Weekend Update

Hi there,

I'm sitting at the one wi-fi hotspot in Kenansville, North Carolina, killing time (hours! five hours!) between assignments. They close in thirty minutes and I'll have three hours left after that. Very glad to have found it, though; A&M cafe. I would never have checked it out had not an acquaintance recommended it, because from the outside it looks pretty sketch, but inside it's nice. I'm sitting next to a print of ivory-billed woodpeckers, in a comfortable chair with a table at a great height for typing, looking out the windows at green trees and blue sky.

I just did the questions for chapter 11 in Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World. My small group is reading it and loving it, but there are 12 chapters, so we're almost out. Luckily, the same author, Joanna Weaver, has another book, Having a Mary Spirit, so we're going with that next. But after that we will be back to square one in the Salt Shaker (Christian bookstore), wandering around being indecisive and feeling blind. We've picked some terrible books--we all agree on this, it's not just me and my snobbery--so I tense up as we near that time again. The reason for my saying this is, does anyone have good ideas for books for Christian small groups to read? Even though we have all of Having a Mary Spirit before next time, I would feel good if we had a few titles up our sleeves. Maybe I'll turn them onto Adam Hamilton.

I'm going to see a movie this evening (for work) that was written, produced, and directed by a local 17-year-old. I was dismayed this morning to find out it's a scary movie, because I hate being scared (come on, the world is scary enough already, people) but I'm thinking it might be bad enough to be funny instead. Which puts me in a bind: do I want a sweet lil' earnest teenager to make a good movie if it means I'll be scared on the long drive home? Or do I want his heartfelt work to be low quality just for the sake of my peace of mind? Not too much longer until we know, confreres. Either way it's part bad, part good, in keeping with the pattern of life in general. I'm slowly learning that it's all about the ratios.