Food & drink

(Tim) Last night, the Bayly, Crum, Ummel, and Weeks housholds were joined by Seth Boles, Annie Hogue (and wee ones), Lizzie Wegener, and Dani Williams for our annual Christmas season progressive dinner here. We picked this tradition up from the Taylor clan (which now numbers about one hundred direct descendants of Dad and Mom Taylor).

We started with horse dovers at Joseph and Heidi's, then soup at Ben and Michal's, main course at Doug and Heather's (bread and drinks provided by Heather, with Mary Lee providing the filling stuff), followed by dessert at Lucas and Hannah's.

For music...

(Tim) Entertainers are the only ones permitted to be honest, today. But sometimes, scientists are cut some slack and are allowed to speak their minds, too. In that vein, did you notice yesterday's news that women are hard wired not to lose weight as easily as men. WebMD titled their article on the study, "Hunger Control: Women the Weaker Sex?" Turns out if we pay scientists to study the difference between the sexes, one of the results we'll get is that the sex that carries and nurses our children is hard wired to...

Well, to what?

Amazingly, to carry and nurse our children. Brilliant! Which got me thinking...

Anyone who's viewed a Reubens has to be skeptical of the cult of the thin body rampant in the American church. Only the perfectly naive would see it as a battle for holiness, the repentance of those who recognize their god is their belly.

When I was in Africa several years ago, David Wegener cautioned me to watch how I spoke about weight. Over there, he explained, any reference to one's weight (if one is adipose, as I am) is seen as arrogance. In other words, Africa is normal across history in thinking a fat wife contented and prosperous. Not sinful.

Through the years, I've had a number of wives come to me and ask me to pray that they'd lose weight...

(Tim) Food. People today can't make up their minds whether it's erotica or The Meaning of Life. For men whose god is their belly, lust and appetite feed off each other and produce similar neuroses. Computer pornography. Obesity. Hooking up. Anorexia. Abortion. Veganism. Birth control.

Enslaved to our appetites, we'd do well to learn a word almost never heard outside Roman Catholicism: concupiscence.

Here's something true: Christians today turn the marriage bed over to a mutual concupiscence we refer to as "making love." But there's little love, and no making of anyone at all.

True love can't possibly be self-gratification by other means...

(Tim) Two conferences to call your attention to:

First, online registration is now up and running for the Christ Church conference, Sexual Orthodoxy, to be held October 15-16 in Moscow, Idaho. Doug Wilson, Ben Merkle, and I will be addressing subjects such as: The Politics of Sodomy; Why Women Make Better Women Ministers than Men Do; The Politics of Fruitfulness; Family Government in the Church; Patriarchalism, Good and Bad; Sentimentalism and the Feminine Ethos; and Abortion: The Blood Sacrifice of Egalitarianism. Mary Lee and I hope we'll see you there!

Second, online registration is also available for another conference I'll be speaking at soon--July 10-12--here in Bloomington, Indiana. (Download the brochure.) Please make plans now to join us here in Bloomington for the ClearNote Fellowship conference, Standing in the Gap. Message titles include, Who Will Stand?; Fight or Flight--True or False Contextualization; Cheap Grace; and Worship Wars.

We plan a refreshing time of fellowship, teaching, food, and worship of our Triune God. The whole family is welcome--we'll be child-friendly as well as childcare being provided. I hope you'll register now and plan to be with us.

If you'd like more information, please feel free to e-mail (Mrs.) Ali Trout at churchoffice at shepherdchurch dot com. Or give her a call, Tuesday through Friday, at (812) 825-2684.

(Tim Bayly: This post is written by a craftsman of musical instruments in our church named Andrew Henry. I asked him to write about his beautiful musical instruments and to include some pics. He's kindly done so and you'll see why I'm tickled pink to own his first guitar. The action is fantastic, the wood is drop-dead gorgeous, and I'm bragging so I'll stop. Read on and order a bass guitar for a loved one or yourself. You won't regret it!)

God has been very gracious in allowing me to make my living working with my hands. There have been woodworkers in my family for generations and, as a kid, I spent many hours with my dad in his wood shop. But it looked like I wouldn't be following in those footsteps until about two years ago when I was finishing up my Viola Performance degree at IU and considering what sorts of jobs to look for. I'd spent three years in the IU Violinmaking program, earned my Associate's Degree in Violinmaking and had fallen in love with woodworking again...

