Day 1

Today’s photos come from my yard. The first is our dying tomato plant that still has ripe tomatos on it. I like the contrast of color between the bright red of the tomatos and the brown of the dying plants. Secondly, our rose bushes have started blooming so I got this photo of a bud of one of the bushes.

A more important question is what should news look like?  It’s clear that news has changed. News feels free and as such people think that it should be free, which is fine until you realize that writers, editors, graphic designers and web developers – not to mention the dozens of other workers at a news organization – have to get paid. Ads that pay half a cent per click don’t equal manageable salaries for all these workers. What a lot of newspapers have discovered is that the switch means having a leaner staff. Jeff Jarvis argues that every organization has to become very focused to the point that they can be the source for one type of journalism and then link to all the other types of news. I am a Jarvis-ian when it comes to the future of news and here’s why. The internet provides a lot of information and along with all that information there’s a lot of good info and a lot of bad info. Gradually over time people gravitate to the best sources of information. If you’re a news organization that focuses on nothing other than providing news you’ll never be the best source of anything and people will gravitate away from you.

There have been a lot of great experiments in the news business to try and figure out how to make money and how to maintain professional journalism in our current economy. I don’t know what the solution will be, though I like to think that Jarvis is correct that news organizations are going to have to become more focused. This will mean that news organization will become smaller, but it will also mean that they get better as well.  Take for instance the TWiT organization. They do technology shows – period. They are unabashedly serious about tech and about being deep into technology. People that don’t care about tech don’t know of TWiT, but people who do love them. As a result TWiT has become immensely profitable. They’re not CNN or Fox or any of the other big name news groups and they don’t have their backing, but they’ve become profitable focusing on what they know and do best – tech journalism. News organizations will all have to be that way. There will be a lot more news organizations as well, but as a capitalist I’m totally for that. What this means for monoliths like the New York Times is unclear. They have been losing a lot of money and are playing with various ways of making money online that may or may not work. But I think their future is in finding a way to create niches within their pages – both physical and digital.

I love newspapers and while they won’t always be found in a physical print edition, I believe they have a great future. Perhaps they will be more like corporations that are comprised of many similar but different departments that join together to make one great product. And maybe that’s the answer – associated blogs. I look forward to the future of news, but for now we need to muscle it out and hope that today’s pain doesn’t kill us for the bright tomorrow that is coming.

For a long time I lived with the misguided notion that there was something earth-shakingly important about my existence. I thought very highly of myself, to the point that in many instances I was a complete asshat. In the last six to eight months those ideas about myself have started to melt, which isn’t to say that I don’t think of myself as important just not world shaking important.

I stopped going to Pentecostal churches because I couldn’t find life in them. There’s a lot of pain wrapped up in the part of my life when I was going to to them and as a result I’m not a big fan of discussions about the Holy Spirit. If you want to talk theology with me I’ll be more than happy to discuss the theological concepts surrounding the Spirit, but if you want to discuss life application I’m going to exit that conversation pretty quick.

All of this is why it seems so strange to me that I said anything at that bible study that was of significance – especially about the Spirit. I’m just a guy that does a little prep work and talks about the bible – Leviticus at the moment. I don’t expect the Spirit to do anything these days. Yet on this day, a day when I was actually hurting from a rough day and night before, God injects God’s-self into my words and makes a dramatic impact on someone’s life. No matter how much I may want to avoid discussing life application of the Spirit, the Spirit still applies to my life.

It’s a heavy thing to realize that no matter what you’ve done or are going to do, God is still working in your life. You cannot run from God, but you can hide in Him and it is my hope that I attempt the latter more often than the former.

The Good

I feel like there are several shows that did well this year. Grey’s Anatomy found new legs this year. It had started to lag, but towards the end of the season with Meredith doing an insanely stupid thing and nearly killing off Cali the show really picked up.

Bones has kept the crown for the best writing on a police procedural. The macro storyline that has all the main characters becoming parents is interesting. Though the most interesting thing in the entire season was the last 10 seconds, where Brennan announces to Booth that she’s pregnant and the kid is his. Neither Jen and I are clear when they slept together, but that’s the assumption the show is leaving us with. Nonetheless, one of the things that make this show is the sexual tension between Booth and Brennan, I’d like to know what they intend on doing now that they’ve apparently released that tension. Though I suppose they’ll have crazy different parenting styles, so that could be fun.

Parenthood, Castle, and The Good Wife kept things going with drama that doesn’t feel completely contrived.  With that said, I feel like I might only have one more season in me with The Good Wife. They tried pretty hard to restore some of the tension that was there at the beginning of the show and in my opinion were fairly unsuccessful. But they’ve set themselves up for success, so hopefully we’ll see something next season.

No show gets my wife and I talking quite like Parenthood. The most amazing thing about this show is that even when the drama seems contrived it also seems plausible given the way they’ve developed the characters. Again, they’ve set themselves up for success in the next season with a good ending this season.

