Wesley's Game

Wesley had a game this morning and I finally got around to bringing the camcorder. Wesley is playing in a 7 & 8 year old rec. league. They use a pitching machine, pitching the ball 35 MPH. There is no stealing and there is a five run per inning mercy rule. The games last five innings. Wesley normally plays second base, but he is the backup catcher and got called upon to play catcher today. He did really well. His team won.

I got about 13 minutes of video, which I am burning onto a DVD. Here are some clips.

Wesley catching--




Wesley hitting--



Wesley's commentary--


BTW, my Wesley was named after John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. John Wesley’s game wasn’t baseball, but preaching. During his ministry in the eighteenth century, John Wesley traveled over 250,000 miles preaching more than 42,000 sermons. [Source]

Wesley (the founder of Methodism and not my son) trained and sent out countless numbers of preachers and circuit riders to preach the gospel. He gave his preachers twelve rules. Some of them need updated, but as a whole it helpful to see Wesley’s passion for preaching in these rules. I don't think Wesley would like jokes in my sermons!

Wesley’s Rules for His Preachers
1) Be diligent. Never be unemployed. Never be triflingly employed. Never while away time, nor spend more time at any place than is strictly necessary.

2) Be serious. Let your motto be, “Holiness to the Lord.” Avoid all lightness, jesting, and foolish talking.

3) Converse sparingly and cautiously with women, particularly with young women.

4) Take no step towards marriage without solemn prayer to God and consulting with your brethren.

5) Believe evil of no one unless fully proved; take heed how you credit it. Put the best construction you can on everything. You know the judge is always sup¬posed to be on the prisoner’s side.

6) Speak evil of no one, else your word, especially, would eat as doth a canker; keep your thoughts within your own breast till you come to the person concerned.

7) Tell everyone what you think wrong in him, lovingly and plainly, and as soon as may be, else it will fester in your own heart. Make all haste to cast the fire out of your bosom.

8) Do not affect the gentleman. A preacher of the Gospel is the servant of all.

9) Be ashamed of nothing but sin; no, not of cleaning your own shoes when necessary.

10) Be punctual. Do everything exactly at the time. And do not mend our rules, but keep them, and that for conscience’ sake.

11) You have nothing to do but to save souls. There¬fore spend and be spent in this work. And go always, not only to those who want you, but to those who want you most.

12) Act in all things, not according to your own will, but as a son in the Gospel, and in union with your brethren. As such, it is your part to employ your time as our rules direct: partly in preaching and visiting from house to house, partly in reading, meditation, and prayer. Above all, if you labour with us in our Lord’s vineyard, it is needful you should do that part of the work which the Conference shall advise, at those times and places which they shall judge most for His glory.

I Hear the Woods A-Callin'

I am packed and ready to go.

The woods are calling me.

Tomorrow I am going hiking in Pine Mountain, North of Columbus, Georgia with some guys from the church. I am giving up a Sunday morning at our church building to be with the guys and worship in the woods.

We are hiking in and camping overnight and hiking out Sunday around lunch time. I haven’t been hiking since I was in the Boy Scouts during middle school. I am looking forward to connecting with the guys and reconnecting with the Lord this weekend. There is something spiritually refreshing about engaging with God through nature.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not going to be totally disconnected. I am taking my cell phone, which will allow me to take pictures and upload them to my facebook account. I also signed up for ESPN Alerts, which will send a TXT message to me after each of the Kansas City Chiefs’ draft picks. It is NFL draft weekend and the Chiefs have 13 picks, 2 in the first round!

So I will keep one foot in the digital world and the other one will be in the woods.

God has made his invisible attributes known in creation (Romans 1:20).

The heavens declare the glory of God (Ps. 19:1).

Jesus often departed to a lonely place to pray (Luke 5:16). In Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord: Road to Cana, Jesus departs into a grove in order to reconnect to God the Father.

I will spend time in silence in solitude. I am taking my moleskine and a Gideon’s New Testament (NKJV). I am looking forward to a time of spiritual renewal. I am expecting God to show up in surprising ways. On Sunday morning, I am preaching a message entitled, “Finally Brothers,” from Philippians 4:4-9. I am going to challenge them to think through the Men’s Fraternity three-fold definition (reject passivity…accept responsibility…lead courageously). We will end our Sunday morning service with communion, receiving the bread and juice from a mess kit.

Pray for us!

