Here are some photos of places that I lived while I was in Carbondale.  The only one I do not have here is the dorm I lived in my Freshman and Sophomore years.  It was Abbott Hall room 114 and we lived on the same floor as the SIU basketball team and people who needed wheel chairs.  Kevin Boske and I shared a room and we lived with guys like Tom Blunk, Curtis Lueke, Wade, Larry Frantzen, Brian Yako, Mirko (who was from Serbia and had an absolutely gorgeous girlfriend that was about 6'1"), Marcelo (Who was a 7 footer from Brazil that could speak no English), Garret (who put his hand through a electric meter), Ken DeLuca and his girlfriend Laura, Tim the wheel chair kid that always wanted me to take him off the toilet, Brad the Weasel, and Larry's giant hairy roommate who had intestinal problems and bad body odor on top of it.

Then Larry, Curtis, Brian, Wade and I moved to the Country Club Circle Apartments and lived  there for a year or so.   Kevin, Ken, and a few of the other guys moved in across the drive from our apartment too.  We were so happy...

Then I moved out the University Heights trailer park with a couple that needed a room mate.  They were from New York and she was a sculptor who made giant vaginas out of bronze and he worked at the Diner with me.  They moved out and Chaz, the other manager from the diner moved in with me ( he was the best roommate ever),  Chaz left and "Shad" moved in.  My friend Michelle Kress, who was from Mattoon also, lived in the trailer across the street.

I met Faith and we moved into the apartment on Freeman and lived there together until the relationship exploded and she left me a shell of man.  I lived there by myself for a while until I got the trailer in the previous post.  

Tracy and I got married and I abandoned the trailer and moved into the Forrest Hall apartment building that Tracy's dad owned for several years.  We were not there long before he sold the building and we had to live with the in-laws for 3 months (Yikes).  We eventually found the house on Walkup and I lived there with my family for four years before moving to Tolono 

Hands down, the most important place of my years in Carbondale was The Corner Diner.  I began working there sometime in 1990 after I had been going there to eat and study for about 6 months and decided that it would be good extra money to supplement my G.I. Bill money.  The waitress I always had, Kara,  was one of the best waitresses I have ever seen and she helped me get a job waiting tables. 

The Corner Diner, in its prime, was a 24 hour diner that would seat about 140 people and would be jammed packed with locals in the morning, studiers from the University in the evening and bar goers looking for some after 2 AM chili cheese fries.  in 1990, there was not one espresso machine in the entire town and the quantity of coffee was more important than the quality.  In many ways, it was a major hub of social activity beyond what a restaurant would have been normally.  When I first started to work at the Diner, it was owned by a man named Bill Haupt. Bill also owned the bar located in the basement underneath ABC liquor, T-Birds, and would serve anyone who looked older than 15.  Bill's personal life and business practices were always questionable and this made working for him difficult.  It was the "pay every one in cash" sort of place at first. 

I eventually became a manager at the Diner and I became a well recognized figure in Carbondale for several years. I met my pastor in the Diner, heard the gospel for the first time in the Diner and even had my conversion experience there by the dumpster. I met every girl I ever dated at College at the Diner and eventually met my wife there as well.  she would sit in the first booth by the pie case with Danielle almost every single day. I was impressed that she drank her coffee black.  After Tracy and I got married I even tried to buy the restaurant with the help of my father.  I just could not get the financing, however, and I am thankful that I did not.  As important as the Diner was in my life, it was time to put it behind me.

These pictures are of the building as it stands now, but it is a shadow of its former self.  The Corner Diner is now mostly a Mexican restaurant. I was in there on Sunday Morning at 9:00 am and there were only about 6 customers. "In the day" we would have 150 customers, 8 servers, 4 cooks, 3 dishwashers and checkout girl and a manager cranking out eggs, bacon and burgers out of our woefully inadequate grill space.  It was sad to see it like that and I did not even stay for a cup of coffee.  You can't go home again.

