Sports and Stories

I love sports, I love to play them, I love to watch them, I love to figure them out. I was never the most athletic of my friends, that role was reserved for those people who hit puberty before they were 17, but regardless I feel like I could hold my own. It wasn't until recently that I realized what sports really are, it wasn't until recently that I realized why I love sports so much, it is because they are a story within themselves. Let me explain before you get upset because you thought you were going to be reading about how awesome the Giants are and how great Peter was at Water Polo in High School but instead he has you reading about stories.

Every story has a beginning and an end, unless you are watching a little tale called, "The Never Ending Story," which by definition never ends (and if you have watched lately you know that Giant dog is nothing short of creepy, he is like a mixture of Clifford and the sadly misunderstood Boo Radley.) But all sports have character development before the actual game. Storylines that come into the game can be seen as the prologue if you wish, but this is whats going on before the actual story, the Hobbit to the Lord of the Rings, the Hide and Seek before the Wardrobe, the Peter and Sarah before the kids. It is what the characters are up to, what they have been through, their attitudes and idiosyncrasies.

This sets the stage for all things that are going to happen during the Event, (which I only watched the first 30 seconds of, and I have it figured out, they are rebooting the War of the Worlds franchise again.) Sports tell a story like few things do, and sometimes it is a great story, think about October 30, 1974 and the Rumble in the Jungle, or Rudy (and even though Joe Montana bashed Rudy a few weeks ago, I still weep every time I watch Sam Wise Gamgee get carried off the field).

Sports move us because of the stories that run through them. I am interested to tear more into this, what are your thoughts about stories and sports, how do they go together? What are some of your favorites sports stories?

Coop and Micah Pics

Yesterday Micah had has big 1 month old doctors appointment. He was a champ.



Today I just got this email from my wife of our oldest watching his show Little Einsteins.


I love my kids.

MASH Lied to Me About My Future

I love games. I think my crush on them started when going on a long bus ride to somewhere educational in the 4th grade. I was sitting next to my BFF Jordan on the bus and across the aisle were two girls who had a binder and a piece of paper out. They were giggling and writing and laughing and pointing and smelling good, standard girl stuff. Being the manly 4th grader I was I leaned over to whisper into Jordan's ear, "Hey man, ask them what they are doing."

Turns out they were playing a magical game called "MASH." Now if you aren't familiar with the game Mash then I can say two things about you, 1. You weren't a 90's kid, and 2. You didn't plan your life around arbitrary counting and random outcomes. But none-the-less, this is when I realized that games make everything more bearable, even if I did end up marrying Mrs. Van Horn, living in a shack, driving a Gremlin, while having 13 kids and being a professional basketball player.

But games can't just be rushed into and done at the drop of a hat. A game has to have a thought behind it, planning, rules, time frames. They have to have an element of risk, excitement, fear, competition, and challenge. If a game is run poorly then no one will want to play next time, trust me, I know. I have done multiple games that in my head sound like a great idea and they have fallen flat on their face because we either played them too long, too often, or they were too easy (or too hard).

But think about what you do when you get together with friends, unless you are only having a boring dinner party with appetizers and cloth napkins, they usually revolve around a game. Whether it be Pictionary or the Superbowl, we love games, they make us laugh, they loosen us up, they give us the opportunity to be our crazy competitive selves and it's okay.

I recently shot flour out of a potato gun at Jr. Highers and High Schoolers for getting an answer wrong, and you know what, they loved every single minute of it. Games are a way that we can worship God through community, they are a way to introduce others into our community, I mean is there a better way to say Jesus loves you by shooting 100 pounds per square inch of flour at someones face? I dare you to find a better way.

God is Love

I ran across this little diddy today, it is pretty thought provoking, tell me what you think.

Coop's Box

Yesterday was a big day in the Anderson household for two reasons. The first being our double stroller came and Sarah is in love with it. More importantly than the stroller was the box that the bohemith kiddy caddy came in. Cooper had his first experience with a box fort.

