Some Blog Site

Here is a guest post I wrote for SCL back in the day (2011 in case you’re wondering, and no, the link there is not to my guest post). It wasn’t run because I didn’t actually write a full blog post for Jon, I just sent him an outline of ideas. But I decided to fill it out and present it to you today.

Cheering for Bannerman

Many of you may be wondering who Bannerman is. Kids these days don’t know their history. Bannerman was 20 years old when I started writing this guest post over a decade ago.

Bannerman is a song by Steve Taylor. Not Tyler, Taylor. Also popular for the song “Lifeboat”.

But Bannerman the song is about Bannerman the person who was ubiquitous in that era: the guy who holds up the Bible verse behind the goal posts during football games. I don’t know how that guy was able to make it to every single football game, or how he managed to get tickets in the same spot in various stadia, but that guy was consistent.

He may have retired or something, because I don’t see him at every game anymore. Or maybe the ticket prices are keeping him from attending multiple games every weekend.

I also wonder if he thought of himself as a missionary
“What do you do?”
“I’m a missionary.”
“In what country?”
“In the USA.”
“Oh, which people group do you minister to?”
“Football fans.”

Thanks to a recent TV ad that shows Michael Bolton singing a version of “How am I Supposed to Live Without You” but with slightly altered lyrics, I was inspired to write this blog post.

I don’t know why it popped into my head this way, but I think there must have been some other TV ad that played or referenced the song “Grandma Got Run OVer by a Reindeer”, and I noticed the two songs fit together well.

Behold:

And it goes the other way too, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader, to put the words to “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” to the music of “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You”.

It’s not perfect though. For one thing this is just the chorus. I have better things to do with my time than to fit the verses of these songs together. Plus no one knows the verses anyway.

And the Michael Bolton song has 5 lines in the chorus but the Grandma song has only 4. I removed one line to make it, and I’m guessing no one noticed until I pointed it out.

Here is a guest post I wrote for SCL back in the day (2011 in case you’re wondering). It wasn’t run because I didn’t actually write a full blog post for Jon, I just sent him an outline of ideas. But I decided to fill it out and present it to you today.

Wondering What to Think of Mel Gibson

It seems that celebrities can fall in and out of favor with Christians. Or rather with Christian media or culture, I haven’t figured out who decides the correct opinion on people.

In general, a celebrity is embraced by Christians once news gets out of his conversion. “Hey, we got So-and-so now!” But since he’s human, and in the spotlight, he will mess up somehow and then will no longer be the trendy poster-boy for American Christianity. We shouldn’t be so fickle, and I hope that in general any new Christian can find a local church that will support and encourage new believers through whatever problems they have.

In this particular case of Mel Gibson though, it seems his popularity within Christianity has had more ups and downs than anyone else.

It starts out with his background: a movie actor who was raised Catholic. Okay, we’ll take that.
Wait, he makes R-rated movies? Never mind, that’s bad.
But he’s making a movie about Jesus. And it’s faithful to the source material? Ok, that’s good.
Did you see he got a DUI? That’s not good.
And he made disparaging remarks about Jews? That’s not good either, what’s wrong with this guy?
He apologized for that though. Well, apologizing is a Christian trait, so that’s good.

Mr. Gibson may have been in and out of the news in the decade or so since I wrote the first draft, but I haven’t kept up. If he has, it’s certainly not been to the level it was back then.

Here is a guest post I wrote for SCL back in the day (2011 in case you’re wondering). It wasn’t run because I didn’t actually write a full blog post for Jon, I just sent him an outline of ideas. But I decided to fill it out and present it to you today.

Other religions have official pilgrimages, and the Jews in the time of the Bible had to go to Jerusalem for certain annual festivals, but Christianity is a little more decentralized, so it has multiple unofficial pilgrimages. I’ve been on a couple of them, keep track and see how high a score you get (one point per destination).

