These are difficult times for our country. And I pledge to [Barack Obama] tonight to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face…I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences and help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited. Whatever our differences, we are fellow Americans. And please believe me when I say no association has ever meant more to me than that.

Read the full text of the speech here.

Why Christians should vote for John McCain.

Why Christians should vote for Barack Obama

(HT again to Jesus Creed) As I head to bed here in Europe, a few hours before the polls close in the States, one thing I hope is that however this election turns out, the concept that all Christians “should” vote for one particular candidate is a notion that will die. Now go vote.

1. The next president of the United States will be a Christian. I am glad of that; I believe that a president who is sincerely seeking to serve and obey Jesus will govern more justly as a result. But while I hope that the president will faithfully act as an agent of the Kingdom of God, I think it’s good to remember that the job we are electing him for is to lead the kingdom of Caesar.

2. Not only will the next president be a Christian, I think it might not be possible to be elected President of the U.S. today unless one professes to be Christian. Can you imagine one of the candidates going into the Saddleback forum and telling Rick Warren, “I think the Christian faith brings much good to our society and am grateful that so many Christians call the U.S. home, but I am not a Christian myself because personally I don’t believe the stories of Jesus are true.” If he stood by that remark, I think his polls would plummet. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Anyway, the other day I found myself reading the carton during breakfast (don’t scoff – you know you’ve done it!) and made an interesting discovery. The words are all printed in three languages, which is certainly not interesting in itself. Almost everything you buy in Europe is printed in at least two; what was interesting was the languages used. The UHT brand sold at the commissary, Arla, comes from Denmark, so naturally one of the languages was Danish. The second was of course English, the linguistic common currency of Europe. Can you guess the third? German? Nope. French? Nope. Dutch? Spanish? Italian? No, no, and no. Nor Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish or Portuguese. The third language printed on all the UHT milk in our U.S. army commissary is of course…

Gaellic. Yep, apparently they store a lot of milk out there in rural Ireland. Or they don’t have electricity. Or they just love that kinda odd aftertaste that makes me feel like I’m back in the wardroom of the USS Mount Hood enjoying some delicious oven-baked breaded meat patty on a ceramic plate. Anyway, I’ve had little exposure to Gaellic outside of chillin’ out to some Enya, and I have to say, that is one strange looking language. So my new favorite word for the week is (make sure your browser is on full screen): assigiiaaqqissqarsimasuuvoq. That’s right, a double U and a double Q in one word. You need at least four sets of scrabble tiles (and two boards) to play that baby.

I’m pretty sure it means homogonenized.

Two weeks ago, we had a bit of excitement at work when our chapel secretary passed out. We thought it was a heart attack and called 911 (actually 112 here in Europe). He was OK, but left in an ambulance and was taken to the hospital for some tests. (Turned out to be an ulcer.) Then last week, I was lifting weights in the base gym with a couple high school guys when one of them smashed his finger pretty bad – fingertip swelled up, he bled everywhere. I walked him the 200 or so meters over to the fire station to get it looked at, and then waited with him until his dad picked him up. Two unrelated incidents, neither directly involving me, and neither ultimately that serious (though the first was a little scary at the time).

That night, for my daily Facebook status update, I wrote “Steve hopes to end his streak of consecutive weeks interacting with base paramedics at TWO.” I thought it was a good status update: interesting, clever, mysterious – always gotta try to hook some comments, right? Of course no one one asked about it, and life moved on. The next morning, as I arrived at work, the garrison chaplain says: “Hey, your name came up this morning. Something about paramedics at two in the morning?”

What? I was completely puzzled at first; it took a minute or two to connect the dots and figure out what had happened. I realized a colleague with whom I’m friends on Facebook mentioned my status comment in the weekly staff conference call, in the process misinterpreting the word “TWO”, not to mention my ill-expressed tongue-in-cheek intentions. Well, no harm no foul I guess, but it’s pretty interesting how differently information is relayed in this digital world.

So, anyone else have any good stories about crazy untended consequences resulting from communication via the Internet?

The decision to resign from flying initiated perhaps the biggest change of life direction I’ve experienced so far. That moment has been on my mind recently; partly due to the anniversary, partly my recent high school reunion, and partly I think the fact that I’m facing another change in direction in the near future. This one (from youth ministry to seminary) might not be quite as radical a change in trajectory as that one was, but momentous nonetheless. High school, college, navy assignments, MCYM…I felt restless to move on after each chapter of my adult life. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever find something I’m content doing for more than four or five years in a row. I think I hope so. But maybe God’s just given me a sojourner’s heart that will keep us on the move as longs as we’re able. We’ll see. It’s been a pretty great flight so far.

