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What a Cool Guy!

The opening paragraph of Jean Fritz’ biography Bully for You, Teddy Roosevelt:

What did Theodore Roosevelt want to do? Everything. And all at once if possible. Plunging headlong into life, he refused to waste a single minute. Among other things, he studied birds, shot lions, roped steer, fought a war, wrote books, and discovered the source of a mystery river in South America. In addition, he became the governor of New York, Vice-President of the United States, then President. This was a big order for one man, but Theodore Roosevelt was not an everyday kind of man. He was so extraordinary that when people tried to describe him, they gave up on normal man-size words. ‘A cyclone,’ that’s what Buffalo Bill called him. Mark Twain said he was ‘an earthquake.’ He was called ‘an eruption,’ ‘an express locomotive,’ ‘a buzz saw,’ ‘a dynamo.’

Do Life More Enjoyably

Opening Every Lawful Door

by Douglas Wilson

We are eager to establish and grow up into a genuine musical literacy as a congregation, as a community. But we have to take care to understand this process rightly. We obviously have to teach our children, and we have a great deal to learn ourselves in this process. And in this area, we have set our hand to the plow. But we must take care—there are certain things that are not meant by musical literacy promoted by the church.

We can understand this by analogy—the Protestant emphasis in the history of the West has been a great boon. Because we are people of the Word, it has been the most natural thing in the world for us to be people of words. Because we want our children to have access to the Word of God, we make a special point of teaching them all how to read. But of course, once we have opened up the Scriptures for them, they go on to read (and write) many other things. The Scriptures are the center, not the periphery. Because we know the centrality of the Word, we can enjoy many other kinds of literature—from haiku to The Lord of the Rings—throughout the rest of our lives. But when the centrality of Scripture is lost, then uninspired letters cannot avoid disintegration. This is why public letters in our nation is the in middle of a 5 spiral crash.

It is the same principle with the music of the church. Man was created to worship God, and to praise him with song. Because this is what we were made for, we want to teach our children how to do it. This is the central motive. We want them to be able to do much more as worshiping Christians than we have been able to do. The songs we sing here are the most important music in our lives, and should be treated that way. This is the center of our music. But when we have been equipped to do what God calls us to do here, we discover that the musical abilities we have acquired remain with us through the rest of the week. We don’t just retain the songs—we retain the literacy.

Do a thought experiment. Imagine a generation from now a community that has virtually a one hundred percent musical literacy rate. Suppose that all the children under the age of ten today are able then to read a new hymn or psalm at sight. Do you honestly think that this will produce a monotonous sameness in all the music that is sung by our people throughout the week? On the contrary, we are perilously close to a monotonous sameness now. But when church music recovers its rightful place, it will do for all kinds of music what literacy does for every book in the library. It will open every lawful door.

HT: Sam Gage

Today in History

Today in 1536, William Tyndale, “God’s Outlaw”, was martyred by strangulation and burning . He was an enormous impetus in the formation of future Bible translators and their translations.

Part of his legacy, includes the following (from Wikipedia):

“In translating the Bible, Tyndale introduced new words into the English language, and many were subsequently used in the King James Bible:

• Jehovah (from a transliterated Hebrew construction in the Old Testament; composed from the Tetragrammaton YHWH.
• Passover (as the name for the Jewish holiday, Pesach or Pesah),
• Atonement (= at + onement), which goes beyond mere “reconciliation” to mean “to unite” or “to cover”, which springs from the Hebrew kippur, the Old Testament version of kippur being the covering of doorposts with blood, or “Day of Atonement”.
• scapegoat (the goat that bears the sins and iniquities of the people in Leviticus, Chapter 16)

He also coined such familiar phrases as:

• let there be light
• the powers that be
• my brother’s keeper
• the salt of the earth
• a law unto themselves
• filthy lucre
• it came to pass
• gave up the ghost
• the signs of the times
• the spirit is willing
• live and move and have our being
• fight the good fight”

Today in History

Every day in assembly at JECA, I try to cull through history for bite or two to bring to those students, faculty and parents gathered. I find it’s a great way of broadly introducing things and names that should not be forgotten. It’s a good way to stem our chronological snobbery. Here is a great link to what George Grant wrote of a meeting that Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain had today in 1889.

Because of my recent time constraints I’ve been blogging less, but have been micro-blogging more through my FaceBook statuses. I sometimes put these tidbits on my status. Meet me on FaceBook.

Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale

In Your Plenty, Steel Yourself for Trials of Life

Danielle shows us the hard side of medicine and life.

Gone for Now Feels A Lot Like Gone for Good

Every FIRST Breath Is a Mercy

Claire Danielle Boomershine is here. God graced our home with a little girl, a little leveler, a great joy. Karsten, Haddon, Lincoln and Knox are beside themselves. Christie is doing well and the induced delivery went normally, well…it’s difficult to talk about normal in the same breath that you should be talking about the wildly amazing and miraculous process. God has lavished the riches of His grace on us, and we rejoice in His way. It’s totally unlike anything we could imagined or designed for ourselves.

