Seattle 2016

 

Seattle Pinball Museum

Cost is $10 for all you can play pinball for the day.

Chihuly Garden and Glass – Seattle

Famous glass blowing artist that we saw in Las Vegas. $19 to get in.

Pike Place Market

The Gum Wall

Seattle Glass Blowing Studio

I’ve been trying to find a place to take glass blowing lessons and here it is. We’ve got it set up for Thursday August 4th at 6 pm.

Church of the Apostle – Seattle

Wanted to check out this emerging church worship for a while. Service starts at 5 pm on Sunday August 7th and there is communion.

Seattle Mariners

Going to the game on August 5th @ 7 pm. Will try to get there early for Ken Griffey Jr. bobblehead 🙂

Gas Works Park – Seattle

Astoria Oregon

Levensworth Washington

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Poem

I wrote this poem after watching the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The movie really disturbed me and I needed some way to express that.

Deep, deep, deep

Trapped, strapped, mapped

Horrific, terrific, exhilarating

But not for everyone, only for one

Is this the last moment?

Is this really it?

Eyes die, expectations are high

The moment has come, no more to be done

Walls closing in, the light growing dim

Stars in the sky circling the eyes

The end.

Never the end.

Out Travelling

After finishing 8 years of school my wife and I have decided to go on a 4 month trip to Europe. We will be spending 1 month in Denmark visiting family, 1 week in Krakow Poland, 1 month in Barcelona, 3 weeks in Paris and finally 3 more weeks in Denmark. I am blogging about the trip so if you want to see what we are up to or just get some interesting perspectives on Europe and things to do check it out.

Europa 2011

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Luther’s Religious World: Two Kinds of Love

Tuoma Mannermaa comes out of the Finnish Lutheran tradition, which has been heavily influenced by the Eastern Orthodox tradition because of Finland’s close proximity to Russia. In this book Mannermaa focuses on Luther’s distinction between Human love and God’s love.

Mannermaa often uses Luther’s own written material and then expounds on it. In the first chapter this one quote by Luther and further explanation provides an excellent example of this. Luther states, “God’s Love does not find, but creates, that which is lovable to it. Human Love comes into being through that which is lovable to it.” Mannermaa goes on to explain that “God’s Love is directed toward that which is empty and nothing, in order to create something of it and to make it exist in the first place…Human Love by contrast turns itself or is oriented toward that which already ‘is’ something in itself and as such is good and beautiful.” In other words God creates something out of nothing, and that nothing is found in weakness, hate, envy etc. God’s Love is oriented toward that which we find unlovable whereas we can only love that which is beautiful and good to us. On top of that we cannot create out of nothing.

One of the joys of reading this book is that Mannermaa provides a clear and concise explanation. He is not long winded and I found myself highlighting regularly. I always wonder about theologians who feel the need to write massive volumes in which there are only a few memorable quotes. This is not the case with Mannermaa. He gets right to the point in the opening pages and then expounds. It is no wonder that in the intro to this book it states that “It is quite appropriate to talk about a ‘Mannermaa school.'” His ability to explain difficult concepts has captured the attention of many scholars who wish to emulate such an excellent theologian.

If you are interested in a book that takes a look at Love through the lens of justification by faith through grace this is the book for you.

Saskatoon Train Graffiti

Everyday that I bike to seminary I ride by a big train yard. I decided to ride through it the other day and was checking out the graffiti on the trains. It always amazes me to see this form of art from all over North America right here in Saskatoon. The oldest piece (the name for a well done “piece” of graffiti) was almost 10 years old. It had travelled around for a while. I have always loved watching the trains go by because if you look closely it is like a travelling art gallery. Here’s a few pics that I took. Enjoy

Depression and Anxiety: Just Below the Surface

Sometimes it’s hard to accept

the things that go right to your depths

Cold, dark and surrounded by silence

the places you no longer can hide it

That one thing you wish was not there

yet there it is seeped in despair

just waiting, just sitting, just biding it’s time

just waiting, just living until “your all mine”

