Dallas

I just got done reading this article about Dallas Willard, a Christian Philosopher one of the deepest thinking and most articulate guys out there. As I've mentioned before, I've read a few of his books, including The Divine Conspiracy, which rocked me like no other book has.

I like this excerpt from the article on the subject discipleship, which unfortunately is way too true:

Generally, what I find is that the ordinary people who come to church are basically running their lives on their own, utilizing 'the arm of the flesh'—their natural abilities—to negotiate their way," he says. "They believe there is a God and they need to check in with him. But they don't have any sense that he is an active agent in their lives. As a result, they don't become disciples of Jesus. They consume his merits and the services of the church. … Discipleship is no essential part of Christianity today.

Wii Gone Bad

Our Nintendo Wii is having problems. Nate brought the Zelda disc up to me and there were some deep scratches in the disc in a circular pattern very close to each other. I looked at one of the other games and saw the same thing. I called Nintendo's tech support and they asked me to send in the Wii and scratched disc for repair. By the time I get the shipping label, send it in, have it fixed and get it back, we're probably talking three weeks, which sucks.

Tags: wii, scratched disc, nintendo, problem

Eli 15 years ago

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Dave Kurt

Dryness

For the past 4 or 5 months or I've been in this slump in my faith. There's been this distance been God and I that's not normally there, or at least not for long periods of time like this. It's tough to describe. During my Mom's death I felt this intimacy with God, not that I was pursuing Him through that, but that He was right there beside me as I was going through it, knowing that I didn't have much to give and He was there to just be enough for me, but I didn't have it in me to pursue Him. Over the past months, I've tried to meet God where I'm at, but it's seemed hollow on my side, like I was going through the motions. I'd sit down to read the bible or pick up a book and just not connect with what I was reading. Normally, I feel like I can just push through this. In the past I felt like if I was diligent in spending time each day reading, journaling and praying that I could snap myself out of my slump. Given enough self-discipline, I could pick myself up by my own bootstraps. This time, I felt like I didn't really even want to do that. It's a weird place for me to be. I've been dealing with life on my own terms and doing alright at it. My communication with God has been more of an on-the-go kind of conversation, but nothing intimate. I know it's not a great long-term solution, but it's been working alright and I just haven't been able to move on my own. I'm all for talking about the good stuff God's doing in my life and the way I'm being challenged and changed, but it's not as easy to throw out there the stagnation. Luckily I've got great friends who know me well and meet me where I'm at with this kind of stuff.

I sat down the other day and wrote in my journal for the first time in 4 months. I did it after reading the Bible as a part of this "Reading the Bible in a Year" thing that my friend Brad setup for Will, Mark, Eli, Bob, Matt and a bunch of other guys. It's a cool setup managed through Crosswalk.com's web site. It gives you a list of sequential readings each day (about 15-20 minutes worth) and allows you to see what you're supposed to read and update your progress accordingly so your friends can see where you're at as well within the group and offer encouragement and accountability. At the very least, it's got me moving. Inertia is always tough for me to get through, so this is a good start. I'm reading with some renewed interest, I'm journaling again and trying move towards a deeper level of intimacy in my walk with Jesus, back to where I know it can be, to where it's been for me in the past.

Pi

Fun facts about Pi:
You might assume that it'd be useful to know a trillion digits of pi. However, if you had a circle the size of the observable universe, and you wanted to compute its circumference with an accuracy equal to the size of a proton, the number of digits of pi that you'd need is only 50.

Em's Outfit

The Wal-Mart Prank

I thought this was an hilarious story about a guy who got fired from the night shift at Wal-Mart and decided to get back at them. Read it here at The Wal-Mart Prank

Shocking Experience

Nate and I went to the Ray's tonight to watch Michigan do what they do best in the Rose Bowl. Matt Gielow brought over this game called Lightning Reaction Extreme. It's a game where each person holds the handle and watches the light in the middle. When it turns from red to green, the last person to hit their button gets shocked. Fairly hard. It's a fantastic game. Nate and I immediately took to it, not sure everyone else was too excited about the game. When we got home, Nate handed it to Cathie to play without explaining how the game worked and Cathie had a very shocking experience with the game.

Tags: Lightning Reaction Extreme, University of Michigan, Big Losers

Bender

My nephew Bender (Ben) Mayes cracks me up. He's almost two and he's almost always got a smile on his face. He's oepn to anyone who will pay attention to him and he seems to like everyone.

As a side note, his sister Allie really took to our kitten rascal when they were over yesterday. Allie has her own little way of speaking, and can't quite say the word "kitty" so instead uses a word that sounds a lot like kitty but rhymes with a part of the female anatomy in the chestal region. It never stopped being funny.

New Years Pranks

After midnight, our neighbors (the Hannigans, Lanams and Lowers) came over and silly-stringed our front door. Not to be outdone, we silly-stringed them back and decided that to turn it up a notch. Kevin and lugged my old hot water heater over to the Hannigans front porch - because who doesn't want to wake up int he morning with a 250lb hot water heater at your house.

We woke up the next morning to find our dryer, hot water heater and a Christmas tree on our porch.

