Thursday, January 24, 2008

New Tax Deal, and other facts you need to know now!

I don't know if this is good for our economy or not, (because I know relatively little about economics) but we could always use an extra 1200 dollar lying around! Yeah! Go government!

In other news, Chris shared a great Onion article with me today. Well worth the read.

In even more news, I am skipping Hebrew today and couldn't feel better about it. The first 5 weeks of this semester are a drag. We're going over weak verb patterns that we only need to "be familiar with" and it's just getting kind of tedious. I'm actually enjoying some aspects of Hebrew now that I can actually read the text and translate it with some proficiency. I'm excited for the second half of the semester which will just be all exegesis and no more grammar! woohoo!

Fourthly, I just finished reading the book "Consuming Jesus" by Paul Metzger (prof at Multnomah Seminary) and am working on a review for February's Next Wave. I've got to say that I was really convicted in this book at a personal level and have been thinking of how we function as a church and why that may hinder racial reconciliation and diversity within the larger body. The consumer church (and church growth specialists) have made niche groups and homogeneous marketing a virtue rather than clearly the antithesis of Jesus' prayer for unity and Paul's theological recognition that the "dividing wall of hostility" has been torn down. I highly recommend this book. I am going to be thinking about this a lot. I would love to see some ways that our church could partner with other, especially other cultural churches in Portland. I think we could both learn so much from each other and model reconciliation in a large way for the city of Portland.

One great idea in the book was a "reverse mission trip" where the money that is typically raised for people out of our church community to go, gets sent to the place where we would have went for the purpose of paying the pastors salary for the year or to build something and to pay for the travel of some of those in the church from this place to come to us and teach and minister to us for a week. I've got to say that this is a fascinating idea and one I've never even thought of.

And finally, and a lot less important, a few guys and I are going to brew a nut brown ale tomorrow morning so we're excited about that. Here's the recipe we are using for those of you who are down with beer brewing:

1 lb. Crystal malt (120L)
1 lb. Munich Malt
2 oz. Chocolate Malt
1-1/2 oz. Perle Hops
1/2 oz. Willamette Hops
1/2 oz. Mt. Hood Hops
#1028 London Ale Yeast
6 lbs. Amber liquid extract
1 lb. Alexander dark
28 oz. Brown candi sugar

I just realized while copying this over that I bought too much chocolate grain and I will have quite a few extra hops which would necessitate another brew (maybe a porter), but i'm not sure how long hops last in the fridge. Anyone? (no, they're not pellets). We're probably going to need a name for this brew. Any ideas?

2 comments:

Aaron Stewart said...

I agree about the check from the government but I think they're hoping that all of us are going to go out and spend it all rather than saving. :)

Dustin said...

Yeah! Unfortunately for them, it's going straight to my credit card which is exactly what they don't want!