The Catholic Church becomes media savvy

Pope Benedict XVI is on his US tour.

He met with the President. Apparent President Bush said, “Thank you, Your Holiness. Awesome Speech.” [Video] He said this after a papal address at the Whitehouse. I love the W. The Pope held an open air mass with 45,000 in attendance at the Nationals Baseball stadium in Washington D.C. He has visited with victims of clergy abuse and offered prayer and encouragement. He even visited a Jewish synagogue. He is now in New York. He addressed the UN and will pray at Ground Zero. The Pope’s visit to the US has come at a good time for Catholics in the US. The clergy abuse scandals over the last years have stirred resentment towards the Catholic Church. The scandals continue to fuel Protestant distained for the Catholics in general and the Catholic Church in particular.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is hoping the Pope’s visit will help in priest recruitment. The number of young men entering the priesthood is down in the US. For example, St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers outside of New York used to have hundreds of young men in preparation for the priesthood. Today there are only sixty in the seminary and only six will be ordained into the priesthood this year.

To bolster recruitment, the Catholic Church in New York has launched a website www.NYpriest.com . The Website includes video clips, moving pictures, and the slogan “The World Needs Heroes.” It looks like the uber-traditional Catholic Church is using the strategies of ultra-contemporary churches by partnering the Pope’s visit with cleaver marketing and high-quality media. When are they going to start a podcast? I wonder if the Pope has a facebook account???

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/19/wpope119.xml

facebook and blogging

So a few weeks ago, I signed up for a facebook account to see a video posted by a friend on his facebook account. I signed on to facebook simply to see his video. I thought, "I blog and that is about all I can keep up with. I don't really want to enter the whole facebook world." And I am a bit like Jerry, the "character" on Seinfeld. I have three friends and I really don't have room for more. Yes, I am an introvert.

After setting up a facebook account, I began to receive emails from people who wanted to be my friend. Sounded pretty nice. (Thanks Santosh, you were my first facebook friend.) I put some time into my facebook account, added some profile info, added some applications, and started searching for friends. I was able to connect with some friends that I haven't talked to for years. So maybe I do have room for more than three friends. I am still new to the social networking scene, but I am increasingly becoming interested in growing my social network.

Now I am connecting my blog to my facebook account. I have been blogging at www.derekvreeland.com since March 2006. I originally set up the blog as an online journal to keep an account of a teaching trip to India. Now some 183 post later, I have found the blog to a great outlet for writing and connecting with others. Today, I am adding an application on my facebook account, so that my facebook friends can see what I am posting on the blog.

With a little tweaking, I hope to successfully interface the two.

Click here to go to my facebook profile.

Bob Dylan's Pulitzer Prize

Bob Dylan was awarded an honorary Pulitzer Prize this week for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."

Congrats Bob! Well deserved.

Whether you respect Dylan as a musician or not, you have to respect him as a poet. He has said, after all, that he is a poet first and a musician second.

I am reading Christopher Ricks' book Dylan's Visions of Sin.

Ricks, who is an English professor and literary critic, is quick to point out the power of Dylan's poetry. Dylan is better compared to T.S. Elliot, Thomas Hardy, and Samuel Coleridge than the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

In one of the opening chapters, Ricks says Dylan was at his best when he wrote, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." This song is one of the examples of the power of Dylan's poetry.

To celebrate, watch this video that has nothing to to with Bob Dylan but this little girl is pretty adorable. How many of us adults have the Lord's Prayer memorized?

Blogging Tips from Seth Godin

Internet-savvy marketing guru, Seth Godin has recently blogged on the the subject of blogging and sounding intelligent when speaking or blogging about the Internet. I have had a couple of people over the last few weeks (months?) ask me about blogging. Seth's suggestions are all good tips to follow.

If you are an experienced blogger, do you have any other tips?

Seth's Blogging Tips

1. Use headlines. I use them all the time now. Not just boring ones that announce your purpose but interesting or puzzling or engaging headlines. Headlines are perfect for engaging busy readers.

2. Realize that people have choices. With 80 million other blogs to choose from, I know you could leave at any moment (see, there goes someone now). So that makes blog writing shorter and faster and more exciting.

3. Drip, drip, drip. Bloggers don't have to say everything at once. We can add a new idea every day, piling on a thesis over time.

4. It's okay if you leave. Bloggers aren't afraid to include links or distractions in their writing, because we know you'll come back if what we had to say was interesting.

