Haiti And Adoption

When Mrs. Scott and I were first married, we had discussed adoption as a possible course our family would follow. We decided to pursue adoption in addition to the possibility of having biological children. One could say that adoption was "Plan A" for us.

The first website we ever visited while looking at international adoption was a site called God's Littlest Angels, an orphanage in Haiti. We have supported them in the past and Mrs. Scott has been an ardent follower of their ministry ever since. The cost of international adoption was prohibitive for us in the early years, and our two oldest children are adopted, but from the States. Adopting from Haiti has been on our radar screen ever since that first website visit, yet the means have never materialized.

Now with the earthquake disaster in Haiti, adoption has been thrust into the media light. Just a few nights ago, a GLA representative was on Larry King Live to discuss the state of adoption from that battered nation. Adoption has been closed, with the exception that the adoption processes for children currently being adopted at the time of the quake were expedited. Many mass grave burials have prevented unaccounted for children from being easily adopted. Child trafficking has reared its head. Haiti needs a great deal of patience as they wait for things to stabilize.

Please pray for, and support, God's Littlest Angels.

Friday Night Potpourri

I'm sorry, what happened again this week?

• After 11 straight days of rain, we had a one day in a row break. It started again yesterday.
• Rain here in San Fran means snow in the mountains.
• The winter of 1982 saw 25 feet of snow in the mountains. Two feet of my friend's A-frame cabin were visible. They had to dig 15 feet down to the upper floor balcony to get in through a window.
• James: Ten Years After had three hit songs. I'd Love To Change The World was their biggest, then I'm Going Home (it landed both on the Woodstock Soundtrack and in the movie documentary), and Love Like A Man.
• Nice church, St. Nick! John Armstrong writes about a Russian Orthodox church in France that was ruled by a French court to be the property of the Russian government.
• Boomerang balloon. Our kids accidentally let a balloon go, and it went over the back fence into the neighbor's yard. Hours later it appeared in a front yard tree.
• Chicks and 5th graders dig it.

Internet Monk Update

As some of you may know, Michael Spencer (aka the Internet Monk) has been battling cancer. Today he posted an update on his condition. Pray for a complete recovery, and being able to make things work in the meantime.

Musical Chairs Football

This is traditionally my favorite weekend of football all year. I love playoff football, and the intensity of the conference championship games is better than any other week. I like these games better than the SuperBowl for a number of reasons. There's a home team with frenzied fans, and a visiting team trying to shut those fans up. The SuperBowl is a neutral site game with fans of all teams present, usually those with the most money to spend on the place to be seen. I couldn't care less about half time shows and all the hype, and what kind of cookies each player's grandma made as a kid.

Anyway, with the AFC game over, I hope the NFC game falls short of its explosive offense hype. I don't like shootout football. I like defense with well developed offensive strategy. It's one thing for a great game to end with one team trying to score and the other's great defense trying to stop them; it's quite another thing for a game to end with each team scoring at will with the game decided on who has the ball last when the clock runs out. Musical chairs football takes the drama out of the game.

Friday Night Potpourri

Thoughts after a great meal:

• Pee-wee tryouts are tomorrow for player evaluation. Our four year old can't wait. It's been raining like crazy this week and the fields are sure to be soaked. But can a kid hit with the ground being wet?
• Bob at Wilderness Fandango writes that sometimes he sees an older man who he thinks looks like his departed father.
• Four days of rain flooded the garage and made things messy. Difficult jogging weather.
• Two weeks ago I stated that it had been years since I've heard a song by the group Yes. The next week I heard three. Okay, let's test this out. It's been years since I've heard a Ten Years After song on the radio besides I'd Love To Change The World.
• Why do eyeglass commercials show the ugliest eyeglasses?
• Unemployment is now over 12% in California. It's no longer considered shameful to not find a job.
• My high school class of 1982 theme song. It gets better with time.

The Good Old Days

I got to thinking about the "good ol' days" recently and what made them good. Often we look back on times of lesser means as better somehow, yet I wonder if it's because we forget about the bad things. Here are a few things from my good old days.

The cars I drove were a '69 Firebird (a good car), an interim '76 Pontiac Sunbird (gutless), then a '75 Camaro for quite a long time. My next car was the complete lemon. A 1980 Plymouth Horizon hatchback. Beige, with a gray primer left quarter panel. The device to hold up the hatchback was one of those air cylinder pressure things. It didn't work, so I had to carry a pair of vice grips to hold it steady. Sometimes the hatchback would collapse on my head while getting groceries out. The car had its share of mishaps. Once, the inside door handle broke. So, I had to roll down the window and use the outside handle to open it. No sooner than I got it fixed, the outside handle broke. I could now exit the car without opening the window, but had to get in from the passenger side, and climb over both the stickshift and hand parking brake. I bought it for 500 bucks and sold it two years later for the same amount. The steal of the century. This gave way for my best car ever, a '90 Honda Accord. I had that for 18 years and put over 300,000 miles on it.

The first job I ever had was maybe the most fun. I worked at a wrecking yard in high school that also had an auto parts, towing and scrap yard built in. I got to run the car smasher. A 17 ton iron lid lifted by an inch and a half steel cable, pulled up by a car engine. I would raise the lid up, the fork lift would put a car in, and I would step off the brake, and wham!, a 60's Cadillac or Lincoln would be about 12" thick. It was a dirty, oily, gritty, low paying job, but being able to pick up a brake drum and smash it through a junk car window was a humorous release of energy. Or picking up a car ten feet up in the air with the fork lift and dropping it to the ground. We had to take gas tanks out of cars before they were crushed, and with a gas filtration system we rigged up, I didn't buy gas all year.

Good old days? or pathetic moments worthy of laughter?