(Tim) Our extended family came up to what we call the Michigan House to celebrate Christmas. We arrived in batches Wednesday and Thursday, and are leaving in batches yesterday and tomorrow (Saturday and Monday). The first pic is of Ben and Michal's youngest--Zion Bjorn. I tell them they spelled it wrong--that "this one is Zion Born"--but they don't listen.

The house bubbled with chidren. Here Joseph reads a book to four while the others are...somwhere else. Eating, taking a nap, in the bathtub, nursing, having their diapers changed, eating, having their nose wiped, eating, playing ping pong, eating, and asking questions--Josiah's specialty.

(Tim) I've been privileged to attend several of the Ministers Conferences put on by Christ Church of Moscow, Idaho, and I commend them to you. So take a minute right now to go over to their web site and check out this year's conference. Speakers will include Doug Wilson, Ben Merkle, Toby Sumpter, and Nate Wilson--all speaking on the theme "The Institute of Awesome: Keeping Calvinism Sassy for the Next Fifteen Minutes."

And if you go, do as we've done and take an extra day to go up and hike in Glacier National Park, wondering at the beauty our Creator throws willy-nilly everywhere: the fall colors, the elk herds, and their bugling bulls.

Readers will note Baylyblog doesn't sell its content. There are only a couple links to stores in the sidebar to the left and those are links to Amazon lists we think readers may be interested in--specifically books written by our dad, Joe Bayly, and another list of recommended books on sexuality. Also, because of our appreciation for...

Two days ago, a mile and a half from our home, a coal train derailed spilling thirty-five aluminum gondolas of coal on the rail bed at the Garrison Chapel Road crossing. Unlike the old steel coal cars, these aluminum cars didn't go off the track and sit on top of each other. They turned into mangled carcasses filling the crossing with something like seven million pounds of coal! Here's a picture of our grandchildren and friends watching the cherrypickers working. When I was an air brakeman/car knocker for Chicago & North Western at their Proviso Yards in the early seventies, working the cherry picker at a derailment was the most coveted job.

About five miles west of the derailment, the coal train had just crossed this viaduct. Imagine the mess if the train had derailed just a few miles earlier!

This trestle is the third highest in the world and we love driving there on a Sunday afternoon to hang out. We took my mother there, recently. She sat in a chair at the side of the road and watched her grandchildren and great grandchildren climb the hill to the top of the viaduct. Then she watched my wife, Mary Lee, climb the steel support she was sitting under...

The American Spectator's "Another Perspective" just ran an excellent piece titled, "What Would Reagan Cut?" The author is Bob Patterson, a close friend who served as the stated clerk of Northern Illinois Presbytery (PCA) back in 1991 when I transferred with my congregation from the mainline PC(USA) into the PCA. Since then, Bob has moved into writing on public policy matters and currently serves as editor of the Rockford Center's very helpful quarterly, The Family in America.

Two reasons to read this piece: first, everyone thinks cutting Social Security benefits is the only realistic way to address the deficit, but did you know that the payments you and I make into Social Security have long served as one of Washington D.C.'s principal cash cows? Bob reports that Social Security has long been producing a surplus...

As a principle, I never, ever read Huffington Post. But something about foolish consistency…

Not addressing observable rashes and visible vomiting and painful skin maladies and lactose intolerance, or my own throat-swelling from eating Mangos (their skins have the same oil as Poison Ivy), but when people get their meaning in life from not eating sugar and veganism and supplements and so-called "natural" food, I always think of Scripture's declaration:

Food is for the stomach and the stomach is for food, but God will do away with both of them. Yet the body is not for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body. (1 Corinthians 6:13)

Today was Make Applesauce Day in our kitchen. Six bushels of apples cut, cooked, and run through the food mill by four generations including my mother, my wife, our three daughters, and nine of our grandchildren. Daughter Michal Crum took the pic and I pulled it off Google+.

And although there was already lots of naturally-occurring sugar in the apples, they added lots of white refined stuff as well. (TB w/thanks to Michal)