Recent problems . . .

I've been lots of places and done lots of things. I've spoken in Wisconsin for a great group, and Orange City for another great group. I got to seem some fantastic theater, and work with some really cool people. I also gave the Sunday morning message at my home church at Second Reformed, which I thought went okay.

So why haven't I been updating?

Well, like the clumsy dope I am, I spilled a bottle of Diet Cherry Pepsi all over my laptop and crashed the whole thing. So, I've been a little preoccupied with getting that mess cleaned up.

It's sort of ironic, now that I type it, that it was Diet Cherry Pepsi that's almost ruined my online life. I've blogged several times about the fact that my diet pop addiction is beyond control some days.

(I've recently been trying to slowly replace my pop intake with hot tea and iced tea. But it's slow going.)

Now my addiction is so out of control that my subconcious (elbow) knocked over a pop to try and ruin my laptop and therein destroying a lot of important information (my speaking life).

I have all my talks, talk lists, presentations, poetry, stories, and the as of yet unpublished book on my laptop. It may be gone, it may not. We'll find out.

Even tougher to swallow is the fact that my entire iTunes library may be gone. I can handle losing the music. But the Ricky Gervais Podcasts will be the real knife in the gut as far as I'm concerned.

I did have an interesting comment after a talk I gave Sunday night at Central College here in Pella. My father in law, and Central's chaplain, Joe, is gone on vacation and he asked me fill in for his Sunday night worship with the students.

I spoke on one of my favorite stories from II Samuel 23 about King David, and a well, and three soldiers, and overall I thought it went all right. The faces in the crowd seemed to be smiling at all the smiley parts, laughing at all the laughy parts, and seriously thinking at all the seriously thinky parts.

Afterwards, a young woman approached me. She told me she was Roman Catholic, it was her first time to the college Sunday night service, and then she commented that, "Everything that happened here tonight completely contradicts everything I believe."

Okay . . .

I'm not sure if it was just the talk, or the whole worship service, but I figure I was implicated in some way shape or form with her complaint. So I just passed her on to Joe and the rest of the staff and told her to bring it up with them.

Sometime I'll have to blog about all the wonderfully interesting comments I've gotten after speaking . . . it can be enough to discourage a guy, but now I tend to find a lot of them quite amusing.

Well, okay, for instance, I gave a talk once for a church where I felt like I really poured a good deal of my heart out. I related some of my own favorite stories that still have quite an emotional impact on my life - several that were ABOUT me and my faith walk.

Afterwards, a guy walked up and said, and I quote, "I don't know if any of that was true or not, but I enjoyed it."

He wasn't joking, he was quite sincere. And I still can't quite grasp how someone's brain might work in that they would think someone would not only make up a "personal story", but also become emotional while telling a made up "personal story." But, oh well.

Sometimes I'll use some of my old standup stories during a talk to lighten things up at the beginning. And sometimes they really are great lead-ins to the deep stuff I'm getting to. Quite often they get very good reactions - lots of laughs. There's the finger story, and the puke story, and the zipline story, many of which are probably familiar the the blog readers.

But what I enjoy, is the occasional listener (usually a high schooler for some strange reason) who comes up afterwards, pulls me aside, and says something to the effect of, "A story like that has no place in worship."

Now, none of my stories are dirty in any way. The most they are is occasionally gross. As in someone throws up, or someone loses a finger. I always want to retort by pulling out my Bible and reading some of the scriptural stories that are so disgustingly crazy and perverse that they'd never be used in worship, and yet they're in the Bible. My stories can't compare to those.

I won't share them on the site, but a camp counselor back in high school shared a few with me under the premise, "You'll never hear this one in church!"

Well, back on to computer repair! Till next time,

Jason