The canceled Beirut trip had a happy consequence: We were here for the visit of Donn, Susan and (most happily) Elizabeth. David, Samantha, Nicole and Joy arrived Saturday afternoon as scheduled. The surprise was Cyndee’s Saturday noon telephone call saying they had kicked her out of the Cannon Beach Conference Center dining room, so she was on the way home. So we enjoyed Nicole and Joy while David and Sam had their date night. We all got together for much of the day Sunday.
Elizabeth is almost seven months old now. Despite her miraculous conception, unnoticed presence for 38 weeks, and terrifying first month in intensive care from meconium aspiration, she’s fully normal and totally charming! She’s quite the traveler, having made three long airplane trips already. She even has her own passport now! You can see more of our pictures here.
My cellulitis continues to improve slowly. The pain is largely gone and the redness is much reduced. The antibiotics are doing their job. But I’m still staying at home. With electronic communication such as it is, I can do almost as much here as in my office.
One happy development is that this morning, I sent in the last bits of the third book Mark Driscoll and I are dong: Vintage Church. Book one, Vintage Jesus, is selling remarkably well. Book two, Death by Love, pastoral letters to tragic situations based on atonement themes, is due out at the end of September. Mark is already preaching the series that will be book four: Doctrine: What the Church Should Believe. We’ll start writing soon. I seem to remember saying I’d never write a book!
I saw a strange development in the news today. Animal rights advocates are appealing to the European Court of Human Rights to declare a 26-year-old chimpanzee named Matthew to be a legal person. If this "person" were living in California, he could marry a human male or female. The state’s supreme court found a right long invisible right in the state’s constitution that any person should be allowed to marry any other person. What a weird world!