not a fan

Sometimes I think I am too pragmatic and focused on work and discipline. There is a danger of depressing the people that you work closely with when you place great focus on agile disciples that know the Truth and how to handle it.

I have found in business, family and life that Jesus was wise to not mislead anyone by painting rose colored pictures. Kyle Idleman describes that leadership style of Jesus in "not a fan" very well.

Most of us focus on the "Come to Jesus" experience where we realize that we need a savior. That is very important, but when Jesus choose and made disciples he spent a lot of time on the "Come after Jesus" experience.

When His fans chose to crucify him on a cross, His followers chose to use the cross as a symbol for all that He taught them about being a follower.

• a symbol of humiliation
• a symbol of suffering
• a symbol of death

After deciding to follow Jesus, the stuff that is left behind does not matter.

In the recruiting and interviewing stages, Jesus directly and explicitly informed candidates that they can not be His disciple if they were worried about the stuff you leave behind. To follow Jesus, we need our full attention on Jesus.

It is true that future glory can not be compared to present sufferings and it is also true that after shedding all the stuff, Christ bears the load for our yoke. However, if your motivation is not a commitment to follow Christ, those things may seem elusive and distant like a carrot on a stick. In fact, future glory and easy loads are just another example of stuff that can get in the way of our commitment to Him.

Radical

My nephew recommended this book to me. I appreciated the perspective of a megachurch leader that follows a minichurch leader. I'm thankful that David writes this stuff down...

Here is a thought from the book that helps to convey what American Culture has done to the gospel:

We have taken the infinitely glorious Son of God, who endured the infinitely terrible wrath of God and who now reigns as the infinitely worthy Lord of all, and we have reduced him to a poor, puny Savior who is just begging for us to accept him.

Do we really think Jesus needs our acceptance?

The cross is not about what we did to Christ or how painful his death was, but what God did to Christ and what Christ accepted for us.

If you don't know the gospel, or have someone with you that does, the challenges at the end of the book could prove dangerous in that it may compel you to perform before you understand your identity...   but then a good kick in the seat of the pants is sometimes what helps us understand.

Dangerous Wonder

Mike Yaconelli does an excellent job of teaching that God wants life for His children rather than for us to be right. He uses the universally observable faith of a child to illustrate that point. As we, especially the educated, responsible and successful pursuers of our cultural dreams, develop an "adult" mind that distinguishes our own definition of right from our own definition of wrong, we are so tempted to serve our own mind instead of God.

Quotes that compelled me:

• Most of us spend our lives "impersonating ourselves" --- Eugene Peterson
• Culture is putting out the light in men and women's souls. --- A.W. Tozer

Coming Back Stronger

My youngest daughter gave this to me for my birthday and I am thoroughly enjoying this book. Injuries, defects, mental breakdowns and mistakes are some of the best ways to learn how to keep pressing on toward a goal.

A pure heart, talent, support and blessing are rare in professional athletes because of the way we Americans worship them. It takes great love and discipline for God to develop character in a super bowl quarterback from Texas.

Reading about athletics and humanity has its limitations, but this is inspiring.  I recommend this book and have given it to a few friends to read when it seems like everything is going bad and the potential is there for it to get worse.

Favorite Quotes from Drew in the book:

• The road to success is usually a pretty bumpy one. And there are no shortcuts. 
• The painful things we go through have a way of teaching us things we can't learn any other way.
• It's not always the first-round picks who rise to the top. It's often the journeyman, the ones who persevere through trials. 
• I believe that when you fear God, you don't need to fear anything else---no man, no task, no obstacle or challenge.
• My goal for each year is simple: to be better than I was the year before.... by digging deep and evaluating yourself. 

25th Anniversary

Jackie and I are celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary this week.  It is really hard to believe that it has been 25 years. Time doesn't really seem to matter much anymore as it passes so quickly.

A friend from Japan just contacted me this week and I realized that he had taken me on a tour through the southern part of Tokyo before Jackie and I were blessed with our oldest daughter.  That tour seems like it was just yesterday, another reminder that time passes quickly.

A friend from work was married just this past Saturday reminding me that the duration of a marriage is not nearly as significant as the foundation of the marriage.

As I am writing this, our three children are all at youth camp in Hardin, KY.  They are spending time with some people that we have known and trusted for many years to teach absolute truth from an eternal perspective.

I am proud of all three children as they are making choices that will affect the rest of their lives, just like Jackie and I do every day.

In the scope of all things eternal, 25 years is really just a fleeting moment.  My prayer is that our children will be able to understand holy matrimony way better than we do one day.  Jackie and I have friends that can appreciate this without ever being married to anyone but Jesus Christ.