Claire was born Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 9:29p at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. She was 8 lbs. even, has a little bit of reddish hair and has been a sweet baby for these first days.

She has a soul that will never die. May God give us good strength and wisdom to train her in the best ways, to smother her soul in Gospel truth and hope.

Also, you can read here what we think about a girl living in OUR house and, especially, why we named her Claire.

It Takes Humility to Laugh

Gospel humility frees you from the need to posture and pose and calculate what others think, so that you are free to laugh at what is really funny with the biggest belly laugh. Proud people don’t really let themselves go in laughter. They don’t get red in the face and fall off chairs and twist their faces into the contortions of real free laughter. Proud people need to keep their dignity. The humble are free to howl with laughter.

– John Piper

National Debt Road Trip

JECA In the News

This story was in the Tennessean’s Davidson A.M. It was written in April or May and then published this morning with some revisions that were made earlier this month. It’s not a great story, but it is good press.

New School Uses Trivium Method of Learning

The Truth in Chart Form

Wilberforce

We acknowledged William Wilberforce’s 250th birthday yesterday in assembly. Here is a good overview of his important life.

JECA Opens in Two Hours

This is what my life has been bent toward for the last two full years.

George Whitfield said that, “whenever God intends to bring about any great thing, he generally begins with a day of small things.”

Come Back to TBAP and Watch This When You Have a Free Sixteen and a Half Minutes

Lightning Strikes

Check out this cool gallery of lightning strikes.

J.R.R. Tolkien Audio – Singing “A Troll Sat Alone on His Seat of Stone”

In the book, Sam Gamgee sings this on the “Flight to the Ford.” Here, this is Tolkien’s voice singing.

Truly Amazing! I Don’t Know How He Does it All

Magician Daniel Chesterfield

More About It

Interview with Nate Wilson. How many publishers give away 500 books?

Too Many People Won’t Give This Book a Chance

Many won’t be able to look past the seeming randomness, loudness…weirdness. But I love it and find myself strangely alone in loving it I expect.

Imagery, revelry, metaphor, simile, cusp testing are all included and can’t wait to read it so I can read it again.

I sat through one lecture of Nate’s in 2006 and it made a profound impact on the way I think about life. I’ve listened to it a few times and this book reminds me so much of it. Life is a story. It’s a poem (and you’ll have to read it to gather the context):

To exist in this poem is a greater gift than any finite creature can imagine. To be so insignificant and yet still be given a speaking part, to be given scenes that are my own, and my own only, scenes where the audience is limited to the Author Himself (scenes that I often flub), to have been here with my frozen nose, to have been crafted with at least as much care as a snowflake (though I’m harder to melt), and to hear and feel and see and taste and smell the heavy poetry of God, that is enough.

Exhaling, I feel the thaw. I should be in the car driving. We’re late, and kindergarten waits for no man.

– from Nate (or N.D. as he goes on paper) Wilson’s Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World

[on July 15th, I posted a trailer video of this book]

I’m Less Helping Now and Much More Bossy

My First Business Card (circa 1981)

My Current One

I’ve decided to not put my picture on my business card anymore.

Even You Could Do This With Birdshot, but Like This!?!?

Clay shooting with a bow

“Nature Does Not Steal Time, It Amplifies It”

This article is chock-full of very important bites of information that pierce my parenting soul. Read it.

The natural world offers children an opportunity to think, dream, touch, and play out fantasies about how he or she imagines the world. Nature brings a capacity for wonder and a connection with something real that is endlessly fascinating and largely outside human control.

Al Mohler on Nature-Deficit Disorder.

Weak Faith is Working Faith, But…

Weak faith will as surely land the Christian in heaven as strong faith; but the weak, doubting Christian is not like to have so pleasant a voyage thither as another with strong faith. Though all in the ship come safe to shore, yet he that is all the way seasick hath not so comfortable a voyage as he that is strong and healthful.

William Gurnall, The Christian in Complete Armour

The Five Year Old Who Stole My Thunder

Me (addressing a pertinent situation with Lincoln): People who steal often go to jail.

Linc (nervously):”There’s none jail for three year olds…. Had told me.”

Tips for Raising Kids in a Pornified Culture

Very good advice from Zach Nielsen.

I’ve Been Robbed

Nate Wilson Strikes Again

And my finger just hit Amazon’s Buy It Now button again. One click. We’ll start reading Friday night.

Even If They Don’t Believe It (Yet), I’m Glad They Talk Like This

Me (walking toward the table): Who wants the bowl with the most brownies and ice cream?

Karsten: Not me!

Haddon: Not me!

Lincoln: Not me.