Now when it comes to building forts I am kind of like Mike Holmes meets a burrowing woodland creature. Need a fort, lets dig a hole, no room to dig? Let's find some scrap wood. No scrap wood? How about those old palm leaves. It is raining outside? Pillows, blankets, and a few staples will suffice. Whatever the material may have been, a fort could be made from them and essentially if I was in a Fort building contest with MacGyver, a gopher, and Wilhuff Tarkin I would win because I don't have a mullet, I am not a rodent, and I wouldn't leave a 2 meter wide exhaust port open for any rebel fighter to come and and blow up my entire Deathstar. In short, forts are my thing.

When I was growing up I remember a time when we were 7 or 8 and for some reason we had 4 or 5 massive boxes just sitting by our garbage can outside. We quickly turned them into our headquarters, command center, barracks, and mess hall all in one. We painted the outside of them, we painted the inside of them, we made tunnels from one box to another box by crawling through a box. I am pretty sure that these structures could have withstood a nuclear holocaust if it came down to that, or at least a strong gust of wind. Eventually the sprinklers came on a our impenetrable fortress collapsed faster than the 2010 Dodgers.

But never mind how awesome we were/are/is the thing that blows me away about Coop's box is that there are no buttons, there is no speaker, no lights, no talking tools, or creepy clowns. The box was simply that, a box. But to Coop it was a new world not yet explored, a fortress of solitude, a darkened lair, a place for his imagination to run as far as it could possibly run.

I wish that as adults we could recapture that sense of awe. The amazingness of a box to a 17 month old is paralleled to how awe-inspired I am when I see snow sitting quietly on top of Half Dome, or how excited I am to see the bright green outfield at AT&T park. The times I am blown away by what God has done in my life and for my life is what my oldest son finds in a simple box, and thats awesome.

What about you? What things make you stop and remember the amazing intricacies around you? What about when you were a kid, what things made you stop and stare in wonderment?

I'm a Sick Dad

No really, I am sick and I am a Dad. Actually the two go hand in hand for me right now, it's not so much that if I wasn't sick I wouldn't be a Dad but more of if I wasn't a Dad I probably wouldn't be sick. A week ago I got blindsided by a head cold, sore throat, runny-nose, a bit of a cough, standard. Now normally I can shake a cold like a champ, my medicine is lots of caffeine and denial, it seems to work pretty well for me, but not this time.

You see nowadays we have a second little tiny person living at our house, and no, we haven't adopted the prepubescent version of the 90's phenomenon known as Kris Kross, we just have a second baby and he's really cute. Now Micah is very different than Coop was, you see to say Cooper at all of his meals would be an understatement, he devoured them and he could rarely be satisfied, which lead to him not sleeping very well because he was always hungry. Micah on the other hand doesn't eat all that well, he is still get food and growing like a healthy boy but because he never "cleans his plate" he wakes up wanting more.

And you know what the crazy thing is, he tends to wake up wanting more at 2 in the morning. I have seen 3 am more in the past week than I did in my whole college career, including when I was the captain of Astronomy Club and we were studying the Ant planetary nebula while it was ejecting gas from the dying central star showing symmetrical patterns unlike the chaotic patterns of ordinary explosions, but thats neither here nor there.

Because I get to see the sites and sounds of the middle of the night on a regular basis my body doesn't have the time to kick this cold and because my body is acting very selfishly and all it wants is sleep I feel like I have been in a state of hypnosis, wandering around the halls of work and home not really knowing what is going on but doing what I can regardless of consciousness. Being a dad is awesome, being sick is not. Live long and prosper others.

Also, here's Kris Kross

Can we use electric cymbals so we can turn them down?

The Fall season of ministry is a hard season, it is when we are trying to boost our numbers, we are trying new things, doing our competition series, games are fed steroids to make them more exciting, I tend to spend more time in preparation to ensure that excellence is a descriptive word that we are buddies with. And so far this Fall has been a blast, we are doing Mac v. PC for High School and Man v. Machine for Jr. High and bth are going well. We shot bean burritos out of water balloon launchers into a crowd of High Schoolers who had to catch them. It's fun stuff, but too often the meat of ministry is overlooked.