I’ve enjoyed Nathan Fillian’s work since back in his Two Guys a Girl and a Pizza Place days – yeah he had work before Firefly – so the fact that I enjoy a show he’s in is nothing new. But Castle is something special. Like so many shows the drive within the show is sexual tension, but no other show knows how to tantalize with it the way this show does. It’s that tension that keeps us coming back. The murder of the week makes for good filler, but really the show is all about how Castle and Becket are going to get together. Unlike the previous couple shows, I’m not sure that they set themselves up for success. I’ guess we’ll have to see, but I’m not convinced.

We really like Dana Delany’s new show Body of Proof. I keep trying to understand what it is about this show that makes me like it, but I can’t put a finger on it. It very well may be that it does nothing badly, which isn’t to say it does everything great just that nothing is bad enough to make me think about not watching it. The casting is good – especially Ms. Delany who I always thought was too good to be on Desperate Housewives. Interesting side note, did you know that she was offered the role of Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City and turned it down before Sarah Jessica Parker took it? I for one am glad she didn’t take that role, it doesn’t seem like the right fit; Body of Proof however does, and that’s a good thing. The writing is good, though they need to do more character development. Fortunately for us they’ve been granted a another full season to do so.

The Not-So-Good

I understand that part of what makes a drama is the constant stream of drama within the character’s lives. This is great when the drama seems organic, but when it starts to feel contrived or forced I start to lose patience.  Two shows that epitomized this for me this past season were Private Practice and Brothers and Sisters.

I’m not sure that there was ever a good reason for P.P. to exist, but being solid Grey’s fans we followed. After 4 or 5 seasons, I’m fairly certain they’ve run out of story lines – at least the kind that feel organic. The show feels like it needs to be put out of its misery and it looked like they were going to try and do that, but alas ABC has decided to give them another season to figure out a purpose for existence.

I could tell B&S was almost done when they invented not one, but two new infidelity scandals – one of which made a sister a half-sister. The main problem with this show is not that the stories seem forced as much as the fact that it seems preachy in doing so. I really don’t need to hear a fictitious Pasadena millionaire rant and rave about why everything conservative is evil. Fortunately for all involved, this show has seen its last scandal and will no longer be bothering us.

House was once one of the most compelling shows on TV. I’m fairly certain that they’ve now “jumped the shark” and are simply having House do stupid things for stupid’s sake. I’m not sure the show is going to work minus Cuddy, but for better or worse it seems like they’ve only got one season to figure it out as rumor has it that this next season will be their last.

The Oh My God What Were They Thinking

Every season sees a bunch of new shows get canceled. Jen and I tend to be good at picking shows that don’t get canceled in their first season, but somehow we picked two this year. Chase and The Whole Truth were both twists on their respective genres, which is exactly what made them interesting and enjoyable for a couple of serial TV watchers like us. Unfortunately it seems like only Jen and I were watching them and their networks cut them off. Though of the two it seems like The Whole Truth really got the short end of the stick only airing 3 or 4 episodes before ABC sent them packing.

I thought about putting Lie to Me in both of the previous sections, but I don’t know what to make of the show. When they stick to their bread and butter police procedural they’re really great, but then they do these shows that have Kal doing absurdly strange things that makes the show unwatchable. Really they need to figure out what to do with the show so I can figure out whether or not the show is worth the time.

A Fond Farewell

For several years now, in our opinion, the best show on TV has been Friday Night Lights. This season – number 5 – is its last season. We will miss seeing Coach and Mrs. Taylor as well as the rest of the cast. For me Eric Taylor is the savior of the TV husband. He’s not a perfect man, but he’s also not a bumbling idiot. The marriage between Eric and Tammy seems real, which I think is the highest complement I can give to both the actors and the writers. Everything else in the show flows from that point and it just feels right. Both Jen and I will surely miss this show, but at least we own all the seasons on DVD and will be able to go back whenever we feel the need.

I know there are a lot of shows not covered here, but frankly I’m surprised you’ve read this far, so can you imagine if I wrote about every show. There were several dramas that we watch that I didn’t cover here. We watch a bunch of cable dramas, but I decided to reign myself in to only broadcast network TV – so please don’t go off on me for not mentioning them.

Mr. Camping – and you could argue God – gave us a great opportunity to share our hope in the second coming of Christ. We could have done it with love and compassion and a bit of humility. This was a great worldwide opportunity to share the hope that is the central tenant of Christianity, but instead we chose to move towards cynicism and mockery. After all there’s no reason yesterday couldn’t have been the end – even fools get lucky once.

Not to be too melodramatic, but I suspect Mr. Camping is having a crisis of faith now. The last thing he needs is millions of Christians mocking him and acting incredibly unChristian towards him. Let us pray for him and his followers as well as for us that we might take the opportunity to share the hope of Christ the next time an opportunity this big is placed in our laps.

Today one of my friends posted a story to Facebook of a group of Christian, veteran bikers who go to military funerals to form a blockade between the funeral and protestors that are saying inconceivably evil things. You’ve probably heard about the church in Kansas that pickets military funerals and believe that God is punishing the U.S. for tolerating homosexuality. So this group of bikers, who believe their faith demands action, take to their bikes and form a wall of humans, flags and sound to keep the evil of the protestors from getting to the people mourning the death of a loved one. This is beauty made manifest. This is beauty overwhelming evil.