This weekend I went to Carbondale for an ordination council at my old church. I used the opportunity to take some pictures of certain places in that I used to live, work and socialize. It was strange to be back and I had not been around town for many years. One of the strangest sites was the finding the last place I lived before I was married: The Estate.

The estate was a trailer that I bought from a women who was one of the many earthy people that seem to be indigenous to Carbondale. She was a receptionist at a Yoga Therapy and Karma cleansing center just outside of town, had lots of "dreamcatchers" hanging around and smelled vaguely of wet cat and cabbage. She assured me that the trailer was quite free of any negative energy, but failed to tell me that the oven did not work.

I really liked this place and it was in really great shape on the inside with its 1950 art deco style, curved wooden ceilings and yacht like appointments. I lived there by myself for the most part although I was joined by friend, aspiring actor and Pavement fan, Reed Coker for a short time. It was while I lived here that I hit my lowest points after my conversion and also the place that I got serious about following my calling. This was also the trailer that I lived in when I hid inside the darkened trailer to foil a burglar that had been robbing me. Follow this link to read the Daily Egyptian article describing the event.

When I pulled up to the trailer yesterday, it was clear that it had seen better days. some windows were broken and the covered porch looked as though it had been ripped off by a strong storm. Most surprisingly, however is that the trailer has not been lived in since I abandoned it in 1995! When I looked inside there were still some of my stuff that I left behind and the construction supplies that I was using to do some remodeling! It was like a 10x35 time capsule! Below is a current pictures and an here is a link to an advertisement of the exact model of trailer and a layout of the inside.

After a battle of many years, activist have pressured the Board of Trustees at the University of Illinois to ban the Chief from performing at home games. The U of I will still be known as the Fighting Illini, which does not make sense. If you are banning the chief because of perceived offense to Native Americans then why retain the name? Perhaps we should change the name of the whole state as well. I wonder if they are going to keep the chief image on all of the U of I logos...

I guess when it comes down to it, I would probably would vote to keep the chief, but it is not something that I feel that strongly about. There are only so many battles one can fight and this is not one of them for me. I would add, however, that this issue is closely related to the flurry of campus speech codes that came about in the late eighties and early nineties that severely restricted any expression that could be found offensive to any group. These laws were all struck down by the supreme court

This also happens to be the first video that I have uploaded to the web and used in Fear and Trembling. I was actually at this game last night. My friend Jason got tickets for this game without knowing it was going to be the last dance of the Chief. By game time the tickets were going for $300 a piece on Ebay so I offered him the opportunity to back out of the deal and sell the tickets, but he wanted to go and we got to see this halftime and a very good basketball game as well. Illinois beat Michigan 54-42 and and judging by all the orange I think every IDOT worker in the state was there to see the game. In the second half a good number of the students took off their orange shirts to reveal black "save the chief" shirts.

"No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us." Romans 8:37

This passage from Romans 8 has been with me for several weeks and I have thought about its content as I look closely at how I live my life, lead my congregation and raise my family. Is the life I live lived in accordance with the assurance of salvation that I have? What does a life lived in assurance look like and what kind of leader, father and husband does it produce? I think this issue also has ramifications for how the church operates in and interacts with the world since it essentially deals with a Christian's self perception. Here is my point in a more direct fashion: We are told that we are more than conquerors and that we can have full confidence in God's salvation, but yet we live as a people that are insecure and fearful.

In the next few post I would like to explore some of the way that this fear and insecurity is reflected in our lives. A careful examination of chapter 8 shows a specific emphasis on persecution and hardships but the not in the manner that one might think. Ultimately this persecution and hardship is diminished by comparison to our salvation in Christ. Why then do we emphasis the persecution? Why then are we Christians pre-occupied with the world's opposition to the Gospel instead of God's favor for those who are in Christ?

