A Boy and His Mii

A "mii" is an avatar on the Nintendo Wii. The other night, Colin brought his Wii over, and Karianne made a mii for our friend Barry.



It's a pretty good match!

And for those of you who just check this blog for baby pictures, here's one of Kaeta with her new friend Amelia:

posted by Derek | 8:21 AM, Tuesday, March 20, 2007 | 1 comments

How Do You Know You've Heard a Christian Sermon?

On the radio program Issues, Etc., the host occasionally plays a sermon and analyzes it using the following criteria:

• How often does the sermon mention Christ?


• Is Christ the subject of the verbs?


• If it mentions Christ, and He's the subject of the verbs, what are those verbs?

In a Christian sermon, Christ should be mentioned! This seems like a no-brainer, and it's supported by John 15:26: "When the Spirit comes,...He will testify about Me." So, Spirit-led preaching will testify about Christ.

And Christ should be the subject of the verbs. As they say on Issues, Etc., this is more than just grammar! Christ came, suffered, died and rose. It is He who seeks us, chooses us (John 15:16), and saves us from sin. He didn't come to rescue us from being stressed out, or to make us feel good about ourselves, or to guilt us into doing good works. That's what we have Oprah for. If a sermon neglects Christ's work, it is not truly a Christian sermon, even if it's preached by a Christian in a Christian church.

Lately I've been listening to sermons with these questions in mind, and it's very eye-opening. So with all that in mind, I thought I'd share this sermon, from a recent episode of Issues, Etc., which I think is good. It's by Pastor Jonathan Fisk, of Our Savior Lutheran Church in Perryville, New Jersey. If you like it, you might also like his website.

A final thought: I really don't want to be hypercritical about this. I just think if a sermon focusses on Christ and what He has done for us, people might repent and be saved. If it focusses on some wordly problem (say, how busy we are, and that we need time to ourselves once in a while), that won't fix the real problem of sin in my life, which is what I most desperately need.

posted by Derek | 12:01 PM, Tuesday, March 13, 2007 | 2 comments

This Guy Can Get 59 MPG in a Plain Old Accord.

In my first month living in Pittsburgh, I remember driving a carload of friends from school down to the [insert unpronouncable Indian name here] river to go rafting. On the way home, I realized that my fuel gauge was way below "E," and there were no gas stations along the 50 mile drive back to civilization (Pennsylvania is weird like that... the exits are also like 20 miles apart). But the hills were just right so that I could shift into neutral and coast for a lot of the way home, so I did that, and we got back just fine. It was stressful, but kind of fun!

There's a whole group of folks who do this all the time, competing to get the best mileage out of their cars. They never run the air conditioners, and they don't use their brakes if they can help it. They're called "hypermilers" -- Check out this article about them!

posted by Derek | 12:13 PM, Friday, March 09, 2007 | 0 comments

Video: Marty!

The dog came home! His name is Marty, he's a miniature Schnauzer, and he's 7 weeks old today. Here's some video of him from the past couple of days:



[Download Video, 2.1Mb]

We also posted some photos of him here. Kaeta loves playing with him, although she sometimes acts a little jealous of the attention we give him. He's really laid back, so he plays well with Kaeta and doesn't seem to mind when she picks him up by the neck and toddles around! And he's very snuggly, so we think he's going to fit right in around here.

posted by Derek | 8:21 PM, Wednesday, March 07, 2007 | 0 comments