the forty-ninth formica friday

It's that time again, another Formica Friday---though today, on a Saturday and late!---a treasure trove of hodgepodge, random tidbits, and a bit of this and that. In particular, it is the place where I can celebrate the best posts I read this past week and want to share with you. This week, in pictures:

[caption id="attachment_2998" align="aligncenter" width="614"] Shooting the cowboy church on Sunday, a little one discovers an overturned cup.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_2999" align="aligncenter" width="614"] You never know exactly what will happen at the cowboy church.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3000" align="aligncenter" width="614"] Antonia and I miss Jerry quite a bit.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3001" align="aligncenter" width="614"] Red, white, and blue cobbler on Monday, for the Healing Place visitors.[/caption]

Posts, websites, trinkets, and the Internet week in review revue. A quote, a link. Perhaps you'll click through:

"When I say I am American, I mean it in the best way and the worst way. I am the good and bad of it." -- God Bless America: Weight and Light by Addie

"I think that people should have the legal right to marry someone of the same gender, though I also think that churches should not have to perform those ceremonies." -- Babies, Burritos, and Same-Sex Marriage: Dinnertime Gets Dangerous by Joy

"I’m given opportunities to bring up crocodiles, and the Nile, and all of sorts of other sarcastic retorts on a near weekly basis." -- {jerry} i trust you. by Jerry

"But at our church, we do not fly the American flag. We do not sing patriotic songs. We do not present the colors during the service." -- The Separation of Church and Patriotism by Brad Williams

"Part of me understands that impulse, the abuse of alcohol has ruined many lives and torn apart many families. But the fact that beer can be used wrongly does not mean it cannot be used to honor God as well." -- Beer, Brewing, and Worship by Mason

"When did Christianity become a way of medicating us from pain rather than a way of living within the pain?" -- Lamentless Faith from Güngör

"Look, I’m as concerned about cultural messages as anyone. I’m a father. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this — and the wrong way definitely includes the permanent state of umbrage that many Christians seem to exhibit. They seem to have confused being salt and light with being curmudgeons." -- Blind-Sided: Heading for Cultural Irrelevance by Eric Metaxas

What was your best post this week? What was the favorite post you read of someone else?

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Meet Preston

Preston is a twenty-something once-upon-a-time conservative Southern Baptist from Texas who learned to read saints, cross himself, and move across the world to China, England, and Scotland. Since, he's been theologically conservative, oft politically liberal, but radically pro-life, a believer in sacraments and sacramentality, a sort-of Christian feminist, an idealist pacifist who also understands the need for civil defense ... and a handful of everything else in-between. He thinks of himself now as a haphazard and patchwork Bapto-Anglican, though he is becoming confirmed in the Anglican tradition. This blog is his repository of working this whole faith thing out day by day, bird by bird. His first book, Tables in the Wilderness, a memoir of God found, lost, and found again, is due out autumn 2014 with Zondervan.