First week

Hi everyone. As you may know, I've been almost completely off the map. It was my first week of work. I thought it was fun, but exhausting. I am happy to be working a 9-80, which means I get every other Friday off. Getting up at 6:00 to make it has not been easy, but I've rolled with it.

Sarah and I visited a nice evangelical free church two Sundays ago, and our visit to a megachurch yesterday was a real doozy, basically a first for both of us. I eventually just started taking notes, because the whole experience was just too much. I'll fill you in as I get time. Sarah and I went to Sam's Club on Saturday morning, and bought Harry Potter VII for half price off a pallet stacked with them. We went to the Tattered Cover first, but they weren't discounting the fastest-selling book ever (or if they were, we didn't see the sign), which was the kiss of death.

I finished What's So Amazing About Grace? again. It's a book about the Christian distinctive that means something: real unconditional love towards the unlovable. That is one definition of grace; another might be "treating people better than fairness and justice demand", or "do better to others than you would ever expect them to do to you", or "the stairway off the karmic wheel of reward and retribution", or "living beyond inertia", or "making the first move". It's a good book and it always makes me think. Spurred by Vince, I visited the USU philosophy blog, so I was thinking about ethics as I read this book. Grace is meant to be beyond ethics, I think. Ethics is about the right thing, and the fair things, and values of obligations and weighing the matter, and determining consequences. Grace is not beyond good and evil, but it lies past them; the Boy Scout's good deed for the day is what ethics means to me. Boy Scouts finish, they arrive, check it off their lists. Grace never arrives. On the bright side, grace never ends.

I got my library card, so I'm in the middle of Firestarter (Stephen King), Don't Know Much About History (a primer for those with an American History hole in their education, which somehow I got), and Come To The Quiet: Principles of Christian Meditation by John Michael Talbot. I am reading that last slowly and carefully. Talbot (a famous singer-songwriter in Catholic and, broadly, Christian circles) has written a very deep book here about quiet time with God, trying to draw out the meaning of meditation in Christianity and also meaningful parallels within other world religions. I've also got a John Scalzi space war novel, an Alice Miller book, and Einstein's biography to get to.

Stay sane, and I'll try to be back soon.

Colorado

Hi people. The Lewis family has successfully arrived in Highlands Ranch, just south of Denver. Our house is quite nice. I even mowed the lawn for the first time in about ten years yesterday. We have approximately one extra bedroom and one extra living room. If you have any suggestions about what to do about this, let me know.

Also, if you're from Colorado and know some things we should do on my last week of vacation for a while, let me know.

The weather is very nice and so is the library and everything else. We'll have pictures sooner or later at Sarah's blog, lewislife.typepad.com. Thursday our home internet gets hooked up, so transmission will be spotty until then.

Independence Day

Tomorrow, I'll be homeless for the last time in a while. Sarah and I are packing up and moving to Highlands Ranch, CO (think the last homely suburb in southern Denver). Maybe we'll see fireworks in Denver, I don't know. Sarah's mom and stepfather are also coming, and maybe her brother.

I finished The Once and Future King. I thought it was very episodic and disjointed. Like Vince told me, the first part was definitely the best.

I also picked up and read The Stand for the first time. It's Stephen King's classic, apocalyptic tale of the near-destruction of the human race by a military super-virus. This is a novel par excellence, with many stories that intertwine and reinforce each other, with some unforgettable imagery, and a backbone of dangerous Christianity, in the sense of "Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things". It's graphic and horrific in spots. It would be an easy R, shades of NC-17 if it were a movie. Sex, swearing, drugs, violence, Satan, and rock and roll. I can't do it justice, but I'm definitely reading it again sooner or later.

I guess I'll be going even darker now than lately. I don't know when we'll hook up the Internet. My love to you all, as appropriate.

Oh, our new address. Email me if you want our Colorado address. We'll be changing the phone soon too.