Fusion Update

It is Sunday night, France is burning and I am listening to Travis. You will have to excuse me, I have been sick the last three or four days and haven't felt like doing anything. It's some kind of sinus infection or something like that. It may even be Malaria or Scarlet Fever or even Scurvy.

As my prior post indicated, last weekend I attended the Fusion conference in the DFW area. It was awesome. The whole point of the conference was to encourage singles to do something with their lives. It also was geared to helping you find out what that might be and putting you in contact with people who can help you down that path. The speakers were tremendous and dead on target and for you Caedmon's fans they led the praise and worship. At one point they asked us to write down if we could do anything, regardless or time and money, what would it be? I put be a writer or possibly a late night talk show host. I wanted to put down be a dictator as well but decided that was to unbiblical and just plain silly to boot.
Margaret Feinberg spoke as well. She was a liberal arts major who had no clue what to do with life until she discovered writing. Anyways, I was highly encouraged by her story. I think there are two things I got out of the conference.

1. I believe I am called to write. This may sound like a gimme but it is something I have really wrestled with. I mean that it sounds so pie in the sky, like a kid who says he wants to be an astronaut, so it has really been a challenge for me to embrace the idea. Perhaps the truth of the matter is that it has been a challenge to embrace the idea God would be good enough to call me to something so cool. I always have struggled with accepting His goodness. Anyways, after the conference, I am sure of the call to writing and I have a great joy and peace about it. I have no idea where it will take me or what form it will take. I could be published someday or I may end up just blogging. It could be short stories or novels or articles, and it may take two years or ten, I really do not know but I aim to find out.

2. I am open to the idea of missions. I have been thinking a lot about this lately. I love to glorify God and serve in churches and I would love to live overseas, so why not do both? Now, I am not saying I feel called to do this, but what I am saying is I'm very open to the idea of doing so and I think I should explore it some more. That alone is a miracle seeing as how in the past I would dig my heals into the dirt at the very thought of missions or ministry. Anyways, I will explore that path as it seems best through prayer.

And now for the moment you have all been waiting for: the start of a new segment, Great Moments in OCD History. Yes folks that's right, OCD is here and it has left its mark in time and space. This segment is compromised of many tales of obsession. It could be something historical that contributed to or took away from OCD (such as the discovery of anti-depressants), it could be something that happened to me personally or even something I read or heard about. It is wide open to interpretation but it's all good as well. So without further ado, and I don't know how the bang can live up to the hype, I give you:

Great Moments in OCD History:

1. The mission trip: The names have been changed to protect the innocent in this first story. My friends, Ronnie and Jenny Mavis, as well as several other people I know, went on a mission trip to Morocco this summer. While there they went into to minister to the Berber tribes. They are the native tribes who still live the rural life in the wild desert mountains of North Africa. The restroom facilities pretty much consisted of a hole in the ground in a little shack. Hand washing equipment was non-existent. So what do they do for sanitation? I will tell you. Whenever somebody has to go, they use their left hand (or maybe it's the right) for bathroom purposes. This is important because at dinner the use a community bowl that everyone dips out of. For dinner they all use the OTHER hand to eat with and dip into the bowl. This would drive anyone with OCD crazy, just the mere presence of unwashed hands around a dinner table would be enough to make me insane. Add that to the community bowl and I think I would lose it. Consequently my fears would have been justified because all but two people on the trip got very sick from the bowl passing. I mean sick in the, you don't want to be sick in the desert without clean bathrooms, kind of sick. So my fears were doubly rationalized. This is truly a great moment in OCD history and also shows why, if I am called to missions, then it is to somewhere posh and civilized, like Western Europe.

2. The office. This is a true tail of an event that happened to me a few days ago and I decided it had to make the list. I went to an office for a visit. On the way in I decided to go to the restroom. I find said location and see a sign that says, "Doors are kept locked, get keys from secretary." Great, that's a recipe for disease, I thought. Taking keys in and out of restrooms is just not a good idea. So I suck it up and do it. In the process I drop the keys on the bathroom floor. Now the bathroom floor of a men's room is not at all like that of a women's room. It is a thing to be avoided at all costs. It is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. So that made things worse. Then after delicately picking the keys up, I wash my hands, turn to dry them, only to realize that there were no paper towels, only an air dryer! So I dry my hands but I notice that the door is locked and has a knob, and I have no paper towels to open them with. So I think I used my shirt tail, mediocre at best, and walk out with the dirty keys in my hand, wondering just where I could wash myself clean again and how long it would be. The real kicker is the office was a doctor's office! They know better! How could they? Then again it could be brilliant. In house therapy and the spread of Typhoid and other diseases would keep patients coming back over and over again with the sickness's they got from the badly designed restrooms. Go figure.

Well that's it for now folks. I hope you enjoyed the new segment. Faith, as for foot washing I am juxtapositionally opposed to the Christian tradition of foot washing ceremonies. Then again, I try to keep my feet clothed in socks most of the time anyways. More to come.

By the way, does anyone think this trouble in France is merely an accident? On no my friends, Prussian agents have been working at this for sometime and now the undermining of the European Union's infrastructure is well under way. Muahahahhah.

In closing I will leave you with a couple of pictures of me and the pumpkin I carved for Halloween. Like father like son I suppose. Later.