Saints go marching home... but at what cost?

Last night I watched as the Saints returned to the newly refurbished Superdome for the first time in over a year. I loved seing the team draw on the emotion of the night to beat the rival Falcons. Alot of people have criticized the city of New Orleans for rebuilding the Dome while people are still without adequate housing in the city. Being from south Louisiana I understood the necessity of rebuilding the Dome and drawing people back to the city in order to stimulate the economy. However, last night, one of the comments made by the announcers really struck me. He said that the new coach, Sean Payton, had someone come up to him this summer and tell him that even though he did not have a place to live or a job he had purchased 6 season tickets because that's how much he believes in the Saints. The announcer told this story to emphasize how important the Saints are to the city and how much havign them back home will help to energize the citizens. But I couldn't help but to draw the exact opposite conclusion from his statements. Here is a person who does not have a job or a place to live who is spending what money he has on tickets to a game. How lopsided has our culture become? How addicted to athletic competition? I don't even know what else to say but that I am disgusted.

Hello world!

That simple statement has been the result of countless computer programmers' first lines of code. As they move on to learn new languages they often return to this familiar phrase. I think that it is appropriate here for my return to blogging after such a long hiatus since I am moving to the new version of Blogger. Many, many, many, many things have transpired since my last post more than 5 months ago. I'll give a quick run down of the summer's activities here and will likely expound on some of them later.

1. I finished out my first year of seminary on May 11.
2. I worked full time (plus some) at our church for the next two weeks preparing for our software switchover from Shelby to Fellowshipone (these are church management database programs).
3. On May 28 I packed up my car and drove down to Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, AL for Commissioned Officer Training (with 209 other new Air Force officers) and the Chaplain Candidate Course (with 47 other chaplain candidates). My instructor for COT turned out to be from Louisville, and I found out around the middle of the course that he is actually a graduate of SBTS and is a pastor of a church here in town.
4. On July 14 I graduated from CCC and was ready to spend a week on vacation in Baton Rouge before returning to Louisville and work.
5. Less than 5 miles after leaving Maxwell my car overheated which cracked the block. We ended up selling it for scrap and are now living life with one vehicle.
6. On July 24 I returned to work and to all the problems that had been waiting for me all summer. I worked full time until school started back.
7. On Aug 15 I began my third semester of seminary. I decided to take things a little lighter this semester. I'm only taking 3 classes (Ministry of Leadership, Elementary Hebrew, and Systematic Theology I), but since 2 of those classes have a combined 3000 pages of reading and Hebrew requires quite a bit of study, on top of the fact that we're still getting the new software properly configured for the way we do church, I thought this would be a good idea.

Well, that's the whirlwind version of my summer. I'm planning to do a complete redesign of this blog sometime in the near (or possibly not so near) future. I just need to come up with a good name. If anyone is still poking their heads in here periodically, don't give up on me (and leave me some suggestions for names if you'd like). I promise there will be much more coming soon.

P.S. Here's a shot of Dee Dee and I just before going to our Dining Out (a formal, military dinner).