Our long national nightmare is over. Today, we celebrate the most beautiful three words in the English language:

Pitchers and catchers

Anymore, when I get spam comments on this blog, it’s for an older post. Got one today on a post that I wrote back in November about Mark Driscoll showing some humility. The very complimentary spam (with a link to some snake oil herbs) said:

I dont know but why i don find such informative and profitable blogs so often,I suspect blogging world is becoming so small that we cant find such lucrative blogs like this one.

Yeah, humility’s really lucrative.

Note: I don’t post this to show how spiritual I am. Unless by “spiritual”, you mean “clueless”. This is just something that I learned, and maybe someone else will benefit from it, too.

Many of you know that I work from home. And those that didn’t, do now. Nothing so glamorous as owning my own business. It’s just that when you have a software support job where you’ve met (face-to-face) exactly one customer in 17 years, there’s not really any reason these days to do it from an office. Granted, my department only caught on to this idea three years ago, but hey, at least it’s progress.

When my department first made the announcement that we were all going to telecommute full-time, my boss brought in a former co-worker of ours who had joined another department and had been telecommuting for about 6 months, so that we could get an “insider’s” view of what it would be like.

His first statement: Get out of the house now and then, or you’ll go nuts. When you don’t have to leave the house 5 times a week like clock-work, there becomes less and less appeal in leaving the house at all. If I was single and didn’t go to church, I’d probably still be in the same clothes that I put on that first work-from-home day in 2004. (Working from home isn’t a good inducer of great hygiene, either. )

I saw where he was coming from, and determined that I wouldn’t fall into that pit (not that I haven’t since then, but my intentions started out good). My first work-from-home day was to be a Thursday. After church on Wednesday night, while admitting it was short notice, I asked my pastor if he’d like to have lunch the next day. (Being with others is a key part to the “get out of the house” issue. Frankly, I don’t see how even the most unsocial person who doesn’t have a church — or some kind of social organization — could survive working from home.)

He said that he thought he was free and would call me in the morning when he had his calendar in front of him. It turned out that he was, and so we met up for lunch. We both rejoiced in God’s creation of the cow, and man’s adaptation of the double-burger therefrom. We talked about our lives in general, things that were happening with the church, and ACC basketball (he’s a Duke fan, but I still love him).

Shortly after I had paid our bill (which he hadn’t expected), I told him that I needed to get back to work, but had thoroughly enjoyed myself and hoped to do it again sometime soon.

He looked genuinely puzzled for a bit, then asked, “So, that’s it?”

I asked him what he meant. Turns out that he had spent the meal waiting for the other shoe to drop. He figured that I was going to tell him that we were leaving the church, or that I had a beef about something he said in his teaching, or some other weighty issue. I laughed and told him that I had just wanted to have lunch with a friend. His face lit up, and he said that this was doubly a treat, then.

I realized in retrospect that most people that want his time probably also need something else. I asked his wife about that the following Sunday — “does he get that a lot?” — and she noted that it’s pandemic in our society in general. We often don’t sit down to eat together unless there’s “business” to be conducted, too. But she also admitted that a pastor does encounter the problem even more.

Maybe for you, the idea isn’t to take your pastor to lunch — I have a good bit in common with my pastor, plus he’s one of the few people I know that actually works near where I live (and work), so he was a logical choice for me. As my pastor’s wife noted, our society has the problem in general, so maybe for you, it’s someone else.

But don’t automatically write the idea (of having lunch with your pastor) off, either. Pastors are people, too. Yes, God has called them to shepherd a particular flock, but they’re still our brothers. (See Dan Edelen’s post over at Cerulean Sanctum for further treatment of this topic. Or stroke my ego some more and read what I wrote about it some time ago.)

Whoever you choose, get out there and do it, with no strings attached. Acts tells us that the early Christians broke “bread from house to house” — I think the general idea isn’t tainted much if you break bread from Chili’s to Ruby Tuesday’s, instead.

In case you need something to do for the next, oh, 20 years or so, here’s a few voluminous lists of sermon MP3s. Some lists are by a specific teacher; others are on a specific topic. These are moreso of teachers that don’t have all their sermons in one place (like a senior pastor might).

These lists were compiled by Paul Schafer (no, not the guy in the picture) on his blog.

Upgraded to WordPress 2.1 today. Apparently, some of the functions have changed, because all my link displays went away (see how empty things are in that right column?).

I’ll fix it later when I have time to go digging and fix their goof.

UPDATE: Well, as you can see, I got the links back through a highly unintuitve process. But, as you can also see, my links’ descriptions are also now visible. Hopefully, the knowledgable person who solved my first dilemna can solve this one, too.

A California judge ruled against a stupid lawsuit — brought by a psychologist, no less.

In an unrelated story, it started raining frogs today. . .