Well, I guess transitions have these weird times. For the next week or so my Internet access will be limited, so my blog posts will not be as regular. However, I’ll do my best to at least keep my weekly posts from the England/France trip going.
Once my computer situation is resolved, though, I’ll bring the blog back in full force, and hopefully better than ever!
Quite a few people the past couple weeks have asked me about Mennonite beliefs. On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, we live close enough to Lancaster County in Pennsylvania to have people confuse Eastern Shore Mennonites with the Amish.
A little explanation: Mennonite theology and doctrine is very similar to that of other biblically-based denominations. The only thing I see that really differentiates them from other denominations is that peace & nonresistance are built into their official doctrine. Many Christians embrace these views personally, but most denominations don’t make it part of their official stance.
If you’re interested in learning more, you can go here to read a summary statement of their Confession of Faith.
Oig.
Just found out it will take a couple days for this site to be automatically forwarded, so in the meantime it will be parked at nathanhyde.wordpress.com
Sorry for all the confusion!
Just FYI: nathanhyde.com will now automatically forward to nathanhyde.wordpress.com.
I’ve had to make the change because I’ve been switching a lot of computer stuff (domain, host, etc.) and messed up the location of the blog. So anyway, the blog is still up and running but is now at nathanhyde.wordpress.com, but like I said, pretty soon nathanhyde.com should automatically redirect you there.
Make sense?
It’s strange how entwined our lives have become with technology. In my mind, I’d thought I was almost exempt from this reality, because at our house we don’t have cable TV, high speed Internet–we don’t even have a land line for the phone.
But as I’ve made the transition out of SonRise, I’ve discovered that my office computer has become kind of like an internal organ. It’s painful to tear it out, and it’s a long, complicated, involved process–it even requires recovery time! My email, online bookmarks, podcast subscriptions, numerous automatic passwords, and many other computer-related aspects of daily life have been greatly disrupted. I had no idea how much I depended on this stuff! It’s kind of unnerving.
And to think we laughed at the idea of robots taking over the world. Seems their cousin, the computer, already has.
Below is the first journal entry recording the events of the trip Carolyn and I took to England and France in July of 2006:
Tuesday, July 18, 2006 London, England
Yesterday Carolyn and I took British Airways flight 224 to Heathrow Airport in London, England. We landed about 8:20 p.m., but it was another two hours before we got through Customs and took a bus to the Tube station. Then it was about another 45-60 minutes before we got to this Bed & Breakfast.
It is hot. We like the place, but AC seems to be rare in London. Not only that, but the local newspaper headlines are talking about the record-breaking heat in London. Great.
The weirdest thing: We went to sleep around 1:00 a.m., but woke up around three hours later with the sun lighting up the world outside. What’s up with that?
This morning we had breakfast with another couple staying here. They’re opera singers/teachers from Hamburg, Germany. (He’s actually from Galveston and Austin, Texas, but has lived in Germany for the last 20 years.)
Today we took the Tube to the British Museum and the British Library….
This is the front of the British Museum. Carolyn fulfilled a lifelong dream in going here. She planned out our trip. Funny that we went here the first day, huh?
It was incredible! They have a ton of ancient stuff. Very cool. We saw the Rosetta Stone…
The Rosetta Stone, which helped people in our day crack the Hieroglyphics Code.
…the Gutenberg Bible, the Magna Carta, the original handwritten copy of Alice in Wonderland, and that weird-looking stone that contains Sennacherib’s account of Assyria’s dealings with Judah…
Weird as it looks, this is actually King Sennacherib’s notebook. It’s his written account of his attempted invasion of Jerusalem, as recorded in the Bible in 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, and Isaiah. By the way, he lied.
We saw arrowheads from Assyria’s invasion/siege of Lachish, a ton of stuff from the Greek Parthenon, and some B.C./early A.D. Roman busts. We saw statues from ancient Egypt…
Thanks to this ancient statue, I couldn’t get the song “Walk Like An Egyptian” out of my head.
