I love to travel, but good grief, it's exhausting. This is my big Washington, DC/St.Louis tip, and I'm now on the second half, so I'm tired, and the next few days are going to be even more tiring. A good thing: I'm sitting at a St. Louis Bread Co. using their free WiFi, and I just finished eating a Turkey Bacon Bravo sandwich (my favorite!). I LOVE St. Louis Bread/Panera Bread! I wish we had one in Austin.
So, Washington, DC...very cool city. I'd love to live there. I'd have an apartment downtown, and I'd walk to work every day at the Library of Congress. And I'd shop in Georgetown, and in the evenings, I'd sit on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and read or write, or just watch all the people walking by.
Here's all the places we saw:
the Lincoln Memorial
the Washington Memorial
the Vietnam War Memorial (so powerful!)
the Korean War Memorial (also powerful)
the World War II Memorial (not as powerful, but beautiful)
the White House (just walked by & saw from a distance)
the Library of Congress (I wanted to lay down on the floor in the middle of the main entrance hall and just stare at the mosaic ceiling...it was beautiful! We didn't go into any of the reading rooms, which was probably good because Kristi would never have been able to get me out, but we did see several of their exhibits...I seriously want a job there.)
the National Gallery of Art
the National Archives (saw the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights...very cool stuff)
and the National Cathedral. Which was probably one of the strangest buildings I've ever been in. It was beautiful and impressive, but why do we even have a National Cathedral? Most of the statues, instead of being of religious figures, were of important people in American history. There was a giant statue of George Washington & another of Abraham Lincoln. And the stained glass showed as many (if not more) scenes from American history as it showed religious scenes. It struck me that it was built to glorify America rather than God. Very, very strange.
We also walked by a bajillion buildings like the Capitol Building, the Department of Justice, the FBI building, the IRS building, etc., but didn't go in any of them.
I'd love to go back and do more exploring when I have more time and don't have to spend most of the daytime hours in a conference.
And now I'm in St. Louis, trying to pass some time until I can check into my room at the seminary for the youth conference I'm participating in. This is my third year helping with this conference, and the schedule hasn't changed a bit, so I know exactly what I'll see: the Synod's International Center (woohoo), the St. Louis Zoo, and the Arch.
Home again on Tuesday.
Saturday, July 30, 2005
Friday, July 22, 2005
Please excuse the extreme silliness that's about to come...
This is a story about Sherrah & her alter-ego Lydia.
This morning, Sherrah woke up...a little later than she intended. She showered, dressed, and tried on a couple different pairs of shoes, but they all iritated the blisters she has on three toes, so she decided to wear a pair of flip-flops because they were the only shoes that didn't rub against the blisters.
This morning, Lydia woke up...later than she should have, but she did that on purpose. She showered, dressed, and decided to wear flip flops to work just to be rebellious. After all, she had already rebelled by sleeping in, what was a little more rebellion???
At work, Sherrah went straight to business. She has a lot of stuff to do. Lydia desperately wanted to goof off, but the reminder that she's going to be out of the office most of next week and the next kept her on task.
Sherrah & Lydia were both saddened by news that came by email in the late morning. A Concordia student serving in the Marines in Iraq was killed yesterday. Neither Sherrah nor Lydia knew him, but they both knew of him. He was going to be a DCE.
Around noonish, Sherrah left campus for lunch. She went to Jason's Deli and ordered a Club Royale. The guy taking her order mumbled something, so she said, "Say that again?" Apparently he asked for her name, because he said, "Alright, Miss Lydia, your Club Royale will be right out." Sherrah was going to substitute her chips and pickle for fruit, but Lydia was so shocked that a total stranger knew who she was that she couldn't say anything to make the change.
Back at campus, Sherrah was going to go right back to work after eating, but Lydia decided that she still had about 30 minutes left of her lunch hour, so she decided to write this post.
Sherrah understands that very little of this makes sense and she wants you all to know that she's sorry, but she's completely lost control of her alter-ego. You can thank the guy at Jason's Deli who interpreted "Say that again?" as "Lydia".
This morning, Sherrah woke up...a little later than she intended. She showered, dressed, and tried on a couple different pairs of shoes, but they all iritated the blisters she has on three toes, so she decided to wear a pair of flip-flops because they were the only shoes that didn't rub against the blisters.
