More Cadence Pictures

Grandma and Papa Fiegl with Cadence Joy
Auntie D and Uncle Marky
Maybe the first captured smile?
Kleinfeld Family Photo
Going home!
At home outside before we enter the house...
Cadence in her adorable rose outfit and in the cool moses basket...

i'm sure there will be many more of these.

we came home yesterday and Cadence slept soundly through the night with many thanks to Grammie's blanket and Grandma's Swaddling Cloth. We actually got three hours of straight sleep!

Introducing Cadence Joy

My world changed on Christmas.

Aubrey gave birth via C-section to Cadence Joy Kleinfeld at 9:20 Christmas morning. She came in weighing 8 pounds, 9 ounces and was 21 inches long.

We are happy to say that both mom and baby are recovering and resting well.

Here are some intro pictures of many that will follow.

Christmas Images

So, sometimes I get images stuck in my head for a while until i get them out. thoughts that might be significant...here are two recent thoughts.

I just heard a story on the news (click on picture for complete story) about a baby Jesus figurine who was stolen last year from somebody's yard. The figurine was returned this year with a set of pictures of the figurine in places the perpetrators had traveled. The "thieves" went around with baby Jesus and kept record of their time with him. For some reason, I think this story can be mined for some significance...

And the other image came to me when Aubrey and I were walking the other night and a family had just unplugged their inflatable lawn ornaments. it was kinda creepy, like the polar bear and her two cubs were having the life sucked out of them. and then we passed a place where the ILO's were being inflated from limp, lifeless flatness. and this image has stuck with me too...

what is it about these things that make such a media hubbub?

what attracts us to controversy?

Asbury College

I don't often toot the horn for my alma mater (spelling on that one?), but i just got a christmas card with this painting by Kyle Keys. I thought it was splendid and so wanted to share it with you all. Click on the picture to find out more about the grand Asbury College.

folk music...

i like patty griffin.

i like denison whitmer.

i wish i was more into this folk scene, but i'm not gonna force it.

a friend of mine just showed me a site where denison is giving away free songs for donations to his favorite charities. check it out: www.happybirthdaydenison.com.

Holiday Pictures

My dear wife Aubrey loves the decoration time at Christmas time...so these pictures are a tribute to her creativity and fun-loving spirit, even though she feels like she didn't do much this year, because of the baby in her belly.
Hooray, in front of our decorated Christmas Tree!
Aubrey always likes to decorate the door...this is a picture of the wreath before it browned (we're debating taking it down or hacking a part of our tree off so we can make another one)
me and sis setting up the tree...oh what fun...oh the memories of years ago...
Sis and me after the tree decided to not fall over...

I am thankful for family, for memories, for ways of remembering during the holiday times.

(I accidently typed "holidaddy times"...baby must be on my mind).

time wasters

so a couple teens showed me a website that is absolutely awesome at helping you waste time. on this site, you create lines for a sledder to slide down and you can make him do little loopty loos and jumps and flips and...

it's www.linerider.com.

go there. waste time. enjoy.

call your friends over and make it an event!

creation groans

Somalia and Ethiopia conflicts...

Peace on earth to all men and women...

what if...

what if love was the hallmark of the church?

what if people left the church because the community loves so much?

expecting

it's any day now.

every time aubrey wakes up in the middle of the night (let's just say an average of 5 times), I wonder.

every time my cell phone rings and I see it's Aubrey, I wonder.

We've got the room set up. The basinet is ready. The clothes have been washed. The electronic swing has been tested. The car seats are installed. The bags are packed.

Advent has new meaning.

What if I lived this way with Christ? Expecting and hoping to find him at any moment...

The greatest Christian revolutions come not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when somebody takes radically something that was always there.

Philip Yancey

Irresistible Revolution

Shane Claiborne, author of irresistible revolution and friend of The Simple Way, did a little survey on "Christians about their (mis)conceptions of Jesus. It was fun just to see how many people think Jesus loved homosexuals or ate kosher. But I learned a striking thing from the survey. I asked participants who claimed to be "strong followers of Jesus" whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Nearly 80 percent said yes. Later in the survey, I sneaked in another question. I asked this same group of strong followers whether they spent time with the poor, and less tahn 2 percent said they did. I learned a powerful lesson: We can admire adn worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.

"When the worlds of poverty and wealth collide, the resulting powerful fusion can change the world...I long for the Calcutta slums to meet the Chicago suburbs, for lepers to meet landowners and for each to see God's image in the other. It's no wonder that the footsteps of Jesus lead from the tax collectors to the lepers. I truly believe that when the poor meet the rich, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end."

Irresistible Revolution, 113-114

At the Margins

my friend scott emailed me an interesting article. It's an African bishop's critique of the American Church and it's concept of power and change.

Here's a section of text about the Great Commission:
We need to begin to read the Bible differently. Americans have been preoccupied with the end of the Gospel of Matthew, the Great Commission: "Go and make." I call them go-and-make missionaries. These are the go-and-fix-it people. The go-and-make people are those who act like it's all in our power, and all we have to do is "finish the task." They love that passage! But when read from the center of power, that passage simply reinforces the illusion that it's about us, that we are in charge.

I would like to suggest a new favorite passage, the Great Invitation. It's what we find if we read from the beginning of the Gospels rather than the end. Jesus says, "Come, follow me. I will make you fishers of men." Not "Go and make," but "I will make you." It's all about Jesus. And do you know the last words of Jesus to Peter, in John 21? "Follow me." The last words of Simon Peter's encounter are the same as the first words.

