Have you seen the movie Rent? If you haven’t then I would recommend it. But, wait! let me clarify. If you are very offended by or have absolutely no desire to discuss the issue of homosexuality then this is not a movie you should be watching. However, if you approach the movie with an open mind I think there are a ton of good in the movie to think about. In my case, I have had very little interaction with the Gay community and watching Rent for the first time with Beth this Fall break in Oklahoma made me a bit uncomfortable! As the movie progressed tho I was struck by the acceptance and friendship of the main characters despite their varied sexual tendencies. What if more people were willing to celebrate their daughter’s engagement when they chose a life partner? Also, while the movie is rated PG-13 for "mature thematic material involving drugs and sexuality, and for some strong language," there is no sex and nudity consists of a dance bar and a mooning. Amazingly clean movie considering the usual amount of overt sexuality included in most movies. Oh yeah, and the songs are catchy too.

Then the March 21st issue of The Mennonite grabed my attention with its title "holding on to chastity." While there were several good articles I found the editorial by Everett Thomas most interesting. In the article he defines the word chastity and discusses its relationship with the Mennonite Confession of Faith. "If we embrace this difficult teaching by Jesus [Matthew 5:28], then adultery is common not only in our society but also in church." What really stuck with me however was his final statements about how he especially respects the integrity of "those who carry a bisexual or homosexual orientation but remain faithful to Biblical teachings." He went on to confront the "unspoken sanctions by our church agains members who succumb o same-sex sins." It is quite sad but very true that the church treats same-sex sin SO much more harshly than any other type of sexual immorality. A very tough situation to say the least, but I definitely don’t want to support that mindset, emphasizing some sin and treating others as unimportant. We have all sinned, God give me to strength to not judge others for their sins!

Well it seems like forever since Spring Break, but I’d like to take the time to officially announce the addition of two new photo galleries from the Chamber Choir ‘06 spring break tour. Out of the hundreds of photos from the trip I selected a mere 100 shots to give you a taste of the trip. However, if for some reason 100 shots doesn’t cut it there’s also the uncaptioned collection of 250+ shots available as well, take your pick

Then disaster struck! My trusty lil server, Guapo, who for so many months has happily resided in the East Hall bathroom, bit the dust yesterday. I returned from work and notice Guapo was off. I pressed the power button and… nothing Even my basic IT troubleshooting was to no avail. Luckily I had very recently backed up the photo galleries, so those are back online. However, until I can do some further recovery work the newest spring break captions and GCmovies will both be offline.

Now, traveling back in time one week… last friday Beth & I went to the newest GC mainstage, After Mrs. Rochester. As The Record put it, it’s a play about a book about a book, which was less confusing than I would have thought. The main characters (Nicole Miazgowicz, Lindsay Nance and Cassie Greer) actually play the three personalities or time periods of Mrs. Rochester’s life: her young self, her adult self and her crazy alter ego, respectively. The play is somewhat of a fictional autobiography based on the book Wide Sargasso Sea. In the end the play was quite intense, tho enjoyable as it made me think about how much about my upbringing and life (not to mention sanity) I truly take for granted. If you haven’t seen it yet it’s still playing this weekend, go watch!

Well, I’ve been keeping extraordinarily busy with work, an upcoming deadline in my Multimedia class, tour photos, and doing the other things I enjoy most. All this to say that I’m a slacker and don’t update this blog as often as I would like. So even though it’s late I have to mention that chain of storms that moved through Goshen two nights ago. It was crazy! Thunder woke me up at least 3 or 4 times though the course of the night and when I finally got up at around 6:45 there was an amazing amount of lightning. I ended up looking up some lightning-strike data that you can check out by clicking the thumbnail. Yeah, those are just the strikes that happened within the past 15 minutes of when I took the screenshot!

Deb Brubaker (my choir director) sent the chamber choir a forwarded email a while back about some ad we should watch and I didn’t think all that much about it, but as I had a spare minute the other day I decided to finally watch it. I was blown away! The commercial is for the Honda Civic, but this is not usual car commercial. The audio for the whole piece is performed by a 60 voice choir making "car noises." It gets better! On Honda’s website there is also a "making of" movie showing the auditions, scoring (yes, there is an actual musical score going along with all those noises) and rehearsals. So go to the Honda Civic UK website and check it out for yourself! Just click the “Watch” link near the bottom of the page. It’s well worth your while!

I’ll close with a little randomness. After searching Walmart, Kroger and local drug stores without finding one bottle of my usual AOSept Plus contact solution I went to the internet to find out what happened. In the end the manufacturer’s website was utterly unhelpful tho several people on a random forum claimed the main plant had experienced a contamination and was temporarily shut down, hence the lack of supply. Regardless, while wandering around various contact lens websites I came to realize that it doesn’t matter if you hire a hot model or not, putting in contacts just looks freaky!

Tho a little late in reporting it, I am indeed back from spring break, and the trip to Florida was pretty awesome. Along with the 11 concerts and 52ish hours on the bus we had time to relax on the beach, a personal cruise in the Gulf of Mexico, interesting and fun host stays, about as many games as one can play with a purple inflatable ball, frisbee, good conversations, excellent potlucks, and of course a full load of rook, euchre, and hearts! We had a really good group of people in choir so having a week to hang out with them was great. Between the 4 or 5 digital cameras on the trip we ended up with around 600 photos and once I get my hands on them and find time to do some sorting and organizing I’ll try to get at least a sampling up in the photo gallery.

There’s more good news too! Not only did I win because of a great spring break, but now that break is over I STILL win because it has been a whole lot of fun seeing Beth again! I am so spoiled from not having to deal with the long distance relationship junk. Makes even the week for spring break too long for my tastes. Hmmmmm, wish us luck in a few months on SST But for now life is good and I’m loving every second I can mannage to be with Beth

Last but not least, I win again! This one was a complete shock, but two days after I got back from break I was checking too see what all I had missed on digikitten when I discovered that my last entry to the February Twisted Pixel competition actually got third place! Talk about a nice surprise! For those who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, I posted a thumbnail of my submission on kuhnsfam a few days ago or you can just look at the winners, or at the rules for the competition.

Well, I’m on choir tour and finally found a few minutes of internet access here at Cape Christian Fellowship. We performed a mini concert here last night and spent this morning cleaning the carpet. Next on the schedule, a ride on one of the member’s 60 foot boat and some time on the beach before we start heading north again. So far the trip has been a lot of fun. Granted, not as nice as it would have been to be in southern CA, but so it goes Alright, I’ve gotta head, hope everyone else is having an awesome break!

(8)i thank you God for most this amazing day!(8)