5. Interactivity is a great shortcut. Your readers care about someone's opinion even more than yours... their own. So reading your email or your comments or your trackbacks (your choice) makes it easy to stay relevant.

6. Gimmicks aren't as useful as insight. If you're going to blog successfully for months or years, sooner or later you need to actually say something. Same goes for your writing.

7. Don't be afraid of lists. People like lists.

8. Show up. Not writing is not a useful way of expressing your ideas. Waiting for perfect is a lousy strategy.

9. Say it. Don't hide, don't embellish.

Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/04/write-like-a-bl.html


A few more tips on speaking intelligently about blogging, the Internet, and social networking...

You don't have 'a facebook.' Facebook is a place, a network, not a page. You're 'on facebook,' or you 'use facebook.'

'Friend' is a verb. "I'll friend you," is a totally valid thing to say.

You don't look up things on 'the google'. It's just Google, no 'the.' 'Google' is also a verb, as in, 'Google me'.

Instant messaging refers to a wide range of software tools and communication channels. It's called 'IM' and it too is a verb.

A blog is something you have (unlike a Facebook). And blog is also a verb. As in, "I have a blog, this blog, which you probably found by googling me. I blogged about Facebook (which I'm on but don't use often). I don't IM, and I'm impossibly lax about friending people."

[Jackson chimes in that a blog is the whole, and that a post is just one article (like the one you're reading). So you don't say, "I wrote a blog about that," you say, "I just blogged about that," or "did you read my post on how to talk about the Internet?"]

Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/04/in-and-on-and-a.html

Book Review: Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana

Anne Rice has done it again.

In her second book in the Christ the Lord series, Rice has again skillfully created a historical novel of the life of Jesus that is engaging, historically connected, and true to the image of Jesus in the Gospels. Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana captured my imagination and fueled my devotion with its earthy depiction of an adult Jesus (referred to in the book by his Hebrew name “Yeshua” or “Yeshua bar Joesph”). Rice has continued with her masterful way of balancing the true humanity and true divinity of Jesus in The Road to Cana with vivid description. With Jesus as the narrator, Rice gives the reader another look into Jesus’ inner life, his thoughts, his anxieties, and his longings.

(WARNING: The following may contain plot spoilers. If you don’t want me to ruin the plot then order the book here.)

Rice has wisely chosen not to fill in too many gaps between Jesus in the temple at age 12 and his baptism at approximately age 30. The Road to Cana begins during the winter before Jesus' baptism. We see less of his interaction between his mother, his father, and Uncle Cleopas and more of his interaction with his older brother James. There is a reference to his brother James being the son of another woman and not Mary, the mother of Jesus. Also there is a reference to Jesus calling his cousins his “brothers and sisters.” This classification is in harmony with the Catholic tradition that Mary remained a virgin and had no other children. Protestants may disagree, but this theological determination regarding Jesus’ family in no way takes away from the power of the story.

One of the triumphs of the book is Rice’s ability to portray Jesus’ romantic feelings in a pure, noble, and historically true way. Jesus’ temptation in this regard is completely free of the trashy, 20th century, sex-obsessed descriptions of his romantic feelings as seen in other contemporary stories of Jesus. Jesus is enraptured with a young woman named Avigail. She is a fictions character, but she could have very well been in Jesus' life in first century Israel. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but Avigail plays an import role in The Road to Cana. Jesus’ love for her is very holy and very real. Rice does a wonderful job describing the pressure Jesus was under to take Avigail as his bride. The temptation was not unbridled lust, but the temptation to marry according to cultural standards. Jesus longs to make Avigail his bride, but he knows this is not his call. The interactions between Jesus and Avigail are wonderfully written.

The first half of the book sets the historical and personal context of the life of Jesus leading up to the Gospel accounts of his baptism, his temptation, and the beginning of his miracle ministry, including the miracle at Cana. Rice describes Jesus' baptism and subsequent temptation in the wilderness with magical imagery and direct quotations from Scripture. She remains faithful to the gospel narrative and fills in the biblical text with wonderful color and texture.

In the front of the book she has a quote from Karl Rahner: The truth of faith can be preserved only by doing a theology of Jesus Christ, and by redoing it over and over again.

Anne Rice has used her gifts as a writer to do just that, redoing a theology of Jesus Christ on the canvass of biblical and historical orthodoxy...a historical-fiction-kind-of-theology that has great benefit for those of us on the journey of knowing, loving, and following Jesus.