Seven Sevens

Bonnie has mentioned my name as a person she'd like to have post on seven sevens. She didn't tag me. I'm responding, more or less, anyway.


Seven things to do before I die:
1. know that my relatives all are believers
2. see my children and their husbands happy with their work, etc.
3. believe that my local church is in a position to grow, not spectacularly necessarily, but healthily, spiritually, financially, and numerically
4. see alligators and moose again, a cougar (from a car) for the first time, and a mountain goat/sheep, all in the wild
5. attend a performance of most of Elijah or Messiah
6. learn how to edit videos taken with our video camera
7. believe that the government (all branches) is willing to honestly and seriously address (not necessarily solve) the problems of health care, poverty, ignorance, peace, the environment, justice, immigration and racism as a priority higher than getting re-elected



Seven things I cannot do:
1. Play in the NBA
2. cook like my wife or sons-in-law or daughters
3. understand most of what our 13-month-old grandson is saying
4. love other people as I should
5. get evangelicals to understand that the Bible does not make a rock-solid case that the world is only thousands of years old, and that claiming too strongly that it is makes Christianity look foolish in the eyes of some, to say nothing of denying some of what God reveals to us in nature
6. really sing well
7. organize my time as well as I should



Seven good things about my wife:
1. She is deeply compassionate
2. She tries hard to understand things that she doesn't
3. She loves me, our grandson, her daughters and sons-in-laws, our brothers, their wives and their kids and . . . you get the idea
4. She is a strong believer
5. She is willing to put up with, and occasionally enjoy, classical music
6. She helped me lose about 30 pounds, and keep it off
7. She is a wonderful companion on trips



Books or series important to me:
1. The Bible
2. Watership Down
3. Mere Christianity
4. Tolkien's Ring trilogy plus the Silmarillion
5. Le Guin's Earthsea books and short stories
6. If I ever teach again, the text for the course
7. Other works by George Macdonald, C. S. Lewis, Patricia McKillip, A. A. Milne, and many others.



Movies I like:
1. Hoosiers
2. To Kill a Mockingbird
3. The Mission
4. the recent Pride and Prejudice
5. Fried Green Tomatoes
6. Ever After
7. Anything that makes my wife happy to watch


Things I say most often:
1. "It's OK."
2. "Don't worry about it."
3. In response to how I am: "Better than I deserve."
4. "He/she/it/they can't help it."
5. "I/we can do it."
6, and 7. No doubt there are aggravating things I say that others would fill in here for me.


Seven people I'd like to join in on this, but I'm not going to ask them:
1. Drew
2. Jason
3. Laura
4. Brandy
5. Anyone else from my family, my church, or SWU
6. Katherine Fodor
7. some of my Flickr contacts


Thanks for reading!