New York, Day 3

Another great day!!! Got a late start on the day. Didn’t leave the hotel until after noon. After grabbing some java, we headed out. The first thing you notice is how much busier the city is on a business day. This town moves!!! Anyway, we started today with Central Park

The massive size of the park is the first thing that blows you away. Over 800 acres. Right smack in the middle of Manhattan. We wandered around for hours (partly because it is so beautiful, but mostly because I got my East and West confused while trying to find The Dakota and Strawberry Fields so I could send Brad a pic message!). Oh well, that is the good kind of lost!

After the park, we went to Cafe Lalo on 83rd for some dessert on the recommendation of the Tingleys. Man, do they know me and my sweet tooth well!!! Delicious Cheesecake. Spendy, but delicious.

After that, off to Rockefeller Plaza. (we are such tourists)

Actually, that place is pretty boring. You know you are not thrilled when the highlight from your trip is running into the Fat Albert and Good Burger guy in the lobby.

For dinner, Little Italy. The accents were heavy and the food was great. After we were stuffed, I had a great idea. WE SHOULD WALK HOME. For some crazy reason, Laurel went along with it. Maybe she is nuts, or maybe she just had no idea how far from the hotel we were!  I just figured we had walked all day, what was 4 more miles.

Well, it was worth it, cuz on the way home, we came across Strands. Strands is 18 miles of new and used books. And everything was cheap. I love places like that, when after you leave your hands smell like old books. We got lost in there until it closed at 1030. I wish I had more room in my luggage to take more books to Claifornia.

New York, Day 2…with Pictures!!

Quite a busy day yesterday. We started with another trip to Times Square, and caught a matinee Broadway play. The play was Xanadu, and at first I was nervous about seeing it, because 1) it’s a musical, and I have never seen a musical that I liked 2) even though we got the tickets at the half-priced TKTS same day stand, they were still 61 bucks a ticket 3) though I have never seen the movie Xanadu, I know of it. All I knew about the movie was Olivia Newton John was rollerskating in outer space or something like that. I have consistently seen that movie on “Worst of all time” lists. But the Theatre people highly reccommended it, saying it was a spoof of the movie, the 80s, and musicals.

So anyway, we went, and I truly enjoyed it. Very entertaining, laughed throughout.

After the show, we took the subway downtown to Ground Zero. Very, very surreal. One of those things that for some reason, when I closed my eyes, I just couldn’t wrap your head around what happened there. And there is this unusual stillness and quiet that is very present there, especially unusual for downtown Manhattan.

After that, we took a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. It’s a really pretty ride, and you get great views of the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Downtown Manhattan. The best part is that the ride is FREE (New York is such a budget buster).

After this, we went to the Irish Pub down the street from out hotel. I had Shepherds Pie. Very tasty. We then went to Grenwich Village and did some wandering. A very cool feel to that community.

Then I realized the coolest part to living on the East Coast. There I was, playing foosball with Laurel at 230 AM, and I got to watch LIVE BASKETBALL from the West Coast. USD-St. Mary’s. LIVE AT 230. Now that was a treat!

Ok, now I gotta go make some more memories!

New York, Day 1

Here we are, the city that never sleeps. After a long day of travel (got up at 5am Cali time, a delayed connection in Baltimore) we got into Long Island around 7. Then, we still had a 90 minute ride on the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan. So all in all, we got into the Herald Square Hotel about 9:30 local time. It’s a very basic hotel, but I really like it. Great location (2 blocks from the Empire Station, 1 block to the subway) and all the people staying here are like minded: They want to spend there money on seeing the city, not on a hotel with silk sheets and a crappy weight room that no one uses.

By this time, we were ready to eat! We got on the subway to Times Squares, which was a very, very  long ride of about 90 seconds. Now, when you walk up to Times Square, it really is sensory overload. The lights, the people, the smells. Ir really was incredible. it looked like there are lots of really good restaurants down there, but we were on a mission. Johns Pizzaria on 46th street. Our friends Travis and Emily said we needed to go there, and they were right. We polished off a large pizza between the two of us. Delicious! After that, we just wandered the streets for a little while. But it got cold and REALLY WINDY, so we called it a night around 1 AM.

