Announcing Baby Shinn!

Friends and Family,

Lisa and I are proud to be expecting an addition to our family! With an expected birthday of December 18, (NAMEHERE) Shinn will join Sam (cat), Max (cat), and Maggie (dog) as our first same-species child. Attached is an image from our first sonogram a month ago. At the time the image was captured, the embryo/fetus was shaped a bit like a shrimp. Now the baby should be about 4 inches long and has fingers, toes, fully functioning ears, fingernails, and lots of other neat little body parts. Today we heard the baby’s heart beating for the first time. Well, sort of. I (Andrew) thought it was hard to hear, but the doctor assured us it was there. And Lisa heard it.

Lisa is at 12 weeks today and just about to start showing. She has been doing well, with only a few minor aches attending the process. At this point, all signs indicate a normal, healthy baby. Please join me in praying for the mother and the child as we all grow.

Excited,
Andrew and Lisa

Sad times for U.S.

“It’s just like it used to be in East Germany,” he told me.  He should know.  He lived there during the reign of the communist regime.  He was detained for several hours yesterday at gunpoint for taking pictures of the Golden Gate bridge from a scenic overlook.  “In East Germany, you could be arrested and detained for taking pictures of any government building or national landmark.  I never thought it would be that way here.”  The park ranger, plainclothes detectives and two squad cars of police officers kept him for a long time, cited him with a fine, and make him delete photos from his camera.  In my understanding as a prior government media relations specialist, this is an unconstitutional practice.  But faced with a night in jail and a trial for resisting arrest (he was told), he complied and handed over his equipment so the officers could delete any ‘dangerous’ images from his camera.  When he asked me about it, I told him that the officers had overstepped their legal bounds.  But the price of showing them the error of their ways would be a trip to jail and a court date to let a judge (who has a fuller grasp of the constitution and U.S. case law) straighten out the constitutionality of the situation.  So he complied and submitted to the unwarranted search, seizure, and destruction of his property.  All for taking pretty pictures from a scenic location.

Inwardly I weep for our country.  If this is to be the routine way of things, then in some ways the terrorists have won.  Will they be able to turn the United States into a totalitarian regime where citizens lose their first amendment and personal property rights?  If so, our momentary security may have the illusion of enhancement, but our idealogical gatekeepers have lost the battle that separates us from our enemies’ version of a perfect society.

Faith and Politics: An Answer to the Question

I’ve wondered long, hard, and deep about a Christian’s role and responsibility within the political realm.  I’ve felt the waters as if with my pinkie finger, wanting so badly to bathe in the stream of that answer.  This morning the answer hit me like a flood.

A friend pointed out that Judaism is the only world religion in which faith seeks to inform power instead of grasping at it.  I understand now that a modern Christian’s responsibility is to do the same.  My friend put the Old Testament prophetic tradition into an entirely new context for me.  What is a prophet?  According to Abraham Heschel, a Jewish scholar, “The prophet is not only a prophet.  He is also poet, preacher, patriot, statesman, social critic, moralist.”

As American Christians, we are called to speak God’s Word.  We are called to speak prophetically.  We are called to start with the message of salvation and redemption, but we’re not to stop before addressing systemic oppression and the dirtier threads of the fabric of our society.

The answer for me came along with another set of questions.  My previous question (What should Christians be doing about politics?) became: What should I be doing to speak prophetically to our culture?  How can I best be a voice to the nations?  And what’s the weight of that task?

Faith and Patriotism

It seems I’m not the only person to struggle with the competing claims of my faith and my love of country.  President Andrew Johnson said, “I do believe in Almighty God! And I believe also in the Bible…Let us look forward to the time when we can take the flag of our country and nail it below the Cross, and there let it wave as it waved in the olden times, and let us gather around it and inscribed for our motto: “Liberty and Union, one and inseparable, now and forever,” and exclaim, Christ first, our country next!”