Princeton Theological Seminary, the oldest Presbyterian seminary in the U.S., is located in New Jersey, about an hour north of Philadelphia in the same town as Princeton University. However, it is and always has been a completely separate institution. Though I (and other folks) will commonly refer to the seminary simply as “Princeton,” it is probably not the Princeton you are thinking of. It’s a common misperception (or at least one recently held by me), that PTS split off from the University at some pont in the past. Not so. Their relationship is only geographical.

When I’ve mentioned Princeton, several friends have asked, sometimes with uneasy concern, “Isn’t it pretty liberal?” (Or as my good friend Kerry said, tongue-not-quite-in-cheek, “You know they don’t believe believe anything there, right?”) Well, first of all, I don’t know. I have liberal friends and aquaintances who seem to think of PTS as conservative. It is a PC(USA) seminary, which is generally a liberal denomination. So if there was some hypothetically objective liberal-conservative theological center point, I suppose Princeton would be to the “left” of it. But second of all, I don’t care. I’m really weary of the liberal-conservative dichotomy. I don’t find thinking that way helpful to faithfully following Jesus. And inasmuch as I feel more and more discouraged when I hear conservative people say the word “liberal” as if it was synonymous with “evil”, I’m inclined to welcome some “liberal” influence in my life.

What I do know is that the PTS grads I’ve personally known (three of them, from three different decades) are thoughtful, intelligent, joyful, fair-minded people who are passionate about following Jesus. (And if matters to you, all theologically conservative too!) Yeah, that’s a pretty small sample set, but Princeton seems to be a place where we would be surrounded by people who are commited to Christ and committed to academic scholarship. I’m excited about that. There’s more I can say about why PTS for us, but that will have to wait for another post.

MCYM has a storage cage in the basement of a building in the area of the base where the PX is. There are no military personnel, offices, equipment, etc on this part of the base; just some fast food, a gas station, and other commercial outlets. The civilian security guard (after scanning our valid ID cards and searching the vehicle) flatly refused to let us enter because of the missing license plate. We would have to drive back to the main post (Patrick Henry Village – PHV) to file a report with the MP’s. “How will we get through the gate there?” The MP desk sergeant will call the gate to let you through. “Can’t he just do that here?” No – we need to go get a report form for the missing license plate.

Ten minutes later, after another vehicle inspection, we explain the story to the gate guards at PHV. They had received the call from the MP’s and they do let us on post. Otis goes into the MP station and starts the process of filling out the report for the missing plate. In his conversation with the desk sergeant, it comes to light that we are driving a rental van, not a government van. “Oh! That’s a different story! You don’t need a police report; I’ll just call the gate and have them let you in.”

“So you want us to go back to the PX and you’ll do what we wanted you to do in the first place?” Of course, Otis didn’t actually say that, but we had a good laugh about it as we drove back over the PX. After searching our van for a third time that morning, the gate guard at the PX called the MP desk to confirm what we had told him. He came back and said “You’re not going to believe this, the desk sergeant says you need to go back over to PHV again.” Fortunately, he was kidding. Unfortunately, I think I would have believed it.

Well, seeing it in print, that story is not as funny as I remember it. Maybe it was the sun and sleep deprivation.

Fabulous has one B.

The makers of Scrabulous went with one; I used two when I blogged about it recently. Since then, Scrabbulous! has been my most active post and that incorrectly spelled non-word has been my most common search engine hit. So in the hopes of getting even more totally random traffic through the halls of Logomanikos (and maybe a couple more challengers on Facebook), I just thought I’d post this strategically-tagged bit of a nothing post. If you’d like to play, click here or leave a comment if it’s not clear how.

I’m curious to see what it will be like reconnecting with other people whom I haven’t kept in touch with. Will it feel odd and uncomfortable? Will it be interesting? Will dormant friendships rekindle? Will I remember anyone? Will they remember me? Will it feel real or artificial? Will it feel like now or like I’m back in high school again? These are the questions that are swirling in the back of my mind. Not the front of my mind though; I’ve been too busy to really think about this trip much.

So one of the things we were supposed to do for this reunion was create a biography / memory page. It was quite a project trying to sum up a little over half my life on one 8.5 by 11 page. And as I did it, I also had to reflect a bit on my motivation for spending so much time trying to “get it right” and make it look good. How much is my pride driving this project? Do I just want to make myself look impressive for a bunch of people I don’t really even know anymore? Shannon wisely reminded me as I agonized with formatting pictures and margins and so on, “All the people who really care already know what’s happened in the last 20 years of your life.” Certainly good counsel. On the other hand, I do look forward to seeing other people’s pages, folks I haven’t seen since 1988, and I do hope that many of them took the time to really effectively give me some sense of where life has taken them these past two decades. So I’m at least telling myself that I really did all this work for them, not for me. You can opine for yourself about that rationale. Anyway, here’s what I came up with (if you find any typos, please don’t tell me):