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If you aren’t on facebook, then you haven’t seen the “25 Random Things” notes that have been going around.  At first I thought it was silly to write a note with 25 things and then “tag” 25 people in that note to write their 25 things.  But as I have been reading others’ notes, I have really enjoyed them.  So, in what feels like betraying the “I’ll never participate in chain letters or sappy email forwards” promise I made to myself very early in life, I give you my 25 things.

1. I’ve fallen out of a raft in a class 4 rapid on the Arkansas river in Colorado.
2. I’d like people to think that I can properly load and shoot a muzzle-loading rifle just because I have once.
3. My wife and I had a fight on the way to staff meeting last week that was resolved via text message.
4. I very rarely read all of the lesson that I teach on Wednesday nights at church before I am actually teaching it.
5. I once could recite the entire book of Philippians from memory.
6. I am frequently interested in making people think that I don’t care what they think about me. That’s right, I hide behind “transparency.”
7. As a (far more self-absorbed than I’d care to admit) verbal-processing extrovert, I talk so much about myself that I find it difficult to find something to put on these lists that people don’t already know.
8. My pediatrician once told me I’d be between 6’10” and 7’0″ tall.  I got good at rebounding in basketball.  Then I stopped growing at 6′ 1″ and started focusing on guitar.
9. I once shared the gospel with a vodka-enhanced former KGB agent who was wearing only tightie-whities.
10. I have typed at least two things that were not true (or not completely true) while making this list and then deleted them.  A few years ago I probably would have left those things on the list.
11. I’ve flown east all the way around the world in a summer.
12. I once wrote a song in an afternoon for my wife (who had gone shopping, I think) that included the line “Still long for the day when we get in a fight // and it turns out that I was right.”
13. I cry at unimportant things like movies and sermon illustrations, but rarely cry at things like funerals of loved ones.  That may be due in part to the fact that I frequently get asked to speak at those funerals, and nerves keep me from crying.
14. I like to think of myself as a country boy at heart, but I’ll never move away from the city.
15. I have an uncanny ability to memorize numbers.  I still remember the phone number from my grandparent’s next-door neighbor when I was around 16 years old, and many of the phone numbers of my childhood friends.  It’s not an automatic thing, in that I have to consciously think “remember this.”  But once I do commit it to memory, I’m pretty stuck with it.
16. I used to have 20-13 vision.
17. Before my senior year in college, I had no idea what a 401-K or an IRA was, or that it referred to anything financial.  I’ve never balanced a checkbook.  (and I can’t remember the last time I wrote a paper check, for that matter)
18. According to my boss in high school, I was the fastest and most efficient weed-eater operator he’d ever seen in 25 years of landscaping experience.  That hasn’t given me any advantage in my adult life, to my knowledge.
19. I’ve driven more of the coolest classic cars (’64 & ’65 GTO, ’26 Model-T,  ’57 Pontiac, ’67 Buick Riviera, not to mention some modern muscle cars like Corvettes, supercharged Mini-Coopers and Chargers) than most folks, due to my grandfather and father’s collection of them.
20. I have creative passion, but very little discipline when it comes to giving those passions an outlet.  And I am ashamed of my attempts at art, often.
21. I didn’t drink my first full alcoholic beverage until I was 22 years old.  At one point since then I tried to make up for lost time.  I am learning moderation.
22. I quit playing baseball growing up because my big brother quit, and I was on his team first.  That and there was a conflict with Boy Scouts.  I think I could’ve been a decent baseball player.
23. One of my biggest fears in life is that I would not live out the gospel in such a way that my son grows up with a positive view of Jesus.
24. I’ve been pick-pocketed on a Roman subway.  They stole my camera.  When I realized I was pick-pocketed I punched a plaster wall in anger and hurt my hand.
25. I’ve run naked (except for hiking boots) through the snow in the Swiss Alps.  There was tastefully long-distance photographic evidence of that, but it was stolen with my camera in Rome.