Blog | robot with a heart

i miss playing disc

Posted on May 15, 2011 by norm

simon sent me a video of trick shots by this guy… which linked me to this video:

i miss playing on a team. ultimate is fun! maybe ill join a summer league or something.

i tend to retreat to narnia when life gets a bit crazy and i always find myself w/ something to share. this particular bit is from the Magician’s Nephew (what i correctly and properly know as book SIX—not book one), but first, a familiar verse (Genesis 1:1-3) to frame this story:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

Selections from The Magicians Nephew:

In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard….

Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars….

The Voice on the earth was now louder and more triumphant; but the voices in the sky, after singing loudly with it for a time, began to get fainter. And now something else was happening.

Far away, and down near the horizon, the sky began to turn grey. A light wind, very fresh, began to stir. The sky, in that one place, grew slowly and steadily paler. You could see shapes of hills standing up dark against it. All the time the Voice went on singing….

The eastern sky changed from white to pink and from pink to gold. The Voice rose and rose, till all the air was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had yet produced, the sun arose…. You could imagine that it laughed for joy as it came up. And as its beams shot across the land the travellers could see for the first time what sort of place they were in.

The earth was of many colours: they were fresh, hot and vivid. They made you feel excited; until you saw the Singer himself, and then you forgot everything else.

creation, narnia, singing | 1 comment

highschool worship snapshot

Posted on March 31, 2011 by norm

i recently cleaned out a bookbag that contained a lot of junk from my old apartment on 29th street. a lot of it was from my childhood: school papers, notes, books, christmas cards, CDs of groups i used to listen to… and one particularly interesting find…

a folder/binder from my high school days that contained a lot of transparencies that i used to use during worship—yes remember those? an overhead projector that shot a bright light through these transparent sheets of plastic to put lyrics on the wall? where the person manning the projector would need to perfect the art of moving the sheet in the opposite direction so that it would move in the desired direction on the wall? yes i had a folder full of these sheets that i acquired through many worship sessions. i decided to open it up and i found the following sheet of paper inside:

it was probably one of the last worship sessions i led in my high school days when i still used to use this folder (i’m sure it was from my HS days bc of what was on the back of this sheet). while my just-for-myself-handwriting is still pretty bad for other people i notice that i haven’t switched over to writing my lowercase ‘d’ in the lazy manner that i often write it now (looks like the “d” you’d write when doing a partial derivative in calculus).

anyway, it’s such an interesting find because it’s a look into my 17/18 year old worship leading self. i know from looking sheet that it is a planning/brainstorming sheet for a prayer & worship meeting because it follows an ACTS (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication) rubric that i used to employ often. it looks like i started over a few times or added a bunch of subheadings. i know i’ve modified this rubic since, simplifying it to just BIG God, little us, the cross, and our response (yeah i don’t have a cool acronym for this one).

what’s also interesting is that i still sing these same songs… like… all the time. i still plan worship sets on scrap pieces of paper. i still draw arrows connecting song themes. i still group songs into categories and then cross songs off as i need to restrict myself to a time limit.

i wonder what it would be like to meet myself from a decade years ago (wow, it’s been a decade since HS for me). i wonder what i would say to my younger self. what bits of wisdom i would try to impart… but as i look at this sheet, i’m also wondering what kinds of things my high school self would tell me of the present day. what kinds of drives and passions have i forgotten or left behind. how would my younger self challenge me to live today?

anyway it was an interesting find… kinda like an unintentional time capsule. just wanted to share it.