In Honor of Memorial Day: How we make military public policy decisions

I saw a fascinating book this morning on the Today show. It’s called AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Class from Military Service – and How It Hurts Our Country. Quite a long title. It’s co-authored by two educated northeast elites whose husband and son unexpectedly joined the military. It details their ‘conversion’ experience and calls for more upper-class sacrifice in the name of better military policy and a bit more national growing-up. Fortunate Son, indeed. You can read the Today Show’s excerpt of the book at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12990432/.

This issue is meaningful to me as a veteran. I read the 9/11 Commission report and think about military policy differently than I did had I not spent almost 6 years of my life serving our country.

Later this morning we’re going to a Memorial Day observance at a cemetery in Kingsburg. I’ll take some photos and post them if they turn out well. Today I’ll be thinking about Nathan Bruckenthal, the Coast Guardsman who died in Iraq and left his unborn daughter behind. The child is typical of many whose lives bear the marks of military sacrifice. For his entire life, he’s owed the thanks of a grateful nations. Heartfelt though it may be, it’s scant replacement for the father he’ll never meet.

Google solves another problem!

We had a pet problem today.  One of the cats (Max, no doubt) took it upon himself to urinate on our down comforter.  Bad kitty.  Then Maggie (our sweet, adorable but sometimes misguided puppy) smelled the cat urine and decided to add her own unique scent.  Now we have a pee-soaked comforter and I have a very upset wife on my hands.  What do I do?  Turn to Google, of course.

I searched for “How do I remove dog urine from a down comforter?”  I could hear sobs emanating from the back room.  The first result I clicked on was a bulletin board discussing pet urine problems. I searched within that page for the words ‘down comforter.’  The post I read was by a lady recommending a product called Just Rite, and she claimed it is made by a guy named Bill, who often answers the company’s phone himself.  I surfed on over to www.justrite.com and searched frantically down the page for a phone number.  The crying in the back room was reaching a fever pitch.  I quickly called the number, which had an Illinois prefix.  Sure enough, Bill answered after the first ring and gave me very specific advice about how to deal with dog urine on a down comforter.

A few minutes later, as I came inside from my trip to the garbage can, I explained to Lisa what Bill had told me.  Oddly, the certainty with which I found the information was comforting to her, as was my comment: “Hey, at least it’s not winter!”

Thanks, Google, and thanks Bill!

Stuff Maggie Does

Maggie’s so cute.  She dreams while she sleeps on our floor, and sometimes when she hits REM sleep, her body starts moving and twitching.  Sometimes she’ll simulate running, and I’ve even heard her bark her defensive bark under her breath.  Today she was sleeping on my studio floor with her tail wagging back and forth excitedly.  Lisa and I like to speculate about what she may be dreaming.  She usually reserves that level of excitement for my arrival home, Lisa’s arrival home, our first-thing-in-the-morning greeting, or a trip to Shadow’s house.  (Shadow is Brad and Mary Fast’s dog, and Maggie’s best canine friend.)  Lisa and I speculated that she was dreaming that Shadow moved in with us, or that Max (our cat) finally decided it was alright to play with her.  That’ll only happen in her dreams.

Yahoo! Answers

I’ve recently come across a fascinating attention economy knows as Yahoo! Answers.  It’s a place where you can log on and ask questions.  Or answer questions.  Or rate other people’s answers.  “What kind of questions can I ask?” you wonder.  That’s a great question.  You should log in and see what kind of questions other people are asking.  I’ve been addicted to this service all week now.  For joining, you get 100 points.  Every question you ask costs you 5 points.  Every questions you answer garners you 2 points, and when your answer is chosen as the best answer to a question, you earn 10 points.  When you earn a certain amount of points, you get….. something.  I don’t know what the something is yet, but I reached level 2, and Yahoo! assures me that there’s something special headed my way.  When I reached level 2 without a significant reward, I kind of gave up on this as an obsession.  I thought I’d come back to daily blogging instead.  Check out Yahoo Answers anyway; it’ll be worth your time.