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.
- I’ve fallen out of a raft in a class 4 rapid on the Arkansas river in Colorado.
- I’d like people to think that I can properly load and shoot a muzzle-loading rifle just because I have once.
- My wife and I had a fight on the way to staff meeting last week that was resolved via text message.
- I very rarely read all of the lesson that I teach on Wednesday nights at church before I am actually teaching it.
- I once could recite the entire book of Philippians from memory.
- 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.”
- 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.
- 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.
- I once shared the gospel with a vodka-enhanced former KGB agent who was wearing only tightie-whities.
- 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.
- I’ve flown east all the way around the world in a summer.
- 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.”
- 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.
- I like to think of myself as a country boy at heart, but I’ll never move away from the city.
- 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.
- I used to have 20-13 vision.
- 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)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.