This morning, Lydia woke up...later than she should have, but she did that on purpose. She showered, dressed, and decided to wear flip flops to work just to be rebellious. After all, she had already rebelled by sleeping in, what was a little more rebellion???
At work, Sherrah went straight to business. She has a lot of stuff to do. Lydia desperately wanted to goof off, but the reminder that she's going to be out of the office most of next week and the next kept her on task.
Sherrah & Lydia were both saddened by news that came by email in the late morning. A Concordia student serving in the Marines in Iraq was killed yesterday. Neither Sherrah nor Lydia knew him, but they both knew of him. He was going to be a DCE.
Around noonish, Sherrah left campus for lunch. She went to Jason's Deli and ordered a Club Royale. The guy taking her order mumbled something, so she said, "Say that again?" Apparently he asked for her name, because he said, "Alright, Miss Lydia, your Club Royale will be right out." Sherrah was going to substitute her chips and pickle for fruit, but Lydia was so shocked that a total stranger knew who she was that she couldn't say anything to make the change.
Back at campus, Sherrah was going to go right back to work after eating, but Lydia decided that she still had about 30 minutes left of her lunch hour, so she decided to write this post.
Sherrah understands that very little of this makes sense and she wants you all to know that she's sorry, but she's completely lost control of her alter-ego. You can thank the guy at Jason's Deli who interpreted "Say that again?" as "Lydia".
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Campy Thoughts
I have a lot of different thoughts tumbling around in my head right now. Not sure where to start....
Camp. It was a great week. I know there are people who think I'm crazy for taking a week of vacation to go work at camp, but I can't think of a better way to spend vacation. It was physically exhausting (I came home and slept 12 hours Friday night and another 12 hours Saturday night), but it was spiritually refreshing. And it was just fun. It was great to see old friends again and to play with them. We even had a mini-reunion Thursday night when the Neuhaus's & Goeke's came to visit. It was very cool...there were about 15 of us, and the last time we'd all worked together was 1999, and most of the counselors on staff were our campers.
I started reading Kathleen Norris' The Cloister Walk while I was at camp. It's one of the few non-fiction books I've ever read that has drawn me in so much that it's hard to put it down. In it, she talks a lot about community and communal living, which makes sense since she's living in a monastary as she's writing the book. Reading it at camp made me draw some parallels. Camp certainly isn't a monastary, but it is the same kind of cloistered, God-saturated community full of individuals working towards a common purpose. That's one of the things I always loved about camp and that I find myself missing.
The book has yielded many good quotes...I love a book that makes me pull out my pen and underline passages and write in the margins. There are only a couple that I've ever done that with. Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water and Philip Yancey's Reaching for the Invisible God.
Speaking of books...I read Harry Potter #6 over the weekend. Simply shocking. I found myself loving and hating it simultaneously. And now I'm waiting for #7 to see how the story ends. In the meantime, I'm intensely jealous of J.K. Rowling and hope that one day I'll write something that's even a quarter as popular and widely-read as Harry.
Last night I went to my women's Bible study group for the first time since mid-May. We've started a new study on prayer...we're reading Stormie Omartian's The Power of a Praying Woman. (They had originally planned to read The Power of a Praying Wife but chose the other, for which I'm grateful.) Realization: My prayer life needs some work. I've decided to read the Psalms. They are, after all, prayers. I'm reading Psalm 8 today. It's one I've always associated with camp: "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens....When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you created him?" I can't look at the night sky at camp and not think of those verses.
There are still other thoughts rolling around, other realizations I've come to recently. But I think this is enough for today. I'll save the others for another time.
Camp. It was a great week. I know there are people who think I'm crazy for taking a week of vacation to go work at camp, but I can't think of a better way to spend vacation. It was physically exhausting (I came home and slept 12 hours Friday night and another 12 hours Saturday night), but it was spiritually refreshing. And it was just fun. It was great to see old friends again and to play with them. We even had a mini-reunion Thursday night when the Neuhaus's & Goeke's came to visit. It was very cool...there were about 15 of us, and the last time we'd all worked together was 1999, and most of the counselors on staff were our campers.
