Well, Christmas is in the air and falling all over my car. Did you know that at 5:45 AM ice is the coldest and hardest to get off your car? Its 100% true. I’m starting to get the Christmas spirit, almost time to pull out the Jimmy Buffett and Kenny Chesney albums. And of course I need to listen to the album by Walter Brennan and the Elvis Christmas songs and Christmas will be here.

This weekend Allison and I went to Fitchburg to visit Eva and John, Allison’s Grandparents to bring them their Christmas gifts. They took us out for an Engagement Meal and we exchanged gifts over Eva’s fantastic homemade lemon squares. After our visit we drove down to Hopkinton for Christine and Marc’s rocking Christmas Bash. What an amazing array of food. And there were babies galore around so Allison was quite entertained for most of the evening. It was nice to catch up with some of the folks from implementation. We even found out that Allison and I stayed at the exact same place that Patty and Chris did at moosehead lake. Same B&B same room everything. So we exchanged stories about our experiences there and had a lot of laughs.

True to form, I had my camera with me and was able to get a shot of all the folks from the LAB MSR group who were there that night.

Christine, Me, Joanne, Peter and Rick, by the Christmas Tree

I am convinced that the Internet is one guy who comes up with cool stuff and then sends a message to his talkative friends, who pass along the information like wildfire all over. Basically what I am saying is I am taking note of a cool website that I found on another cool website. I give you. The Church Sign Generator.

Okay here’s an interactive bit of the site. I want you to use the The Church Sign Generator to make a witty sign. I know you’ve seen them in front of churches all over and I bet that some of the good ones stick out in your memories so here is what I’d like you to do.

Go to The Church Sign Generator and create your witty (please no offensive materials messages.) and save the file and send it to me. I will create a page for the signs so everyone can see your creativity.

How to save an image from the Internet. If you already know this please skip. Generate your sign at The Church Sign Generator then once the sign is created put your mouse over the picture and use your right mouse button. There should be a menu with options. Choose “Save Picture As…” then save the image to your desktop for easy retrieval and then e-mail it to me.

I will post a collection of the signs in a future blog post.

Okay so digging deeper through the sites I came across a few things.

1. There are books that collect pictures of actual church signs.

2. I found a site called God Hates Shrimp.A parody site based on fundamentalists and their oh so wacky close minded blind devotion to the “Literal Truth” within the Bible.

I’m not going to get into it, but let me say this, have you ever written a paper for college at the beginning of the week and you believed that your position was solid and then had some insight or influence later that week so you revised that paper?

Well, imagine 1500+ years to work on that paper with influences from years of study and thought and political agendas. What about all the different versions that abound as well. And don’t forget that some things do not translate literally, and how about the many languages the Bible has been translated to and from. How can you derive direct quotes from the Bible as “Literal Truths” when the Bible is no longer the exact literal text that was first written. I mean, I’ve rewritten this last paragraph 15 times so far and its only been an hour since I first posted.

I’m no theologian, (although I experimented in college) but the core value of the Bible is Love thy Neighbor, as you Love Yourself. Everything else leads up to that. The Golden Rule is the key value, something that you see in the stories about the actions of Jesus. Why do you think that the WWJD movement is so big, it is so simple, Jesus acted out of love, plain and simple. What would Jesus do? He would Love.

I guess I did get into it then. Go, eat some shrimp. Make a funny Church Sign. Serious boy is taking his soapbox and going home.