The usual post-camp funk hasn't been too bad this year, though a post-camp crud (physical sickness) did set in.

So I'm reading A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren now, and so far it's really interesting. I really enjoyed A New Kind of Christian. I'm really starting to think like a missional Christian now. I used part of the first of the book, The Seven Jesuses I Have Known in my sunday school lesson last week. Speaking of which, I don't think that I can honestly take another Max Lucado study in sunday school. That's what the group voted to do this time around (Come Thirsty) and it was just another one of those studies that is very personal salvation centered with really silly stories — the kind that you'd be likely to find in some motivational story that's been forwarded in an email. The lessons don't lend themselves to discussion, don't make me really think, and they always come with questions to ask that are so vapid and lacking in substance that no one really cares to answer. I think that the attendance levels suffer when we're doing such a study.

So for my two turns at teaching lessons from the book, I have taken two approaches. The first time I took a contrary opinion. The lesson was about death and the attitude that the book took was cavalier about all of it. I disagreed and taught about Jesus weeping at Lazarus death and introduced the idea of sitting shiva. This time it was 2 chapters, one about Jesus as our guardian, so I took that and used the Nooma - Rain video, and then used that to explore what is really promised to us with a discussion on the prosperity gospel The second part was about going deeper. We talked about what does it mean to be a discple of Christ? What does that really look like?

So the good news for me is that they have decided to let me teach the rest of the summer on whatever I want to. :-) We have another teacher who may be coming back for a series in the fall, so who knows beyond that, but this is what I had been hoping?
T-minus 9 days to go on the iPhone launch. I've already got my funds lined up to get one. I have been saying for years that cellphones are really lousy and Apple will make a killing if they ever decide to get into the cellphone business, and I think that's about to happen. Some of the naysayers are coming out here in the last few days, but if you go back and look at some of the things that were said when the iPod was launched, they were all proved absoutely wrong. I have a Windows Mobile device right now, an Axim x51v. It's very powerful, but frustrating to use and clunky. It takes too long to get to the info I need. It's overly complex. The operating system on it doesn't work like most computers do without downloading 3rd party tools. It's a pain to get it to talk to most wifi hotspots.