realization

i have recently come to the realization that my last bunch of posts have been simply hockey facts and article clips. i was getting pretty high and mighty for keeping up the blog-land, but i realized now that i suck and am a cheap phony, stealing people's articles and writing about hockey, which only nic and jeremy care about. so here i am, in search of redemption, but not likely to find it. am i being a bit over-dramatic, maybe? maybe...

i find myself feeling a little discouraged with myself lately. i have been living very selfishly. i have been living this way with my money, my time, and my life for a while now. where to begin...

i have bought a couple new cars lately. by new, i mean an 84' Toyota Corolla Hatchback and a 1997 Toyota Rav4. you might be saying to yourself, 'that's cool that they bought some older, more economical vehicles.' toyota's, after all, are known for their great gas mileage. and yes, that is part of the reason i bought them. the other part is that i hate my car, and wanted something more. i wanted something better. my motives weren't very pure. i still think we made a wise decision, but i can't help but feel like i have spent more money on myself and my family in the past two months than we have our entire lives and i'm feeling guilty for that. plus, i haven't sold my old car yet, so it's kind of funny that only me and melissa drive in our household, yet we have three vehicles. makes perfect economical sense, right? anyway, i also splurged on an 80 gig ipod. who the crap needs an 80 gig ipod? that is ridiculous! (i say as i add some sweet new podcasts to my playlist...cough cough...) i don't know. ipod's aren't evil in and of themselves, but i have found myself caught up in our culture of consumerism. bigger is better. why get something smaller when you can get something that is bigger than life itself. bet you didn't know an 80 gig ipod was biger than life itself. now you know. i put all the music i know of on and i think i have used 6 gigs so far. i am supersized. not just cause i'm fat either.

for those that don't know, we are ready to bust any day now with a beauty of a new baby girl. melissa has been a trooper from day 1 and i have been a slacker all along. yeah, i've been working. but i haven't given enough to my home life, and it has come back to hurt me and my relationship with my family. luckily, melissa and makena are very forgiving. melissa has shown unconditional support for me in my new role at the church, but i have lived a very hypocritical life separating myself from my family as i immerse myself in my work. that's dumb. there isn't an excuse. i have made many excuses along the way, but that is flat out dumb. when you have a beautiful wife at home and the most beautiful child in the world at your fingertips, it's dumb not to take advantage of that. a couple weeks ago, i had this epiphany where i realized that i was having a baby in two weeks. yes, i am a loser for having an epiphany about something i knew has been coming for 8.5 months, but that is how stupid i have been lately. so in the past couple weeks, i have started to make up for 8.5 months of neglect on my family's part. ha...a little late, but like i said, i have a wonderful and forgiving family. i cannot live a self-absorbed lifestyle while i have a wife and soon to be 2 children who are depending on me for friendship and support.

anyway, this all has left me feeling rather dirty lately. sticky, almost. like someone dumped syrup on me and i can't get it off. i don't know. life goes on, and i am so lucky, but i really want my lifestyle to match up with all the junk i preach to everyone else all the time. meanwhile, i am buying monster ipod's and not being good to my wife. at least i recognize it and admitted it. my wife won't let me get away with it anymore. plus, she'll steal my ipod if i'm not nice to her...

just wanted to share.

what do you think?

(CNN) -- Former President Carter met Friday with a top Hamas politician, exiled leader Khalid Meshaal, in Damascus, Syria, Carter aides said. Former President Carter says he hopes to see a breakthrough in the Mideast peace process in his lifetime. Carter, Meshaal and lower-level officials had a closed-door meeting that lasted more than an hour and a half. The ex-president's visits with top Hamas officials this week have drawn condemnation from the U.S. and Israeli governments. They said Carter is engaging in diplomacy with a group they consider a terrorist organization. Carter's controversial tour of the Middle East included a meeting Thursday in Cairo, Egypt, with two other senior Hamas politicians. "I'm not a negotiator. I'm just trying to understand different opinions and communicate, provide communications between people that won't communicate with each other," Carter said at the start of his trip. Most Israeli officials have refused to receive Carter during his visit to the region, angry over his insistence that Israel should talk to Hamas. Many Israelis dislike Carter's observations about Israeli policies toward the Palestinians in his 2006 book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid." U.S. and Israeli officials said they believe that Carter's talks with Hamas will achieve little and even could harm the Middle East peace process.

