My family has been talking about taking up camping for a couple of years now.  I have personally always loved camping but wasn’t sure if my family would.

So last year we spent three days camping and hiking at Tallulah Gorge.  We borrowed equipment from some friends because we didn’t want to make such expensive purchases only to discover that camping was not for us.

We LOVED it!!

Not only did we have a great time together, it was also a great homeschool field trip for the boys.

We are now determined to make all of our future family vacations, camping vacations.  This of course means the purchase of gear.

I am VERY excited about this part.  Camping gear, tools and books are always at the top of my list of “stuff I need.”

A few days ago we made our first major purchase–an 8 man tent that we found on sale.  It is the Coleman Tucana.

My next purchase will be a camp stove.  I am leaning towards the Camp Chef Yukon.

If any of you are family campers out there I would really appreciate any advice you may care to give on camping fun and safety.  I would especially appreciate any tips on essential gear items you may have.

If you were going camping with your family, what gear would you say was an absolute must?

Thanks in advance for your help.  I will keep you informed about our forays into the “wild.”

Purpose:  The Charismatic Phrase Book is a series of posts designed to help people understand the linguistic idioms of the charismatic/pentecostal subculture in America.

Today’s phrase is…

Reading Your Mail

In charismatic/pentecostal churches, people who are called “prophets” are often called in to conduct special meetings.  For several weeks before the “prophet” arrives, the congregation is regaled with stories of his or her past prophecies that apparently were true.  They may tell you that they prophesied the Gulf War one month before it happened, or perhaps the current drought in Georgia.  These stories also include at least one about how certain people in past churches were called out in the middle of the service and had all their sins revealed by the prophet to the whole congregation.

It is believed that these stories, the validity of which cannot technically be proved, will strengthen the faith of the congregation and force them to “get right with God” before the prophet comes.  The reason for this is that no one wants to have their sins revealed to the entire congregation, and if the people aren’t filled with faith then the prophet will not be able to utilize his or her gift.  In fact, during these prophetic services, those not being prophesied to are instructed to stay in their seats and pray “in the Spirit” aka praying in tongues.  It is believed that doing so will “strengthen the annointing” on the prophet and will make his or her gift “flow more freely.”

When the prophet calls you out and begins to prophesy over you, people call it reading your mail.  The idea behind this term is that the prophet was able to look into your private life and reveal all the secrets found there.  After the church service, people will come up to you and say; “Boy he sure read your mail didn’t he?”  The problem of course is that it is entirely possible that nothing the “prophet” said was true.

That doesn’t matter.

If the prophet said it, then it must be true and everyone will assume that it is.  If you deny it, then you are just “hard hearted.”

Only once in all my experiences of being prophesied over, and there have been many, was the word the prophet gave me actually correct.  Every other time has been so vague it was useless, or it was just downright wrong.

For instance, I was once told that for my whole life most people thought that I wasn’t much of a man because I had a “feminizing” spirit on me.  My wife, who was standing next to me at the time, laughed at that notion.  She thought it was funny that anyone could possibly think that about me, and she was also probably laughing because she knew that I was about 2 seconds away from punching the man right in the nose.

The prophet took her giggle as a confirmation however and proceeded to try and cast the feminizing spirit out of me.

Never in my life has anyone seriously accused me of being feminine.  Of course there were the occassional verbal spars in middle school where somebody was called a sissy, but those usually ended in fist fights and then we were all friends again.

The problem was that it didn’t matter that none of the people in my church had ever thought of me as being feminine.  They did now.  And why?  Because the prophet had “read my mail.”

Are you a racist?

There is a test you can take which will tell you whether you are or not.

Okay, it’s not actually that simple.

In his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, author Malcolm Gladwell describes a Harvard research study using a test called the Implicit Association Test (IAT) that is designed to study preferences in the test subjects.

The test is administered by computer and measures your responses to images and words.  For instance, the instructions will tell you that the E tile on your computer represents “Good” while the I tile on your computer represents “Bad.”  It will then proceed to flash pictures and words on the screen while you label each one as good or bad using the E and I tiles on your keyboard.

The idea is that your responses, which thanks to computer technology can be measured in milliseconds, will give you an idea of your preferences.

I took two tests.  The first measured my preference for old or young candidates in job interviews.  My score indicated that I have a “moderate preference for the younger candidates.”  The second test I took measured whether or not I prefer white people to black people.  In that test my score indicated that I “slightly prefer black people to white people.”  This apparently was interesting because I am white.

Try and take some of the tests yourself.  You can take them here.  You may not be happy with the results, but it is for legitimate research and they can be very revealing.