We've got a running thing going with these neighbors. When Buck was visiting once, we went over and took a road-barrier complete with flashing lights and put it on their front porch. We've done a bunch of stuff back and forth, but this was the first time it involved appliances.

New Years Eve

Last night we had most of my family over for New Years Eve. The Dan/Kris family were there, The Kevin/Sooze family, our family and my Dad were all there. Everyone got here around 7 and we ended up getting to sleep about 2.

Around 10pm the kids decided to put on a show for us. They sang and danced to four different songs for us. The video's pretty darn funny. I'll post it later.


My Dad was the real hero, playing cards with the the kids for about four hours straight, while the rest of us

Kevin taught us a fun game with scrabble pieces that goes pretty quickly and doesn't use a scrabble board. I'm not much good at it, but I was able to get some big points by twice using the combination of Eh and Ho to double-use the letter H.

We had all sorts of interesting drinks - from Jello shots (tequila/lime, vanilla stoli/orange, coconut rum/rasberry), a peanut butter, jelly drink and one that tasted like a red tootsie roll pop. We had enough food to feed a small army with everyone bringing different appetizers and desserts, including guacamole. I'm not sure exactly what Cathie and Sooze are doing in these pictures, but it had something do with the fact that old Guacamole looks a lot like baby diarrhea. I know Cathie's going to love this picture.

As you can see from the picture below, my sister Susan wasn't happy when Ben kept getting out of bed, but at least Ben got to bang in the new year. My friend Nicki told me a while back that her family would always bang pots and pans on their porch for New Years. I thought this was the goofiest tradition in the world, but it turned out that Cathie used to do the same thing as a kid. At midnight, all of the kids have their pots and pans ready to go, but it was raining too hard and even

Another tradition that my nephew Matthew has always loved is his new years eve kiss from his Aunt Susan. Maybe it's the hair on her chin-mole that tickles Matthew that he loves so much, but we this is one tradition that Matthew never misses out on.

You can see the pictures here in the Kurt Family Photo Album.

Tags: New Years Eve, Scrabble, Guacamole, Diarrhea

Pursuit of Happyness

Cathie and I went on a date the other night and saw the movie The Pursuit of Happyness with Will Smith. I can't remember the last time I walked out of a movie that drained and down. The movie ends on a high note, but you spend two hours watching Will Smith's character, Charlie Gardner take hit after hit. You spend so much of the movie willing things to go right for the guy and it's exhausting. The movie is great in that it puts life in perspective, things like having a hot water heater and dryer go in the same week for instance. You walk away reminded of the plight of the poor and how the smallest things can help. Good flick, but take a Xanax before you gou.

Rascal

I'm a dog guy and I hope I'm not becoming one of those guys who loves his cat a little more than is healthy, but this cat of ours cracks me up. I was against it from the beginning, but this guy seems to have a pretty decent personality, as my sister and fellow-cat hater Sooze attests to. Rascal loves to wrestle with the dog, toes, the guinea pig and Emily's stuffed animals and when he's not doing that, he's being carried around by Emily. We've had a couple girl cats in the past, both who were annoying. Rascal is a boy and he seems to be pretty tolerable. Riley pretty much just ignores him as the cat tries to launch on her and wrestle with her. The cat will walk up to Riley and just smack her in the fact with her paw, nibble at her ears and try and get the Riley's tale. Riley hasn't retaliated yet. Maybe it happens when we're gone.

Hot Water Heater

On Tuesday Cathie sent me downstairs to check and see if the pilot light was out on the hot water heater only to find that it had died, leaving lots of water in the basement. I cleaned up the water and called Sears to find out what the easiest model would be to replace this with. While I was on the phone with them, I noticed on the web site that the new model ($500) came with a 12 year warranty. It turns out, so does the one i have now. After talking to them for a while, they agreed to replace mine at no cost, except for installation. Meanwhile, we had no hot water, thus no dishwasher and very cold showers.

My brother-in-law Kevin and family came down Thursday to help me remove the original one and install the new one. My sister Susan spent most of the time making flemmy chicken noodle soup and laughing about our kitchen. It wouldn't have been a tough job for people who knew what they were doing, but both Kevin and I were a little lacking in the "copper soldering" department. After 7 hours non-stop and 5 trips to the hardware store, we called it quits at about 11pm and decided to start fresh in the morning.

After another couple of hours, we got it working, short of a couple minor leaks that will hopefully stop soon. Kevin's the kind of guy who knows how to do just about anything around the house and is willing to lend a hand to anyone to get the job done, no matter how nasty. He came down last year and and built a deck for Jon and he's helped me on a bunch of projects around here. He may suffer from male-pattern-baldness even though he's not yet 30, but he's a hand brother-in-law to have around, not to mention he can help Nate and I beat any video game level we get stuck on.

Weird Weather

I can't remember the last time it was 50+ degrees at the end of December. The kids are disappointed because they can't play in the snow on their winter break. As much as I enjoy a white Christmas, I'm okay with taking my Christmas lights down without having to wear a coat. This has got to be the first time I've ever gotten them down this quickly after Christmas.

