t mean I know everything I should. Nor does it mean that that I’m very effective at teaching my sons about sex and how to faithfully answer God’s call to chastity in a postmodern, sex-saturated society.… Read the rest

Lady in the Water–A Review

lady_in_the_water_ver2.jpgBoy, the things a guy’s got to go through to tell a bedtime story these days.

If you’re director M. Night Shyamalan, it means that first you part ways with long-time partner Disney after they excoriate your latest project, Lady in the Water. Then when the film is produced and released by Warner Brothers, it means you must run a gauntlet of cynical and surly critics, the same ones that mercilessly panned your signature film, The Sixth Sense, when it debuted (plus every movie you’ve released since). While Shyamalan seems somewhat hurt and nonplussed by all the fuss (listen here to his comments from an NPR interview broadcast the day before the movie’s release), he remains confident that his vision will be accepted by both his longtime, core fans and moviegoers at large.… Read the rest

Name…That…Shooooe!

After coming clean on my shoe addiction, I’m ripping off a page from everybody’s favorite Catfish Queen reject Nancy French and having my first contest at Ocular Fusion.

(Cue the audience to shout) Name…That…Shooooe! (cue wild, audience applause and generic game show music)

That’s right, the first person to correctly ID the following shoe will receive, courtesy of yours truly, a signed copy of Doug Mendenhall’s new book, How Jesus Ended Up in the Food Court: Seventy-Seven Devotional Thoughts You Never Thought About Before.

Here’s the picture. Remember, I’m looking for the exact name of this Nike classic:

nikeoregonwaffle-01 2.jpg

It’s really not that hard; there are sufficient clues scattered here and there that should lead you toward the correct answer.… Read the rest

Buy, Take Up and Read

According to Augustine, the key point in his conversion came when he heard the sing-song voice of a little girl telling him to “tolle lege” or “take up and read.” The book she was referring to was The Bible, and when Augustine obeyed, his eyes fell upon Romans 13 and the rest is, as they say, history.

Now comes another otherworldly voice offering a good piece of advice– “Buy, take up and read.”
dougs book.jpg

This time the book is entitled How Jesus Ended Up in the Food Court: Seventy-Seven Devotional Thoughts You Never Thought About Before by my good friend Doug Mendenhall.… Read the rest

A Front Porch View

Summer Storms.jpg

I’ve been grabbing some much needed and overdue front porch time in my homestate of Virginia this week. The view above is from a couple of nights ago as a late evening thunderstorm rolled into the valley where I grew up. That particular storm blew the roof off the Virginia Transportation Museum in downtown Roanoke. I know that probably didn’t make the A.P. wire, but it sure got the attention of folks around here.

Besides sitting on the front porch taking in an eyeful of Blue Ridge Mountains, here are a few of my other favorite things to do when I’m in Virginia:… Read the rest

Eyeguy in the Sky

When I started Ocular Fusion 2.0 a couple of months ago, I gave you all fair warning that the retina in my header really works. Well, I wasn’t, as we say in these parts, “just whistling Dixie.”

Behold:

City of Children, Ensenada, Mexico.jpg

Ok, maybe I did have a little help from the folks at Google Earth, but what you’re seeing is a nice satellite image of the City of Children in Ensenada, Mexico. Eyegal and Number Two Son have trekked there this week as a part of a missionary group from our church. Number Two is busy with some building projects, teaching VBS, playing soccer (an indispensable part of any mission effort) and generally enjoying hanging out with the kids there.… Read the rest

Nothing New Under the Sun

“Our youths love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders, and love to chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their household. They no longer rise when their elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize their teachers.” — Socrates, Greek philosopher and teacher (470-399 B.C.)

The origins of that quote, like many, are often disputed, but it does illustrate the point that “the problem with today’s youth” most likely dates back a few millennia. I was reminded of this as I read “Tech Creates a Bubble for Kids” in this morning’s USA Today.… Read the rest

This Harding Thing of Ours

mpuzo-godfather.jpgI recently wrote of a pleasant serendipity in which I ran into an aquaintance from my alma mater, Harding University, at a Wendy’s restaurant in south Birmingham. It seemed an unlikely turn of events, but as JRB explained in the comments section, all things are possible with “La Harding Cosa Nostra.”

I chuckled at the image of a “Harding mob” (would that make President Burks the Godfather?) spread across the globe helping each other out and doing good for mankind rather than whacking people and eating platefuls of spaghetti on checkered tablecloths while listening to old Frank Sinatra records.

I had no idea then how right he was.… Read the rest

Correction–It’s the Doughboy!

Thanks to Scott Freeman, we now have some new information to mull over this morning regarding the Burger King-Antichrist connection.

In the comments section of yesterday’s post, Scott chimed in with this pearl:

“You know the founder of Burger King was COC right?”

I replied:

“Get out of here! Really? No, I wasn’t aware of this, but that does thicken the plot considerably.

Well, now that you’ve piqued our curiosity, we’re waiting with bated breath to hear more. Do you happen to know if he was premillenial or amillenial?”

Then he shot back:

“I may be wrong. But during my first youth ministry gig I worked with a former missionary to Brazil.

… Read the rest