i'm interested to hear what you guys think about this. personally, i think this is great. obviously, i am no expert on foreign policy, but I think that unless we are willing to take the first step to bridge the gap between groups like Hamas, Al Queda, other Sunni & Shi'ite Radicals and the western world, then nothing will ever change. the hatred will continue to increase. this is my short-version opinion. i am interested to hear yours before i comment further.

hockey's great, but this really gets me excited

The moderator called on Jim Wallis to ask a question of Sen. Obama:
As you reminded us a week or two ago, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed 40 years ago, he wasn't just speaking about civil rights. He was fighting for economic justice, was about to launch a poor people's campaign. Yet, four decades after the anniversary of his death, the poverty rate in America is virtually unchanged, and one in six of our children are poor in the richest nation in the world. So in the faith community, we are wanting a new commitment around a measurable goal, something like cutting poverty in half in 10 years. Would you commit - would you at this historic compassion forum, commit to such a goal tonight, and, if elected, tell us how you'd mobilize the nation, mobilize us, to achieve that goal?
Obama's response:
I absolutely will make that commitment. Understand that when I make that commitment, I do so with great humility because it is a very ambitious goal. And we're going to have to mobilize our society, not just to cut poverty, but to prevent more people from slipping into poverty. … [After a series of specific policy proposals] And many of these, by the way, can be part of a faith community. And so, you know, just to go back to our theme here tonight, people sometimes ask me, what do I think about faith-based initiatives? I want to keep the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives open, but I want to make sure that its mission is clear … the faith-based initiatives should be targeted specifically at the issue of poverty and how to lift people up.

3 more things hockey related...

sorry for those who don't like hockey. you can tell what is pre-occupying my mind these days.

#1-KOVALEV!!! after taking a bad penalty to let the BRUINS tie the game, he saved the day. CANADIENS all the way!
#2-don cherry is a joke. i used to like him. sometimes now i can even appreciate his craziness. but his rant at the end of the game was just an obvious anger because the team he was cheering for lost. i mean, don't get me wrong, i would maybe do the same thing. but he has an obvious bias towards boston, and to claim that the CANADIENS got away with 100 penalties was laughable, to say the least. like i said, i used to like him, but now he just gives me a headache.
#3-the referees in this game were a joke, and even more so than don cherry. there were many occasions where obvious penalties should have been called against the BRUINS and weren't. now, the penalties evened out in the end, but that doesn't change the fact that they should have been called. and if they would have been, that game wouldn't have been close. i don't know if they didn't see them. i will give them that possibility. but it's their job to see, and if the CANADIENS lost, i would have been ultra-supremely-P.O.'ed.

XCANADIENSFORLIFEX

playoff beard update #1

despite my wife's warnings of shaving my beard in my sleep, i am still going strong. i have dark brown hair, yet a red beard...what is that all about? XBEARDPOWERX

3 things hockey related...

#1-bryan mccabe is a spineless coward. he was hit by a rookie playing what i think was his first game for montreal, and mccabe turned around and slashed him. not once, but twice. then this small rookie, drops his gloves to fight. mccabe didn't even have the cahoney's to drop his gloves in the first place. that would have been better, but even so, to fight a small kid? that spells coward in my books. oh yeah, in case anyone hasn't heard, toronto maple leafs didn't make the playoffs. i think that's just peachy!

#2-the montreal canadiens are #1! GO HABS!