I started reading Kathleen Norris' The Cloister Walk while I was at camp. It's one of the few non-fiction books I've ever read that has drawn me in so much that it's hard to put it down. In it, she talks a lot about community and communal living, which makes sense since she's living in a monastary as she's writing the book. Reading it at camp made me draw some parallels. Camp certainly isn't a monastary, but it is the same kind of cloistered, God-saturated community full of individuals working towards a common purpose. That's one of the things I always loved about camp and that I find myself missing.
The book has yielded many good quotes...I love a book that makes me pull out my pen and underline passages and write in the margins. There are only a couple that I've ever done that with. Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water and Philip Yancey's Reaching for the Invisible God.
Speaking of books...I read Harry Potter #6 over the weekend. Simply shocking. I found myself loving and hating it simultaneously. And now I'm waiting for #7 to see how the story ends. In the meantime, I'm intensely jealous of J.K. Rowling and hope that one day I'll write something that's even a quarter as popular and widely-read as Harry.
Last night I went to my women's Bible study group for the first time since mid-May. We've started a new study on prayer...we're reading Stormie Omartian's The Power of a Praying Woman. (They had originally planned to read The Power of a Praying Wife but chose the other, for which I'm grateful.) Realization: My prayer life needs some work. I've decided to read the Psalms. They are, after all, prayers. I'm reading Psalm 8 today. It's one I've always associated with camp: "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens....When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you created him?" I can't look at the night sky at camp and not think of those verses.
There are still other thoughts rolling around, other realizations I've come to recently. But I think this is enough for today. I'll save the others for another time.
Saturday, July 09, 2005
Going Home
I'm on vacation!
And I go to camp tomorrow!
I feel like I'm 12 again, going to camp for the first time. I feel a little bit silly, getting so excited about going to a place I've been going to for the last 15 years. But I am. I've been looking forward to this week all summer. And as we've gotten closer, I've become more anxious to be there. I think part of the reason is seeing so many old friends who I know will be there. There's going to be an incredible group of volunteers...plus one who I hear doesn't want to work. (Can't wait to see you, Jim!) :-)
It is kind of amazing to think that I've had some kind of connection with camp for fifteen years. It's been six summers since I last worked there, but in those six years I've managed to go there in some form...for BBQs, to drop off/pick up a brother, or to volunteer. And every time I go, it kind of feels like coming home. There's something about the place that realigns me...that straightens me out and reconnects me. At camp, I feel God's physical presence more strongly than I do anywhere else. Probably because it was during my summers as a camper and a jr. staffer that God truly became real to me. My faith went from just believing in Him to having a personal relationship with Him. And that relationship grew and strengthened during my summers as a counselor. No matter where I am in my faith, whenever I go to camp, I'm reminded of where I've been and how I've grown, and that's what realigns me.
You know what I can't wait to do when I get there?
See the stars. I always loved to sit out by the lake after evening devos, and just look at the stars. I miss the stars in the city.
And I go to camp tomorrow!
I feel like I'm 12 again, going to camp for the first time. I feel a little bit silly, getting so excited about going to a place I've been going to for the last 15 years. But I am. I've been looking forward to this week all summer. And as we've gotten closer, I've become more anxious to be there. I think part of the reason is seeing so many old friends who I know will be there. There's going to be an incredible group of volunteers...plus one who I hear doesn't want to work. (Can't wait to see you, Jim!) :-)
It is kind of amazing to think that I've had some kind of connection with camp for fifteen years. It's been six summers since I last worked there, but in those six years I've managed to go there in some form...for BBQs, to drop off/pick up a brother, or to volunteer. And every time I go, it kind of feels like coming home. There's something about the place that realigns me...that straightens me out and reconnects me. At camp, I feel God's physical presence more strongly than I do anywhere else. Probably because it was during my summers as a camper and a jr. staffer that God truly became real to me. My faith went from just believing in Him to having a personal relationship with Him. And that relationship grew and strengthened during my summers as a counselor. No matter where I am in my faith, whenever I go to camp, I'm reminded of where I've been and how I've grown, and that's what realigns me.
You know what I can't wait to do when I get there?
See the stars. I always loved to sit out by the lake after evening devos, and just look at the stars. I miss the stars in the city.
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