Yesterday the news covered the rescue of Jim Loney, Harmeet Sooden, and Norman Kember - members of Christian Peacemaker Teams who have been held captive in Iraq for nearly four months. The celebration of their rescue is coupled with the mourning over the death of Tom Fox, another member of their team.
In January, I had a chance to meet Jim Fitzgerald, a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams USA. He was one of the presenters at a Illinois Conference Youth Initiative Peace Retreat I helped lead. I found a quiet, unassuming man who displays incredible courage in "standing in the way" of violence. There's no "fight for peace" or "war on violence." CPT stands for peace, period. As we celebrate a rescue and mourn a loss, I hope that the message of spreading peace by being peaceful rings all over the world.
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Yesterday I also discovered a tiny bit of controversy with the name of this blog. On January 15th of this year I registered sabblogical.com in preparation for blogging about my sabbatical experience. I had actually thought I was going to call it "sabblogital" but when I wrote it down on paper I realized that it didn't work as an inserting of "blog" into "sabbatical." So I registered sabblogical.com and givingupchurchforlent.com at the same time. (I haven't done any kind of publicity on givingupchurchforlent.com, but if you type in that site, you get this site.) I figured that sabblogical was a hard word to remember for many (and apparently, it isn't all that easy to pronounce correctly -- many people have said, "Is that sabb - logical?") and "giving up church for lent" is something people would remember.
But now comes the slight controversy. Earlier this week I googled (cha-ching!) "sabblogical" and found just a few entries. The first one refers to this site. Then there are two others. One refers to a sabbatical proposal that a person named "Elliot" who's blogger profile says that he is an English teacher from Western New York. In February of 2005 he said that if he gets to take his proposed sabbatical he thought he might blog about it in a blog called "sabblogical." Elliot's last blog entry, as far as I know, was the one I read from February of 2005.
Another entry comes from a many named Kevin Boyd, who decided to take a break from blogging and called the blog-free period "sabblogical." He used the word October 4, 2005. (In this case, he gave credit to a person named Shawn for the word.)
And that brings us to Shawn, who doesn't appear in a google search. But in a blogger search, I found Shawn Ashmore, who in September of 2005 thought he should coin the term "sabblogical" and then cash in on the sweet royalties later.
What Elliot was planning (or thinking about) is much more in keeping with what I'm doing -- Shawn and Kevin have a different definition for the word.) My definition is "A blog written by a person during a sabbatical."
I had no idea about any of these entries before starting sabblogical, but I wonder what Elliot, Shawn and Kevin are doing now. (Well, Shawn still has an active blog, as does Kevin. I have no idea what happened with Elliot.) I looks like three of us came up with the word independently, though Elliot was the one who sang first.
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I sang yesterday too. (Bing! Another tremendous segue!) I recorded Jumping and Shoo Fly. The lyric for Jumping is pretty much that one word, and it is hard to say over and over again. Thankfully, when I am singing it with a bunch of little ones they are jumping and laughing instead of noticing my enunciation. I wrote it one day right after singing Marching Around the Room because I needed another active song.
Sometimes after the last word in the song I laugh like the kids at the end of the VeggieTales theme.
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