1. Last night after cleaning the kitchen, Bethany and I sat in the living room and listened to Jason Isbell records and the songs of the Cicadas outside. The fireflies swirled outside the window. Dusk settled. Sometimes we sang along and once or twice the silence of the needle between those hometown songs made the moment even more so of what it already had been. I want 1000 evenings like this.
2. My fantasy team appears to be on strike.
3. I started a new Wendell Berry book last night. Every page a wonder. No one writes like him.
4. Once again, someone has asked why I’m buying music on vinyl. I do it because it’s more expensive and because they are not portable. The price and the inconvenience means I have to stop and listen to an album for awhile. It’s an investment. And it forces me to sit and listen actively. It’s not just entertainment or background music.
5. On my Facebook feed the other day, I saw someone mocking the idea of a completely sovereign God and the doctrine of Predestination because they said it didn’t make sense. I guess that’s unlike the Trinity and Jesus being fully human and fully man.
6. One effect of the diet I’m on is I’m able to stay up and read each night. Previously, two pages in and I was done. Now I’m reading multiple chapters. Plus I’m sleeping through the night. It’s been years since I’ve done that.
7. Hate war. Love those left behind in its terrible Father and son stealing wake.
8. I hope I grow into an old man longing for young people to hear the comfort of the gospel. I don’t want to be a man of frowns and disgust.
9. Can I point out something awkward? Bathing suits.
10. Me: The thing about this diet is that I’m always hungry.
Friend: That’s no different than before.
Me: Okay, yeah
Echoes and Stars 
Matt, when we moved into our new house here, we actually had a place to put our record player in the living room. I set the vinyl on the shelf, not thinking much about it, but Ollie was interested, and now pulls out records and plays them everyday. He has discovered so much music that I’m not sure he would have heard otherwise. Liz and I think it’s so cool that he gets to experience music this way, much like we experienced vinyl, tapes and CDs. Currently his fav band is International Noise Conspiracy (no longer a band, I think, but I have a 7″).
That is so cool.
#5. I guess God is a less rational concept than the idea that “nothing acted on the nothing that existed to cause that nothing, through no outside influence to turn into everything ” right?
Any concept of origins or life in general requires faith, and that, by definition, has to be somewhat irrational. Because faith requires us to believe what can never be properly explained or understood.
My daughter once when she was quite young, explained the Trinity, or at least the Father and Son as “there is only one God, but He’s both the Father and Son, so that means He is His own Dad, right?”
Wouldn’t it depend on how the “doctrine of predestination” was being used…perhaps in a way that may have required mocking?
That would be true of literally anything and everything.