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So after a week absence I am back. I spent my bachelor week last week enmeshed in a problem with a project at work. I inherited another guy’s code and it was full of errors. Finally I scrapped a lot of it and rewrote it the right way. I worked like 7:00am – 7:00pm almost every day. Woo hoo party time. Then I was so tired I didn’t feel like doing anything else. I certainly didn’t get K’s office cleaned out and painted…or the garage cleaned or any of that good stuff

The highlight of the week was going to get 4 pizza’s for the week, a box of twinkies, two bags of buffalo wings and a tub of cookie dough. I call them…meals for men. We didn’t even eat all that stuff but it sure seemed like a good idea. One night I didn’t eat dinner and another we went to Applebees. So yeah Ike and I are pretty much dorks.

Ike joined a Mixed Martial Arts/ Muay Tay Kickboxing club. It is an open membership so he can show up for as many sessions as he can handle. It is one of the best if not the best MMA clubs in Milwaukee and highly regarded in the midwest. There are a few UFC fighters from this club. All the skills are good for other sports. I hope he enjoys it. The wrestling coach at Wisco is already recruiting. If Ike does enough juijitsu that coach will be drooling.

We also picked up a new bike so he can get around. Ike picked himself up a girlfriend a couple of weeks ago too. She's a nice girl from St. John's Tosa.

Katie got back from Florida today. She is still a little rambunctious. She is high on Phil. Phil is coming up here for the July 4th weekend with Zach. I'm sure our house will be filled up again with Zach's old crew. yay :-/. It will be nice to have him home though. I'm not sure he has thought about the fact that he only has a couch to sleep on now. The rest of the family won't have seen him for 6-7 months.

Karen had a great week in IA. She did not get tturned into a flaming atheistic liberal in her Critical Thinking class. Rather Iowa sports a rather conservative crowd and she found it quite enjoyable. The professor was excellent. The group bonded very well and went out for some meals together. Sounds like something Karen will want to repeat.

This last weekend we went to a baptism party on Sunday for Karen's cousin's baby. We also went to my cousin and my uncle's 50th and 80th birthday party. Nice to see old faces....wait...faces that we have not seen in awhile.

Hopefully by the end of this week things will be calm and boring as usual.

Reformation Relevance

Today at Victory we had a great service. We have been going through a series called Victory Core Values. The core value we covered today was Reformation Relevance. I just think this sermon hit our mission on the head. If anyone wanted to know what being in a mission to the unchurched is about they should listen to this sermon. If anyone wondered what having a contemporary Lutheran mission means...this covers it. If any Ichabodians or BW officianado's want to actually hear what its about..they should listen.

podcast of sermon on Reformation Relevance

You can hear the other Core Value sermons at the podcast site or Subscribe to the Victory of the Lamb Franklin, Wi podcast in Itunes

Victory Update

God is blessing our work at Victory these days. The jump in attendance up to around 130 – 135 each week since moving to the theater seems to be the new baseline. Even on Memorial weekend we had over 100. Lots of new faces. That trepidation some of us had in how moving to the theater will change the dynamic of the church has faded away. It is starting to click. For the most part I think we have realized that the service is still the same and the Word is being proclaimed in its truth and purity. The location does not change the law and gospel.

Last Sunday represented the first Sunday without any real technical glitches. We had volume issues which we have fixed with speaker placement and more wattage. We had issues with the new software based mixer and clipping but that is now resolved. We had a few issues providing sound to the video camera and also in transmitting WVIC to the lobby TV. We’ve got those resolved now. We now have the podcasting working well and available in iTunes weekly. Check it out.. http://podcast.victoryofthelamb.com/. It was my goal to have the technical side of things resolved by the end of May and we did.

Next up? I’m working on presenting the sermon video in our own Video player off the website as well as providing a video for iTunes video podcasts. We may have some incremental improvements in our service video’s coming up. There are some opportunities coming up for us to expand our reach and mission with high quality video production. Stay Tuned.

