Request for Reader Information on Jobs, Tithing, and the Economy
March 30, 2006
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Work Feedback : 28 comments
Anyone who reads Cerulean Sanctum knows that I tackle plenty of business issues and the American Church’s response to them.
Well, I have a huge post coming up that will be looking at the dichotomy between all the positive comments we hear about the health of our economy and the reality of many Americans. For instance, The Wall Street Journal just ran a front page story about our strong economy, while another story on the same page said that singles’ ads are now including pleas for possible mates who have good health insurance policies. To me, that latter story negates the former and tells a much different story.
What I’d like to hear from readers are answers to the following nine questions:
- 1. Are you better off financially today than seven years ago?2. Are you saving money or is the money coming in going out as fast?3. Have you personally seen that giving more money in tithing resulted in more coming back?
4. Do you actually tithe ten percent?
5. If you are married, do both you and your spouse work? How might that have changed in the last seven years?
6. What message do you hear in your church or among churchgoers about employment, finances, and the economy? Does that message reflect your reality?
7. Have you or your spouse been laid off in the last seven years? When you found a new job, was it for more or less money?
8. Have you moved in the last seven years in order to follow work?
9. What extended family lives within thirty miles of your home?
If you find that these questions are too personal for this blog’s comment section, PLEASE e-mail at the address listed in the sidebar. I get many e-mails from people who are struggling with issues like these, so if this is a tough area to write about in a public forum, send me a private e-mail. Know, too, that every e-mail I get like this receives prayer—that I promise!
If you are married or single, please let me know which one applies to you. Also, your age would be nice to know.
I hope to have this post (it may turn into a series) out next week.
Thank you all in advance.
No tag for this post.
Books, Writers Groups, and Shameless Promotion
March 29, 2006
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Writing Feedback : 1 comment so far
Content on Cerulean Sanctum is going to be a little light in upcoming weeks. With the rough of my speculative fiction novel Fade into Blue complete, I’m pushing hard on editing to FINALLY get it wrapped up by the end of April. That puts me almost three months behind my original schedule. Sickness and general mayhem took their toll on my finishing the rough draft, but things have been speedy lately. I rewrote the first forty pages and as one of the guys in my writers group said, the results were “spectacular.”
I thought I’d take a little of the blog space here to plug the efforts of my writing cohorts. They’re all published authors, so I’m kind of the lowly member of the esteemed group. All three have recent books out, so I’ll devote a little space to each (alphabetically):
H. Michael Brewer’s latest is Lessons from the Carpenter: An Apprentice Learns from Jesus, a devotional examination of Jesus’ ministry through the lens of his earthly work as a carpenter. The reviews on this one are glowing, and it’s a featured title at Family Christian Stores and The Crossings Book Club. Mike seems to be one of those pastors that can pull meaning out of any situation and that wisdom shows up in his books. He’s also a comic book expert and fan of speculative fiction, so you can bet I’ve taken his advice on my own writing. You can catch Mike (and a few other of his titles) at his site.
Wayne Holmes has an even newer release that we finally got our hands on yesterday, The Embrace of the Father: True Stories of Inspiration and Encouragement. Look for it in April 2006. Wayne has several excellent books available, all of them ideal as gift books for mothers, fathers, and teachers. And if you love the prayers of children, also consider another recent title of his, Whispering in God’s Ear: True Stories Inspiring Childlike Faith. Wayne’s got a stupendous eye for grammar and punctuation mistakes; when his corrective pen is done with my manuscript submissions, there’s so much red on the page it’s like a mafia hit! And he’s almost always right, too. Wayne’s author site is here.
Joe Lacy gives us a stirring look at the life of African missionary/doctor James Foulkes in To Africa with Love. If you like tales of how Christ helps believers overcome all obstacles, even in the wildest places on earth, this is the book to grab. Joe’s also got an incredible basketball novel he’s pitching now, and I’ll vouch for it. Some of the most amazing metaphorical language I’ve ever read in a novel. My own work feels meager compared to Joe’s mastery of a phrase. Agents and publishers, are you listening?
Okay, okay, my name may not be on the cover, but several of my devotionals are featured in A Cup of Comfort Devotional. Lucky me got the prime spot for the last entry of the year in that work. 
If you like brief meditations on the Christian life, this would be a fine devotional to check out.
Anyway…
Joe, Wayne, and Mike have been superb eyes and ears for me over the last few years. I thought now would be a good time to mention their writings since I’ve spent so much time blabbing about my novel.