#3-here are my playoff pool picks today. there were 6 of us and we all picked 12 players, just going on points.
1st pick-Sid the Kid Crosby (don't really love the penguins, but he is a brilliant player)
2nd pick-Alexei Kovalev (after his breakout year from a less than stellar previous record, i have high hopes for playoffs)
3rd pick-Teemu Selanne (came out of retirement a couple months ago and has been on fire ever since)
4th pick-Sergei Gonchar (i wanted a second pittsburgh player, as i expect them to go far)
5th pick-Corey Perry (i hate the anaheim ducks, but corey perry and selanne are strong offensive threats. ducks will go far)
6th pick-Milan Michalek (i'm picking san jose to meet montreal in the finals, strong player)
7th pick-Patrick Marleau (not his greatest year, but i expect him to be jacked for playoffs)
8th pick-Michael Ryder (underachiever all year, but will explode in playoffs. i have seen the future)
9th pick-Zach Parise (i needed to diversify in case my picks to win the first and second rounds don't go far)
10th pick-Brian Rolston (this will be a tough series fought to game 7 i think, rolston will put up some points)
11th pick-Tomas Holmstrom (detroit will go to second round at least, but will choke like usual, just filling out my roster)
12th pick-Petr Forsberg (big risk, but if he catches fire, he can do some real damage)

anyway, that is that. i have my entire house riding on this, so lets go all you 12 guys! bring home the bacon! literally, because if you don't, i'll have no home and need some bacon to make a home out of.

the way i see things

in the past few days, it has come to light that two prominent canadian politicians are suffering the consequences of mistakes made many years ago. in 1991, Tom Lukiwski, the Conservative MP in my Regina-Lumsden Lake Center riding was caught on tape using homophobic slurs. the Premier of my province, Saskatchewan, Brad Wall, was in the same room and on the same tape, making an ethnic slur, imitating a Ukrainian voice and belittling then premier, Roy Romanow. another was heard to call then Liberal leader, Linda Haverstock a slut.

now, I have made no secret of my dislike of Conservative politics. one might think I would jump all over this in an attempt to discredit the Conservative agenda. and that was my first reaction, if I'm being honest. but then i remembered that i am a christian first and a political junkie second. to jump all over these men for mistakes they made in their past would be no better than someone holding the fact that i used to be a drug addict 7 years ago against me today. everyone deserves forgiveness. and not just a second time, but a third and fourth. this is what Jesus taught and this is what we must live by. so regardless of my political stance, i will not hold this against them. i know i am not directly involved, so my forgiveness might mean nothing to them, but i want to call on everyone to accept their apology and move forward. i stand up for gay rights and believe they deserve to be treated every bit as equal as heterosexuals. but if we hold grudges against those who slight the ones we defend, we are no better than they are. we must extend a hand and forgive, not because we are better, but because we are all people and we have all made mistakes. now, the video was very disturbing. demeaning homosexuals, ukrainians/ethnic groups, and women. they pretty much covered all the bases. as offended as i am, i can claim no superiority over these people. i have made many mistakes which most of you know of and many that you don't. when someone airs my dirty laundry for the world to see, i would like to think that someone i have offended might extend me the grace that Jesus would to anyone, and does to us today. just my two cents.

things i appreciate today...

i appreciate good friends who are willing walk you through tough moral dilemmas.

thanks dad, john, michael and melanie for your help! i feel good knowing my integrity is in check, and thank you for not helping me justify the thing pulling me in the other direction. you are true friends!

to the rest of you, don't worry, it's nothing too serious. i was debating between whether to kick my dog when i'm mad at it, or to just shoot it and get it over with. they told me to shoot it. i think they are right. and for those that don't know me, this is a joke. i love my dogs. i only want to kill them half the time.

my play-off beard

i'm not quite up to jeremy's beard status yet, but i'm working on it.

GO CANADIENS!!!

why can't there be a president like this?

(CNN) -The Rev. Bernard LaFayette Jr. was resting at his Chicago, Illinois, home one autumn weekend in 1967 when the phone rang. The caller didn't identify himself, but LaFayette immediately recognized the baritone voice. By the time Dr. King made his final trip to Memphis, he was planning the most radical campaign of his ministry.

"Bernard, I need you," the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said. "This may be my last campaign. We're going for broke."

