Posts Tagged ‘snow’

I have a friend who left a comment that seemed to question my intelligence about the incident that took place here. I want to explain myself. To borrow from Paul Harvey, here’s the rest of the story…

Our friends, Ralph and Christy Ramsey with their daughter Hannah, came to visit us in Virginia. It was a week after our last big snow, and there was more than 16″ on the ground in some places. After they arrived on Thursday, we all were planning a great sledding extravaganza on Friday. Being from the Dallas area, it was a little surreal that they got 9″ of snow there on the day they were flying out.

Ralph and I have been great friends since Carolyn and I got married in 1992. They were a young couple at First Baptist Church Garland, Texas where I served first as a lowly youth intern and then as a lowly Singles & Young Adult Minister. After I discovered that Ralph was rather gullible, he became one of our circle of friends primary targets for practical jokes. That is, until we realized that there’s not much point in playing jokes on Ralph since he so often does it to himself.

Ralph seems to always get hurt whenever we’re up to something. If you could amputate your leg with a ballpoint pen and a feather, Ralph would manage to do it. In fact, I’m convinced that many of the inane warning labels we see on products these days are simply because of accident prone folks like Ralph. He’s also exceptionally good at putting his foot in his mouth – a talent that I love to exploit.

However, it did seem like a good idea at the time on Friday when he suggested we video our daughters and wives sledding down the hill. Then he threw in a twist. Let’s (that would be me, Sam and Ralph) lock arms at the base of the hill and play “sled chicken.”

We were sledding near Lark Lane where there was a huge, snow-packed hill, and you could achieve near Space Shuttle launch speeds coming down the hill with a mere piece of plastic under you. So Ralph set up the video camera behind us, and the three of us locked arms to face the sledding missiles.

My rationale went something like this:

• Humor Ralph and don’t shoot down one of his “ideas.”
• Take some great close ups of  the girls coming down the hill with Carolyn’s fancy Canon which she had asked me to hold.
• The odds of us getting hit were minute. Most of us were falling off the sleds before we reached the point we were standing.
• Ralph’s ideas never work.

So there we stood. I’ve included the video again for your study of the event.

There are few observations I’d like to make about the incident above now that you’ve witnessed it:

• It is impossibly difficult to tell how fast someone is going on a sled heading towards you when you are zoomed in taking pictures of them.
• The response time of pulling the camera from your eyes, calculating the proximity of a rocketing sled, telling your body which way to go to avoid impact and then moving is almost negligible.
• If you should attempt to escape injury by leaping to the right where your son and friend are pushing you into the sled’s path, you will most likely fail.
• One’s feet are not meant to occupy the same space where one’s head was previously in a 2 second span.
• A Canon D40 with zoom lens does not make an adequate cushion for your ribs but in fact can survive such an impact with no adverse affects.
• A 42 year-old man’s ribs are able to absorb a Canon D40 mass impression without breaking.
• It’s disconcerting to hear one’s daughter more concerned about the aforementioned camera than she is her father who is lying a quivering mass of wounded flesh.

Now, watch this version of the video in order for me to point out a few more observations that are only intelligible in slow motion:

• My wife’s and Christy ear-to-ear evil grins.
• How high my feet got.
• The sudden realization after I bring the camera down from my eyes that I am in trouble.
• Ralph’s bracing himself to push me into the path of the sled.
• How narrowly Sam missed being plowed over as well.

Ralph was supremely proud of himself. Heck, I would have been too. It was a flawless plan and execution. The odds of that happening are astronomical – especially with the two of us involved.

Now that you know “the rest of the story,” I hope you agree with me that I am in no way to be second-guessed for my participation in the incident. It was all a fluke. You would do the same thing if you were in my shoes. Right?

It’s a long story that I’ll supply later this week when I get to it, but without any further ado, here’s “The Fall 2010.”

The Fall – Real time from Jeff Noble on Vimeo.

And in slow motion:

The Fall 2010 from Jeff Noble on Vimeo.

It’s nice to have a sled run, with jumps, in our own backyard…

It was one of those weekends as a leader that you anticipate/dread with equal measures of enthusiasm and uncertainty. Our church had an opportunity to host the Glory in the Highest concert tour here in Blacksburg. After deliberation and an email survey, we jumped at it.

There were more than 900 folks at the concert Friday night, and we surpassed the break-even point. While it was never a financial-only perspective for me, I knew that there might be those in our church who would look at it that way, and I was grateful that those results might assuage any concern they had.

One person told me at the concert, “Congratulations on the success of this event.” The comment was made in reference, I perceived, to the amount of people in attendance. And the comment broke my heart in a way. Success at such an event is never measured in terms of numbers and attendance. Biblically, we can only view success as to whether God was glorified and honored in the context and whether we are faithful and obedient.

Jesus Christ was clearly painted as glorious, majestic and worthy of worship and honor from the stage by the artists, and because of that, I was deeply grateful to have been a part of the event. My prayer is that folks who attended, helped and prayed for the event were encouraged to discover that life’s ultimate joy rests in an authentic love relationship with the Father.

Snowy Saturday

We awoke Saturday a.m. to a thickening layer of snow on the ground. It snowed steadily most of the day, finally clearing up around 4-ish. It was simply beautiful, and my kids leapt out of bed, dressed with no sense of grogginess, and were outside in a few moments. If only they treated school days like that…

It was surreal and beautiful. Most of the snows we experienced in Arkansas came after December. One of our church members related that this snow “really didn’t count” as a significant snow. It was more of a dusting. (It was 3-4 inches!!). Man, are we unprepared! My toes have been icicles since last week when the temps started staying stubbornly in the 20s at night. I wore two pairs of socks to our worship service last night.

I had planned to avoid the snow play. However, after helplessly watching two different fathers on our street laboriously build Frostys, I was eventually guilted into creating our own version of a frozen snow human. Sam and I pelted one another with snowballs for a while before my one hand was frozen solid (I had on a nice mitten but couldn’t find its match so on the other hand, I was wearing a cotton glove I use for subzero scooter rides).

Carolyn was out shopping for most of the day, and when I learned she was returning, I told her to look for our snow creation. When she pulled up, she said, “It’s dead.” It had fallen over. Bummer.

Finally… December Nights

Now you see why this was a “Big Weekend.” Our church moved its worship services to the evenings during the month of December. We have creatively called this “December Nights.” It’s…

a wonderful, warm and inviting December of worship and celebration of Christ’s birth! There will be NO MORNING WORSHIP SERVICES during December; instead, we’ll be meeting each Sunday at 5:00 p.m. at the BCM at VT for “December Nights.” This is a superb opportunity to invite friends, neighbors and coworkers for 1 hour of contagious joy involving worship and teaching! Come celebrate Christ with us in December!

We experimented with December Nights last year at Journey Church, and our congregation there loved the break in schedule and the ambience. This past Sunday evening was our first DN here. We met at 5:00, enjoyed some hot chocolate and cookies, and then we sent out a large group into the neighborhoods around Virginia Tech to sing Christmas carols.

They returned, frozen, but cheerful, and then we enjoyed a time of worship and teaching centered around the Advent theme of Hope. As folks exited back into the frigid night air, and we cleaned up the BCM, I was thankful for all that happened in a few days.

It was a big weekend.