Happiness All Around

Several fun notes about my recent happenings:

Cambria (my five year old) was home from church yesterday with a fever so my wife and I swapped.  I stayed home for Sunday School with Cam (since she teaches pre-school) and she stayed home for service (since I preach).  So for S.S. Cam and I discussed the story of Esther, Haman and Xerxes (which was the lesson for her S.S. that morning) and we decided we should color pictures of the MANY parties that were thrown by Esther.  Cam determined that apparently I am quite the artist (I did do a "stunning" Esther with Haman sitting next to her on the couch begging for mercy and Xerxes returning mouth agape in anger :-)...if you can image anything like chubby stick people with colored pencils and crayons.  We had to include balloons to make sure it was a party and Cam just wasn't convinced my scene was very authentic since everyone (including the king and Haman) were wearing dresses).  Oh well.  So much for authenticity.

I was overjoyed today to finally receive the complete set of Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics (14 volumes) for ONLY $99 from CBD!  I had ordered it back in March and just received it in the mail today (even though the official publication date isn't till November 2010.  I can't wait to work my way through the set for my leisure reading (yes it isn't a part of any required reading for Seminary and yes I do consider it "fun" and leisure reading and I'm still not exactly sure where in the world to store them until I've read through them all :-).

On another note...I'm posting a paper I turned in last week where I gave an all-too brief history of the Old Testament text (Hebrew and Greek), but chose to do so in a midrashic form just for the fun of it.  Hopefully Dr. August Konkel enjoys reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it...now to move from the "origins" of the Old Testament to the "originals" of the Old Testament...a far more complex and yet more interesting (from my perspective) topic to engage.

Imaginatively entering the world of the Hebrew Bible...Karl Barth...text criticism...a wife and children that understand my many addictions and love me anyways...life is good!