Midwinter snippets

• Some weeks ago, during our family's evening prayer service, we read Luke 4:1-13, about Jesus' temptation in the wilderness. Afterwards our Theresa spoke up, noting that in Luke's account the last two temptations are in a different order than in Matthew's account. I guess nine years old is not too young to discover the Synoptic Problem.


• Today at evening prayer we continued our lectio continua reading through the gospel of Luke, reading the account of the Transfiguration in chapter 9:28-36. Coincidentally we read of this event in church this morning, as the Transfiguration is traditionally remembered in the western church on the last sunday before Lent.
  


• My wife broke her arm two weeks ago in an ice skating accident. Today was the first time all three of us were in church together since then. Her arm is in a sling, though not in a cast. Coincidences seemed to abound today, for as we were singing the final hymn, Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus, we both chuckled when we came to these lines: "The arm of flesh will fail you,/ ye dare not trust your own."


• This afternoon the three of us watched Disney's High School Musical, mostly of course for Theresa's benefit. After this I am now inspired to write and score my own production, provisionally titled Graduate School Musical. It should be a big hit. In certain crowds, that is.


• I've recently learnt of a christian university located in, of all places, the Empire State Building in midtown Manhattan. The King's College was founded in 1999, reviving an earlier institution located up the Hudson River in Briarcliff Manor prior to 1994. In 2005 a member of the New York State Board of Regents objected to its using Columbia University's original name. However, because Columbia relinquished this name in 1784, I doubt very much that anyone is still around who will confuse the two.


• Thanks are due to Steve Pypker, Willem de Ruijter and Matthew Vandervecht for digging us out from under the accumulation of friday's snow storm. May God bless them for their kind beneficence.


• It seems evangelicals are rediscovering monasticism: The unexpected monks. Could this be a case of trying to reinvent the wheel? I think others got there first.