Thanks guys!
No tag for this post.
The Loss of Innocence
March 28, 2006
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Holiness, Maturity, Youth Feedback : 18 comments
I live in an area of the country that suffers from “chronophobia,” the fear of keeping up with the times. LA is about eight years ahead of us, and even our major Midwestern neighbor to the northwest, Chicago, is about five. I can’t point to the chapter and verse, but it’s a foregone conclusion the Rapture for righteous Greater Cincinnatians will occur at least three years after the fact.
When you live in a “backward” area, things that are “forward” startle you. I was jolted this last week by a seven-year-old boy in Kroger yelling to a woman who was clogging up an aisle, “Get out of my way, you fat f***.”
Besides being glad that my son was not with me to hear that, my unconscious response was to run the mental wayback machine to California, 1996. My wife and I were new arrivals, but we understood the vibe well enough to know we were “not in Kansas anymore.” The tape ran and ran, but I don’t remember kids in the Valley launching a tirade like the one I’d just now heard.
Still, it had to come from the coasts. Doesn’t that kind of filth crawl Godzilla-like out of the Atlantic and the Pacific, aiming to meet in the heartland, like some hell-tinged rendition of the driving of the golden spike?
I was in the new Wal-Mart about a half hour from us (tore down the regular “Center” and replaced it with a “Supercenter”) and was fascinated by the 40″+ flat panel displays strategically placed throughout the store playing “The Wal-Mart Channel.” A video by some new teenage singing sensations was looping, young people re-enacting everything they’d seen in Mountain Dew commercials throughout their young lives.
I could not stop watching that loop. This time my son was with me, pulling my arm with both hands, near-screaming, “Daddy, let’s go!”
There, in the eyes of those kids.
If you’ve ever seen the open eyes of someone freshly deceased, then you’ve seen that look. There’s nothing there in those eyes. Emptiness defines them. Even a child knows that something is missing when he or she sees the eyes of a corpse.
Those two dozen teens in that music video loop channeled that same deadness. Behind the eye liner and mascara was a vast nothingness.
After my son was practically biting my thigh trying to get me to stop watching corpses dance to the music, I could not stop staring at the under-20 crowd that filed past me everywhere we went the rest of that day. How had I—for so long—missed the ungrateful dead?
It’s miserable spotting a worn fifteen-year-old suburban girl you know could teach a fin de si�cle Parisian hooker a thing or two. Madonna may have been a tramp in my era, but this girl is something altogether different. She may not even be human, at least as we define it. I’ve seen mannequins with more expressive faces. If there was a soul in that kid once, it vacated a while ago.
But more than anything else, I want to apologize to that zombie of a girl for my generation. We let her generation down. Our harebrained youth ministry experiments, our obsession with our careers, our self-centeredness—we allowed the Enemy to gut them while we slept on our watch.
Or maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe we did care, but we got stuck fighting so many endless battles against wickedness that we had to compromise somewhere. The low-rider jeans were too trivial to fight. It could be something worse; she could be doing crystal meth.
I just can’t get over the vacant stares.
What’s the entry point for death in our children? One day our sons are playing in the sandbox with their Tonka trucks and our daughters are having tea time with their stuffed animals, then the next they’re passing around rubber wristbands that signify what sex acts they’ve successfully completed, or strangling each other to the point of passing out—for the “fun” of it.
Sunrise, sunset, swiftly fly the years.
Sure, we’ll get some PhD pedagogue regaling us with tales of the Dark Ages and the need for kids to grow up fast back then, but childhood today seems to be measured in seconds anymore. When girls in the first grade consider Barbie a toy for preschoolers, and boys have abandoned G.I. Joe as young as six, maybe picoseconds would be a better measure of the length of childhood.
It gives me the willies to think of my own son encountering one of these kids who’s a fifty-year-old in a ten-year-old’s body. I used to think they only minted those out on the coasts, but when I hear a seven-year-old neighborhood boy calling an adult woman a “fat f***,” I’ve got to wonder if someone’s firing up a local franchise.
The soap hasn’t wound up in anyone’s mouth around here, yet. I’m not looking forward to that day. My son got out some Blue’s Clues tapes the other day and watched them almost nostalgically, eyes wide and still sparkling. I watched with him for a few minutes. Though I knew he wouldn’t want to stop watching, I let him go, even if knew he’d ultimately sit there for two hours. Why? Because the precious gift that God has bestowed on him is indeed that.