And yet here I am, just beyond grasp

walking the tightrope, feet on thin glass

I see it, it sees me and maybe that’s all

that I know, that you know, that anyone knows

Scanning Books: Snapscan S1500M

So you want to know the fastest way to scan a book huh? Well after some serious thought and research I have found what I would consider the quickest way. As you can see on the video below you can be scanning 1 page double sided every 1.5 seconds with the Snapscan S1500M. It cost around $500 Canadian. You can feed approximately 65 pages into the machine at a time and with the odd paper jam which takes all of 10 seconds to fix you are looking at about 15 minutes for a 1000 page book. That means that in an hour you can scan around 4000 pages. That is phenomenal!

Well you knew this was coming. What’s the catch? The catch is that you need to take the binding off the book which some people would consider destroying a book. Destroy literally means putting an end to the existence of something so that seems like a misnomer (wrong word to use). I like to think of it as transformation. You are taking your book and moving it from physical form to digital form. So basically what it comes down to is are you willing to sacrifice your physical book for a digital copy. The books that I decided to digitize are mainly reference books so only need to read parts of them at any given time. This works great. So in the end it is up to you. Here’s a stack of books I scanned while watching TV one evening.

I thought of several ways to get the bindings off and finally one of my friends suggested that I take the books to a print shop. There they had huge shears that simply cut the binding right off leaving the book ready to be scanned. I ended paying about 50 cents a book to get them cut which I thought was a bargain.

While the price of the scanner and the fact that you have to cut your books up looks like a lot think about the alternative. You can buy a flatbed scanner for cheap so you can save your books but you will spend at least 10 seconds a page and you will have to sit there and flip the pages each time. With this system I put in 65 pages and come back a minute and a half late to reload. In fact I am writing this blog while my scanner is doing the work. With a flatbed scanner it would take 11 hours to do 4000 pages if you had the patience to sit there and flip the book every 10 seconds. The question is what is your time worth.

No One Dies Alone

“Do not be afraid.” (Matthew 10:31a)

In the book Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, we    encounter a group of people living in Nazi Germany  during WW II. Fear abounds in the German population as  death hangs over their heads at every moment. It is out of  this situation that Otto and Anna Quangel, the main  characters, end up on death row for distributing anti Nazi  post cards. As they sit on death row waiting for their  inevitable death they contemplates how

There are people sentenced to death who have been  waiting for fully a year, who every night go to bed and  don’t know whether they will be rudely awakened by the  executioner; any night, any hour – while they are chewing  their food, while they are sorting peas, while they are slopping out – at any moment the door might open, a hand beckon, a voice say, “All right! It’s time!”

What is it like to live with the knowledge that while you are sitting at home watching TV, while you sleeping in your bed, while you are at work, a hand might beckon, a voice might say, “All right! It’s time!”?

These words send shivers down my spine. To be constantly aware that any given moment could be your last. This is still the case for people today. Just recently at a Pakistani electronics manufacturer people where heading into work for the morning when a suicide bomber blew himself up at the security gate, killing two security guards and five other workers. In countries where suicide bombs are a threat, a voice might say, “All right! It’s time!” while you are walking to work.

Even for us, whether we acknowledge it or not, there is a constant threat of death, whether it is a tragic head on collision or an artery getting clogged and cutting off oxygen to our brain. No matter what we do, death is hanging over our heads at every moment, we are just not reminded of it so frequently.

But for Anna Quangel, sitting on death row was a constant reminder, so constant in fact that it was all she thought about. But one day she had a visit from her friend Judge Fromm. He gave her a vile of poison and the comforting words “Don’t be afraid, child, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

The vile of poison gave Anna control over when she would die, it freed her from wondering if the next moment was her time to die. But the words of comfort “Don’t be afraid, child, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” freed her from the need to be in control, allowed her to live each moment without a fear of what the future would bring.

