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You will remember from the last entry that I drove into Orlando early on June 25th. Then I had one day to sort things out in my room before work started. On Sunday the 26th, I drove over to the Plaza Theatre, just a few miles from my house, to help set up for the first week of TCS. TCS stands for “Text. Context. Soul.” Or, “Text, Context, Soul,” if you prefer less trendy punctuation. It’s essentially a learning/teaching/training/equipping seminar series that Excelsis (the company I work for), in partnership with GCM (some vaguely-defined missions-and/or-church-planting organization), puts on. This summer marked the second annual TCS (I talked about last year’s earlier—it was a good bit of the reason I decided to work for Excelsis). ...

Road Trip V2 is what my brother David (hereafter Dav, pronounced “Dave”) and I decided to call our cross-country road trip. On the morning we left San Francisco for Orlando, we printed out two TripTiks to guide us home, but by different routes. We ultimately chose the second one, hence “V2”. But V2 is also a climbers’ rating of bouldering difficulty–the rating that happened to be right at the top of Dav’s and my skill levels–and since we planned on the road trip being a climbing road trip, it was fitting in that sense as well. So here is the chronicle of that 2-week adventure, replete with the most pictures of any entry in this series (I think). ...

As I noted in the previous entry, it has been quite a long time since I said anything of substance on the weblog. Well, it’s time to catch up. So get ready for “What Happened Since Graduation”–a weblog series in an as-yet-undertemined number of parts. We begin with “The Week of Graduation”. I guess technically this can’t cover any of the time since graduation (being before it), but that week is important, so we will cover it anyway. ...

Hello! Welcome back to the weblog of Jonathan Lipps. It’s been quite a little hiatus, forced on us when my web hosting company decided to erase all my data. I can’t remember a 6-month period, what’s more, that I wouldn’t have rather had a weblog to write in, about the things that have been going on. Hopefully over the next few weeks I’ll be able to catch up on some of the more major life changes and whatnot. ...

In a shocking move of endearing humility, I am about to give the floor over to someone else. That is, I think Immanuel Kant has something to say which I would like him to say in his own (translated) words. This is from part 3 of Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, at 6:103. “The only faith that can found a universal church is pure religious faith, for it is a plain rational faith which can be convincingly communicated to everyone, whereas a historical faith, merely based on facts, can extend its influence no further than the tidings relevant to a judgment on its credibility can reach. Yet, due to a peculiar weakness of human nature, pure faith can never be relied on as much as it deserves, that is, [enough] to found a Church on it alone. ...

This quarter was supposed to be easy. I’m taking two classes, both of which are undergraduate courses, and one directed reading. A total of 10 units–the fewest I’ve ever taken. I was supposed to have lots of free time to hang out with friends, go on trips, make money at my jobs, write music, and go cycling and running in the beautiful spring sun. But somehow, I’ve turned into the biggest bundle of depressed stress I’ve been in a few years. I can’t possibly have as much work as I had in previous quarters, but somehow it seems all I’m doing is work, and somehow I’m still behind, yet without even the trade-off of hanging out with friends. Recently, I also found out I have to re-write a paper from last quarter in order to graduate, so all of a sudden it’s like I have an extra class. ...

Last summer, I interned for a company in Orlando called Excelsis. The hallmark, perhaps, of that experience, was never quite knowing what exactly Excelsis was doing (or, since it is more or less a start-up, what it aims to do), or what I was doing for Excelsis. Accordingly, it was always very difficult to answer either the question, “Oh, so what do they do?”, or the question “What do you do for them?” I fabricated a set of answers to each that I felt reasonably honest in giving, but you would be surprised at how much they varied. At different stages before, during, and after my internship, I described Excelsis as a publishing company, a think-tank, an academic consortium, a distance-learning provider, a networker, a producer of theology curriculum, a software development house, and various other things. In fact, I think the problem was that the object of my analysis was just plain vague–I’m not sure Excelsis knew what it was! ...

Since I have been unable to go to church, for the past year or so, without feeling various degrees of discomfort and displeasure, I decided to forego it this Easter in lieu of a different kind of worship. You see, I thought that the best thing to do to commemorate Christ’s resurrection would be that which most uses the benefits of it. If we are right in the matter, Christ rose again to institute the redemption of humanity, so I wanted my act of worship to be an outpouring of my own redeemed humanity. ...

We are all longing, no doubt, for those glorious days when I used to actually talk about things, instead of relate events. My hope is that those days will return, but before they do, I feel I have a duty to discharge–namely, telling about my many spring break adventures. This could potentially be a long entry, so for those short on time I have embedded pictures, which are easier to read than words. ...

I am on my way, in just about two hours, to Park City, Utah, with my suitemates. We’re going to do some skiing (snowboarding for me), and some hardcore lounging about. In keeping with that latter spirit, we’ll be driving to Orange County for the second half of next week; may sun and good times prevail! But since I felt it was a bit mean to have all that fun without even saying anything at all about Thailand, I thought I would leave you with this word: Elephants are large beasts! It’s true. I didn’t see very many bigger beasts in Thailand except for, obviously, larger elephants than the ones to which I referred in the last sentence. And the sky, if you count that as a beast. Also, I don’t know what my friends were talking about (see previous post), but I didn’t see any hookers at all. Just in case you were worried that I might be led astray into wantonness. And by saying I didn’t see any, that is not to imply that the not seeing was the failed result of a looking for. There was no looking for either! Oh well, I should stop talking about hookers, none of which I saw, wanted to see (qua hooker of course; qua human I would want to see them just as I would any other person. Hookers are people too!), or tried to see. And now, the end. ...