"What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us?" Romans 8:31

California Dreamin' by The Mamas and The Papas irritates me every time I hear it! These lyrics in particular:

Stopped into a church
I passed along the way
Well, I got down on my knees
Got down on my knees
And I pretend to pray
I pretend to pray
You know the preacher likes the cold
Preacher likes the cold
He knows Im gonna stay
Knows Im gonna stay
California dreamin
California dreamin
On such a winters day

Most people have this dumb notion that you are doing the preacher some big favor by coming to church. Last time I checked I did not get a dollar per convert and this song makes it sound like we just sit around wringing our hands waiting for people to walk in!

Although I love the song Eleanor Rigby, there is a similar sentiment in that song too.

Father mckenzie writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear
No one comes near.
Look at him working. darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there
What does he care?

I guess it is interesting how popular culture portrays pastors, especially Baptist. Who can forget the Baptist preacher in Footloose played by John Lithgow? He practices his sermon delivery in an empty sanctuary and has congregation members who want to burn books, of course.

Every snow storm, hurricane or other natural disaster reminds me that when something bad has already happened your time for planning ahead is over. For the past few months I have been buying extra food items to be ready for self sufficiency for 3 to 6 months. This article about the rapid production of a bird flu vaccine has several positive points but it also holds a few disturbing ones as well. The main point is that the world health systems are getting better at creating a bird flu vaccine, but it must still wait until the strain breaks out until they can begin to create the vaccine. After an outbreak it would take 3 months for the vaccine to be ready. This three month lead time is better than before, but I am quite sure that this does not include distribution and immunization time.

The second and most disturbing point of this article was that Indonesia recent stopped sharing the bird flu strains with the World Health Organization because of an "exclusive deal" made with the U.S. Pharmaceutical company, Baxter. When we have a serious outbreak of some sort of killer flu will the vaccine be caught up in an "intellectual property" fight? Indonesian has since started to share samples again, but I believe that this is a foreshadowing of things to come. Somebody is going to try and make a lot of money on a global flu pandemic.

I can do little against these global economic forces, but I can have some extra food on hand in case the family needs to stay out of the public a while. I just made an order to Honeyville Grains for some Steel Cut Oats, some dried fruits and powdered eggs. I have already start to use the incredibly good steel cut oats in my families normal diet so I got a whole case of oats in #10 cans (they can be stored indefinitely) for 36 Dollars. This is enough for about 250 bowls of breakfast porridge that cost just 15 cents each! That is a lot of inexpensive and nutritious meals. I am going to experiment with recipes and uses for the powdered eggs and the dried fruit so I just got one can each until I can decided whether or not I will actually use this stuff on a regular basis.

I have also purchased some food grade 5 gallon buckets for flour storage. Tracy is on board with the stocking up plan but she does not like the 10 bags of flour that we have sitting in the kitchen. 50lbs of flour might sound like a lot, but when you cook from scratch like we do, you can go through that much flour in just a few months. I can buy 6, 5 lbs of flour at Aldi for less than 6 dollars. This is a lot of pancakes, pizza crust, bread, waffles, cakes, and biscuits for little money. As you can see, there is also an immediate economic benefit from planning for a disaster. If nothing else, it makes you reconsider your basic home economics and increase the health of your family by not depending on overly processed foods

Last year at the all -grade school track meet we discovered the K was incredibly fast. She won the 50 meter, the 100 meter and came in second in the 200 meter, but only because she was confused where the finish line was and let up too soon. K has always been a bit....aggressive, so these high intensity races were right up her alley. I only wish that I could have gotten a picture of her face as she ran. She was furiously sucking in air through gritted teeth while her eyes looked as though she was chasing down an antelope for the kill.

Tracy and I recognized that she might have some serious athletic ability and decided that we would try to encourage her to develop her giftedness and it just so happens that Tracy works with a world class hurdler at the Fitness Center. Abe Jones is his name and he has offered to train K and another girl on the hurdles. Abe says that good hurdlers are rare and are guaranteed a college scholarship. Tonight was her first night over at the Armory on Campus and I am eager to hear how she did.