NY tip of the day: Watch where you are stepping!!! I was looking around at all the lights and buildings, and walked into a big fresh pile of puke!!!! (Some Long Island kid must have had one $14 cocktail too many.) Around 70 people saw me do this,and laughed and pointed at the giant tourist!

Bummer of the day: We bought a new video camera for this trip. The camera works great, but my computer won’t pull up the video. Come to think of it, this computer is being a butthead. It wouldn’t play DVDs on the plane either. Oh well, I will have to have one of my more tech savvy friends look at in when I am home.

Going to the Big Apple

Laurel and I have always talked about going to New York City. We were actually tentatively planning on going in September. But last week, as we were looking at me going back to school, we realized September would not work. So anyways, to make a long story short, we looked at our options and said “if we are ever going to go, now is the time.” So we cleared our schedule and bought our airline tickets and are off on Saturday.

We have the normal touristy stuff planned: Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, Broadway play, Yankee Stadium tour (duh, it’s the last season, gotta go see all the history that it holds before it becomes a parking lot). Anyone have any good ideas on what else we should see and/or do???  I would love to hear your ideas.

On a related note, I plan on using this as a travel blog, posting pics and talking about whats goin’ on with the Prestons in the city that never sleeps. So stay tuned…

Flying Piggies on a Frigid Day in Hades.

Many of you know that I am down on college. When I…eh…left Puget Sound Christian College in 2001, I swore off school, saying I would never go back. I said things like schooling was overrated and asked “how many people are actually using their precious degree that that spent 80 grand getting??? Many people I know have a degree in a field they never plan on having a career in, like my friends with a psychology degree that are now bartending. Way to spend your parents money. Or the world class cop-out sociology degree. (What is sociology anyway?? Ok, so its the study of society.) If you have a B.A. in sociology, you probably really mastered in partying and minored in keg stands!

Anyways, as I was saying, I was certain that I would NEVER be going back to school.  It’s funny how God works when we use absolutes like that. Because last week, I followed a leading I have been sensing for much time, and sent in my application (along with 55 bucks) to Hope International University to complete my BA in Christian Ministry. I’m still not sure about this, and God is going to have to make it VERY CLEAR, but I would say chances are very good that I will be spending the better part of 18 months finishing taking classes like Pauline Theory and Hermeneutics.

And the crazy part is…I’m very excited about all of this and what it could mean for both my walk and my ministry!

Did you miss me??

Hello faithful reader! (all 2 of you)

Now I know that I have promised at least one new blog post a week, so first let me justify my extended hiatus by saying that My ‘puter was in the shop for 10 days. We got it back today, so I will fill you in on all the exciting news in the days to come!

My Bucket List

Laurel and I went to see The Bucket List on Sunday. Not a bad flick. For those of you that don’t know the basic premise of the movie, two guys (Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman) find out they are dying and come up with a list of what they want to get done before they kick the bucket, hence… The Bucket List. They then set off to get do accomplish what they want to get done, knowing their time is short. Now I don’t want to throw out all the cliches like: No one is promised tomorrow, You never know when your number is up, blah blah blah blah blah blah. All true, but… how morbid.

Anyway, this movie got me thinking about something that we have all thought about from time to time: what do I want to do before I die? So I came up with my little list, some general, some specific. Here it goes, in no particular order:

1)Catch a ball (home run, foul ball) at a MLB game.

2)Be a contestant on a game show.

3)Ride a motorcycle across the country.

4)Give hope to someone that is truly hopeless.

5) Travel to every continent.

6) See God do something miraculous (not U.S. miracles, like getting an unexpected check in the mail. More like an Acts miracle, like blind people seeing!)

7) Memorize a book of the Bible (Do I hear 3rd John calling my name!!!)

8 : To watch a Seattle team (Mariners, Sonics, Seahawks) win a championship.(not much I can do to help on that one.

9)Be moved to tears in Worship.

10) Be out of debt!!!!

So what am I missing? What about yours? Let me know!

