The Power of Parable

"It was an out of place blue door among the ruins of a forgotten world. Proudly it had been built. With cheers it had been painted. In reverence it had been passed. By shouts it had been defended. In screams it had been lost. With cries it was remembered until it was remembered no more. Behind its timbers hid both the foundation of a kingdom and of that kingdom's demise, and if time would allow, the rise of that kingdom once again."

A blue door, an ancient story, and a mystery. With a few words we find ourselves being pulled into a story.

After a crazy week of many messages, I found myself at a lost for my Tuesday night youth service. We've been working straight through the book of Ephesians and the next couple of verses stumped me on how to present them. I understood them, but I just wasn't sure how I could get it across to my students.

Diagramming

I did something crazy and probably extremely boring in my youth service this past Tuesday. I took a large chunk of my teaching time and showed my students how to make a rough diagram of a sentence. Now I know that there is an actual method for diagramming a sentence which is fairly in depth, but I ran more with the idea of breaking the sentence into basic portions of thought that you write on following lines of the paper. A thought that clarifies or answers a question from the previous thought is placed underneath that thought.

Things I'll Miss

In a little over a month my team is heading back to Kenya. I know it sounds a little presumptuous to call them my team when I'm not going with them, but I worked side by side with these people last year and somewhere in my soul I still consider myself a part. I've had the opportunity to speak with a few of them in the past couple of weeks and it really stirs me up. I fully understand and accept that this isn't a time for me to go, but that doesn't stop me from thinking about it. In honor of that, I feel compelled to compile a short list of things that I'll miss by not going to Kenya. Some are poignant and others pointless and I'll leave you to distinguish between the two.

I'm going to miss going to dinner late at night in Eldoret, Kenya. Not just dinner at any old place though. I'm going to miss going to an Indian restaurant while staying in Kenya. And not just any Indian restaurant, but one that served up Italian style pizza done the American way. And if that wasn't enough, I'm going to miss being able to choose Chinese chicken as our pizza topping. To put it all into perspective and in one long sentence. I'm going to miss going to Kenya and having dinner in an Indian restaurant that served Italian pizza done the American way with Chinese chicken on top. I love the craziness of it all.

If the opportunity arises my team, eat a slice for me.

The Daisy Chain 2

If this appears in Facebook and it's not just in my notes section, then technology is really crazy,

The Daisy Chain

This is a post to see if this crazy daisy chain I've set up will work. Currently I have my blog at www.focusedjourney.com. I have it set to automatically sync with a Blogger account of the same name. I'm a sucker for backups. Now, I have my Tumblr page pulling in the info from the Blogger RSS feed. I think it's possible to set up Tumblr to automatically update Twitter. Then, I have Twitter update Facebook. It's more of a test of whether or not it can be done and not something I'm sure I intend to keep.