Some randomness for my three readers . . .

I’ve added Lone Prarie Art Works to the bloogroll. Julie has a great post on being invisible [hat tip and a complimentary carton of Amdro to the the Gazette]

The gestalt happened in the aisle with the pasta and sauces. I was trying to decide which pasta sauce to select, always and irritatingly the slow and deliberate shopper. As I stood there, deciding and weighing possible selections’ pros and cons, two college guys walked into the aisle and stopped behind me, talking.

“Here, hold the basket.”

“It’s your stuff.”

“No, hold it. I don’t want to be seen holding it if some hot chick were around.”

If some hot chick were around.

I appreciated the moment as only a rather mousy, life-long wallflower can. In case a hot chick were around, the toilet paper in the shopping basket would be detriment. However, if some decrepit 32-year-old were around, it would be fine. Though I’ve never thought of myself as hot, I did assume I existed. Not that I want to exist for everyone — who needs that burden? — but it just struck me as oddly funny, that I didn’t happen to exist at that moment for that category. It was the answer, I suppose, to the question I think we all wonder secretly: what do I look like or seem like to other people? My friend’s father had it right when he said that we’d probably all be offended if we realized how little other people were thinking of us, particularly since the driving force for stupidity in humanity is the concern over what others will think.

All this, in front of Newman’s Own Tomato and Garlic sauce.

Ever been invisible?

She takes great photos as well as writing some great blog.

Jared continues to write eloquently on the scandal of grace, here tackling the parable known as the parable of the prodigal son:

It gets tricky here, because I think the vast majority of us never put ourselves in the place of the older brother. He’s always someone else. Somebody, to be sure, probably somebody we know. But not us. We are either the repentant prodigal or the grace-giving father, but we dang well know the resentful brother is that fundamentalist at work or that TV preacher we can’t stand or some relative who ruins every family reunion. There’s millions of them out there — but none of them is us. Right?

The truth, however, and this is when the scandal gets most scandalous, is that we are the older brother more often than not. Here’s the litmus test: Ever angry about somebody not getting what you think they deserve? Ever resent that someone seems to have it easier than you? Ever think someone asking for forgiveness got it too easily? Are you constantly seeing lots of people as messed up, screwed up, or wrong, but don’t worry too much about if you are?

Do you point the finger a lot? It doesn’t matter why, and you may be calling someone a legalist or thinking you’re calling them the older brother, but I got news for you — it’s you. (It’s me too!)

Bob quotes from Frederick Buechner:

“We are fools for Christ’s sake,” Paul says in the first letter to the Corinthians. God is foolish, too, Paul says. God is foolish to choose for his holy work in the world the kind of lamebrains and misfits and nitpickers and odd ducks and stuffed shirts and egomaniacs and milquetoasts and closet sensualists as are vividly represented by us all.

God is foolish to send us out to speak hope to a world that slogs along heart-deep in the conviction that things can only get worse. . . . He is foolish to have us speak of loving our enemies when we have a hard enough time loving our friends. . . . God is foolish to have us proclaim eternal life to a world that is half in love with death. . . . God is foolish to send us out on a journey for which there are no maps, and to aim us in the direction of a goal we can never know until we get there. Such is the foolishness of god. And yet, and yet, Paul says, “the foolishness of God is wiser than man.”

Well said.

The blogosphere has lost some of its pizazz lately, don’t you think? In a way, I think that’s a good thing. And – don’t get me wrong, there is still a lot of great writing going on out there.

I don’t trackback like I should. Too lazy. And I don’t check links back to me very often. I’m becoming a blog-hermit.

In case you’re wondering why the Bloogroll Posts feature sometimes splatters portions of posts everywhere on the screen, it’s because of unclosed tags (or overly-closed tags) in the posts I’m bringing in off the bloogroll. Yeah, it’s on the list to fix – will be in the beta release.

Happy Birthday Andrew! I love you. And I can’t believe you’re seventeen.

And, finally, yes, I’m working hard on the first beta release of Bloo. I’m doing a huge refactoring of the code.

I must be crazy.