My motivation: Putting it on my blog

Laurel and I are going to Maui in May, and I want to be in better shape by then. Before the holidays, I was working out 6 days a week and feeling good. I lost some weight, got more energy, and just felt better. Then, the holiday parties hit. I didn’t gain the weight back (not much of it anyway), but I stopped going to the gym, and now I just feel…blah. So I am putting it on my blog, thinking I will not want to explain to you all why I didn’t do it. It’s my own twisted motivation. I want to weigh in at 240 by the time I leave for Maui. Right now, about 265. So there, it is out there for all to see!

“The Evangelical Church: Dead in 50 Years”

A few years ago, I was killing time at Barnes and Nobel here in Temecula, and saw this book in the bestselling section: “Misquoting Jesus: The Story of Who Changed the Bible and Why” by Bart Ehrman, professor of Religious Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. I thought, “really, a best seller.” I sat down with it and read the first few chapters. Ehrman eloquently and persuasively explains that early manuscripts of the New Testament is riddled with holes and cannot be trusted because it contains, not one or two, but between 200,000 and 400,000 inconsistencies and errors. The former evangelical, who graduated from Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College, now calls himself “a happy agnostic.” As I turned the pages, my faith in everything I knew about the Bible was slowly crumbling. I knew about a few textual variants: John 8 and the ending to Mark came quickly to mind, but this claim of 400,000! I didn’t even think there were that many words in the whole N.T. (there aren’t by the way).

I don’t know that I ever really recovered my complete faith in Biblical inerrancy until the other day. I stumbled across an interesting quote in a book I was reading “The Case for the Real Jesus” by Lee Stroble. The quote was from Daniel Wallace, a professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary,and a highly respected Biblical Scholar. The topic was why do so many believers have their faith shaken every time some new attack on the Bible comes along. Pick any one of this recent bestsellers: The Da Vinci Code, Holy Blood Holy Grail, Misquoting Jesus, The Jesus Tomb, etc. Dr. Wallace had just finished defending these claims (I won’t tell you how, you’ll just have to read the book).

Dr. Wallace then says the quote that caught my attention. “I have been saying for some time that I don’t think the Evangelical church has fifty years of life left to it until it repents.”

This isn’t some wacko agnostic religious professor at NYU or some state school in California. This is a leading evangelical scholar. He has given his life to the evangelical church. And now, he is giving it a somber death sentence.

I’m guessing your question is the same as mine “Repent, for what?” Says Dr. Wallace, “We need to quit marginalizing scripture. We can’t treat the Bible with kid glove. We really need to wrestle with the issues, because our faith depends on it. And second, we need to quit turning Jesus into our buddy. He is the sovereign Lord of the universe, and we need to understand that and respond accordingly.”

He’s right, and we all know it. There are so many uninformed Christians out there who couldn’t really defend their faith from hard questions, me being one of them! Part of it may be fear. We think the Gospel cannot stand up to modern critique, that the Bible, out-dated as it is, is simply no match when pitted against big modern words like carbon 14 and evolution. We fear that everything we base our life on crumbles away when placed under closer examination. So instead of investigating these claims ourselves, we turn away and run from the challenge. I guess it’s just easier to have blind faith.

So what am I to do? What are we, as a Church (with a big C or small c) to do? Now I know we can’t all go back to school and become New Testament scholar, but I suppose it starts with digging into the word. Getting familiar with word, and hiding it in your heart (Psalm 119:11)

I mean, if we really believe the Bible is wholly inspired by God, and is what we base our life on, shouldn’t we (I) be more interested in knowing it inside and out.Some might say that this approach is a little to “religious.” Is it? All I know is I love the Church. I truly love the people. And I would hate to have to explain to my grandkids the reason why the Church has lost all relevancy to our world:Laziness. Thoughts??

Snowboarding

My friend (and fellow Washingtonian) Fader and I went snowboarding at Mt. High on Tuesday. It was great. Sunny, good powder, not crowded at all. Both of us Northwest natives agreed on our Southern California snow trip: Not bad SoCal, not bad at all.