i’m sitting in our church worship center at the 2nd-from-final rehearsal for our middle school one life revolution variety show (which is next weekend). last year, we had hoped to raise $3000 to build a house, but ended up with $25000. our middle schoolers decided to use the funds to put in two clean-water wells for a village in zambia that didn’t have them.

anyhow — i hadn’t seen most of the acts for this year before today. and at this very moment, as i type, there’s a 6th grade boy on stage doing a hula-hoop dance act to a disco song — hollywood swingin’. it’s a riot — another year or two and he’d never be caught dead on stage doing this. but he’s totally into it, and it’s very fun.

i’ve never posted a “painting in need of a caption” — it’s always been photos. but this beauty (officially titled “alice”, btw) is, well… so, either alice really needs a new orthodontist, or a new painter.

add your captions. i’ll add the “contenders” up here in the post. to be a contender, it just has to result in anything audible from me when i read it (gasp, chuckle, groan). winner gets a ys book of his or her own choosing. closes monday sometime.

contenders:

Deacon Al’s Gender Reassignment Completed. kevin j. bowman

mom?! ty hogue

Truth to the fact that it wasn’t only Liesl’s classmates drinking some strange brew lately but this photo taken of Liesl’s teacher, Alice. Gman

“Unphased by the liberties Kinkade took in the portrait he sat for, Crowder jokingly said he thought the resemblance was remarkable.” turff89

Alice obviously hasn’t been to wonderland lately. brian aaby

june cleaver’s sister alice - now you know where the “beaver” genes came from! bobbie

“Feeling the need to put on a “happy face” for the congregation. The pastor’s wife resorted to botox.” riddle

i think it’s benny hinn in drag! paul

and the winner is…

Deacon Al’s Gender Reassignment Completed. kevin j. bowman

had lots of strong contenders this time around. almost gave it to ty hogue’s “mom?”, which really made me laugh. but, in the end, we’ll go with kevin’s bowman’s submission — funny stuff.

baklavah and hummus, anyone?
liesl had a major project due in school this week — a “country report” with a full display on a three-fold display board. it was a cross-subject proejct for english, history and science. she chose “sri lanka”, because she thought the name sounded cool. she did a great job (with, um, a little help from mom and dad). but a couple nights this week, the different sections of 6th graders have to display their projects in the school gym, and all parents and family are invited to come see them all. each presentation is also expected to have finger food that would reflect the country they studied. so i nibbled on a rather exotic variety of finger food while a strange combination of 6th graders and doting ethnic grandmothers refreshed plates around me.

the country with substantially more displays than any other county? iraq. that’s right. i don’t know if you’d find that in any other middle school in america! but we have a very large chaldean population in our area. i was grabbing a pistachio-filled baklavah-like thing (that was amazingly good) off the display of a little girl who’s father and grandmother were obviously actively involved in helping her — very proud of their iraqi heritage — and the dad leaned over and said to me (about the snack i’d taken): you know what we call those, don’t you? chaldean viagra!

an interesting aspiration
we also had max’s school open-house last night. he was very proud about touring us through all their class projects. one was a sillouette of him with a bunch of comments about himself. one of the lines was “i believe strongly about…”, and i was suprised to see he didn’t say anything about god. another project had the kids write a big long list of things that bug them. one of max’s was, “it bugs me when i have to go to church.” (yup, he’s not too fond of our church.) but then i saw it. hanging from the ceiling was a very fun “crest” he’d made of himself. the front side had four drawings, one of which was a great drawing of a drummer (complete with stage lights, and a roaring crowd). max has been taking drum lessons for a year or so. on the back was an essay that explained the drawings. i was a bit surprised to see, “when i grow up, i want to be a christian drummer” with a full explanation of how cool it would be to be a christian drummer. hmmm. think my kid has been around a few ys events?

the pistil, the stamen, and the useless man
at another stop in max’s room tour, he showed us a model flower he’d made, and explained all the parts in science-teacher detail. best comment: this is the stamen. it’s considered the male part because it doesn’t really do anything.

very fun shakespeare insult kit.

(ht to steve case)

my daughter — 6th grade, 12 years old — had a friend suspended from school this week for the rest of the year. she (the friend, NOT my daughter!) was bringing vodka to school in plastic water bottles every day. my youth ministry life and my family life are colliding…

i had to get an upper G.I. this morning. strip to my undies and lay on a table while drinking chalky barium. then they take all kinds of xrays of my belly. it was a trip to watch the live screen of my stomach processing the barium. i felt a little like gumby when they moved me into different poses, shaping my legs and arms. my doc thinks i might have a hiatal hernia between my stomach and esophagus, due to my heartburn every single night. good times.

this one is actually very cool. it’s called ray-ray parade. a great little logic game (read the “how to play” link). after dinking around to get the feel of it, i went through the easy levels, thinking it was doing really good. but i got an “F”. i’ll be trying again.

[[update: got a “B” — i’m on a ray-ray move, baby!]]