As I have thought about it, isn’t this exactly the way God works? Jesus is murdered, but in that murder comes the salvation of humanity. Anytime there is a crisis — a school shooting, a tsunami or earthquake or the like we see a thousand examples of beauty to take away the stench of that which was evil. I think of the words of Joseph in the book of Genesis, “That which was intended for evil, God has used for good.”

I don’t think that God provides the evil so that the beauty can be presented, but I think that when evil happens God is there with something beautiful. I still can’t explain why evil exists in a cosmos that is controlled by a loving God. But I do think that God is taking the metaphorical lemons of evil and making lemonade.

Our friend Carolyn (left) with Sara (center) and Jen at one of Sara's concerts that Jen organized in 2004

One of the first places of commonality that Jen and I found was in music. We were both passionate about it and managed to talk for a couple hours on the topic during our first date. It was an amazing thing for me to find someone that shared — so closely — my taste in music. Jen’s favorite artist at that time, and probably still now, was Sara Groves. I was fairly ignorant of anything that Sara had done, but gave it a listen. Since that point her music has been a place of connection for Jen and I. Whether we’re working through a disagreement or dealing with something particularly hard, there always seems to be a Sara Groves song to sooth our souls.

Sara writes beautiful music, but as with all great music it’s the lyrics that have hit me. A common topic in her music is marriage. I think that it is these songs about the marriage relationship that have been the most meaningful for me. She has this one song “Roll to the Middle” off her “The Other Side of Something” album that I think defines marriage to me. Ironically the song is about fighting and Jen and I don’t really fight, but it’s the concepts on display in the song that make it so powerful.

We just had a World War III here in our kitchen
We both thought the meanest things
And then we both said them
We shot at each other till we lost ammunition

This is how I know our love
This is when I feel it’s power
Here in the absence of it
This is my darkest hour
When both of us are hunkered down
And waiting for the truce

All the complicated wars
They end pretty simple
Here when the lights go down
We roll to the middle

No matter how my pride resists
No matter how this wall feels true
No matter how I can’t be sure
That you’re gonna roll in too
No matter what, no matter what
I’m going to reach for you

It probably says something about me that I find the truth of love in a negative boundary like this, but there’s something about the lines:

This is how I know our love
This is when I feel it’s power
Here in the absence of it

And then the last lines, which ring immensely true for me in our marriage:

No matter what, no matter what
I’m going to reach for you

All I need is to hear the opening chords of this song and I am reduced to a misty-eyed softy reflecting on the depth of my love for Jen.

When I lost my job last fall, we were both scared and unsure of what was happening. We had no idea what was going to be happening with us until — you guessed it — we found the Sara Groves song “From this One Place” off of “Fireflies and Songs” and particularly these lines:

from this one place I can’t see very far
in this one moment I’m square in the dark
these are the things I will trust in my heart
you can see something else

I know it sounds crazy, but that gave us both the comfort we needed to move forward. As it turns out God took care of us and we were fine until a new job was provided. Over and over it’s things like this, where we find ourselves in a difficult place and somehow one of Sara’s songs seemingly floats out of the ether and brings us comfort.

Sara has so many good songs and I’m not doing her justice here. I promise you that it’s worth your time (and money) to invest in Sara’s music. I’m sure that you’ll find comfort there.

P.S.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out my favorite song by Sara. It’s called “To the Moon” off of “Add to the Beauty” (I would have linked to the song, but I can’t find a link – you’ll just have to buy the album ). I’ve always heard it as a piece of satire, which is one of my favorite genres of writing. But more importantly I think that it points out the inconsistencies of the church particularly here in the west.

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

Books are a place of comfort for me.  I love to read them and discover new ideas or go new places. I unfortunately don’t spend as much time reading as I should or probably would like to. Jen loves the library and I for one can tell you that’s a good thing at the rate she reads. Our book poundage would easily quadruple if she were to buy every book she reads. I instead opt for the easy entertainment of the television or computer.  In spite of this, I continue to buy books.  I think that part of why I continue to buy books is that their presence gives me comfort. Books are essentially a heavy security blanket that allows me to be at rest.

As I look around our house, there are only a couple rooms without books in them. I’m certain that we didn’t purposely set up the house this way on purpose – I think it was mostly a practicality issue in that you can only put so many bookshelves in a given room. Still, I think that Cicero has a point and our home is a warmer place because of our books.

Lenten Reading

On the subject of books… Every year when Lent comes around I choose a book to read. For several years now it’s been Stanley Hauerwas’ “Cross Shattered Christ“, which I would recommend anybody read. This year I have chosen Bonhoeffer’s “Meditations on the Cross” to read through during lent. A couple of my friends will be reading through it with me and you’re welcome to join if you like. I will be blogging through the book as I think through Bonhoeffer’s thoughts. I hope you join us during this time of meditation on the purpose of the sacrifice of Christ.