Yesterday we got an old school blizzard here in Central Illinois.  The whole family stayed home all day while the snow came down for about 24 hours and the wind blew at up to 40 mph.  We ended up with somewhere around 14 to 16 inches of snow and more is forecasted for Saturday.

It reminds me of the winter of 1978 when We had several blizzards like this one.  I remember trying to walk to a neighbor's house and not being able to move against the wind.  The snow drifts looked like mountains to a 7 year old and we would dig snow caves and tunnels into the enormous drifts.

This morning I went out to try and dig out some of the older people in the church and my friend Martin who had a fiendishly large drift in his drive way.  It was a morning that I really appreciated having a big ole SUV.  The Explorer in 4x4 low made quick work of the drift in my drive. I decided that I will always try and have a capable vehicle like this for emergencies.    Ironically, I woke up this morning lamenting that I was going to miss my work out because the gym was closed.  Shoveling snow for 5 hours took care of my exercise allotment for the day!

The kids have been home from school, of coarse, and I have decided that I need to show these kids how to make a proper snow fort.  They have not seen what you can do with a five gallon bucket, a shovel and some good tunnels.  It might even be a good time to teach some winter survival techniques to the kids.  

The same man who gave me the gargantuan MCS receiver (that I still need to do some work on) also gave me the matching MCS turntable. It did not have a stylus but through the miracle of the internet I found one for a good price on LP Gear, website with all kinds of great phonograph resources. Records are making a comeback recently and I have been trying for several years to pick up a good table for a decent price. Every table that I have found has been defective for some reason and in a fit of desperation I sold most of my LPs at a garage sale (fool). I now have to replace them, but I think that a goodly amount of them were bought by Kyle Wisher, a young man in my Sunday School class for young adults. He is going into the Marines soon, so I am sure that Dark Side of the Moon will do him no good in the Deserts of the Middle East and I will offer to buy them back from him.

I do have a few albums left and you see Sting's Dream of the Blue Turtles cued up on the table in the picture. When I started the record, I forgot how good albums actually sound. I don't think that I have heard a record played since my Gerrard turntable was stolen in the fall of 1995. My ears have become accustomed to MP3s played my home computer system. The MP3s are fine for what they are, but an album played on 1970's vintage equipment (even my speakers are Bang and Olfusen circa 1973 or so) has such incredible sonic presence. I am currently listening to the only Pink Floyd album that I have left, Ummagumma. This album was loaned to me from my Uncle John along with Dark Side of the Moon and they were my first introduction to Floyd. I eventually got copies of my own and wore out a needle listening to them (in 1985 you could still pop down to the radio shack to buy a stylus).

I brought the kids up to the office to see my new record player and they seemed pretty amazed at the contraption. My oldest, however, was not too impressed and asked "How do you know what track is being played?" Well, sweetie, in the old days we used to just listen to the music and know what was playing then you counted the blank spaces on the record until you found the track you wanted to hear. In fact, we used to listen to entire albums and music was composed, for the most part, as part of a larger album. I can't remember ever trying to find one particular track on Dark Side of the Moon. You would put on Side 1, lie down on your Star Wars sheeted twin bed and drift off into the music. I guess that is another change in music these days. Music today is always just background for doing something else and not an activity in and of itself.

"So what do you think of my record player Danielle?"

"I think I will just stick with my IPod…"

I have had an interesting intersection of college coursework this morning. As I have said before, I am taking a course about the First Amendment of the Constitution and a class about human rights. They have both proved to be outstanding classes and they have brought to my focus one of the major differences between the United States and the rest of the world. The difference comes down to the legal trend of the United States to have a more absolutist protection of expression versus most other nation's tendencies to restrict speech that is considered extreme or harmful to other groups. This restriction includes any religious or political group that advocates unpopular political positions. One might understand how laws like this developed in places like Europe since countries like Germany and Italy were both overwhelmed by Fascism and this Fascism led to some of the most horrifying consequences in human history, but this is quite different from the American experience.