And if you’re wondering whether or not you can “cheat” the test–forget it.  In study after study with people taking the test daily for months, the results are almost always the same.  The times they were not the same came as a result of positive exposure to one of the groups before the test was taken.  For example, if I were to read stories about Martin Luther King Jr., George Washington Carver, and Rosa Parks before taking the race test, it may influence my preferences.  In other words, being exposed to images and information about great black heroes, might cause me to prefer blacks to whites when I take the test.

To me, this type of information reinforces what God has been saying in Scripture all along:  We must be very careful with what we allow into our minds and hearts, because it has a direct impact on how we live.

Check out the following passages of Scripture for further study on this truth.

• Proverbs 4:23
• Romans 8:5-6
• Colossians 3:1-3

If you do take the tests, I would love to know what you scored on which ones if you would care to share the results.

Leave it to the brilliant people over at Pixar to create a movie about robots in a futuristic dystopia who fall in love while trying to save humanity from extinction by lethargy and make it totally believable.

The family and I went to see Pixar/Disney’s latest offering Wall-E on Saturday and all of us loved it.  This film is heart warming, fun, and entertaining.

I’ll admit that when I first heard about this film I thought that Pixar Studios was going to lay its first egg.  I didn’t think there was any way they could pull off a story about robots that would even be entertaining, let alone make you suspend your disbelief long enough to invest in the story.  I was very happy to be completely wrong on that one.

Some are calling this film a political statement and/or social commentary.  I would have to disagree.  At its heart, this movie is a love story.  It is about hope, sacrifice, love, and redemption.  It is set in a statement of social critcism, but that is not what the story is about.  I think that’s why the social commentary in this film is easy to see and accept.  It’s subtle.  It’s almost a subplot.  In too many films the statement is the story.  Not here.  The statement is the setting and the story is something entirely other and yet intertwined with it making Wall-E first-rate cinematic harmony. 

I hate spoilers in reviews, so you find none here.  All I can do is highly reccommend that you scoop up the kids, put them in the minivan, drive them to your local ciniplex and watch this movie.  You won’t be disappointed.

I give Wall-E an A+.

These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation.  I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot.  I wish you were either one or the other!  So, because you are lukewarm–neither hot nor cold–I am about to spew you out of my mouth.  You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’  But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.  I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes so you can see.  Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline.  So be earnest, and repent.  Here I am!  I stand at the door and knock.  If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.  (Revelation 3:14 - 20, NIV)

Steve Camp is one of my favorite musical artists.  His lyrics are straight from Scripture, and his songs reveal a deep passion for God.  I woke up this morning with one of his songs running through my head and I can’t seem to stop singing it.  The song is Living in Laodicea.

For I’ve been living in Laodicea

And the fire that once burned bright, I’ve let it grow dim

And the very Word I swore that I would die for all has been forgotten

As the world’s become my friend.

So hear I am walking back to my office from Chik-fil-A with my tea and my hashbrowns, singing the chorus of this song over and over again and weeping!

It is such an expression of my own heart right now.  I am living in Laodicea.  What happened to my passion for Christ?  What happened to the days when I was overwhelmed by His love for me and when I longed to live every moment of my life as a response to that love?

O Lord take Your plow to my battleground

Let Your blade dig down to the soil of my soul

For I’ve become dry and dusty, Lord I know there must be

Richer earth lying below.

Christ’s call to the church for repentance from their lukewarm hearts is His call to me right now.

I pray that He would break my heart with His mercy, grace and love.  I pray that He would open my eyes to how wretched, poor, blind, and naked I reallly am, and I pray that He will make a passion for Him and His holiness overwhelm me once again!

So while we’re living in Laodicea

Keep the fire burning bright, don’t let it grow dim

For the very Word we swore that we would die for, it must not be forgotten

Fear the world become a friend…

“Erasures are anathema.”  I read this in a blog post about the new Maker Notebook, produced by the editors of Make Magazine.  I was so inspired by the post that I ordered my own Maker Notebook and cannot wait until it arrives so I can begin to fill it with all sorts of things.

To me, a journal is many things; a part of the process of discovery, a repository of thoughts, ideas, and dreams, a record of my fears and my rage, a treasure trove of meditations, prayers, studies and inspirations.  A journal is a gift to myself and to anyone who may read it after I am gone from here.

