You are a sad, strange, little man. And you have my pity.

It's Wednesday. How do I know? Well, the birds are singing, the sky is clear, the grass is soft, and I was forced to sit inside a poorly-lit, musty room for an hour with the lot of you while someone droned on and on and on and on. . . .This obviously shows that SNU doesn't care about the tree-huggers.

"This is gonna be a good chapel." [And how, may I ask, would you know? Are you using your Jedi mind powers again? If the past is any indication of what is to come, your claim, good sir, is quite unfounded.]

Get ready, get set, go! *This is the part where we're listening to a better-than-average band play some better-than-average gospel music. . . .* Wait! What's happening? We're watching a lame video about the history of the Nazarene church? What the hell? Oh, and now we're going to talk about the video?! *This is the part where no one is listening to His Holiness and everyone really just wishes he would shut the hell up so that the band could play some more.* [And since when did being Nazarene matter? I thought Christians were all supposed to be one big happy family in Jesus!] What's this? Brad is not on stage and someone is still spouting nonsense? *This is the part where the band starts to play again and the singer gets back to what she's good at.* And all was right in the world.

I am completely shocked by the music this week: two full days where worship didn't suck the proverbial 'big one.' Amazing.

Here's a tip for whoever is teaching the ethos group for non-Christians: put all those sinners on a strict diet of gospel music. Mark my words, if anything is ever going to be successful as a ministry tool, it's going to be gospel music.

"Jason is going to speak now. Pay attention, because he's a very smart guy. But you really have to be listening to catch it. And he's weird. And he has a quirky sense of humor. And he has a new haircut. And he's dressed like a fifteen year old trying to negotiate his identity. And he makes pop culture references that I don't get. And he has a bucket of dirt on stage. . . ."

Thanks Brad. I'm sure Jason was very flattered.

Today, if you'll remember, the good reverend Hubbert attempted to make the point that God can take all of the "dirt" from your past and make something beautiful out of it. A good lesson, to be sure, but he didn't quite get all the way from here to there.

The scripture employed to support his thesis was from the good book of Genesis, chapter two, verse seven. "Then the Lord God formed the man from the dirt of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man's nostrils, and the man became a living person." Jason was correct to note the controversial nature of this text, as it is caught up in the debate [that the Church won't let die] between creationism and evolution. But oddly enough, even after making this aside, the Good Reverend proceeded to reference the text as though it were literal. Or maybe he just assumed that it had somehting to "say" to us, around 4000 years in the future. [Yeah, right. . . .] Unfortunately, the use of this text caused the Good Reverend to commit the fallacy of the high-school English teacher.

High-school English teachers are notorious for two things. First, they wear denim vests with kittens embroidered on them. Second, they have their students read books by Joseph Conrad and then write exegetical papers that extract and examine every possible shred of symbolism in the book. This would all be fine, except that The Heart of Darkness contains no symbolism. Such was the problem the Good Reverend encountered, unknowingly, today.

Genesis 2:7 served, at the time of its writing, to explain to unscientific, bronze-age sheep-herders how humans came into existence. These people did not have a scientific understanding of the natural world, thus, this explanation is necessarily little more than myth and unsubstantiated speculation. [Unless, of course, you are of the opinion that there should be a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to heterosexual couples. If that's the case then you might actually think that Genesis 1 and 2 are historical documents.] Also, people of this time and geographical location were predominantly poly-theistic and and had little or no understanding of human psychology. This makes it very unlikely that the author of Genesis 2:7 meant for the word "dirt" to be used as a metaphor to represent all of our past "sin." I'm pretty sure they just meant for "dirt" to mean dirt.

That said, the Good Reverend's trick of redefining "dirt" and using it in the metaphorical sense so that our past sins could conveniently be equated with the dirt that unknowing herdsmen suspected The Almighty of "creating" glittering, children's playthings from [props courtesy of Mattel], doesn't really work to support his argument.

Please notice that I am not saying that God does not want to, or cannot, make a beautiful Barbie doll out of the miserable, contemptible wretch that you were/are/will be. All I'm saying is that Jason's argument for that position was without merit. Oh well, maybe next semester he'll get it right.

"And God will come down and put his lips on your lips. . . ."

Aww yeah, God. That's it. You know how I like it.

"Keep near me and you will be safe."

Daedalus