adam feldman blog

20 week sonogram

Kim had her 20 week sonogram today. (For those of you who don't know, that's when you can find out the gender of your baby.) The results are in... we're gonna have.............

seminary at work

MO and Joe (MOJoe... hehehe) are blogging some of their seminary research projects from this past semester. Incidentally, they both have to do with postmodernity.

• Joe's series: Storying To Postmoderns
• MO's series: Postmodern Counseling

good week

This is going to be a good week:

• It started off with a wonderful Memorial Day weekend cookout @ our house for Metanoia folks.
• My family was in town (always a nice experience), but headed home this morning.
• Kim and I find out the gender of our baby later this week (20th week ultrasound for those of you who know what the heck I'm talking about).
• metanoiachurch.org v2.o went up and is podcasting.
• We begin our summer long preaching series through Ecclesiastes with Metanoia this weekend.

Gonna be a good week...

metanoia website v2.0

metanoiachurch.org got a major overhaul today. It has much more dynamic text capabilities, more photos and... yes... even podcasts. Check it out!

family

Family in town for the weekend... back to posting early next week...

soul.breakin'

I have to unplug. I have to get away--to the mountains--to reconnect with Jesus and my own soul from time-to-time. This is how I know where God is moving in the depths of my soul. This is how I keep my ears and eyes open to the movement of the Spirit. This is how I fast from the busy-ness of life.

My last soul.break was two weeks ago. I didn't tell you about it because it happened rather quickly. I went to Skycroft for an evening and unplugged.

Some things I like to "do" while on soul.break:

• Bring my journals. I flip through the pages since my last soul.break (usually 6-12 months prior) and record what I discover to be the 3-5 major themes emerging in my life. I then write down the lesson I learned (or am learning) and how I will respond. (BTW, I believe this is practice of journaling and solitude is part of the lost art of "listening" to God...)
• Bring my Bible. I generally read through one book of the Bible during my time away. This past time it was Luke's Gospel. I've read through Jeremiah, James, 1 & 2 Timothy, Galatians and Jude before as well.
• Walk. I take long walks through the woods. Try not to think about much--just decompress from life.
• Bring half-a-dozen books. I usually bring around 6 books with me and feel which book I need to be reading. This past soul.break I spent a lot of time in Willard's The Great Omission. (Other favorites that I read while on soul.breaks include: Miller's Blue Like Jazz, Brother Lawrence's Practicing the Presence, Foster's Celebration of Discipline, Peterson's Traveling Light.)

My buddy Earl took a local soul.break recently. He's flickr'ing it here.

Do you ever take soul.breaks? What do you do to cultivate the disciplines of silence and solitude in your soul?

soul.breaks (well, a few of them that I actually blogged about):

• soul.break 5.07
• soul.break 11.05
• soul.break 2.04
• soul.break 11.03
• soul.break 7.03

on television

Our favorite television shows are either finished with their most recent season or finishing the season this week. We get "free TV" via our antenna (living so close to Baltimore and Washington DC has its perks!), so we are pretty much locked into watching network television. We made a conscious decision during our first year of marriage not to get cable/satellite television because we already watch way too much TV and felt it to be a poor investment of finances and time. All of this comes back to bite us every fall when we want to see BAMA or UGA football games which are often times not broadcasted up here in college-football-no-man's-land. But, that's what friends with cable television and ESPN Gameplan are for, right? I digress...

Two of our television shows continue to rock the Casbah, so to speak, while we were disappointed with a few others. My assessment of our "must see TV"...

Great TV. These TV shows are solid, well executed and rarely disappoint:

• ABC's LOST continues to be our absolute favorite show on television. It is well written, well acted, well directed, and, well, just darn good all around. Season 2 (last year) was admittedly slow, but season 3 made up for it and then some. If you're not already a LOST fan, you have the summer to rent seasons 1 and 2 on DVD and you might be able to squeeze in season 3 just prior to season 4 beginning next year. The writers/producers of LOST have put out two solid episodes in a row over the past two weeks, and the two-hour season finale should be nothing less than "stinkin' awesome!"
• NBC's The Office also continues to be one of our favorite television shows. Though we spend most of our time with eyes closed and heads turned away from the TV due to Michael Scott's unbelievable stupidity, we still enjoy the Pam/Jim tension and office dynamics.