I hope you enjoy and are challenged.

Jesus Wants to Save Christians

Anybody who's anybody should check out the most recent sermon series at Mars Hill Community.

They brought the pain especially on hell and witnessing.

They told the story about the blind man who was healed with Jesus' spitwad. How the man, when asked about the healing, repeated "I don't know". It's okay to not know all the answers. What's most important is that my life has been changed for the better b/c of Christ.

[edit from original post: the sermon series (title of the post) can be accessed on the link above. the first one by rob bell is a little scattered, but the rest are more direct and a pretty interesting examination of how God desires to change Christians...rob seems to be talking about people who think they have it all together and rather than having the love and mercy of Christ, use their Christianity/religion as a weapon against the world rather than an invitation to the world.]

when did we stop telling people that God has big plans for them?

when did we stop believing it for ourselves?

why do we think that God's plans are always future oriented and not now-oriented?

i want to be the type of person who realizes God's goodness now and encourages others to live in God's plan now.

the last month in pics

our good friends ross and rachel got married! woohoo and flowers to them!
my college buddy and friend, Nate, stopped by and we took a road trip to DC. this is us at the washington monument.

I'm so in love with my wife!

and she's great with child! can't wait until december 17 (or before, as is being predicted).

Quote from Life After God

"For so many years I lived a life of solitude and I thought life was fine. But I knew that unless I explored intimacy and shared intimacy with someone else then life would never progress beyond a certain point. I remember thinking that unless I knew what was going on inside someone else's head other than my own I was going to explode."

143, Life after God, Douglas Coupland

some interesting thoughts on the need for community and intimacy that all people have...

Every moment is sacred.

It is sacred because God shows up.

But time is not sacred in itself.

What is sacred is that every person matters to God.

What would happen if we saw every encounter with another person as an encounter with God?

Creation Rushed or Unrushed?

I wondered this morning as I was rushing around trying to get stuff ready for the week.

I wondered if God was rushed when he created the universe. Like, did he wake up one morning, look at his schedule and say, "Oh my me! I have to make light and darkness today. And tomorrow I need to separate the waters. And the day after that I gotta make dry land and from that land I have to make sure that stuff grows from it. And that's not it. The day after that I'll be required to make stars and the sun and moon. Whew, that's going to be a lot of work. But I won't be done then either. The next day I have to make flying things and swimming things. I'm not quite sure what those will look like yet, even. Oh my. And when I want to be done, I have to get up the next day and make animals that walk on the earth. And I'll probably need to make one of the animals rule over all the others, just so that there can be some semblance of order. And after that day, I'll get some rest. Man, I can't wait for Saturday."

Or was there peace in all that he made?

coming home...

well, i just turned in my final assignment due this week. so that means i am done for the week.

it's been good, but i can't wait to be home...

i am going home tomorrow morning. super early.

can't wait to see aubrey. less than 12 hours.

Relaxing Weekend (save for absence of aubrey)

So, this past weekend was relaxing, after feeling completely wiped from a full week of late nights and early mornings. I'm thankful for the Hulls. Here's some fun pics...for some reason I don't have one of Carol...who is quite the excellent cook. The only thing missing this weekend was Aubrey. It would be complete if she was here.

here's the box car kids. they're crazy.
and here's the cutest face ever...
And of course, hanging Brian himself has been quite dandy. He's a good friend. A good one. I think I'm lucky.

Also you should check out this cool conversation on his blog. Click on his picture and get sent to it.

Also, I hung out with an old friend from VA, Jeff Edmonson today. It was quite fun. He took me on a tour of the Nazarene Publishing House, showing me the printing presses and the massive folders. It was amazing!

adventures on the plaza 2

this is for aubrey

this was quite reminiscent of fountains in rome...

this is a guy i met. quite friendly, but slightly cold.

this is a waterway. hm. water.and this is another mosaic. lots of the around. not sure what a knight is doing chasing foxes in the plains of america...

adventures on the plaza 3

So, if you want a chronological turn of these pages, go to the first adventures and then the second adventures.

can't resist the gelato. too much like our time in rome.

unfortunately this gelati had a hole in the bottom of the cone, which left me leaking all the way around the plaza. so much leakage that i threw it away. it made my hands too messy to be sociable.

and another cool tile painting. i felt like stealing this one, i liked it so much.
i thought this was cute, and as aubs and i are preparing for the maternal and paternal roles, these things stand out to me more and more.
Ah. Nothing like finding Neptune hard at work among the traffic of an American city.
A store completely dedicated to cheese! What could be better? (beside having Aubs here)
dancing penquins. cute.
and aubrey likes doors, so i thought this was cool.
and more tile work. this kind of stuff is everywhere down here.

While all this stuff was great, it was not quite the same alone.

I can't wait to be back with Aubrey and the baby next week.

adventures on the plaza

So brian was kind enough to show me to the plaza in KC yesterday. after a sweet lunch at PF Changs (a chinese bistro, interesting combo) with dave and brian, brian turned me loose on the plaza, which i explored for a bit. below you will find some pictures of my adventures.

this is the original four faced fountain in KC, which started the fountain revolution.

KC is known as "city of fountains" and is also known for it's unique artwork.

I actually forgot the name of this fountain, but i loved it. it's to the left of the four faced fountain. Below you'll find individual pics of the horseback riders.


each of the riders was in great detail and portrayed a heated struggle with some type of beast.

this is one of the main streets of the plaza. the buildings have very unique architecture, playing off of italian and spanish themes.