Protestant Traditions Not Found In The Bible - Followup

My recent post Protestant Traditions Not Found In The Bible received one of the highest site visit counts I've ever had. I'm wondering the reason. Is it because so many people are interested in the topics of church and tradition? Is it because I also happened to leave a higher than usual number of comments on other large readership blogs and gained clickthroughs from my comments? Probably a bit of both.

In any case, I created the list to make a few observations. One, Protestantism has its traditions, too. I often hear criticisms from Protestants about the traditions of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Many of these criticisms are not necessarily about the specific traditions themselves, but that RC and EO have them at all. We should be careful about criticising others who hold to traditions if we ourselves do as well. Some of the Protestant traditions I listed are rock solid foundations of some people's faith, and to question them is to suggest one's own apostasy.

Another observation is that some of these traditions not found in the bible are so central to church that things that are found in Scripture aren't observed parts of those traditions. For example, I recently added "going to church" as a tradition (thank you, Judy). Hebrews 10:24-25 is so heavily relied upon as a command to go to church (funny, it isn't even in the imperative) that the other traditions like the Sunday meeting being a "worship service" crowd out what the passage actually says about what we're supposed to be doing in church, if in fact we take not forsaking the assembling together meaning we need to go to church. Where is stimulating one another to love and good deeds and encouraging one another as mentioned found in our worship services?

I don't have a problem with tradition as long as it neither contradicts Scripture, nor crowds out things that Scripture says we must do.

Friday Night Potpourri

Thinks:

• I helped some friends move last weekend. In a drawer I found one of those yellow plastic 45rpm-to-record changer adapters. A college student that was there helping had no clue what it was. Her dad and I had some fun with that. "It's an adapter...you know, for 45's...so they can be used on the record changer...you know, vinyl..." No clue. (image: photobucket.com)
• Small world gardening: The owner of the house we're temporarily in has a gardener. We've known him for years. Our friends that we just helped move have a gardener provided by their new landlady. They've known him for years, too. Not only is he the same gardener, he does each of our houses on the same day, one right after another, yet in different cities. But wait... it gets better. It was after our gardener's wedding nearly ten years ago that Mrs. Scott and I (who both attended) had our first date. We went out to dinner after the reception, and were married later that year. The gardener married my best man's mother.
• While job searching, here was an interesting ad I found: freelance editor for a Korean slang book. I could do it with a little bit of improvisation.
• There's no better way to secure your checked luggage than to carry a gun. So says Cory Doctorow. (HT: Lew Rockwell.com for the link)
• One of my favorite types of weather is dense fog in the winter. It's like being blanketed in, muted sound, kinda cozy. Fun to jog in, too.
• Speaking about dense fog, I remember a number of times where it was too dense to drive. A couple of times in my neighborhood I had to open the car door and drive with my head out to see the dashed lines. Only in residential neighborhoods would I do that, of course. Once, the line ended and I was on my own, not knowing how close to the center of the road I was. A silhouette of a mailbox appeared in front of my hood. I guess I veered off center slightly, so I backed up and steered a bit left. I'm alive today so I estimate that I made it to where I was going.
• Another classic childhood radio song memory. So many one hit wonders, so many good songs.

Friday Night Porpourri

The week in whatever:

• It has been a long time since I've heard a song from the group Yes on the radio. Even the classic rock stations aren't playing this staple group from the days of album oriented rock. Why not? Have the rock radio gods gone crazy?
• The winning Christmas presents for each of our kids: our two year old loves his three story parking garage for Matchbox cars. Our four year old loves his new Nintendo DS. Our eight year old loves his radio controlled helicopter.
• In an attempt to create widespread (no pun intended) breast cancer awareness, women on Facebook were urged to enter a one word color on their Facebook status (the color of the brassiere they were wearing at the moment), with no other explanation, and to pass this cause on to other women. To the complete exclusion of men. Of course, there are no secrets on Facebook, and the guys soon became aware of why numerous women were dropping colors on FB. I don't know whether it is the nature of men to do this, but humorous, sarcastic and dirty-old-man comments appeared all over. Of course, some women weren't wearing any, and commented thus. In the end, awareness of breasts beat the awareness of cancer, hands down, in my estimation. Boys will be boys. You go, girls!
• YouTube is also a great place to listen to music.
• Fog, overcast, dense fog, sunshine, overcast, heavy rain, dense fog, rain, fog, sunshine, overcast. Just a day of driving around the Bay Area with its varied microclimates.
• I've been walking with the boys in our region's "open space" areas quite a bit lately. We've seen deer, hawks, ground critters, snakeskins, dead things and yesterday a coyote. Oh, and oak trees.
• My hair feels much more wiry than in past years. I'm told it's gray hair that just can't be noticed in all the blond.
• Haven't heard this guitar piece in years.

[Update: Mrs. Scott pointed out that I made a mistake spelling "Potpourri"]

New Year's Potpourri

Decade transcending musings:

• Gee it was just ten years ago that we feared the ball dropping in Times Square meant computer crashes, bank failures and nukes flying all over the place.
• I can remember 2009 like it was yesterday.
• Do we have a name for the decade yet? The aughts? The two thousands? The zeros? The double oh's? What about a name for the new one?
• I found this about a distant ancestor of mine, a Swede kidnapped in England and sold into slavery in the south. He was instrumental in helping establish Swedish churches and communities in Delaware during the late 1600's. (HT: inspired from a Billy Goat link)
• Growing up we watched Guy Lombardo every New Year's Eve. Dick Clark wasn't on the radar.
• Earlier I reviewed a list of stupid new laws passed by power hungry, money hungry, authoritarian politicians. At least I can still blog while driving.
• Mrs. Scott and I started a new bible reading program. It's email driven (from the person who set it up) and you can listen to somebody read out loud while you follow along.
• Happy New Year song.