"Okay" TV. Everyone has their "guilty" pleasure TV that they don't want to let other's know they watch... but... you keep watching for some reason:

• One of our guilty pleasures each week is watching NBC's Heros. At the core of this show is a solid idea with a great plot--though relatively unoriginal given the X-men comics of the past several decades. Despite the great idea and plot, the execution of the show is rather "blah." The writing is poor and the acting is even poorer. But... we... just... can't... turn... away... Probably because we absolutely enjoy Hiro's character.

"Fallen from Grace" TV. There are certain TV series which used to be "Great TV" shows, but failed to live up to their past performance this season. We still watched them out of loyalty, but groaned in sadness at the same time:

• I think it can be safe to say that you have a malnourished modern culture TV diet if you have never watched a full season of Fox's 24. 24 is one of the best written, produced and acted TV shows out there. You have to hand it to the writers/producers of this show for bringing Hollywood to TV. Unfortunately, this season just didn't do it for us. We've already seen Jack Bauer stop nuclear bombs in two previous seasons, and we have also seen the "rescue the girl" scenario multiple times as well. Besides, 24 has a silly way of killing off the best characters on the show (anyone else miss Tony, Curtis and Michelle??). This season saw the introduction of "Ricky Schroeder" (Luke Skywalker?) as a totally unbelievable field agent and the reintroduction of the way-too-skinny, annoying, poorly acted Audry. Thank heaven for Chloe and Jack--otherwise the season might not have made it!!
• Fox's The Simpsons has been letting us down for two or three seasons now. This season the writers/producers reverted to pratfall gags and leftist political propaganda to make people laugh. We didn't laugh. If I want political commentary, I listen to NPR, read my RSS feeds and read blogs. The Simpsons was my momentary escape from this stuff. *sigh* Maybe The Simpsons should just gracefully... go the way... of The Cosby Show. (Also, the 400th episode was a royal let-down. The 399th episode, shown immediately before, should have been the 400th... it was great and almost redeemed a pathetic season.)

Finally, we are uber excited about our summer "must see TV" show premiering this week: Fox's So You Think You Can Dance! WOOT!

[expectant] mother's day gift

I gave Kim her first "mother's day" gift this past weekend. It involved my destroying a section of our back yard lawn (I almost cried), creating a new garden bed, installing wood, brick and plastic borders and then planting four Japanese Holly bushes and one flowering dogwood tree. Needless to say, I was throughly exhausted by the end--to the point that I cussed at some random cat feces in our yard (if you're new here, I hate cats). Oh, and for the record, the state of Maryland apparently doesn't know that hard, red clay is supposed to stay in the deep south!

Kim did her share of the work, too! She bought several annuals and some vegetables and planted them in our other gardens and flower pots around the  house.

Over the past two years we have been slowly transforming our little Baltimore row home into a friendly, warm, welcoming space for family and friends. I enjoy projects like this because of the long-term enjoyment factor of them. It is the repainting of outside wood door frames, bay windows and basement windows that I could do without!

(Pictured is our backyard. The photo was taken just a few moments ago from my home-office window with the built-in webcam on my MacBook Pro--you can see its reflection in the window.)

breathe in...

This is one of those weeks when it seems that I cannot find time to breathe. I have had time in the evenings to blog, but have chosen not to in order to spend time with my [pregnant] wife and reconnect with living. I know you understand. I'll have some fresh material up soon...

missional dialogue: gathering follow-up

A handful of us met yesterday to discuss a picture of missional ministry in local church life. Ken played a big part in helping us to understand worldview. We did record the dialogue and will try to podcast it in the coming weeks--just keep an eye on this blog for when it will be up and running.