December 4, 2023

The Weekly, December 4, 2023

Hi all,

Let's start here. This is beautiful:

This is a week quite full of significance for my family.

On Wednesday my parents will celebrate 39 years of marriage.

Thursday will be eight years since mom took dad to the hospital with severe difficulty breathing.

Friday will be eight years since he called the nurse from his hospital bed in the early morning hours to tell her he felt his side going numb. Not long after, he lost consciousness before having emergency brain surgery.

You can learn about what happened next here:

Finally, Saturday will mark 13 years since I asked Joie to marry me on the steps of the Cathedral of Saint Paul in St Paul MN after we saw the Minnesota State Orchestra perform Handel's Messiah.

True story: Matt Anderson came out to the Cities a few months prior to that for the 2010 Desiring God conference. We got away for drinks at The Local in downtown Minneapolis—when a Presbyterian and Anglican conference with the Baptists they must take a break to go drink whiskey at an Irish pub—and as we were catching up I told him a bit about Joie, that I was thinking about proposing, and that I had just seen an ad for the state orchestra performing the Messiah at the Cathedral. But I was feeling a little hesitant. Matt laughed and said, "I mean, I can think of many worse ways of proposing than that!"

A couple months later, I had managed to procure Joie's grandmother's engagement ring, but I was wanting to get it redesigned for her. I went to the jeweler the day after I got it, we worked out a design, and the woman helping me asked when I needed it. I told them a week. She grimaced and said that wasn't possible. I explained the situation. Then the jeweler looked at me and said, "we'll make it happen." They did. And now here we are 13 years years later with a house, four kids, and much else besides.

It's a week that has a lot of emotional reminders in it of where God has brought us.

Reading

Books

I finished Benedict's book on the church fathers. It is excellent. I highly recommend it. I also started on Douthat's Decadent Society, which has been on my list for awhile.

Articles

Hannah Seo on the relationship between loneliness and spending all our time indoors

Jon Askonas on innovation

Matthew Crawford on progress and cars

Freya India on what algorithms have done to zoomers

Michael Lind on the founding fathers

Geoff Shullenberger on the meaninglessness of "populism"

Rachel Roth Aldhizer on disability

Brian Mattson on rootedness

James Matthew Wilson on Michigan

Elsewhere

Joie loves Bailey's but, unfortunately, her body doesn't really get along with dairy anymore. But this year I think we found a solution. If you want to try making your own home-made dairy-free irish creme, you won't go wrong with this.

Under the Mercy,
~Jake