She eventually decided to throw the vile of poison out the cell window, to throw away the control she had been given, to rest in the words “Don’t be afraid, child, there is nothing to be afraid of.” These words gave her a freedom that no vile of poison could give, the freedom to live in the now without a fear of the future.

These comforting words echo Jesus’ words to his disciples, to us, to Anna, “Do not be afraid.” And they are comforting because the one who stands behind them, God, is trustworthy. We can trust that if God says “Do not be afraid,” we do not need to be afraid. We, along with all those who are facing death, can rest in the knowledge that not even death will separate us from the love of God.

Vegas Sky vs. the Milky Way

Having spent the last two times in Las Vegas on the infamous Strip, with all its mega hotels and huge casinos, I decided to go for a more down to earth version (if that is truly possible in Las Vegas) by staying at the Golden Nugget in the old downtown part known as Freemont Street. This is where it all started and so why not go there. Recently they have overhauled this section of the city to breath new life into what was fast becoming a place of the past. It seems like it has worked fairly well. One of the ways in which they have done this is by adding a four block cover over Freemont Street. Every 1 hour of so after dark this canopy lights up with millions of little lights, a variable sky of lights.

As I gazed at this canopy which obscured my view of the sky, I couldn’t help remember that only the night before I had been at Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah looking up at the stars as they lit up the canopy of the sky. That night in Bryce Canyon I could see a thick band of what looked like dust cresting across the sky. The park ranger had explained to my parents earlier that this was the Milky Way streaking across the sky, the result of millions of stars closely packed together.

Flare in the Milky Way over Utah

But what he also explained afterwards was disturbing. At this point in time only 40% of the world is able to see what I saw just the other night because light pollution had virtually blotted out the stars from our view.

With that in mind I saw the Freemont light show with new eyes. Here, in a city that has a spotlight so bright that it can be seen from outer space, a city that  pollutes the sky with so much light that when I looked out the hotel window the only stars I saw were the ones displayed on the adjacent billboard, they had gone so far as to create their own night sky out of little LED’s.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

As if destroying the absolutely awe inspiring night sky wasn’t enough we feel the need to replace it with a tacky light show. We love to pretend to be God but we sure are lousy at it.

Addiction: What is it really like?

Like an Itch

Addiction is like an itch, a mosquito bite

It starts out feeling great to scratch

But once you realize that the itch can’t be satisfied

It becomes an annoyance

And yet it feels so good when you are scratching away

Your mind is released from the constant bother of thinking about scratching

You are feeling the delight of an itch being satisfied

But the moment you stop scratching the need to scratch is still there

It hasn’t gone away, it hasn’t stopped

The satisfaction only lasts as long as you are scratching

It only feels good in that very moment

And your life is consumed with scratching

Everything else fades away

Nothing else is important

Only the need to scratch

Only the desire to fulfill the desire to scratch

You scratch so incessanty that it starts to bleed

It actually starts to hurt

The pleasure is gone

But the itch is still there

The itch that once was so enjoyable now hurts

It aches as you run your nails across it

The skin feels tender as you dig into your bloody flesh

You begin to wonder if this will ever end

You start to think that this scratching will consume your life

As if it hasn’t already

You try and tie your hands behind your back

Thinking that now you will be unable to scratch

But now you can’t do the normal things in life

You can’t feed yourself, or wash yourself or shake hands

You manage to hold off from scratching by sheer will power

Long enough to forget, long enough to for it to fade

Aha you say, I have accomplished the impossible

But then you accidentally itch your arm without thinking, like an old habit

And it all starts over again

You begin to think that there is no getting away from the itch

And so you reserve yourself to scratching it once and a while

Just enough to give temporary relief

Because there is no way to stop completely

But each time you give a little scratch the desire from before becomes stronger

With each pull across the skin your desire increases

Until the blood is once again flowing

In utter despair you lay on the ground and watch a drop of blood drip down your arm

And on to the floor

The blood lays there

Holding you and all your pain inside it.

Don’t worry, there is much more where that came from…