Here's what I mean, Youth Ministry is fun, we launch bean burritos, we play games on slip 'n slides and with shaving cream, the music is too loud, the students have too much energy and the hormones are all raging. Sometimes they don't pay for sodas, sometimes students are caught kissing, sometimes I want to kick them out because of the annoying self explanatory repetitive questions they ask, but all the time we put up with the baggage of ministry to show these students the love of Christ.

If we do all of these things, these crazy, fun, sometimes stupid things, and have not love, not for each other and not for Christ then we are a mere clanging cymbal. There are days when I have zero desire to go to the office, there are days when I don't want to be a creepy older guy on students campuses when I go to visit, there are times when I don't want to sacrifice another Friday Night to go to a football game, but I do it not because I am awesome but because God first loved me and I need to do my best to reflect that mirror at the people, and specifically the students around me.

Cheers.

Seek, Don't Mope

I met a friend when our Youth Ministry went to Yakama Valley Reservation to serve the Yakama Nation for a mission trip, his name is Brandon. In Youth Ministry there tends to be a lot of politics even between other Youth Pastors as far as beliefs go, theology, group size, most of it has to do with ego I am sure, but it is rare to meet someone and instantly become buddies not just mere acquaintances. So I follow him on Twitter, if you are wondering, his handle is @daxsdad, and I hope to collaborate with him on a few things. Regardless, today he posted this, “How are you engaging God today?”

When in ministry (or in life for that matter) it is easy to feel alone and so your reliance needs to be on the Lord and you need to find a community that is going to encourage you, both of these things are critical to continue in ministry. But lately I have felt closed off to God, like we were playing hide and go seek in a meadow and he is still hiding even though it is time for dinner.

At first glance it seems like a normal thing that your token Pastor friend would write to encourage those around him and especially those he does ministry with, “How are you engaging God today?” But I got to thinking about this question and the more I thought about the more that I came to realize that God hasn’t gone anywhere, I have. I counted to 100 and rather than finding His hiding spot I sat down and waited for my mom to call me in for meatloaf because I felt like the game was too hard.

God is everywhere, His creation is majestic, and he isn’t hiding, we just tend to get lazy, or bored, or frustrated, or busy and we sit and sulk rather than to glance up and see him smiling and swinging his legs on the Oak branch above you (Does Jesus climb trees?)

2 Chronicles 7:14, “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

Monday Morning with Coop

So I haven't written about my boy lately and I think I am overdue. Yes, it is Thursday morning but to keep with tradition I am going with my normal Cooper-man title, Monday Morning with Coop. My boy is at a cool age right now, he can interact with you, he has a personality, one of his current favorite things to do is to impersonate the sounds he hears. He loves making barking noises, and the other day I taught him how to say, "Doh" in true Homer Simpson fashion.

He has also reached the height where everything is forehead level, mix that with still being slightly wobbly and you have a recipe for disaster, this kid hits his head everyday as often as I did while sitting through two hours of, "Dear John," with my wife. But he remains a champ regardless.
(He fell on pebbled cement)

And he is getting really big really fast, which I guess is a good thing because his little brother will be peaking into the world in 2 short months.

Because of this we are working on Cooper's ability to share, we are working on please and thank you, and we are working on his ability to be a bit more independent (Just yesterday we taught him how to use public transportation.) Everyday we hang out with Cooper-man is a day that he learns more and more, he has recently taken to killing bugs. I was barbecuing last night and Coop walked over to the door but stopped half way, turned around, bent down and squished an ant with his fingers then continued on his way. I am very proud of the way he has asserted his dominance over inferior beings, he squishes ants, tackles our dog parker, and just last week caught a fly with a pair of chopsticks (we may also be training him to be a ninja as well.)

Life is good, Sarah is pregnant, Cooper is talking, and we are busy. I love you all. John 3:19-21