Jackie and I were blessed to have been raised by families that understand words like love, faith and hope and how a relationship with Jesus Christ and accountability within a community can make 50th Wedding Anniversaries as achievable as 25th Wedding Anniversaries.

As we celebrate for a few days looking back 25 and forward 25, the  time that seems most significant is now.  That has always been the case for the two of us, for better or for worse.

We are planning to meet our children in Louisville at a wedding that is significant to all of us.  As Josh and I have been meeting this past few months, we have been touched on the difference between the titles of bride and wife.  They are both significant.

Approaching a wedding or an anniversary or just another day, a marriage has just as much need for bride and groom as it does man and woman or husband and wife.

Your God Is Too Small

When Jackie and I left Charlotte, NC for the opportunities that awaited us in Lexington, KY, my Sunday School teacher gave me a book that he thought I would enjoy.  I read it immediately and appreciate Tommie Mull for giving it to me.

In 1989, I thought the perspective was timeless because J.B. Phillips was writing down truths in 1961 that were relevant to the events and technology of 1989.

On a recent hiking trip in NC, I decided to re-read this book and have determined it still to be timeless in 2011.

C.S. Lewis wrote the Screwtape Letters to help us see how demons are restricted, limited in scope, and how their tactics to speak to us from time to time in the first person as though they were us.  A fictional piece that aligned with the truth.

J.B. Phillips works from a different direction.  He lists several destructive views of God that we have created in our own finite minds that keep us from understanding the limitlessness of God.  Those views are often a result of good experiences with people that have been inspiring and helpful to us.

I'll list a few of those destructive associations that we have made between a limitless God and a limited image of God.

• Resident Policeman
• Parental Hangover
• Grand Old Man
• Meek and Mild
• Absolute Perfection
• Heavenly Bosom
• God-in-a-box
• Managing Director
• Second-Hand God
• Perennial Grievance
• Pale Galilean
• Projected Image
• Assorted

The Myths of Innovation

A friend at work recommended I read this.

Enjoyed the first chapter that suggested that epiphanies are things we look for, hope for and believe in but are rare, and usually embellishments of reality because people want to believe them, and therefore not a good source of innovation.

I have to respect an author that is emphatic about getting his readers to put down all books and make something with their hands in the same book that includes a 100 book bibliography rank ordered by frequency of reference.

A God Sized Promise

Dustin and Mindi were married in a beautiful ceremony that represented a God sized promise.

Pastor Dave shared an encouraging charge about the details of accessories, recipes and life together as family.  Details tie us all together as they are woven together and prepared in a tasteful manner.

No one can know what God has in store for us as His children.  The Martins and the Matterns certainly have traveled a path that no man expected for them even though the final destination is clear and full of lots of joy.

In addition to the ceremony, it was good to see so many people from the community that I had not seen in a very long time.

It was also good for our family to be able to all go together to the wedding.  Lots of details there to be woven.

MC Escher: Waterfall

One of my hobbies is to put together 1,000 piece black and white MC Escher puzzles because it just seems like a hard thing to do.  MC Escher's work has always intrigued me because of his ability to tie two dimensional art with engineering and physics and visual trickery.

A friend sent me this video and I am so disappointed with myself for not having tried something like this before....



To make up for not thinking about this on my own, I'm thinking I need to do this in a larger scale.

Favorite movies we all watched in 2010

In order to make this list, all five Ebys must have seen this movie during the year it is nominated. Half the movies that were nominated by individual Ebys were disqualified because they were not viewed by all of us.


Here is the list for 2010:

1. Unstoppable ( One #1 vote )
2. Toy Story 3 ( One #1 vote )
3. Knight & Day
4. Bounty Hunter
5. The Tourist
6. Shutter Island
7. The Box
8. Eat, Pray, Love

There were five disqualified movies that were ranked higher than any of our qualified movies.

• ( Receiving #1 votes )
  The A-Team, The Book of Eli, Date Night
  We all know that Adam would have liked A-Team, but he didn't see it...
• ( Receiving #2 votes )
  The Social Network, Secretariat
  Adam thinks we all would have liked The Social Network, but none of us saw it..

The Tourist was the movie with the greatest spread of votes ranging for #4 to #14.

The worst movies tend to get seen by all of us since Red Box has made it so cheap to watch movies.   We are watching these movies at least 28 days later than all of our friends that are watching better movies sooner with Netflix, Cable or Satellite.

Christmas Letter: Take 2

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Some birthdays provide gifts for everyone

The kids are growing up so fast and this week I had to just step back again and admire how God has used trials to grow us all.  It was Carmen's birthday, but we all enjoyed the evening together more like a reunion than a dinner or a birthday.

