This past weekend was fantastic. I’d never been to the great Northwest and it was just beautiful. I was telling some of my friend about how amazing it was to be driving north on I-5 on Friday around 7.30pm and be able to see both Mt. Hood and Mt Saint Helens. Breathtaking.
Classes don’t officially start until Tuesday but I’m going to do my best to get reading a little early (like yesterday… errrr… tomorrow is what I meant). This weekend is going to be a great one for multiple reasons (1. Matt, Steph & Ella Jones are coming to visit::: 2. 707 should be off the hook this weekend as we talk about Deborah and Jael::: 3. Labor day off ps no more white:::) but the thing I’m most excited about is laying out a strong schedule for the fall (and hopefully the rest of my life). With 707, school, friendships oh and being married I’ve got to get some order to my life and this is going to be good.
Another thing I’m sure of is that stepping into this new season of life means that things will probably change around this blog. I’m guessing I’ll be posting a lot more in response to what I’m thinking about, reading, and writing for my masters program. This should mean much more important things will be posted here, but only time will tell.
Keep rock’n the suburbs just like Michael Jackson (or Jon Bon Jovi) did.
I’m sitting right now in one of the seminary classrooms trying to get registered for classes. I’ve met a lot of new GREAT people while I’m out here and I’m really excited about what the next couple of years will hold.
I thought I’d give out some link love to a couple of my new friends…
Let me introduce you to my friend Petey*Crowder. He does college ministry in Corvallis, OR (you can check out the ministry website here). He’s blogging at Petey’s Faith. Seems like a fun guy. I really look forward to getting to know him more.
My second new friend is Jason Feffer. He’s from Elgin, IL and a HUGE Cubs fan. Jason and I are in the same co-hort and he’s the closest student geographically so I’m sure that he and I will become fast friends. You can check his blog out HERE.
Filed under: Life in General
I thought I’d give you a bit of an updates as to what’s going on in my world.
This summer has been crazy for us. Lot’s of big changes at 707 that all came at us by surprise. While I wish that it would have been a different kind of summer God has been faithful and I have learned even more what it means to trust in Him, find life in Him, find hope in Him, and find today in Him. I am more sure today than I have been in 2 years about my place and calling and I look forward to what this fall and 2008 have in store for us as a community of faith.
Throughout the crazy times I’ve had a chance to have a lot of fun. I’ve traveled a great deal. We went to New York, Fort Wayne and Delaware together and I had a chance to go to a camp in Pennsylvania and to St. Louis to visit my brother and parents for my Mom’s 50th birthday.
The trip to St. Louis was so special. My parents moved there to open a deli in December. It was a rough time in the beginning but things have really changed. Their business has really picked up and now their the coolest place in Ellisville, MO. I had the greatest Turkey Club I’ve ever had their plus I sampled about 5 other things. It’s AMAZING food. If you’re going out to St. Louis at all you should really go check it out.
Wednesday I’m flying out to Portland to become a student again. I’m kicking off a 3 year seminary program at George Fox Evangelical Seminary. I have to be honest, I’m a little nervous and extremely excited. This trip will just be an orientation and the rest of the program is distance based with 1 week intensives every semester. This trip will be pretty sweet because I’m staying with Johnny and Jamie Driver and will get to hang out with *thelongbrake as he passes through to get to Seattle (you can read more about that trip here).
I know that updates like this are often a bit bland but I wanted to give you a long excuse for why I haven’t updated this in like a month.
I’ll try and not be so boring next time.
Filed under: Baseball
It was hard for me not to shed just a little tear for Barry Bonds after he hit 756 last night. He for sure is a roid monster and of course he has no business being celebrated in the same breath as Hank Aaron but for one minute I was happy for Barry Bonds.
It makes me sad that he had to stand alone on the field. His dad’s dead, Bud Selig didn’t show up after his “hurculean feat” of attending 8 baseball games in a row and the closest Hank Aaron would get to him was a DVD played over the scoreboard. Kind of a bummer.
Tomorrow I’m sure I’ll wish that this never happened and will hope for some evidence to come out that gives MLB cause to erase half of Barry’s homers but tonight it was nice to see a record broken that will stand until that punk A-Rod breaks it.
So I’m reading out of NT Wright’s “Paul for Everyone: Romans Part Two” to get some insight and background for this Sunday’s sermon and this really stood out to me…
Did Paul ever get to Spain? There’s is no evidence whatever that he did. But his desire to do so, and the fact that he wrote Romans as part of the preparation for such a trip, points out an extremely important lesson to us all. Perhaps God sometimes allows us to dream dreams of what he wants us to do, not necessarily so that we can fulfil all of them – that might just make us prod and self-satisfied – but so that we will take the first steps towards fulfilling them.
And perhaps those first steps are in fact the key things that God actually wants us to do. Paul may not have got to Spain. That didn’t matter; the gospel got there fairly soon anyway. What mattered then, and has mattered enormously in the whole history of the church, is that, as part of his plain to go to Spain, he wrote Romans. We should never underestimate what God will do through things which we see as small steps to a larger end.
Filed under: Link of the Day
This comes as quite the shock to those of us here at andrewsikora.com.
Apparently we have topped Stephen Colbert’s “ON NOTICE” board. What is even more shocking is that Michael Vick is just below us. We’re unsure about what we did to land ourselves on the board but the fact that 1999 Toyota Camry’s are on the board and Andrew Sikora himself drives a silver ‘99 Carolla may have something to do with it.
Thanks to Brian Manley for pointing this out!
My friend Jason Mitchell is reading a book called “Serve God Save the Planet” that I would really like to read (but I’m lazy errr…. busy, yeah, that’s what I mean)… At any rate he’s reading this amazing book and it’s messing him up and since he’s getting messed up he’s messing me up as well.
Listen to this…
He explores one chemical in particular that is widely known now to be potentially harmful. So much that it has been taken off the market now.
Drum roll please… Red Dye
I’ll quote Sleeth here from page 28:
“One of the most toxic red dyes ever formulated is added by the ton to the 6.7 billion gallons of home heating oil burned each year in the United States. Only someone who was suicidal would drink even a small glass of this deadly red substance. Yet it is used without thought – all so that when a wooden stick is inserted into an eighteen wheeler’s fuel tank, it comes out with a red stain if the driver is using home heating oil to fill up his truck. Home heating oil and diesel fuel are the same, but diesel fuel is taxed more heavily. The red dye is used to prevent a few people from using cheaper heating oil in their vehicles. Could it have been the red dye in heating oil that caused Sally’s cancer? Will burning more of it to heat our home cause my daughter to fall ill in ten to twenty years?”
So… that’s rough, but Jason keeps going. You should head over to his blog and then think about this for a few minutes.
I am sitting in a condo with Meri’s family at Dewey Beach, Deleware. We flew from Cleveland to Baltimore and then did about a 2 hour drive in a brand new white Chevy Malibu. It’s nice to be away and just chilling out.
As I sit here Meri, Will and Mrs. T are strategizing how we’ll fit in all the laying on the beach and shopping at outlet malls (there are 130).
More updates to come.