Most Americans think of King as the "I Have a Dream" preacher at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. But the man who made his final trip to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968 had become radical, scholars and activists say. King was gambling his legacy on a final crusade that was so revolutionary, it alarmed many of his closest advisers. Some became concerned about his emotional stability. King called his crusade the Poor People's Campaign. He planned to march on Washington with a multiracial army of poor people who would build shantytowns at the Lincoln Memorial -- and paralyze the nation's capital if they had to. The campaign's goal: force the federal government to withdraw funding for the Vietnam War and commit instead to abolishing poverty. What King was saying by this time was even more provocative than what he planned. In his final presidential address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he said the movement should address "the question of restructuring the whole of American society." He called for a guaranteed annual wage for all able-bodied people, he urged the nationalization of some industries, and he told people to "question the capitalistic economy."

"It didn't cost the nation one penny to integrate lunch counters ... but now we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power," King said during a trip to Mississippi in February 1968. The campaign was so risky that King told LaFayette, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference leader, during their phone call that he was going to appoint a new layer of executives to the civil rights group he co-founded. "He was anticipating that we might be hit with some assassinations, so he wanted somebody left to assume responsibilities to keep it going," said LaFayette, who was appointed director of the Poor People's Campaign. Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Parting the Waters: America in the King Years," said King didn't expect the crowds in Washington to embrace his vision of economic equality. He expected violent reprisals from troops. He might die. Yet King hoped that the sacrifice would lead to an economic bill of rights for poor people.

"When he did the Poor People's Campaign, he knew it wasn't likely to win," Branch said. "It was a witness."

But it was a witness that few people were prepared to hear...

King had also lost the ear of his most important ally, President Lyndon Johnson. On April 4, 1967, exactly a year before he was assassinated, King delivered a highly publicized speech against the Vietnam War. "Johnson was outraged," Wilkins said. "He turned sour toward King and the movement. He felt that Martin had rejected him."

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King's own organization, withdrew support from him. The group's board of directors voted against publicly backing King's opposition to Vietnam. Other black civil rights leaders criticized King as well. "There were some black preachers telling him he was out of his element," LaFayette said. King became depressed at times, Branch said. One night, King -- alone with a whiskey -- awakened friends in adjoining hotel rooms with his shouting: "I don't want to do this anymore! I want to go back to my little church!"

"The shameful truth is that very few people were paying attention to him," Branch said.

King mused about getting out of the civil rights business. He considered the idea of becoming dean of the chapel at Boston University, his alma mater, Branch said. "He was constantly saying, 'Oh, I wish I could do this,' but he could never do it," Branch said. He was just possessed by the movement." Yet King's evolution opened alliances with new supporters such as anti-war activists, said the Rev. Vincent Harding, an author and friend of King's who helped write his 1967 speech denouncing the Vietnam War. "Some people were backing off at the same moment that there were other kinds of people who now recognized that King was not there for black people but for a new American society," Harding said. "Those who wanted to work for this new society were seeing him as a hero." What this new American society could have looked like under King's leadership is unclear. He never got the chance to lead his final crusade. He was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, while helping lead sanitation workers on strike. The Poor People's Campaign has faded from historical memory. It remains the most overlooked part of King's legacy, Wilkins said. It remains in the shadows because King rewrote the traditional civil rights script, Wilkins said. As long as he fed Americans images of bigoted Southern sheriffs clubbing demonstrators, people could remain comfortable. But the Poor People's Campaign gave Americans a new cast of villains: themselves. Americans didn't want to look at the face of poverty, but King was going to force them, he said. "When the movement was just about the South, you weren't rattling the status quo," Wilkins said. 'You were doing things that made Northerners feel morally superior to the South." LaFayette last saw King on the day he was assassinated. At the time, King was still thinking big. He told LaFayette that he wanted to globalize nonviolent protests. King may have been isolated and dejected during those last days, but that's not the man LaFayette remembers. He takes comfort from one of King's final moments: the "mountaintop" sermon King gave the night before he was assassinated. "You could see it in his eyes; he was consumed with passion," LaFayette said. "He was prepared. They didn't take his life. He gave it up. They didn't have to run him down and try to catch him. He was standing tall despite the threats.

"You can't take a person's life who's already given it up."