Bart Blair

Things That I Don't Understand

Jonas Brothers

hummus

electric lawnmowers

The BCS

United Nations Day

carbon footprint

Miley Cyrus

Twitter

the Dow Jones Industrial Average

H1N1

Cricket

potash

What is it that you don't understand?

You Are My Friend

You Are My Friend from Grace Church on Vimeo.

Apple Picking

While I watched the Longhorns oust the Sooners from any hope of a bearable football season (Hook 'Em!), Elizabeth took Silas and Ephraim apple picking at Chudleigh's.  Here's what they did:

 
 
 
 

A Salvation Story (as written by Silas Blair)

He Found Me

If I were a frog I would live near the water.  I would splash and jump on the lily pads and I have slime on my tongue.  I'll eat bugs and I am smooth.  First I am a tadpole.  And I jump high and I'll get my sword and I'll cut down a tree and live in a toilet and I always get flushed down.  And there's a lily pad in the toilet.  There's lots of fish in the toilet.  And a boy found me in the toilet and he kept me forever.  And then I died and then I turned back alive in five days.

---

I copied this story from a writing journal that Silas kept at school last year (in 1st grade).  I corrected his spelling mistakes (i.e. toylit = toilet), but kept the story intact, including his title.  Re-read the story, with a spiritual slant, imagining these allegories:

Frog - me
Toilet - my world
Jumping high - my attempts to do good
The Tree - my sins
Lilly Pad - the unstable ground on which I build my empire
The Boy - Jesus

There's more to it, I think!  Use your imagination.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

I recently began reading this new book (A Million Miles...) by one of my favorite authors, Donald Miller.  It is another "memoir" or look into his life, primarily stemming from the experience of making one of his former memoirs (Blue Like Jazz) into a film.

Here's how Miller starts the book:

IF YOU WATCHED a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn’t cry at the end when he drove off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. You wouldn’t tell your friends you saw a beautiful movie or go home and put a record on to think about the story you’d seen. The truth is, you wouldn’t remember that movie a week later, except you’d feel robbed and wanted your money back. Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo.

But we spend years actually living those stories, and expect our lives to feel meaningful. Truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won’t make a story meaningful, it won’t make a life meaningful either. Here’s what I mean by that: