Minipost - LOVE 2

Last Saturday evening I just finished reading what I now believe to be one of the most astonishingly well written parallels to the concept of true love that has ever been written. C.S. Lewis’s “Perelandra” proverbially “Took the words right out of my mouth” when it comes to my thoughts on what love is. I’ve tried to explain it to many people through different stories, but this fantastically crafted tale displayed it so well and in so many relatable forms that it would be hard for anyone to walk away from this book without a better understanding of God’s true purpose in temptation, sin, and its converse: Love.

I did my best to try to explain the concept of love in a previous blog post, but I ended up (accidentally) abusing my own story to cover up for one of my own misconceptions. After I wrote the original post, I had a long conversation with my older sister about it and she straightened me out a bit. I had planned on writing another post to explain the faultiness of my first example (and did), but even after explaining it, I don’t think I really did the concept justice.

The truth is, I could spend another couple months typing out all my thoughts on what true love is, and what God’s intention for it was in us, but that would be pointless, since all of my thoughts can already be displayed in a single book, written and explained in far more detail and clarity than I could even dream to. This book, Perelandra, is simply amazing. Read it now. C.S. Lewis, I salute you.

“It is like a fruit with a very thick shell… The joy of our meeting when the we meet again in the great dance is the sweet of it… If we had listened to (the evil one) we should now be trying to get at that sweet without biting through the shell…. And so it would not be ‘That sweet’ at all” – C.S. “Jack” Lewis in Perelandra

DALLAS

The journey there

This last Friday, began one of the most amazing and exciting adventures I’ve experienced in my life: “The Adventures in Odyssey Live show”. The air travel alone would have been exciting enough to make me want to post something on here, but getting to meet and shake the hand of these voices that I’ve grown up listening to was simply awesome.

I’ll skip past the most of my trip to the airport and whatnot, since that’s not really the most interesting part. My favorite part starts right after I landed, so that’s where I’ll begin:

When I arrived in Dallas, for some reason I was expecting a quaint little old west’y type of town with a few horses and some cowboys and stuff… I couldn’t have been more wrong. When we landed, I was astounded to find myself surrounded by hundreds of sky scrapers and stadiums knitted together by this maze they call “the highway”. Never before have I been caught in such a tangled mess of roads so obviously inspired by Italian pasta. It was a preverbal “spaghetti junction”, as my good friend Eugene would say.

After getting hopelessly lost for a couple life times, we finally arrived at the first event of the day at Mardel’s bookstore about 2 hours late. I don’t think we missed too much, since I still got a chance to talk to Will Ryan, and harass the Mr. Whittakker puppet a bit (who actually turned out to be Bob Smithouser). After having a great time meeting and catching up with some friends from Focus on the Family, we decided to go get some rest before the big show the next day.

The next morning around 9 AM, we all began to slowly drift back in to the real world, and out of the state of unconsciousness. The day was christened with the nostalgic listening to of a couple Odyssey episodes, and a few old TCF bloopers that hadn’t ever been shared before. We had a lot of fun with that, too much perhaps, because we almost ended up being late for the show.

The show (article for the Adventures in Odyssey Scoop blog)

June 16^th, 2012 the AIO live show (This article DOES contain spoilers, so be warned!)

When Kevin, his sister and I pulled into the parking lot around 20 minutes before the show was to start, we were surprised to see how incredibly vast the venue was. The church itself was practically the size of a football field crossed with a couple concert halls. We were even more excited to see almost all 3,000 of the seats (in both shows) in the auditorium packed with enthusiastic fans.

The show began with the two hosts we’ve all come to know and love from the Official AIO podcast (Bob Smithouser and Jesse Florea) introducing the show. Considering the idea that the whole thing was a “Birthday Bash” for Odyssey’s 25^th birthday, they decided to kick off the event with a birthday cake, and a larger than life birthday card signed by hundreds of fans.

Soon after the devouring of said cake (which I didn’t get to partake in, unfortunately) Chuck Bolte took the stage and systematically introduced the actors in order of relevance to the show. When all nine actors had arrived on stage, and director Nathn Hoobler gave the signal, the lights went down to begin one of the most entertaining stage events I’ve been to in a long time.

The first scene started out, already flaunting the impressive skill of the production team, with Dave and his son Landon Arnold masterfully operating the miniaturized stage edition of “the foley room”. It was incredible getting to see so much of what goes into making an episode of Odyssey all in real time.

The story seemed normal enough in the beginning; however, as the show went on, the script started to get more and more, well… strange. I was a little confused at first, wondering how they could get away with letting a villain from the captain absolutely comics escape from KYDS radio and begin attacking all sources of art throughout history via the Imagination station. It seemed a little far fetched for Odyssey. After the show got closer to the end, though, I didn’t really care how "out there" the story was, because it gave the cast and crew so many opportunities to show just what the team was capable of.

In a breathtaking (and even more ridiculously silly) finale sequence where the entire town was blown to smithereens by an atomic bomb, I was finally and hilariously reassured that Odyssey was still the same show I’d come to know and love when the line came out of Jess/Wooton’s mouth: “so anyway Mr. Whittaker, that was my dream”. Incredibly cliché, but it had everyone in the entire audience rolling on the floor.

The show was filled to the brim with stunning audio and visual effects and hilarious dialogue. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much at an Odyssey episode in my life (I also never knew Dave Arnold could tap dance!). Everything about the show was as good as I could have imagined it to be, and judging by what I saw of the footage from the last live show, a million times more fantastical. The venue, the acting, the writing, the production, everything about the show was top notch, and really showed the world how talented the team behind the show is, and just how much fun the actors have in the studio.

My only negative comment, and I’m not even really sure it should be considered “negative”, is that the show overall was quite a bit more silly and over the top than you’d normally expect in and Adventures in Odyssey episode. But really, I’m glad it was. It gave the cast and crew so much more of an opportunity to have fun with the episode, and keep the crowd involved.

I guess if I were “rating” it, I’d give it a 9.9/10. (I would have rated it 10/10, but I had to take a point off for the one line Will messed up on. That’s right Mr. Ryan, you can’t just get away with stuff like that. :P)

After the show

In the hours in between and after shows, I was very surprised and excited to see how many fans of The Ceiling fan and the ScoopCast came up to both me and Kevin wanting our autographs and pictures with us. It was such an honor to be there with all these famous actors, and having people recognize US, fans of the show, and wanting to have their pictures with us and stuff. I’ve never really had people recognize me from something I’ve done on the internet before, so I was super excited to have people knowing who I was.

I got plenty of chances to interview lots of fans, and even some of the crew about the show. It was such a blast meeting so many people all at once who are interested in the same things I am. I also met quite a few creative people who also do stuff on the internet. I ran into some really cool guys from Youtube under the username “Blimeycow” who do a show called “Messy Mondays”, you may have seen their video about homeschoolers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJHt-m3VX6o

I’ll add a link a video blog of mine and Kevin’s journey’s as soon as he finishes editing it. 

@#$%!

Finally, the full blog post you've all been waiting for/dreading!

Let me first start of this post by saying that I will no longer be following the original format that I made for myself. I’m not often inspired to write anymore now that I’m not required to for school, so when I am, I don’t feel like restricting myself with some stupid set of writing rules.

Let me also mention this before I get into what I really wanted to talk about in this post:

In my last post, I told a story about the love of God, and then I mentioned at the bottom as an “edit” saying that I didn’t entirely agree with myself on that point anymore and that I would post again soon explaining why. I’m going to do that now.

The story I told, was actually a pretty good representation of the way I feel about the subject of God’s Love, or really just “love” at all. The thing was, I used that story to explain away the highs and lows of my relationship with him. I was trying to say that my love to God meant more because I still chose to read my Bible even when I wasn’t that close or inspired to talk to God. I said that I was glad that I wasn’t always in that super close relationship to God because it made me work harder to love him, thus: making my love mean more to him. After talking with my oldest sister, I realized how incredibly silly that idea was, and laughed at myself for thinking it. *sigh* Ahh past self, what an idiot you were. 

Anyway, I realized that God doesn’t want us to go through those “spiritual lows” where we aren’t as passionate about him and stuff. He wants us to be in that place where he’s our closest friend 60/60/24/7/52/10/10/10! (sixty seconds a minute, sixty minutes an hour, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year, ten years a decade, ten decades a century, ten centuries a millennium!)  Anyway, that’s it. On with my real post.

Here we go. Sorry for taking so long, but what the #%$@, who really gives a $#@! Anyway? I can start any time I #$%@ well please thank you very #$%@ing much.

Are you offended yet? Yeah, maybe, but at least I’ve got your attention.

About a year ago, I began to allow myself to use some language that most Christians wouldn’t consider to be very “holy”. I honestly couldn’t see any problem with it, since I didn’t really see anywhere in the Bible that it said that it was wrong. I just figured “As long as I don’t say anything like this around people who are all strict about this sort of thing, I’ll be fine. I just don’t want it to become part of my vocabulary”. I didn’t really see any problem with it other than other people thinking I was “immoral” or something because it went against their personal convictions.

 After that, I began living by that rule, “to never let it become part of my vocabulary”. The thing is, no matter how hard you try, it gets harder and harder to not be affected by something the more you open up yourself to it.

 I since I made that rule for myself, I began to listen to a lot of music that contained such language. Read a lot of media that contained that kind of language, and talk to a lot of people that used that kind of language. Like I said though, after a while it became harder to keep that more vulgar version of the English language from melding with my own version. I began to get all these songs stuck in my head, humming along to them. The other day, in fact I thought to myself “Man, it’s a good thing I’m only humming, or else all these people would think I’m some sort of heathen with all this ‘bad’ language”.

You may be saying to yourself now “Ok, that’s great, but what does that matter to you Garrett (you flipping pagan), I thought you just said you didn’t think it was a sin or anything?”. Well, that brings us to now.

 I’ve been thinking a lot tonight about this dilemma of how to keep enjoying media that contained this language that wasn’t accepted by “my people”, and still not using that language myself. I’ve never said anything among my family that would be considered overly vulgar, but I had a few times around other people that didn’t really know me that much. I didn’t really even care that much at the time either, but I was just thinking about it tonight. Even though I don’t really find these words so offensive to myself, if I used them around anyone else at all, either their view of me would change, or their view of ‘cussin’ would change. I would be an influence either way.

If my previous philosophy were correct, that still probably wouldn’t matter to me. But I’ve now come to realize something: this language of vulgarities isn’t only considered offensive among Christian circles. It is, in fact, a way of being rebellious in nearly all social settings. Even though it may not be considered a sin, the initial idea when you begin to swear as a young teen is that you want to break some rules. You want to be known as someone who makes their own choices, and not just some kiddie who only does what his parents tell him. It seems like it the rebellious attitude behind the language that’s the real problem here.

So that’s what I was doing, in those situations where I would use this language around maturing young people. I’d be planting a spirit of rebellion when I’m supposed to be the ultra-sheltered goodie-goodie preachers kid, I was the cause of a spirit of rebellion against authority.

In light of this (and a few other Bible verses), I deductively reasoned out that I should cut off my intake of vulgar media. This media includes (but is not limited to) all my music on my computer with such language (I truly will miss you Ben Folds, you were an inspiration to me musically and in song writing style). I’m not sure how far I’m going to take this yet… I’m going to have to do some more thinking and praying… Either way, thanks to that stinkin’ old Bible of wisdom and and junk, I just lost a butt load of my favorite music. Thanks a lot God for being so perfect and wise and stuff or whatever. Gosh.

Recap: I'm not keeping music with vulgar language in my musical library any more because of the influence it may have on people who falsely assume that I am a good role-model.

Until next time. 

                                                                                                   - Garrett 

(Is this weird? I don't remember if I used to sign posts or not. Oh well. Maybe it'll be a thing now. We'll see)

MAGIC

I've been thinking about this a lot recently:

We all know that the two most magical animals on the planet (unicorns and platypi) were created as hybrids between other animals (duck/beaver, horse/norwall).

Since the conception of these two angelic beasts, the world has been a brighter place. But imagine with me for a moment, something even more magical than either the unicorn or the platypus. I present to you, the "platycorn". A combination of them both.

(Feel free to send me your own picture of a platycorn, but don't expect me to use it here, since I'm obviously the best artist that will ever exist in the history of this planet.)

There you are world, thanks to me you are a more perfect place. My only remaining goal in life is to hunt down a choice specimen of both of these wonderful speices and breed my very own flock of platycornen. I'm just not sure if I'll have to take a course in mythical husbendry first. I shall update you when I am more informed.

Post script:
I tried the name "unipus", but it sounded far more like a new gender than a magical animal with the power of rainbows and webbed feet. "Platycorn" is far more descriptive, and sounds flashier too.

Late Night Thoughts that Make Very Little Sense - with Garrett Vandenberg

Have you ever noticed how pickles are the ONLY vegetable that actually taste good pickled? Pickles are amazing, which is why it baffles me so much that genius who decided to start the whole trend of pickling stuff had to go and ruin his own quite obviously divinely inspired idea by taking it 7 steps too far. Who in this WORLD actually wants to eat a pickled tomato, or a pickled beet? Who in their right mind even wants to eat a beet in the first place? What's wrong with you?!

That was only the beginning though. I've heard horrible tales of so called "chefs" who have abused this method of enriching the taste of vegetables to the extent that they've dropped the idea of using it exclusively on vegetables altogether. Have any of you heard tell of the despicable substance (and I shutter to even ask)  known as "pickled pig's feet"?

Even the idea of that phrase, is more than just animal cruelty; It's a disgrace to humanity. I ask you, fellow breathers of oxygen: Can we live with ourselves anymore when our very own race has defiled our planet with this substance? I don't think so ladies and gentlemen. I DON'T THINK SO.

Anyway... I really do need to sleep.

#POOPLOL

In my continuous journey of searching for Bible truth, and revising my worldview as I come across more, I have come to this realization: Though the Bible may be against making sexual jokes, I can find nowhere where it condemns the usage of poop jokes. 

In light of this fact, I hereby announce that poop jokes, shall officially be my new primary default source of humor when I can't think of something sufficiently ironic or outrageous.

(If you can find me a verse in the Bible that convincingly proves me wrong, you get a free pony)

Also, poop.
- Garrett Vandenberg

FULL BLOG POST COMING SOON. YAY