Oppressive LEGOs?

I just read this on Fox News' Political Grapevine. I don't really have a comment other than "Huh?":

Banning LEGOs

Teachers at a Seattle day care center decided to ban LEGO building blocks — those colorful little bricks kids use to build such creations as robots, monster trucks, space ships and vast futuristic cities. The Hilltop Children's Center bills itself as a nationally recognized, non-profit, non-religious facility. So why did the teachers toss the LEGOs?

We'll let them explain: "We agreed that we want to take part in shaping the children's understandings from a perspective of social justice. So we decided to take the LEGOs out of the classroom. The children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys — assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive."

After months of what the teachers called "social justice exploration" — they let the LEGOs back in — but kids were only allowed to build "public structures" of standard sizes in a village dedicated to what they called "collectivity and consensus."

Update:
I found the following articles concerning this:
Why We Banned Legos
L'Eggo My Lego

I think the first article is actually from the people that did this, so I'll be curious to see what they say when I have the time to read it.

Thoughts on Being Single

I'm always on the lookout for sermons on the topic of "Singleness". I like to listen to sermons on all sorts of topics (esp. Missions, Grace, The Gospel, and the tough topics of the Bible), but sermons geared specifically towards Singles are of a personal interest to me.

While browsing around on the website of FBC Smyrna where my former youth minister now preaches, I saw a sermon recording titled "Singles", so I was interested to hear what their head pastor had to say (you can listen to it here and be patient for it to load). I must say that I was a little disappointed to hear the usual sermon addressing 1 Corinthians 7. By "the usual sermon" I mean that it talks about the following topics:
- It is better to marry than to burn with passion.
- Some people have "the gift of singleness" and others don't, therefore those that don't have the gift should get married to deal with sexual temptation.
- Even though it's not in 1 Cor. 7, Gen. 2:18 "It is not good for man to be alone." always gets mentioned.

The argument to get married if you're struggling with sexual temptation sounds good, but a lot of us are trying that. "Just get married" sounds easy, but it's not. In my opinion, this causes us young singles to spend all of our time and energy trying to find a spouse. Then you reach an age where you give up on marriage and resign yourself to a life of uselessness in the church and society. The topic of how to live while single NEVER gets addressed. Well, that's a little exaggerated; I've heard it talked about exactly TWICE (hereafter mentioned as the Two Sermons).

Another argument that bugs me is the idea of a gift of singleness. One of the Two Sermons talked about how if you're single, you have the gift of singleness. Marriage is a gift from God, and Singleness is a gift from God. I'll address the Genesis 2 verse here as well. This sermon I was listening to from FBC Smyrna talked about how God is pro-marriage because he arranged the first marriage. Yes, I agree that God created marriage, but he created Adam SINGLE! We are all born single.

A lot of the frustrations that I have with my church and other churches has to do with the wrong focus. God is not pro-family (see Jesus in Luke 14:26). God is not pro-marriage (see Jesus in Matthew 22:29-30). God is pro-God! According to the Two Sermons, we are to live a life of service to God and a life that glorifies God whether we are married or single. Now, I admit that marriage can help with this, but it's not NECESSARY. The thing that I wish would be mentioned more in other sermons is that Singles can be MORE useful to the church than married people because we have more time to give and we can more whole-heartedly focus on our ministry. We should exploit this instead of being ashamed of our failed attempts to be married, and I wish that we would be encouraged more to do so.

Now, I don't know if one is better than the other (single or married), but I like how one of the Two Sermons says that marriage is a picture of Jesus' relationship with the church, and singleness is a picture of how we will each individually be in heaven (again, see Matthew 22:29-30).

Here are links to listen to the Two Sermons
Nathan Trice - "A Word to Singles" (You'll have to give an email address in order to download the sermon, so make sure you give your Junk Mail email address if you have one since they send out weekly newsletters. I can email it to you if you really want to listen to it)
Paul Matthies - "Singleminded Part 1" and "Singelminded Part 2"
Okay, it's actually three, but I could the 2-part sermon as one.

Please listen to these sermons and post your comments about them and anything else to do with singleness or marriage or anything else you feel burdened to share.

The Result

Tonight was the big race at church. To my surprise, 13 of the GA's had made cars to race. The officials kept the boys' and girls' races separate, which is probably a good thing since there were some really fast cars on the girls side.

As far as my car, it was a good news/bad news night. Good news: Down & Derby was faster than about half of the cars there. Bad news: it was slower than my E-Racer from last year. I brought my E-Racer out of retirement to compare speeds from one year to the next. For those who may not remember, this was the car I built last year:



For you new-comers, I called it the E-Racer because it looks like a capital E from above.

As usual, the race event was pretty chaotic. Any time you have 30 or so elementary school aged boys running around in an excited, competitive state, nerves are bound to get frayed. Fortunately, our fearless leader Mr. Cooper did a great job of keeping the kids under control and kept the judging going smoothly. He asked me to be one of three judges to pick the best design and most unique car for each grade level and overall. My favorite design was a yellow wedge that had a bunch of large holes drilled in it to look like swiss cheese. There was another cheese car, but this one was much more interesting and realistic. All in all, it took 3 hours to go through all of the heats to determine a winner for the fastest car, and the kids won't find out who won that category or the design categories for another two weeks.

The Final Product

Here it is, the Down & Derby racer.





After airbrushing with what I thought was black paint (the label said "Soft Black"), I kinda liked how the car looks like the brown felt on a derby hat, so I decided against a coat of polyurethane. I did the lettering and derby graphic freehand. Turned out pretty good, huh?

And The Winner Is...

I think that I've settled on a winner in the Name-My-Pinewood-Derby-Racer Contest. I shall call it....
Down & Derby
Will the nominator please step forward to accept your reward?

I will post up pictures of the final product and how it performs at the race sometime later this week.