(ht to steve case)

this is great. you enter your zipcode, and are shown gas prices for today at all the gas stations in that zip code. the prices are updated every night. i was surprised to see that a station just down the road from where i normally fill up is 10-cents per gallon cheaper!

one year ago today i started blogging. i had resisted for over a year, worried that i would either alienate ys customers (if my blog was really honest) or allow it to become a cheap marketing piece, disguised as a blog. but i chose to launch out. my first post said this:

so. people have been bugging me about blogging for a year or more. and i’ve wanted to. i’ve almost started many times. here’s been my two primary concerns: i don’t want a cheesy blog that’s just a marketing front for Youth Specialties. i keep seeing organizational leaders are starting blogs simply for this reasons (of course, there are great exceptions). i could easily write laundered, sanitized, and even occaisionally fiesty-but-well-aimed thoughts in a organizationally-promoting way. not interested (as much as i love promoting YS).

But the rub has been this (and my 2nd reason for a year of hesitancy): if i blog about what i’m really thinking, i stand to alienate a reasonable portion of the YS crowd! i don’t really want to do that either.

so, i sat and stewed about it for a year.

about a month ago, i decided, “crap, i have to do this.” then, this past weekend, i was reading (WAY overdue reading, i might add) Kenda Dean’s Practicing Passion (the link goes to Jonny Baker’s review of the book, because it’s such a great summary) on a plane, and kept thinking, “ooh, i wish i could blog about that!”

i want to do this as a sort of spiritual discipline. i know this will help me work things out — whether they be personal issues, faith issues, church issues, youth ministry issues, whatever. if you choose to read, so be it.

here we go!

so here i am, 505 posts and 3489 comments later. about 600 people visit this blog on an average weekday (about half that on weekends), approximately 80% from the u.s., a good amount from canada and the u.k., and a wonderful growing assortment from a dozen or more other countries all over the world. technorati (the blog search engine) ranks ysmarko as 8634 in the blogosphere, #2 in “youth ministry” and “youth work” (behind the uber-blogger jonny baker), and #10 in “emerging church. it’s #26 in “church” and #24 in “faith”.

but at the end of the day, my blog isn’t about ranking or readers (i’m glad you read, though). my blog has been a way for me to be honest: with myself, with god, and with, well, others. it’s provided me accountability and processing-space, thinking fodder and a journaling niche. i love blogging; i love what it’s done for me and in me, and how it has become a spiritual discipline for me, a guy who doesn’t naturally take to most things with the word “discipline” attached to them.

i raise my starbucks cup (it’s actually a bit cold, and only has the bottom half-inch of coffee in it right now — so it’s not much of a toast) to year two!

, by jonathan safran foer. i’d read foer’s second book, , and thought it was beyond fantastic. a friend had raved about this one, so i thought i’d give it a turn (a page turn, that is!). really, foer is an exceptionally creative writer. when i’m reading his books, i regularly stop to ask, “how did he come up with this?” jewish history, ukranian history, fantasy, wise-cracking but earnest teenage translator, pain and loss, farting dogs, pretention and honesty, and, wow — this book covers a lot of territory. i can’t visualize how they made it into a movie (starring elijah wood), but i’ll have to rent it and see. highly, highly recommended for readers of creative fiction.

, by alan moore and david lloyd. this is the illustrated book that spawned the movie. originally written as four comic books, it’s been re-released as one fairly long graphic novel. i enjoyed the read — but this is a rare case where i liked the movie better than the book (which is interesting, because the author of the book sued the wachowski brothers to have his name removed from the movie after he didn’t like the differences). the book dragged along for me at points — which is hard to do with an illustrated book! and the illustration style left me cold. i guess — for me — the characters in the movie were more believable; and the same characters in the book were a bit — well — two-dimensional (and i’m not only talking about the fact that they lay in two dimensions on the page!).

, by mike king. mike’s book doesn’t come out until october of this year, but i was asked to read it and write an endorsement. it’s a great book. more than once i found myself chuckling with a low laugh, thinking, “wow, i can’t believe you had the guts to say THAT in a book, and that the publisher had the guts to leave it in!” this book will beautifully and gloriously get mike black-listed from the few most-conservative church circles where he hasn’t already been banned. i actually enjoyed the first half of the book better (the stomping-mad, name-calling, saying it like it is, call to change 1/2 of the book). but i expect many in-the-trenches youth workers will find the second half (the practical stuff of moving toward spiritual formation in youth ministry) more helpful. mike actually proposed this book to ys — and we ONLY passed because we already had mark yaconelli’s book, , in development, and there is a lot of similarity in the two books. but i’m glad mike’s book is seeing the light of day — and very soon!

, by danny holland. this book releases in august, and i was asked to read it and write an endorsement. (btw, did you know it’s common practice for endorsers to not even read the book they endorse? did you know it’s common practice for publishers, or assistants to the author, to draft the endorsement on behalf of the endorser, and they only have to agree to it or tweak it? i find this practice hideous — especially in the christian bookselling world. ys does NOT do this. and i will never, personally, write an endorsement for a book i didn’t read.) so… i’m not writing an endorsement for this book, and i DID read it. it’s not a terrible book, by any stretch of the imagination. i just found it to be less than “endorse-able”.