The United States has, for the past hundred years, consistently moved towards a rejection of such "group libel laws" and protected the speech of groups such as the Nazis in Skokie (I hate Illinois Nazis), The Klu Klux Klan and the most challenged group in American Supreme Court law, the Jehovah's Witnesses. Other countries think little of barring certain political parties, not recognizing duly elected officials to legislative bodies and censuring many forms of political expression for the sake of protecting their Democracies. The argument has been stated in many ways that to beat Fascist, you must act like them. Historically speaking, however, laws on the books in the United States that were meant to suppress one group invariably were used against the very group that advocated the laws in the first place. A classic example is the House Un-American Activities Committee that was originally designed to investigate and suppress Fascist groups in the 1930's but by the 1950's the committee was used to squash groups that were on the left.

The human rights issue arises when you look at documents such as the various United Nations declarations concerning human rights. Most of the statements are based upon the United State's Bill of Rights, except for glaring exceptions for speech that is deemed libelous towards other groups based on race, color, creed, or religion. What is an American to do? The big question comes down to this: Why has the American democracy been so resilient and thus able to protect all manners of speech without fear of being overthrown by extreme political positions? The French certainly do not enjoy such stability nor do most of the Western democracies. The countries of Europe, although often thought of as "progressive" and "liberal" are in fact quite repressive within their own boarders and have difficulties dealing with the inclusion of unpopular minorities (look at their problem with the growth of Islam in their countries compared to the treatment of religious minorities within the United States.)

I look forward to addressing these questions this semester…

BTW, this post was made using Microsoft 2007. I will try to post an entry with a picture in it. Kevin and I were discussing whether or not that would work or not.

I received Office 2007 today as my friend Kevin foretold in his comments to my previous post. I tried to install them yesterday but my system went wacky jacky on me and the windows installer kept popping up every single time a Microsoft program started. Then my system restore points disappeared and neither 2007 Office OR 2003 Office would work, allow me to uninstall them or let me repair them. With 4 papers due for Saturday, a sermon, and my other projects on OneNote, I started to panic...

So I went medieval on my laptop. I transferred my documents over the network to my home computer, pulled the hard drive, installed the HD in a nifty little USB case that I have, then reformatted the hard drive. Reloading XP and installing 5 years worth of security patches took the better part of 5 hours, but I have finally got the laptop up and running again. The positive side of this is that the computer is really clean of accumulated gunk and running really well.

I did get the Office 2007 installed and I really like the new UI called "the ribbon." I have yet to try the blogging functions, but I have Windows Live Writer that works well enough for the time being. OneNote is the real killer app for me however and I will be writing a post all about OneNote in the near future. It is really that special

To ease the pressure on out family budget we are implementing a moron tax. Our children seem to lose the capacity to make good decisions the closer they get to the age of 18. For example, Danielle, our 16 year old, went to school wearing flip flops because they were the only shoes that matched her outfit. This might not seem to outlandish but it was 2 degrees at the time. This would be a $2.00 offense. K Elizabeth decided to stack all of our plates precariously on top of a small glass as she was doing the dishes. Of course all of the plates fell and 5 to 6 Correll plates shattered into a billion shards on the kitchen floor. This would be a $4.00 moron surcharge (surcharge is what our Govenor calls a new tax). Kaiser came home with a note from school last week stating that he was dancing around in the bathroom with his pants around his ankles. A surcharge of at least $8.00 for parental embarrassment.

I am confident that my children's obvious lack of frontal cortex activity will ensure that our household budget will be in the black for many years to come.

I have been considering what direction I want to take Fear and Trembling. I get a good amount of traffic and readership already, but I believe that I can take that to a new level. The first thing that I need to do is familiarize myself with some of my other hosting options. MSN Spaces has been a good start, but it is entirely too much like MySpace for MyTaste and I would like to have more control over the visuals of the site. I would also like to be on a site that might garner more interaction and comments from outsiders.

