Well, liability has been established in the accident and the insurance company is taking very good care of us. The car should be ready for us sometime in mid-September and until then we are driving a very fancy rental car.

The accelerator pedal on the at-fault car malfunctioned and he ran a red light going 75+. He hit at least three cars before he spun out into my front end, which is very fortunate since the other impacts are what finally slowed down his car.

At first, I was anxiously following his medical progress by way of his insurance adjuster, but when I heard that his doctors didn't expect him to survive his neck fusion surgery, I decided that it would probably be better for me to pray for him and his family and then bury my head in the sand regarding the details.

In other news, my mom's in town and I'm back to class for another two-week intensive. Based on a survey we all took at the beginning of class, I can say with certainty that I am the only person in the class of 60 who doesn't have pastoral ministry as a short- or long-term vocational aim. The class is very practical and I have quickly become the pregnant girl in the back who keeps asking about the moral/ethical consequences of practical methodologies.

Additionally, this class is meant to be taken in first year and I managed to put it off until third year by taking no practicals at all for three semesters in a row. This means that many of the students haven't taken any philosophy or ethics courses and therefore have an "anything goes" philosophy of ministry.

If all of that weren't enough to make me lose my cool, may of these students haven't ever been outside of their small, rural Nazarene districts and are apparently unaware that there are Democrats within the fellowship nowadays. The things that are being said in this class are wiping me out.

During a discussion of whether the church has moved too far away from its more egalitarian roots:

It's just like the Iraq war. If we ask all Americans, they're going to want to leave. Because you can't trust the people to see the full picture. If they could, we wouldn't need a leader to keep us moving in the right direction.

Then my head exploded. The community of faith is just like the United States? And George Bush is what exactly in that analogy? The wise pastor who directs his people in faithfulness?

During a discussion of the costs/benefits to the church of having Christians (ed. note: nominal Christians) in the White House:

This may all seem theoretical now, but in two years, we could have a radical Muslim running the country.

Dude, he was talking about Barack Obama. I'm telling you this because I had to be told myself what this crazy talk was.

I don't come to class to argue the finer points of politics. I don't attempt to politically proselytize. More importantly, I don't assume that everyone in my class is ideologically identical to me. I don't assume you care about social justice (even if I think you should). Don't assume I support a constitutional amendment banning abortion and gay marriage.

This class is like an exercise in groupthink. When the professor (being intentionally ironic) said that the positive of a Christian world leader is that Christians don't have to be different from their society, all you could hear in the classroom were the cicadas because, apparently, no one was bothered in the slightest by this. I felt like I was in an episode of The Twilight Zone. The church is supposed to be different from the surrounding culture. We've had nothing but Christian presidents so far and I have yet to see a decidedly Christian society. [/crazy rant]

Apropos of nothing, Alliclaus is cutting molars and thinks Mommy is the Antichrist. At least she doesn't think Barack Obama is.