I am looking forward to this summer build up to a grand re-launch event in September. We have the new advertisement replacing the old one which I am very tired of seeing. The 4th of July festivities we are involved in. The Hallepalooza event after that and the Bible Soccer Camp.
I’m excited that we now have a paid part-time Director of Children’s Ministry and Volunteer coordinator. She has put in so much time and work already and now she doesn’t need to work full time AND put in another 35 hours for Victory each week. Her organizing abilities are great. We also have two summer assistants working for us from MLC again.

I think this summer we are going to see even more great things happening. If you are looking for an opportunity to be involved in a church and be part of its ministry…come to Victory.

Zach Update

Katie and Zach on the Beach in front of Zach's Barracks.
Zach has classed up with the second phase of his training. It is a 4 week piece of training. After that he has two more phases. One is 16 weeks and if he does well and gets what he wants there will be an additional section that is 10 weeks long. So either in November or February he will get his Permanent Duty Station. He did get his desired “I” strand training section. There is also an “O” strand. Basically the difference will be that “O” strand folk work “Outside” or at least directly on the planes and helicopters. They diagnose the issues and replace faulty parts and radar equipment. The “I” strand or “Inside” people sit in their little boxes and fix the issues with those
faulty parts. It requires a higher level of technical competence and intricate electronics knowledge. The O strand requires more diagnostic and knowledge of integration etc… different flavors I guess.

Zach loves Pensacola. The base and the weather and being on the ocean. He has it pretty cushy there. Four of his friends from Muskego are heading down as well this week. They actually are flying down within hours of Kt on the same airline but they are on slightly different routes. Kt flies through Atlanta to Pensacola and they are going through Memphis. Kt gets there an hour and a half later. So from Thursday through next Monday Zach will have plenty of company and hyperness with those 4 girls. Kt will be off with Phil so I don’t think she’ll be too involved in their gatherings.

Family Update

Ahh the end of the school year. Kt is done in two days and Ike is done in a week and half. Unlike the common reaction of summer vacation for parents, I cannot wait for summer vacation to start. First of all I get to start riding my bike back and forth to work. Since Ike is a wussy and won’t bike with me the 9 miles each way to St. Marcus during the school year I have to wait for the summer to be able to ride. As it is, Ike has summer school for 5 weeks as well and he just may find himself riding bike after all. I consider it football cardio training. It is just nice that the kids can be off doing their own things and I usually get a lot of work done at work because I have total flexibility. Ike is getting comfortable with the bus concept as well. Ahhhhh.

Kt goes to Florida in a week. She will be there 10 days visiting her boy, Phil, and her brother too I suppose. She is very excited. She has enough excitement that if you were lacking some...she has some to spare. It would appear that in July Phil will be flying up to visit for a day or two and then taking Kt to meet his family in Washington. I'm guessing Kt will be excited... After that Phil will get his permanent duty station as an Air Traffic Controller. He could end up who knows where at some Marine Air base. I'm guessing Kt will hope for a base in the lower 48 as frequent trips to Hawaii or Okinawa are not in her budget. I'm sure eventully he'll get a deployment to Afghanistan and be an ATC at some remote air strip. A challenging relationship to maintain to say the least as really any military relationship is. We'll see how it goes and I will wish them luck. Tucker (as marines do not go by their first names!!) seems like a really nice guy. He is chivalrous, old fashioned, and is a gentleman. He seems to put Kt 1st in his life and has been darn right dedicated. All good things...and since it has been a long time since a guy has been that honorable with Kt I am happy about it. So far its all been through the phone too except for a couple of short visits during Easter. Something they will need to get real comfortable with.

Have a great week all!!

"Advanced" Education

Karen will be gone for a bit here at the beginning of June. Karen is going to Lafayette, IA for a week of classes at Upper Iowa. The class was going to be Ethics but not enough people signed up so she is taking Critical Thinking. I told her if she comes home spewing all this crap about tolerance, personal relevance, truth is relative, humanism and post-modernist thinking that she will need to go through a few sessions of de-brainwashing before being allowed back in the house.

Lately I have run across too many people who adapt to this style of thinking in college and particularly advanced degrees. I’m beginning to think that advanced degrees are a recipe for disaster. Why do all the people I know who get them become all humanistic and self-centered? I’ve now seen three marriages ruined by this kind of thinking.”I’ve got my degree, so now it’s all about me!! See ya later honey!!" It just scares me how pervasive it is and it has been sad to see people I thought could not be "turned to the dark side" become self-centered humanistic fools.