I keep multiple journals:

• A general, all purpose journal.   It serves as a diary of events and my thoughts about them.  It also contains meditations from my time in God’s Word and written prayers as well as sermon notes from church.  I use a moleskine book for this one.
• A pocket notebook that is a sort of catch-all that I keep with me at all times.  It has everything in it from phone numbers and driving directions, to lists of books I want to buy, to ideas for plays, novels, and essays I want to write.  I use a pocket version of the moleskine book mentioned above.
• A spiral notebook used for in-depth Bible study notes.  The spiral is set up with two columns.  The left-hand column is for topics and sub-topics, and the right hand column, which is much larger, is for notes, quotes from commentaries and other references, lists of cross-references, etc.  I use a Cambridge Sprial for this one and eventually transfer the pages to a three-ring binder.
• A spiral notebook for reading notes.  I use another spiral to capture notes on any books that I am reading as well as lecture notes from any talks I attend.  I organize the notes the same way I do in my Bible study journal and index the pages by topic in the front of the notebook.  I do this because I read 4 to 5 books at a time.
• A maybe-someday book.  Right now this is a simple composition book and is nothing more than a long list of things I might like to do someday.  It is a list of travel ideas, project ideas, book, play, essay, and story ideas, home projects, science projects, research topics, and anything else I might be interested in exploring.
• My new Maker Notebook.  This will be my science and project notebook as well as my nature journal.

Now, why are erasures anathema?

I once read about a man who kept his personal journal in a three-ring binder so that he could “edit” (aka: remove) any content he wanted to later on.  To me, this defeats the whole purpose of journaling in the first place.

In his later years, George Washington often went back into his diaries and edited content such as grammar, sentence structure and other items.  It is believed that he was embarassed by his lack of formal education and that as he learned more, he wanted to erase any evidence that he had ever been so naive and ignorant.

This is, in my humble opinion, a mistake.

My journals are filled with all of my my faults, and foibles.  There is much to be learned from making mistakes.  Failure is a critical part of any true learning process.  As I go back and review old notebooks I am often embarassed by my selfishness, my pride, and my downright stupidity on certain issues.  But I am also thrilled to see that I recognize those things and that God has brought me to a new place in my journey with Him.

Besides the many other benefits journaling provides, it is also a record of our journey with Christ, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and that should be treasured not eliminated. 

We all have a sense of destiny…

But we don’t all do something about it.

If you’re presently a coward desperately trying to avoid any stress, unecessary pressure, or unforseen danger, you might call it a design flaw, but we humans are most alive when we passionately pursue our dreams, live with purpose, and have a sense of destiny.  Again, if you’re currently a cynic, skeptic, or pessimist, you might not appreciate the fact that as Martin Seligman points out in Learned Optimism, we thrive when we are optimistic about the future.  It seems failure is no match for the person who believes in the future.  When we see failure as personal, pervasive, or permanent, we become paralyzed.

Bottom line:  We cannot live the life of our dreams without an irrational sense of destiny.

And all of us have dreams.

More than that, all of us need dreams.

Some of us sadly are just sleeping through them.

All of us long to become something more than we are.  We are driven to achieve, moved to accomplish, fueled by ambition.  It burns hotter in some than in others, but it is within all of us.  We’re all searching for our unique purpose, our divine destiny, or simply a sense of significance or some measure of success.  When we are optimistic about the future, we find the energy to create it.

We may disagree violently about what success is; we may even change our own minds about what makes our lives actually significant.  But all of us are united in our desperate attempt to make a future for ourselves.  We all desperately want to achieve something, to accomplish something; we just don’t know what.  Worse than that, we don’t even understand why.  Yet that doesn’t stop us from searching.

an exerpt from Soul Cravings by Erwin Raphael McManus

As we move closer to election day, the debate rages between the candidates, the analysts, the talk-show hosts and the bloggers about who the next President of the United States should or will be.

Unfortunately, we live in a day and time when many people base their voting decision on party affiliation, the opinions of ministers, family, teachers and friends, or even worse; Jon Stweart and the cast of The Daily Show or Bill O’Reilly and The O’Reilly Factor.

I would encourage you to examine the issues carefully and prayerfully.  I realize it is considered simple-minded to be patriotic these days, but I sincerely do love this country and I am convinced that although our government and its officials are no where near perfect, we still have the greatest system of government in the history of mankind.  One of the things that makes it so great is that the governed (that’s us) get to take an active role in the governing.  It is a great honor and an enormous responsibility and it is best if we do not blindly follow the TV and radio loud mouths who are screaming their favorite candidate’s praises and vilifying and excoriating everyone else.

Take some time to really examine the issues up for debate.  Look at the candidate’s voting records, and written records on where they stand.  And most of all, pray for wisdom understanding that it is ultimately God Himself who appoints those who rule over us (Romans 13:1).

Below, I have listed a few links that may help you in your research.  May the Lord bless you and give you insight and wisdom as you exercise your rights as a citizen of this country.