My post from last week about Mike Huckabee marks the beginning of the Presidential election campaigns and I would like Fear and Trembling to be part of the campaign "blog-o-sphere" In addition to coverage of the campaign I want to be able to provide some podcasting of sermons and bible studies, more links to related blogs (or even unrelated as in the case of my friend Kevin the Atheist, which by the way, I think is his Warcraft name) and even some interviews of local people that I find interesting. I think that I have a secret desire to be the next Charlie Rose.

I also know that I promised some poetry last month and I have been writing poetry for my class, but I have found that the poetry I have written was so intensely personal that I hesitate to put it on the Internet. As a spend some more time with particular poems, I might reconsider. I certainly underestimated the wrenching that might come about from writing personal poetry. It can be difficult to express certain thoughts that have lived on the periphery of ones mind. I have not written any poetry from recent events, instead they are all happenings of more than 12 years ago that have had time to go from being memories to objective events that seemed to have happened to another person.

I have preached an entire series on the Church Covenant of my local church. This statement is an ethical statement that is meant to embody the principles of church membership as put forth by the scriptures. Such statements can be an important document to assist in establishing expectations for new members and a document to help us hold each other accountable to a commonly held standard of behavior.

However, and this is a big however, a church covenant can also be used to constrain the freedom that we have in Christ. As a bookend to the recent series on the church covenant I am going to preach expositorily through the entire Letter to the Galatians. No other book so clearly portrays the freedom of Christ as something to protect with great zeal.

The question remains though, "What is freedom in Christ?" I have struggled with this issue lately because of what I have seen happening in American Christian culture. Frankly, it is the issue of Christian culture itself that seems to be the problem. Instead of culture or set of external mores and values, the Christian is called to "live by faith" and "walk in the Spirit." A life of faith is not blindly adopting a set of commonly held beliefs of some particular local church body, it is about the inward change that comes from regeneration and Christ being expressed through that particular person. Our common beliefs should then come through the revelation of the Scriptures through the Holy Spirit, not by some sort human socialization that we mistakenly call discipleship.

Galatians deals with the two extremes of this position. Paul is talking about the legalism of the judiazers on the one extreme and the licentiousness of some on the other extreme. I hope that the close study of Galatians will help reveal what "freedom in Christ" looks like in the daily lives of men and women of faith. There are always those who fear licentiousness so much that they fall back into a written code and there are those who rebel so strongly against particular rules of Christian living that they reject any attempt to verbalize a working ethic.

It is freedom in Christ that I want to preach and most importantly it is freedom in Christ that I want to live. To always be constrained by cultural norms is to be at the mercy of the "brother of weaker faith" As much as we should not be stumbling blocks for these weaker brothers, at what point does it become a tyranny of those with lesser faith? At what point is a whole body of Christians constrained in their maturity because of their dependence upon the written Law? I pray that Galatians will reveal this to me and the the Lord gives me the clarity of thought and speech to explain His Word.

My parent went with Tracy and I out to dinner and a movie (the Departed, a very good film)  and we stopped off at  Espresso Royale for a cup of coffee after supper.  I have been trying to cut back on the coffee and the only way that I have found that I can do that is to replace it with some other hot drink, like green tea. 

I decided that I would try some of their "natural" Mayan cocoa that has cayenne pepper in it.  Apparently this cocoa does not go through the "Dutch process" and retains a lot more anti-oxidants and flavnoids, etc.  The fella whipped me up a cup of the stuff and WOW was it good.  The cayenne and the chocolate were really made for each other.  I bought a can of the stuff to bring home and I have been mixing it up with vanilla soy milk instead of milk or water.  I read that milk sucks up all the good stuff out of green tea so I did not want to do that with the cocoa.

Here is the product if you would like to try it for yourself.  It was a little expensive, but I am searching the Internet for the components to make up a mix for myself.  It should not be too hard and comes down to getting the right proportions.