Fantasy Football Finals 2006

The season is over and the results are in. Here's how it went:
First Place - Mark Niemi
Second Place - The Rays Boys
Third Place - Me

Sadly enough Brad, his brother, his son and Eli and his brother-in-law Jeff and Matt Gielow all finished waaaay behind me.

Susan's Christmas Outfits

My sister Susan went all out this year in wearing beautiful Christmas outfits. The first being her brides maid dress from our wedding, the second outfit being a flannel body-suit pajamas of my Mom's.

Christmas Day

We were able to sleep in until around 8 on Christmas Morning, which is a record. Again, you gotta love the kids getting older. The kids opened presents from my Dad and then we loaded up. Normally we go to Cathie's parents a couple miles away and spend Christmas with them, but this year they're on an extended vacation in Hawaii. Instead, we headed home and cleaned up in order to head over to my Aunt's house for Christmas Day. This is something we haven't been able to attend since we've gotten married, but it's a tradition I grew up with and my Mom had done growing up as well. We would head down to Detroit on Christmas and would spend Christmas Day with all of my relatives.

We had a chance to see a lot of extended family that I hadn't seen in a long time, including my Aunt Elaine, one of my Mom's cousins who has always been super generous and thoughtful with us as kids and our kids for Christmas. We got home around five and were exhausted.

Christmas Eve

This year's Christmas was different and tinged with sadness. It was always one of my Mom's favorite holidays and she would go all out between her cooking, gifts and joy to make each Christmas more special than the last.

We all met at my Dad's house for our big dinner, trying to replicate the giant meal that my Mom always made each year. We ate an awesome meal and then got ready for church. Taking the family pictures is always quite the ordeal but this year went smoother than most, maybe because the kids are getting older. We each took the standard family picture:

And then the great-grandchildren took a picture with my Grandma, one normal, the other silly:

We took this brand new family picture of everyone (except Will):

We then headed to church at St. Luke's in Haslett. Even though I go to a church that would be considered contemporary, I love the traditional liturgy for Christmas Eve, finished with the candle light service. Somehow I was in a row as the only "responsible" adult with 6 kids, which made the cande light part of the service fun. I was able to blow out Matthew's candle four times, Andrew got yelled at three times by Dan and Emily and Allie each burned themselves. We were surprisingly good with not having my Mom there to keep an eye on all of us. One of the funniest moments occurred when the boys (all sitting in my row) sang the hymn What Child is This and giggled as they heard and saw the line, "Where ox and ass are feeding?". I mouthed to my brothers and Dad what the boys were all giggling about and they too found it pretty darn funny. We got to say "ass" in church. That's funny to me. I think my Mom would have grinned and then rolled her eyes.

We came back to my Dad's house and ate some more and the kids got to open presents from their Aunts and Uncles, which included penguin themed pajamas, which Kris was somehow able to find for all of the kids and herself. Kris loves penguins - their shape, their size and their textures so we weren't suprised when she finally was able to fulfill her dream.

One of the kids got this cool stretchy thing, which at one time or another we all were able to put on our heads.

My sister Sooze loves to try and get into other people's pictures (I'm guessing this is where Nate gets it from) and this picture is no different.

Once the kids were downstairs hanging out, the rest of us did our new stocking exchange thing. We each spent no more than $5 to get the maximum amount of stuff. I had drawn Kris's name and picked a theme that she would appreciate as much as my brother Dan would (hint: it involved dollar store lingerie and a rooster statue). Kris was kind enough to get me gifts that involved this very nice jock strap.

As a new tradition, each of us put some memories of my Mom in a a stocking and we took turns sharing them. There were a lot of laughter and a lot of tears, but it was a cool, focused time to remember Mom.

We got the kids to bed around 11ish and Kevin, Jon, my Dad and I ended up playing the Wii together. My Dad turned out to be a master at Wii bowling and golf and ended up smoking us all. The controls are so intuitive, it makes it a blast. With bowling, you move your arm just like you are bowling, twisting your wrist on release to put spin on the ball.

We had a great Christmas eve and wisely hid the bells before to ensure a peaceful Christmas morning. My Mom had a tradition of getting up super early on Christmas Morning and letting the kids get the rest of us up early as well ringing these demon possessed bells that make you want to hurt someone badly at 6am.

You can find the pictures from Christmas Eve in the Kurt Family Gallery.

Christmas Eve Eve

Because our church is in a school until our building is completed, we have church on Christmas Eve Eve. This fits well into our family Christmas schedule and since we're in town, we invite friends and neighbors to church and then over to our house afterwards.

We had a nice service with a nice mix of music, teaching and drama. The message and drama focused back through the Old Testament Maddie did a reading during the service (thanks to Mark Hamilton for the video footage)


After church we went back and over to our house and hung out. We had lots of food and we hung out talking. The kids had their turn at playing the Nintendo Wii before the Dad's took over. We took turns with the different sports games, bowling, baseball, golf and tennis - finding a way to compete at all of them.

Eli and Mark only dreamed of keeping up with my ninja like wii skills.

You can see the pictures of our Christmas Eve Eve here.