No Lightning?

So for the first time in months, I set foot in a church yesterday for a Sunday service. Much to my surprise, I was not struck my lightning immediately upon entering the door. In fact, overall, it was a rather pleasant experience. For those of you regularly following this blog, you'll have probably gathered that me and the Roman Catholic Church are no longer on speaking terms. The pope seems to have lost his marbles and overall I've found the church to be like the brick walls Rob Bell talks about in Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith. They spend so much of their time making rules and regulations and dealing with doctrinal things that they build this wall that tends to fall when you remove a brick and is very good at keeping people out. In light of this, but because I do enjoy a combination of more liberal social ideas but more traditional services, I attended a service at an Episcopal church. It was a nice service in a beautiful old Gothic church. It also had a kick-ass organ which always makes me happy. It's someplace I might consider going back to.

In other news, I've finished Dodd's My Faith So Far: A Story of Conversion and Confusion. It was again a good read and draws some of the same conclusions at Bell. Essentially, questions aren't a bad thing. Ending up in the middle is ok. My own conclusion, the journey isn't a waste. Just because you end up somewhere completely different than you intended doesn't mean the time you spent elsewhere along the way wasn't valuable.

Gotta Love the High

So the first half of the week, my visits to the pool were largely to catch up from being really busy last week and not really getting to the pool like I should have. Today I was back up to my usual distance in the pool and had a great workout. Serious runners speak of having something called a "runner's high" when during a good workout you get an endorphin induced high where you feel like you're in a real groove and like you could run forever. Well, the same thing happens to swimmers and probably to others who participate in highly aerobic endurance type activities. So during my workout today I actually had one of those swimmer's highs and ended up making my set a little bit longer than I'd intended because my freestyle was just feeling really really good. Eventually of course, I did get tired, but it was a good tired.

Aside from that, I decided to pull out a book I read a few years ago for a paper in an Intro to Religion class. We had to select a book for the paper that was not regular course material. One of the two professors for the class reccomended the book and it turns out the other one could be found in the acknowledgments. It was a great book then but seems more appropriate to my current religious situation. So, in any case, I'm re-reading Patton Dodd's My Faith So Far: A Story of Conversion and Confusion. It's a brutally and comically honest autobiographical book about Dodd from age 18 to 20 and his journey from being forced into religion until he was 14, dropping the subject, and then somehow ending up a part of a crazy charismatic Pentecostal megachurch in Colorado Springs at 18. It chronicles his journey from there, including a year at the (in)famous Oral Roberts University. It's a good read and deals a lot with defining oneself as a Christian and what that really means. If nothing else, I can't spend all day on the job search, so I'm enjoying trying to have something on hand to read.