A Night With Willie Nelson

This week I took PopPop and Jack to see Willie Nelson and Family at our local community theater. It was a great night listening to a country music legend. At 82 years old, Willie puts on a fantastic show. He hit all of his classics and our third row seats in this small auditorium was a perfect venue for hearing one of the greats.

My dad (just one year older than Willie) had a great time clapping along! He loved all the old classics, but I personally think he really enjoyed Willie's new ballad: "Roll Me Up And Smoke Me When I Die." Here's a clip of the song from our show below.

I've enjoyed his music over the years and even though I'm not a die-hard fan, it was pretty cool to see a music legend perform. It was even more fun to go to the show knowing that three generations of Fletchers were enjoying the same music.

If you want to hear the full song, this is a video from Jimmy Kimmel about a week before we saw him perform. 

Quietly making noise,
Fletch

Rejected Olympic Events

I was throwing out an old sketch pad and found a few funny pictures from a project that Jack and I worked on a few years ago. It was during the London Olympics and we decided to doodle a few pictures with the theme: REJECTED OLYMPIC EVENTS.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Can you think of any rejected events? Let us know in the comments below.

Quietly making noise,
Fletch

Freedom In Christ

I updated my MacBook Air this week with the new Mavericks operating system. I love the iBooks app that comes pre-loaded. Reading on my computer? Are you kidding me? Yes, please. As I opened my library, one of the stored books I found was The Radical Reformission, by Mark Driscoll. I remember reading and enjoying this book several years ago when I was trying to read books on my iPad.

I enjoy finding old books that I connected with at a different time in my life. This was one of those books. At the time, I was in the midst of recovering from Gospel Amnesia, this was one of the books that spoke to me from nearly every page.

This section below was one of the few I had highlighted. I even wrote a blog post about it once. It's worthy of a second mention.

“Reformission is ultimately about being like Jesus, through his empowering grace. One of the underlying keys to reformission is knowing that neither the freedom of Christ nor our freedom in Christ is intended to permit us to dance as close to sin as possible without crossing the line. But both are intended to permit us to dance as close to sinners as possible by crossing the lines that unnecessarily separate the people God has found from those he is still seeking. To be a Christian, literally, is to be a “little Christ.” It is imperative that Christians be like Jesus, by living freely within the culture as missionaries who are as faithful to the Father and his gospel as Jesus was in his own time and place.

I am advocating not sin but freedom. That freedom is denied by many traditions and theological systems because they fear that some people will use their freedom to sin against Christ. But rules, regulations, and the pursuit of outward morality are ultimately incapable of preventing sin. They can only, at best, rearrange the flesh and get people to stop drinking, smoking, and having sex, only to start being proud of their morality. Jesus’ love for us and our love for him are, frankly, the only tethers that will keep us from abusing our freedom, yet they will enable us to venture as far into the culture and into relationships with lost people as Jesus did, because we go with him.”

Excerpt From: Mark Driscoll. “The Radical Reformission.” iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=362055909

Quietly making noise,
Fletch

What Others Are Saying About Noah

We are very excited for the release of Noah and this new featurette gives a little more information to the film and what the director was intending to do with the story.

Check it out and let me know what you think:

Quietly making noise,
Fletch

Here are a few previous posts about the film Noah.

Noah - The Building Of The Ark

Our family is very excited about the new film, Noah, that will be released at the end of March. Loaded with great talent like Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Emma Watson, and Sir Anthony Hopkins, it promises to be a fun movie of an often told story.

Much like Exodus (starring Christian Bale) which is in production, I really enjoy when Hollywood takes a stab at visually portraying stories from the Bible. There is ALWAYS a question of accuracy, but I will admit that even what I create in my minds eye when I read through scripture lacks in accuracy, therefore I can appreciate what a production team puts together and the team for Noah seems to have done just that.

In the following featurette, the designers talk specifically about the Ark and how it was created for use in the film.

Critics have already begun to voice their concerns regarding accuracy and the script. I wonder though, as Christians, if we can be prepared to have grace saturated discussions about the movie itself, the topic of sin/judgment and how God responds with a covenant of grace not only with Noah, but with us as well.

I am looking forward to sharing a few more featurettes in the next week prior to the release of the film. In the meantime, what about you? Are you looking forward to seeing this movie? Let me know in the comments.

Quietly making noise,
Fletch