• Israel – tying into the Biblical pilgramages to Jerusalem, this is the most spiritual of the Christian pilgrimage options. Most people opt for a Bible tour – seeing the places mentioned in the Bible, and hopefully learning something in the process. I’ve experienced this only vicariously, by watching videos. That method is worth half a point, by the way.
• Colorado Springs – this is a close second because of all the ministries there. You can visit headquarters for Compassion International, Focus on the Family, and the Navigators.
• Northern Kentucky – this is a close third because only an hour apart from each other are both the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. Get your fill of Genesis in this part of the country.
• Vatican City – this is a controversial one, because hard-core Catholics are probably considering this an official pilgrimage and hard-core Protestants are probably considering it heresy to give any attention to the Vatican. There’s a lot of church history there, and in surrounding Rome as well, so you can get something out of it no matter your affiliation.
• Up North – I used to think “going up north” was a Michigan thing, but people in southern Minnesota go north to relax/escape/vacation also, so I’m just going to apply the term to everyone. Since the location of the temple changed from Jerusalem to each believer’s body, you are holy no matter where you go. And thus anywhere you go could be a pilgrimage. You could push it and say anywhere anywhere, but I prefer anywhere that’s not work.

That last one may have been a stretch, but lists are required to have either 3, 5, 7, or 10 items. I had only 4 and that was not going to cut it. Any places I forgot?

No, I didn’t misspell the name of the guy from South Africa. I’m just providing a mandala of the name “Nelson”.

But, so that those of you who were hoping to see a picture of Nelson Mandela are not disappointed, here is a Nelson Mandela Mandala

And I expect that some others of you are hoping to see a picture of the other famous Nelson.

That’s right – it’s a Willie Nelson Mandala. Not to be confused with a Willie Nelson Mandela mandala, that’s below. And Willie Nelson Mandela has to have been the answer to Wheel of Fortune for the category Before and After. If not, I will be disappointed.

That’s all the combinations of Nelsons I could think of for now. Real Nelsons, not cartoons.

Here is a guest post I wrote for SCL back in the day (2011 in case you’re wondering). It wasn’t run because I didn’t actually write a full blog post for Jon, I just sent him an outline of ideas. But I decided to fill it out and present it to you today.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a church that fills out pew-by-pew attendance forms, but a decade or two ago it was not uncommon for certain churches to keep an attedance registry in each pew.

In part of the service (usually during the announcements), the congregation would be instructed to have the person on the end of the pew take the attendance sheet, fill out their info, and pass it to the next person. Then the ushers would collect them all and in theory someone would look at them later. Usually that person would be the church secretary.

On some occasions, I would visit my brother’s church. No, he didn’t own it, it was the church he attended. I had to make sure I sat upstream of him so I got the attendance form first. Because if he got it first, he would fill out his information correctly but then also fill out my information.

Now if you can’t picture the church attendance registry form in your head, you need to picture that there is a line for name and address and phone number, and then there are checkboxes for things like “I am a visitor” and “I would like more information about the church” and “Please contact me about church membership” and various other options. All of which my brother would mark for me.

In this case, we both knew the church secretary (one of my other brothers), so I knew it would go nowhere. But he would also do the same thing in other churches, so I had to be on my guard – check the pew for an attendance book, grab it first or sit between him and the book.

Other times, if relatives weren’t visiting the church, my brother would make up names for the people in his pew. He’d get the number right, so the church attendance figures would not be off, but instead of his name he’d put Clark Kent, or Ronald Reagan, or Barry Sanders, or whatever. Just to provide some amusement to the church secretary during a probably otherwise dreary task.

What was fun was when my one brother forgot to tell my other brother that he wouldn’t be working in the church office that week. Then the backup secretary would have to sort through the attendance records and have to figure out why they didn’t notice Clint Eastwood was in the congregation that week.

I just watched Encanto last weekend, so I have that going through my head. And one thing that popped into my head during the movie was something like this:

Not that I ever saw that other movie, but I heard enough references and saw enough memes to figure it out.