And once you’ve lost it….
No tag for this post.
Cell Phone Hell
March 27, 2006
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Simplicity, Technical Feedback : 26 comments
This is not a post that has anything to do with the regular topics discussed here on Cerulean Sanctum.
I’ll start off by saying that I detest cell phones. People existed for a long time without them and somehow managed. 
Scientists still aren’t sure that they don’t fry your brain and give you brain cancer, but even if they did know, the cell phone carriers would never let them print the truth due to massive class action suits. And I mean MASSIVE. We’re talking scientists at the bottom of a Finnish lake in cement overshoes kinds of massive.
My wife insists we have a cell phone for emergencies. Actually, the “insists” there should be typed as “INSISTS” to denote the level of insistence.
Last month, Cingular informed us that the $19.95 monthly plan that we purchased two and a half years ago will no longer be offered. I bought that plan because it was the dirt cheapest plan available from a carrier that actually guaranteed coverage for our area. Now, we are conveniently being moved to a plan that costs $29.95 a month a more minutes we never will use. (We use that phone for less than ten minutes a month. Ten minutes. That translates into $2.95 a minute now plus tax.)
I refuse to pay this. I didn’t want to pay $19.95 a month. I’m canceling Cingular as a result.
I’m forced to go to “pay as you go.” That’s fine. I can deal with that. What I can’t deal with is the fact I have to get a new phone (and possibly a new provider) to make that happen. Truth be told, there’s nothing that irks me more than having something that works fine and then being told I can’t use/do it anymore.
We currently have a Nokia 6340i. We have all the accessories for it, including an extremely handy speakerphone/charger base that cost $30 when I bought it (Nokia DCH-12). The idea of tossing all that and buying new sets my hackles to raising.
This is what I want:
1. A Nokia phone compatible with our existing speakerphone/charger.
2. A Nokia phone with a low SAR rating (that’s the actual microwave radiation power level rating for the phone.)
3. A Nokia phone under $60.
4. A service provider that will cover our area in SW Ohio out to Adams County.
5. A pay-as-you-go service that doesn’t have weaselly “convenience charges” every time you make a call—like Cingular’s does. (Weasels!)
*. It would be nice to transfer my existing phone number, but I can live without it.
My problem is that this simple five point dataset has enough variables to put the standard “traveling salesman route optimization” puzzle to shame. All I really want to do is plug in all my data and have some phone and service options spit out.
That would be easy wouldn’t it?
Instead, we get an impossible tangle that even Newton, Einstein, and Hawking would have seizures over.
Is there a living soul out there who has any idea how I can solve this? Anyone who knows of a site that might allow me to do this all simply?
No tag for this post.
Seventeen Churches
March 24, 2006
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Church Issues Feedback : 27 comments
This morning, I was pondering how many churches in my 43 years I’d spent at least three months attending. The number came up seventeen; they are listed below in close to chronologicial order (though I returned to the Springdale Vineyard twice after returning to the Cincinnati area.) I spent at least three years in the churches listed in boldface.
- First Lutheran Church—Cincinnati, OH
- Hope Lutheran Church—Cincinnati, OH
- Trinity Lutheran Church—Mt. Healthy, OH
- Shadyside Presbyterian Church—Pittsburgh, PA
- First Christian Assembly of God—Cincinnati, OH
- Fellowship Christian Church—Cincinnati, OH
- College Hill Presbyterian Church—Cincinnati, OH
- Elmbrook Church—Brookfield, WI
- Vineyard Community Church—Springdale, OH
- Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Wheaton—Wheaton, IL
- Assemblies of God Church—Naperville, IL ?
- Willow Creek Community Church—S. Barrington, IL
- Ginger Creek Community Church—Aurora, IL
- Vineyard Christian Fellowship of San Jose—San Jose, CA
- Vineyard Christian Fellowship of the Peninsula—Palo Alto, CA
- Montgomery Community Church—Montgomery, OH
- Clear Mountain Community Church—Williamsburg, OH
That seems like a lot, but when you factor in college and moving, maybe it’s not unusual. How many churches have you attended for at least three months?
Update: I forgot my time at Carnegie Mellon University and the church I went to there: Shadyside Presbyterian Church. That church was there for me at a profound time in my life and I can’t believe I forgot to list it!
Tags: Clear Mountain Community Church
Posts
Comments