Then there is the issue of the egos of those people who get advanced degrees. It becomes rare to find a humble Phd out there. There is a lot of self love and power trips going on. I remember once at a family gathering an article written by an ex relative who had obtained an advanced degree got passed around. She has a hearing disability and was working for a hard of hearing advocacy group at the time. The article was about the ”Elephant in the Room”. So many of my relatives were touched and drippy by this relative's drippy story about her struggle with her hearing loss always being the “elephant in the room”. I’m sorry but my wife and I just thought, “What are you talking about?? You weren’t an elephant in the room…the problem was you were a mesquito in the room.” I can’t remember the last time I remembered she was deaf. It was sad to think that she thought the problem was nobody wanted to talk about her deafness or acknowledge it because we were afraid, or it was taboo when really it was more about nobody realized she was deaf, didn't care, or just didn’t think it was any kind of big deal.

This humanist assumption that it would naturally be all about me so if people aren’t talking to me about it they must be avoiding the issue is a funny one. Of course that’s pretty depressing I suppose. Who wants to admit that the reason no one acknowledges their particular concerns is because they are simply ignorant of it, indifferent, or their concerns simply elicit no concern by others. It would make one feel small and unimportant. This is not cool for a humanist. I find this situation a lot with my daughter. She has some sort of self-centered melt-down and I find myself struggling to be empathetic because my reaction for the most part is, “I understand your upset however you’re being very self-absorbed so therefore it seems to be your own problem. I’m sure you’ll understand as I go in the other room and not care about this selfish episode.” You’d be surprised at how this is not helpful for her and does not score me Father of the Year awards. However it is a right of passage for most teens so it's nothing to get worked up about.

I guess this means that my hypothesis is that as those who get advanced degrees become more self-centered they become more like teenagers. Ahh the wisdom of this world….so much to take your focus off of Christ and put it on ourselves.

Memorial Day Memorials

I know this is after Memorial day but I have some memorials to make. This last week and weekend has certainly been filled with a number of tragedies. First there was the death of two students from MLC. They were driving up by Two Rivers and the driver lost control on a curve and went into the ditch. There was mention of a high rate of speed but I don't know if that's true. Both these kids were from my high school alma mater, Lakeside Lutheran, and graduated last May.

Next on Friday, a 17 year old kid from Kt's class at Wisconsin Lutheran got his recently purchased car over 100 mph on highway 45 and hit a median, rolled 4 times and him and his two passengers were ejected from the car. The driver BJ Webb died. The other two had serious injuries but are alive.

Lastly I heard about Pastor Paul Schmeling, a WELS pastor who died this last weekend when he fell out of a tree. He was pruning the branches in the tree and fell and landed on his head.

I have had many thoughts. One of my first was anger that a certain child of mine has on numerous occasions stressed the limits of my BMW or his RX7 as if the manufacturer's might have been mistaken when they said the top speeds were 125 or so. One wrong move and ....lights out. I am not prepared to have to deal with my children's stupidity in this way. I would not be opposed to placing said crumpled vehicles right at a prominent corner of the school as a testimony to what can happen in one moment of misjudgement.

The deaths of these young kids and an esteemed called worker however unusual in their concentration still mark that the Lord is in control and he numbers our days. Everything happens according to his good purpose. Perhaps other kids will live this "graduation season" because they paid special attention to the recent tragedies. Heck, I also am a seatbelt slacker and I have now been remembering to buckle up.

Lastly I do want to salute all those who have died in the defense of our freedom. It is certainly more poignant now that I have one in the Marines and (hopefully) one more on the cusp of enlisting. However, my first appreciation for the service our fallen soldiers gave struck me the most when I was a caretaker in a couple of cemetaries while in college. It was the least I could do to make sure to fix any broken flag holders and to make sure no weeds grew around their graves. The most striking things of course were the funerals. In the small town I grew up in the American Legion would often provide a 3 gun salute for veterans. I think this is a thing of the past, but I do remember that I would always turn off my mower and note that those shots ring right to your core. I hope I never hear them in relation to any of my own children.