Today I had to work from 7-9:30 and am going back at about 5:00 to work until midnight. It's been boring since I came home.

I started working on my sermon today that I'll be giving here in a couple of weeks. I'm glad that I came to the realization that this time around I have a fulltime job and can't wait until a week before to start preparing. I'm actually hoping to have it done by next Monday, so I'm not as stressed out about it. Right now my plan is to talk abou the beatitudes and their relevance to the countercultural tendency among many young people.

It seems like many that I talk to, and whose blogs I read, have this great need to speak what they perceive as truth to power. A lot of wanna-be prophets whose purpose is to seek out injustice (even though we have a hard time defining that) and speak out about it. But no one is offering any genuine alternative. Oh, you ask them and they'll give you a good, and different, agenda, but I'm not seeing any really substantive ALTERNATIVE. I think maybe we are displacing problems.

Anyway that's a lot of rambling. Hopefully it'll take some form as the days go on.

Seth has a link to a friend of his blog on his page. http://theinvisibleman.blogspot.com. I read this guy's, (or girl's), ramblings against Americans. He says something along the lines of "I hate Americans." And goes on to tell a story about how the people in his class are conservative idiots and look down on him because he's liberal. I almost got totally ticked off until I realized this kid was in high school. At least I assume he is, since he said his class was taught by a coach.

I wish, though, I could just count this toward a youthful ignorance. But the unfortunate thing is that it seems to be common among people in their twenties. It's obvious that this kid either a.) is angry at the world, possibly at the fact that he has never traveled much, and is taking out on all the idiots of his class or b.) has traveled to a foreign country once or twice for a couple of weeks at a time, and feels like his vacation experience validates him to rip on all americans for the stupidity of a few.

Anyway, I personally don't have a lot of problems with Americans. Sure, there's some fucked up Americans. But there are fucked up French, British, Somalian, Russian, even Estonian. We are all ignorant in our own particular way. It's no reason to hate.