Thursday, February 09, 2006

Family Tidbits

January 20. Anne competed in the Spelling Bee at her school, Dulles Elementary, and won. Her winning words were arcing and teemed. She'll be competing next in the district/county competition on February 25. I honestly really don't have high expectations on how well she may do in the next round, only that she should do her best to study and prepare. I have a quicktime movie of her reaction to winning but I still have to figure out how to put it on the site.

January 22. Preached in Encounter worship at FBCC on the topic "Beliefs to Convictions" and showed an 18-minute excerpt from Beyond the Gates of Splendor DVD. I encouraged parents to examine whether we are just passing on a belief system or an unwavering conviction and commitment to the cause of Christ. I got a lot of good feedback, and felt it was mostly undeserved. Since my main outline came from Josh McDowell's website and I only got to preach half of the sermon (the DVD preached the other half).


January 25-28. Betty and I were out of town in Orlando, Florida for Children's Pastor's Conference. We didn't travel to any of the theme parks, so did not get to see the Big Cheese, er, Big Mouse. However, Betty did get a few photo ops with Super-U, Roc-Fish, and Miss Patty-Cake.

January 28. Last December I bought several copies of Pastor Karl's Order of the Ancient and received one autographed copy signed to my oldest daughter Anne. Elise Joy wasn't too happy about that then, so it was a pleasant surprise to her to receive her own copy of OOTA, personally signed by Pastor Karl. She brings it to school almost every day and is reading through it right now.

February 5. Preached in the Cantonese service. This is the fourth time I'm preaching this message (part of my Must-Preached Series), its current title being Parenting Lessons from Selected Psalms & Proverbs. This is the same message as the Superman sermon, albeit without the Man of Steel and his parents. I used Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club to illustrate the generational and communication differences in the immigrant Chinese population here in the U.S. I borrowed from the discussion of high-context and low-context culture from a literature course in a New York university.

February 8. Nathan turned sixth. We're real proud of him as he reaches this new milestone. Nathan was at the dentist yesterday, and apparently the anesthesia caused a side-effect in that his lower lip swelled three times its normal size. We felt bad for Nate but he just shrugged it off. Didn't even bother him one bit.

February 9. I'm undertaking a new blog, Jonah 101. It's a resumption of a journey I started a few years ago, but has set aside. I now want to go back and resume it.

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Father-Daughter Article on LWW

See Happy Family for an article interviewing Mr. Frank and Anne about our interest in C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Oh yeah, the article is in Mandarin.