• On the Issues:  A site that gives you the voting record of every candidate on all of the major issues as well as direct quotes from them on those issues.
• Voter Speak:  An excellent site that poses questions for you to ask yourself as you consider who to vote for.
• Barack Obama On the Issues:  Where Senator Obama stands on the issues according to his own website.
• John McCain on the Issues:  Where Senator John McCain stands on the issues according to his own website.

If you have other links you think should be added, please leave them in the comments section.

The boys really wanted to see Get Smart with Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway, Dwayne Johnson, and Alan Arkin, so we took them to see it this afternoon.  My expectations really weren’t that high for this film, but I think Steve Carell is hilarious and Anne Hathaway is easy on the eyes, so I thought; “How bad could it be?”

Pretty bad it turns out.

Maxwell Smart (Carell) is an analyst in the employ of CONTROL, a government intelligence agency whose sole purpose it to stop their enemy KAOS from destroying the world.  Due to a major global attack on CONTROL agents, Smart gets promoted to the position of field Agent 86 and is assigned to Agent 99 (Hathaway) as her partner.  Smart and 99 then more or less bungle their way through the rest of the film in an attempt to stop the terrorist activities of KAOS led by the evil Siegfried (Terrance Stamp).

Steve Carell is one of my favorite comedic actors, and I liked the fact that he played Agent 86 without attempting to copy the performance of Don Adams, the star of the 1965 TV show.  I also liked the way they didn’t make Smart a complete idiot.  He is actually a rather brilliant analyst who has very little experience in the filed and so has a few mishaps along the way.  Alan Arkin is always fun to watch, and many of the scenes were actually quite entertaining.

The biggest problem with Get Smart is that it just takes too long to get started, and once it does, you may find that the comedy is a case of too little, too late.  I was at least 20 minutes into the film before I even smiled let alone laughed, and then it was another 10 minutes before I really laughed.  For a movie that is supposed to be funny, that’s not a good sign.

The second problem with this film is Anne Hathaway.  Normally, I really enjoy watching her perform and not just because she’s pretty.  She is a talented actress and usually has excellent comedic timing.  But I have to say that she really phoned it in for this movie.  Her character–Agent 99–is cardboard and unconvincing.  Her humor–such as it was–is flat and half-hearted.

What saves this film from being truly dismal is the performance of Steve Carell.  Remove him from the movie and the whole thing collapses like the proverbial house of cards.  There are several scenes with him doing what he does best that ultimately make this movie at least entertaining if not hilarious.

I will say however that the scene with Smart trying to get out of his handcuffs in the airplane bathroom is side-splitting funny.  If the whole film had been made with that same energy and humor, this review would be quite different.

All three of my sons laughed until they couldn’t breath, so if you have kids, you may have more fun watching them watch the movie, than watching the movie itself.

In the end for me however, Get Smart just gets dumb and never really gets funny.

I give Get Smart a C.

It has been said–and I know from experience that it is true–that the more men you get together the more stupid they become.  Men in a group will do things they would never dream of doing alone.  These things usually involve jumping from some high place, blowing something up or setting it on fire, eating something truly disgusting or some other act of daring-do that might get them killed or at least injured.

I can also speak from experience that the more women you get together the more “girly” they become.  I have just endured being the only male in a group of women at lunch and I can tell you that I would rather jump off the roof of a house into a kiddie pool holding a cherry bomb and eating an earthworm than go through that again.

Allow me to give you a brief run-down of the topics of conversation:

• Babies
• Baby showers
• Hairspray:  The hair product, not the musical, which would have been just as bad I guess.
• Decorating
• Babies again
• Cats
• Dieting
• What to wear at various events:  Apparently there was some woman who wore a bright green dress to a funeral and this was a point of great contention amongst my lunch companions.
• Hair styles
• Dress styles
• Babies…again
• Hot male TV stars:  I wanted to shout out at this point; “I am a MAN for crying out loud, my ears are starting to bleed!”

# of topics I was interested in…ZERO!

I sat there, quietly eating my cheese tortellini and wishing that I wasn’t there.  Once I tried to steer the conversation towards sports by mentioning that I was going to the baseball game tomorrow night.

They then started talking about how the new stadium was being decorated.

I wish I was joking.

So ladies please, if you are at the table with a gaggle of other women and there is one poor member of the male species with you, throw us a bone once in awhile.  Talk about sports, work, cars, camping, or hot FEMALE TV stars…PLEASE, I am begging you on behalf of all men everywhere.

And to my brothers I will say this:  Be afraid, be very afraid.