I picked Carmen up from her dorm on my way home from work and we all enjoyed a great birthday dinner even though Adam was at work and not able to join us until later.

Carmen is a private person and not much into her birthday, but she allowed her mother and her sister to shower her with gifts, stories and pictures.  It was a fun night just to sit back and watch them interact.

I was also impressed with Becca's desire to make this a special evening for everyone else.  For many years, it has been a tradition for me to get the camera out and take pictures of the kids as they grow up.  At each birthday, I think the kids have grown up enough that they don't want a rigid picture by a cake, but we do it anyway.

This year was different, Becca already had the camera out and was excited about getting pictures of her sister's birthday.  She took a lot of great pictures and avoided the rigid picture by the cake.

Carmen got a lot of books and devotionals and a coat and some other stuff to keep her warm going to class, but we were all blessed with her presence.

Laxville Wins First Tournament

Adam tried out for a new Lacrosse team in Louisville that was attempting to collect players from many different schools. The team is called Laxville because of its mission to grow Lacrosse in Louisville.

Evan Wright and Matthew Parker heard about the team and Adam decided he wanted to play too. I was concerned about the time it would take to practice in Louisville, but after all three players made the team, sharing the driving duty has made that not as much of an issue for the parents. It's still a pretty big part of ten days of summer for the boys.

I knew at the tryouts that this would be a special team. The coaches all worked together very well to run excellent drills that kept the boys moving for two hours with virtually no down time. Adam was one of several boys that was leaning on his stick in the heat.

The Lax-n-nati tournament was the first time that I got to see the team play together and it was a beautiful thing to watch. Crisp passes and rapid ball movement change the game completely from what I am accustom to watching.

It was a great tournament. Six games in two days at Clear Creek Park on the East side of Cincinnati. The weather was gorgeous and the competition was great.

They played teams from Georgia, Ohio and Indiana on Saturday and went undefeated. They lost to a great team from Cincinnati on Sunday morning and had to beat a tough well matched team from Franklin, TN in a very close game to earn a rematch for the championship.

I really enjoyed getting to talk with parents from all the the other states and meeting all the parents from Lax-ville. It wasn't until dinner on Saturday that I knew the origin of the team was so recent.

For as much fun and as much development as the team has made in so short of a time, it was no surprise that people were talking about looking for additional tournaments.

Carmen graduates from Tates Creek High School

The ceremony at Rupp Arena was very professionally done and well executed. It seemed so short, much like High School. To watch Carmen parade through one of the lines that received a diploma and a handshake from superintendent Stu Silberman looked more like a synchronized choreography than the graduations that I have witnessed in the past. Did I mention it was short?

In the past few months and years and really my whole career, I have been obsessively focused on objectives that I have set for myself and I have always considered myself very blessed to have a family that is not dependent on my daily direction or re-direction. As this graduation ceremony was executed in a few fleeting moments, I couldn't help comparing it to the four years of high school that went by so quickly.

It seems like just yesterday that Carmen started her freshman year of volleyball and then wrestled with a decision to pursue an aggressive objective of an International Baccalaureate Diploma.

The arena was also roomy. We sat with a group of 11 family members. You can see us at the top of the photograph on the right. Second row: Shirley, Vickie, Buddy, Bud, Becca, Keith. First row: Adam, Peter, Stephanie, Jackie and I.

Matt and Kim were there as well, but we didn't even know it until we saw them afterward. For the 360 or so Tates Creek Graduates and those there to witness it, there was plenty of room and plenty of comfort in an arena built to place 22,000 fans around a game of basketball.

On the right, Carmen's family looks down as her principal approaches the stage and podium. At the bottom, the NCAA Championship banners hang over her, waiting to witness the next four years of her life. I hope those banners know how much they have to look forward to with Carmen. I know that Tates Creek has prepared her well for the next set of four very short years.

Spring Break in Clearwater

We are not usually a family that likes to go back to the same vacation spot twice, but we did this year.

The first few days were cold and windy, but we shopped for sweatshirts and did things inside instead of laying on the beach and burning.

It was a very relaxing weekend because we had seen most of the things on Jackie's lists and we didn't have to be certain places at certain times.

The only scheduled event was para-sailing on a calm and sunny Wednesday afternoon. In the photo to the left, Carmen and Adam are riding in the Superman chute at 600 feet.

The Hilton did a great job of hosting our vacation again and we love the variety of restaurants that are available in Clearwater within walking distance from the hotel.

