The Sheltered Path

From the Japanese Tea Garden located inside the Golden Gate park comes today's photograph. This path circles behind the pagodas and just at the end you can catch a glimpse of the zen garden located there off to the left. The weather this day was gorgeous and will always be remembered for our extensive use of public transportation!

The Vacation Hangover

After any spectacular holiday it's quite easy to suffer from 'vacation hangover', the condition where one's return to reality is constantly compared to what one was doing the week prior while on vacation. (Like many comparisons sometimes the current situation is better; for example, I was on an airplane in coach class this time last week. Sitting here, writing this, is immeasurably better.) However, around noon I would have been sitting down to lunch at the Neiman Marcus Rotunda and a Croque Monsieur with a glass of red wine. Win some, lose some. More updates as the week progresses.

Oatmeal and Legitimacy

During Thursday night's 2b meeting I took lots of notes, not something I typically do. While the attempt originally was to keep in mind what others were thinking it wasn't long before it became only what I was thinking. And, to that point, many ideas started to slowly generate other ideas and this kept up until the ideas were jumping out onto the notebook.

One thing I specifically mentioned was my need to understand what type of leadership structure others had in mind or were currently using as a frame of reference. If I'm interested in leadership via the Friends Society model and someone else is interested in leadership via papal authority it makes for a tough conversation. I firmly desire and egalitarian model where each of us is equal in leadership; this isn't helpful, though, if others have a different model in mind.

Here is a link to a wikipedia article on the Friends Society. There's a lot here and please don't think this is 'who I am or what I want'; I just want you to read section 2.0, 'Quaker Worship' and have an idea of what's appealing to me. (And, if we all learn something new about our extended network of believers, that's good, too.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_Society#Quaker_worship

The second thing I wanted to mention, and this might cause some head shaking, is my preoccupation with the legitimacy of many of current churches we consider to be in our movement and, specifically, the legitimacy of those churches' pastors. It is very difficult to ascertain the accreditation of colleges producing these wonderful people. So, the question is: Are they legitimate? How does one define legitimacy? I can't answer this now but what I mean to say is thousands of years of tradition and practice mean a lot to me right now and that we shouldn't expect that the gospel has only been revealed in all its truth over the past 100 years.

Straight from the Louvre

Comes today's Fine Arts quiz. What's the name of the painting depicted above?

Wedding at Cana -- Amy got it. (Fact is, I'd completely forgotten what the name was.)