(1)  Tommie Harris – football player, millionaire – punching another player in full view of the head umpire, 27 TV cameras, and 80,000 fans?

Or

(2) holding up your iPhone to block your son’s efforts to spray orange paint all over your head…

Tough call…vote in the comments…

This may seem a bit off topic for a blog about faith & life, but Panera has been a staple for me in both these arenas for quite some time.  The seminary Dan and I attended was right across the street from the corporate headquarters of ‘Saint Louis Bread Company‘ – aka – ‘Panera’.  Their flagship store was within walking distance of campus and served as an awesome way to get quality nourishment to prepare for the deep dive into theological matters like the modalistic monarchians of the early 3rd century or the communion of attributes (Communicatio idiomatum) of Christ’s divine and human natures.   As you can imagine, working these matters out at Panera took a long time and allowed me to sample most of the menu!  (Not to mention that Panera donated all their day old bread and pastries to the sem – YUM!)

I’ve got an Asiago bagel in hand this morning along with a light roast coffee.  A great way to start the day!

For lunch, I’d recommend the Pick 2:  1/2 Frontega Chicken panini and 1/2 Fuji Apple Chicken Signature Salad.  Mmmmm…

What do you like at Panera?

Trudging through the spongy, rain soaked straw paths to discover that perfect pumpkin – the one with a solid base for standing on the front steps, a semi-flat front for easier carving, and no major punctures or insect infestations – was great fun for our family this week.  But the best part came when we flipped through the book of pumpkin carving designs with our 3.5 year old . He passed up all the designs we used as kids:  the triangle eyes, squiggly mouth, and vampire teeth.   How passe´ he thought as he snubbed his nose at them.  Instead he flipped to the back of the book and picked the most intricate design he could find:  a terrifying pumpkin headed man haunting a field, ready to come right out of his pumpkin prison to tear you to pieces!!

My wife’s response, “Boys are so wierd!”

It was the hardest design in the whole book, rated 4 out of 4 pumpkins in difficulty. But my wife was up to the task.  She used up all her creative energy for the day, but she did it!  I wonder what the kid’s going to pick next year!

What was your favorite halloween-pumpkin memory?

For me it was selling our first house this week.  Sitting at the Century 21 conference table, waiting for our realtor to close the deal with the buyers gave us plenty of time to reminisce about our first house.  And it also allowed us time to grieve the loss of our youthful home-buying-innocence.  No longer could we claim to be “1st time home buyers”, or blame the problems of our house on our inexperience in house buying.  Oh well.  I guess with age comes wisdom, huh?

Boy, this is a great topic to dwell upon on a cold Monday morning… but maybe it’s worthwhile.  If I can start the week owning up to who I really am – a ‘homeless’, 2nd time home buyer desperate to find a nice house in a new community – I can be wise and avoid the same mistakes I made last time.  And maybe you can too!

So, I want to hear about what made you feel old this week… (to share, leave a comment)

**Bonus**

Here’s Peyton Manning with a pep talk for those of us feeling old today:

1.  Has it snowed already where you live?  (tell us where…)

2.  Do you like snow?

–reply by leaving a comment–

EAA is the yearly gathering for airplane enthusiasts.  People who fly or build their own planes flock to Oshkosh the last week of July every year to get tips & tricks from one another.  Oh yeah.  And then there’s the celebrities (Harrison Ford pops up each year, Richard Branson brings interesting planes, and ‘Captain Sully’ spoke).  And for all those who are merely spectators, there’s the 2-foot-away gawking at military experimental aircraft, vintage planes, and the biggest planes in the world that make for an excited day out of the house.

Sometimes really exciting things happen at the festival – like planes finding creative runways…

This week’s Question of the Week asks if you have ever pictured yourself doing what thousands of people in Oshkosh this week have done:

“Have you ever wanted to learn to fly or build a plane?”

And I must say that I’m sorry I’ve neglected this blog!

But now, out of the proverbial ashes of late night meetings and early morning meetings and mid-day meetings and meetings in my dreams, rises a splendid phoenix of new ministry frontiers (and also a few minutes to eek out some blog posts!). A driving force for this new adventure is the need that both our churches have to reach the increasingly unchurched population in the Fox Valley.  So we’re searching ourselves & our community trying to understand how we can uniquely connect people with the love of Jesus!  And this leads to my question for you all today…

Question of the week:

How do you describe your church when you ask someone to go to church with you?

In other words, what is it about your church that excites you, that you’re proud of, or that you think a ‘non-churchy’ person might appreciate or enjoy?

Thank you, though, for your patience and your willingness to keep checking back here at faithemergence.com as often as you do!  I hope that we can continue to foster the kind of discussions that help us all to follow our Lord Jesus in a deeper, more meaningful way.

My ‘Question of the Week’ goes out to all you bloggers and website owners:  what host do you use?  How well do you like them?  How often is your site down?  How’s the customer service?  (I’d bet you’d even get a referral fee if we switched to your host)

It’s just about time for a hosting change, and we’re up for suggestions right now…

Seriously?  Why doesn’t everyone who can use a computer have a Facebook profile?

It’s got a simple interface, clean design, and a killer concept:  ‘be friends with people’.  For people who are extroverts, Facebook becomes yet another tool to feed the addiction: you can chat live, post tons of pictures of all the cool stuff you do, and have a contest to see how many friends you can ‘friend’ (a new verb inspired by Facebook).  For introverts it provides a non-threatening, passive way to communicate through the news-feed, status updates, comments, etc…

If it wasn’t for Facebook, I would never have had time to keep in touch with 90% of people who are my Facebook friends.  That alone makes it worthwhile.

Do you love Facebook?
or
Why aren’t you on Facebook?

(Here’s me on Facebook)

Personally, I’ve never lived in a place that was threatened by hurricanes.  I can’t imagine what it would be like. Windy, I suppose.

I have been through tornadoes & floods, though.  But that’s not the most interesting natural disaster I’ve lived through.  When I was 12, my family took a road trip out to California.  Exhausted and terribly sick of our Ford Aerostar minivan, we finally arrived in Anaheim, CA the day before Easter.  No sooner were we settled in our sturdy, concrete built hotel room than my parents announced that we were going to spend Easter at Disneyland.  Whoo hoo!  My sister & I could hardly settle down for bed!

As we were watching California news (which we thought was so much more ‘Californian’ than our news), my dad walked by the tv.  The stand wobbled a bit.  He turned around to walk back.  The stand wobbled again. And then the walls started to come alive:  cockroaches crawled out from everywhere-scurrying all around us like there was some kind of cockroach convention scheduled for our hotel room that night.  Then came the surfing.  As we stood in awe of the prolific magnitude of cockroach reproductive rates, the concrete floor began to wave underneath our feet.  For just a few seconds, it felt like we were on the ocean (sans salty smell).  As the floor turned from jello back to concrete, my mom figured out what happened, “That was an earthquake”, and was confirmed momentarily by the LA newscasters, “Dude, that was a gnarly earthquake!” (j/k).   We were so freaked out by the wavy concrete and the overpopulation of cockroaches that we threw everything back into our car & drove all night back to Vegas, where we had relatives. Later that next day, we learned that the earthquake was rated a 6.1 and our relatives in Vegas had felt it too!

I thought the earthquake was cool.  Cockroaches – not so much.

I still haven’t been to Disneyland.  **sigh**

What’s your natural disaster story?  I know you’ve got one!!  Share as a comment!