I was visiting at my parent’s house (as I will be on Friday as well, and as I do most Wednesdays) and my little brother was watching me pour my mother’s chilli into a plastic container to bring home for my food-deprived self. So he asks me what I’m doing, and I say “Bringing this chilli home.”

To which he replies, “You mom must like that!” Now, he’s only 5 or so, and I’m 24, so I guess he thinks that I still live at home with my own mom. And I was like, “Um, we’re brothers, you know.” And he nods energetically and says, “And your mom is going to like that chilli!”

I shatter his illusion then by explaining that both he and me proceeded from the loins of the very same woman. Freakish, yes. Twenty years apart, yes. Separated by nine other children, yes. But miracle of miracles, we are kin! With the same mother!

I thought it was funny, though, that Josh didn’t really picture me as part of the family - I suppose I knew this would happen, that my younger siblings would never really get to know me as a brother, but it never hit me until that moment how abstracted I have become from my family proper. Not that I’m terribly sad about it: life happens, people move on, and in an immediate family as large as mine, things get lost in the shuffle. Not to mention that my life has taken me in divergent paths.

On a slightly different note, I’ve cleared a few IP ranges from the .htaccess file on the server here, so those of you unable to access this site before now will be able to take part like anyone else. Which is to say that you won’t be able to. I suppose it was silly in the beginning to block people from reading it, especially when there’s a mirror at http://www.xhan.com/blog/ and you could access the Google Cache just about any time you wanted to get any and all of the text you wanted. So that said, have fun.

One last thing: I’ve started a study of Ephesians, and it struck me as I read the first chapter how much hope is inherent to Christianity. Not just the hope of deus ex machina but hope for the hear and now in what we go through on a day-to-day basis. It’s amazing really, and I am thankful for the reminder.

Tags: personal, ruminations