Dave Pletcher recommended the Thirsty Marlin in Palm Harbor. Jackie and I drove to Tarpon Springs on Monday, but didn't see the restaurant. We were glad we took the icy (ask Becca) drive to Palm Harbor on Wednesday night with the whole family.

We also enjoyed a Thursday evening walk to Jimmy's Fish House for a sunset dinner.

However, being a morning person, I love breakfast and thoroughly enjoyed every one of them in Clearwater.

Whether it was the Hilton continental breakfast with fresh fish, cheese, meats, muffins and fruit or the cafe across the street for a hearty midwestern two egg breakfast, the morning meal is always my favorite to share with family.

Favorite Movies we all watched in 2009

In order to make this list, all five Eby's must have seen this movie during the year it is nominated. There are a few movies that have been nominated by individual Eby's that were disqualified because they were not viewed by all of us.


Here is the list for 2009:

1. Blindside ( Four out of Five Eby's chose this as #1 )
2. Transformers II
   
3. Eagle Eye

As this list gets shorter each year, it is becoming apparent that our tastes are diverging. The kids have seen all the "cool" teen movies and don't want to nominate them to the Eby Favorites.

Examples of divergent tastes:

• Adam and I both saw Star Trek on DVD and we know that it was a great movie with a great story line, but the girls didn't even want to watch it. Braveheart, Gran Torino, Amazing Grace and Sherlock Holmes all fall in this category as well, just not as highly rated as Star Trek
• Carmen liked Hangover, the rest of us have not seen it yet. Carmen has seen many other movies with her friends that she did not nominate
• Jackie and I thought Julie/Julia was in the top 3 but none of the kids were interested in watching it. I let Jackie twist my arm into seeing Have You Heard about the Morgans and I enjoyed listening to her laugh through it.

Coming up with a favorite movie used to be a lot easier when we all went to the movies together. Life was simpler way back then.

New Year, New Colors for Becca

Becca selected three colors from her "Pillowcase of many colors" for the four walls. Jackie and I thought they were a little intense. Adam offered advice on which color to put on which wall and Carmen cleaned Becca's room while the paint was drying.

Later that night, Becca went through all of her stuff and purged whatever was not necessary. When I say purge, I mean the same thing as what Carmen does on a regular basis. When stuff is not actively used, it moves to Mom's bedroom so Mom can deal with it.

My job is simply to paint and tell. It is an enjoyable job. The first color was Celestial Blue and it covered two adjacent walls. The second color was Pink Frenzy which would drive me crazy.

The third color was "Can't Miss Lime" and I would prefer to call it "Three Coat Lime" since it goes on in streaks and spots as if the pigments they used repelled each other.

I also took pictures of the harsh working environment and tight spaces where I had to manuever behind furniture and pre-purged stuff to reach no less than thirty corners of walls, windows and doors.

I decided not to post those since people would accuse me of whining.

Out with Lavender, Horses and Teddy Bears

Becca finally convinced her mother to remove the Teddy Bear wall paper from her room this summer. Jackie wouldn't let me paint the room until she was satisfied with the color in the master bathroom, so Becca has been living with her furniture in the middle of a small room for a while.

After returning from Indiana, Becca picked out three colors for her walls and we went to work from there. Over the last two days of 2009, we covered three walls with two colors and it looks like we will finish the last wall with the last color tomorrow so I decided to take a few pictures of the room that has reminded me that our youngest daughter is growing up.

After we finish the new room, I will name the three new colors. For now, it is safe to assume that they are not close to the baby soft lavender color on the walls in these photographs.

It is also safe to say that this sketch from Disney World in a clean white frame will not make it into the teen age room. The subject of the sketch will never be lost in her parents' memory. The tiny little girl with glasses just screams "I'm happy".

The golden retriever in the corner of the picture was added later when she cut it out of a birthday card from Robin. These lighted horses were up year round in her room ever since she got them. They will now become a seasonal display at Christmas time.

Passing the Ping Pong Torch... not just yet.

Over the years, I have handed many torches to Adam. In 2008 is was the 40 yard dash. In 2009 it was Ultimate Frisbee. With Cousin Ben's assistance, I have nearly relinquished the Ping Pong torch over the Christmas holiday.

At Thanksgiving, I played over 100 games as Adam and Becca both challenged their father. Of all the matches, I only lost one to Adam. Until Thanksgiving, he pull off a game here and there, but never won a match.

Ben and Adam spent time together over Christmas working on spins and change-ups. By the end of Christmas, Adam was able to beat Ben in a game and beat me in more than one match. I won more matches against Adam than he did against me, but the writing is on the wall.

So Ping Pong and Pool are now in transition.

We challenge each other in chess, but that is one that I am hoping to hang on to for a while.