…including a piece of the Sphinx! And a lot of this stuff wasn’t behind cases or anything–it was out in the open, where you could walk up and touch it (if you’re one of those people). We saw mummies that were about 4,000 years old–including cats, dogs, alligators, snakes, eels–even a fish; and one mummy lady wasn’t wrapped in mummy stuff. They had lots of mummies. They had lots of everything. We saw a pile of human hair that was several thousand years old. We saw ancient money, weapons, and church artifacts. We saw bricks inscribed with Nebuchadnezzar’s name. We saw King George III’s enormous library. We saw handwritten lyrics by the Beatles (written on scrap paper, with some lyrics crossed out and replaced by the familiar ones), musical compositions by Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart, and handwritten letters from Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. We saw pages from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. We saw handwritten copies of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. We saw an original edition of Shakespeare’s First Folio from 1623. We saw a 1,000-year-old copy of Beowulf. (Some of these things were at the British Library.) This is a small fraction of the things we saw! We also saw an original edition of the King James Bible, a Tyndale Bible–that belonged to King Henry VII–and the oldest complete Greek New Testament, from the third or fourth century. Oh yeah–and we saw Handel’s original, handwritten Messiah.
We took a break for lunch at a cafe nearby–very good chicken and cheese sandwiches.
We stopped at the room for a couple minutes and went to a nearby Italian restaurant for dinner.
Tomorrow we’re going to Stratford-upon-Avon, the hometown of William Shakespeare.
What a beautiful, beautiful day on the Eastern Shore! I went to the Delmarva Shorebirds game (local Class A minor league baseball team). They played the Lake County Captains, and it was a pretty lame game until the eighth inning. It was so bad I almost left before the action started. It didn’t help that I’d brought a pen and notebook to do some church planning between innings, and my lone pen died. Lesson: always bring back up.
Coming into the bottom of the eighth, Lake County was thrashing the Shorebirds 9-2. The Captains didn’t even look that great except for their pitching, but the Shorebirds were having a lousy game. They walked several people every inning, and two of their opponents’ runs came on passed balls. In fact, I’m not even sure if any of their 9 runs were earned.
Then in the bottom of the eighth, Delmarva got a series of solid base knocks to score three runs, narrowing the gap to a 4-run deficit. With the bases juiced and two men down, Brandon Tripp went long with a 400-plus-foot blast to dead center. His grand slam tied the score, and with a 7-run eighth inning, the game suddenly got interesting.
Lake County added two unanswered scores in the top of the 10th on a two-run homer to wrap it up, but it still turned out to be a pretty good game overall.
However, I do feel–and look!–like such a dummy. I was sitting along the first base side the whole game, and the sun was to my right side. I didn’t realize just how sunny it was. Turns out I should have switched over to the third base side after a few innings, because now my right side is very bright red.
Guess I’ll have to go to another game soon and sit on the other side, so I’m burned evenly.
Wow. I just found out that a friend of ours has been making the co-payment on our prescriptions for over a year. Since I don’t pay much attention to insurance stuff, I just figured we paid something for it through our health plan. But instead, a friend of ours who works at a pharmacy set it up to automatically redirect our co-payment, and she picked up the tab.
It’s unbelievable how generous and thoughtful some people are. And it was done anonymously–I had no idea!
The Calvary Chapel was cool. It was called Newark Calvary Fellowship. The worship music was excellent–just a couple guitars and vocalists, and people really seemed to be into it. Very worshipful atmosphere. The pastor preached a message on James 3:1-12, and he did a really good job illustrating it and explaining its meaning.
The people were also very friendly. After church we went to lunch with Carolyn’s sister Kristen, and her husband Michael. One of the families from the church went to lunch with us. Really nice couple, and they have three really cute and entertaining little girls.
The restaurant was California Tortilla, there in the middle of the University of Delaware campus. It was awesome. I’d eat every meal there if I could. If only we had one near Ocean City!
It feels strange not to go to SonRise today, but it’s not because we’ve left already. We’re visiting Carolyn’s sister Kristen and her husband Michael. They go to church at a Calvary Chapel. I’m really looking forward to checking it out. I’ll blog about it later.
Surfing the Inner N8 
