"Stand in the place where you live, now face north. Think about direction, wonder why you haven't before." -R.E.M.

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Josh Crain | Blog

Update From the Road

05/27/2008 02:22 AM Filed in: Personal
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Hey, guys. Just a quick reminder to have you check out our road trip website, Lumpy Places.com.

We've been updating it regularly with stories from the road and I'd love to see your comments on it.

Have a great week and I'll catch you all soon!

Cheers from New York City,
Josh
















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The Launching Pad

05/17/2008 12:28 AM Filed in: Personal

Launching Pad Crain

Well, according to our Road Trip USA book, the first side stop we would want to make would be The Launching Pad, a nifty little hole-in-the-wall diner with a gigantic Space Man Wrestler Rocket Holder guy outside.

Launching Pad Carnes


Inside the young woman who took our order was nice, but not very helpful in guiding us toward a dining decision:

"What's good?

"Everything!"

"Okay...well, what gets ordered the most?"

"Everything."

"Okay, we'll have that."

*blank stare...blinking...

"Okay, I'll take a bacon cheeseburger and a chocolate shake."

To be fair, the food was pretty good...

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Eddie Izzard

05/16/2008 12:16 AM Filed in: Personal
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Well, I don't know what to say. For the first night of our little road trip, we went to go see a performance from my favorite comedian: Eddie Izzard.

The guy is an absolute genius: a rock star among his fellow comics. The show started with bright lights and loud music; Eddie walked on stage and bowed to either side of the audience amidst what had to be some of the loudest applause I'd ever heard.

From there he said he wanted to talk "about everything that has ever happened." And he did.

He talked about hamsters, badgers, and giraffes. He mimed dinosaurs going to church, Noah's wife trying to keep the ark clean, and Latin-speaking people trying to conjugate their language quickly enough to warn each other of danger. He made mince meat of a few hecklers, he showed us how the stone age began, and he explained why there are very few movies about farmers ("farming is so dull...'Earl, you killed by cabbage! I'm gonna poison your asparagus'").

I've been a fan for a long time, and getting to see him in person was an awesome treat and one more thing I can check off my "bucket list."

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Patrick the Crazy Guy

05/16/2008 12:00 AM Filed in: Personal
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Well, it's the first day of the road trip and we've already had an amazing day. First, off: Patrick the Crazy Guy.

As we boarded the Metra train to ride into Chicago and see Eddie Izzard perform, what appeared to be a kindly middle-aged man looked at my wife and said...

"HELLO, LOVE!!!"

To which my wife politely responded, "...well, hello."

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The man, who later identified himself as Patrick, and then Dan, and then Alfonso (maybe not...we can't remember the last one, but he just seems like an Alfonso), then proceeded to explain to us how he had improved his singing voice through diligent practice over the course of the last several years.

And then he sang for us. A whole song. Loudly.

His voice must have been really bad when he first started practicing.

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The Lumpy Places

05/15/2008 02:43 AM Filed in: Personal

jeep

So there's this book, and it has several wonderful conversations contained within its pages. One conversation goes something like this:

“Where will you go?”

“America.”

“We’re in America right now, Don.”

“Yeah, I know. But there are other parts to America. I’d like to see the other parts. I was looking at a map the other day, you know, and Texas was sort of brown with some green, a few hills, but then there were other places that were more green with big lumpy mountains. I'd like to go to those places.”

“Do you think God is out there somewhere? Out there in the lumpy places?”

“I think God is everywhere.”

“Then why do you have to leave?”

“Because I can’t be here anymore. I don’t feel whole here. I feel, well, partly whole. Incomplete…..Something got crossed in the wires……Do you know what I am talking about, about the green lumpy places?”

The conversation went on like this for about an hour. I went on and on about how the real me was out in the green lumpy places. I wasn’t making any sense. I can’t believe my pastor didn’t call the guys with the white coats to take me away.

The last couple of months have been absolutely dizzying. After an enormous amount of prayer, counsel, and discussion, Emily and I have decided to accept an offer to come as lead pastor of a church that is not in the Chicago area. We're extremely excited about the opportunity and I'll have a lot more details to share with all of you in the coming days.

In the meantime, I'm headed to the "lumpy places." Me, my beautiful wife, and my friend Josh Carnes have decided to take an amazing road trip to finish off this chapter of our lives and help us prepare for the next. We'll be driving through Chicago, St. Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Washington, D.C., Ocean City, Atlantic City, Trenton, New York, Boston, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, and a host of other places. We'll be seeing baseball bat factories, Hershey chocolate plants, Dinosaur World, the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty, Niagara Falls, and a host of other stuff.

And we're leaving tomorrow. But wait, there's more...

We'll be blogging, photographing, podcasting, and filming the lumpy places. You can check out our trip website at www.LumpyPlaces.com.

I may be posting updates on both sites, and thanks to some cellular wizardry we'll be able to publish new entries from the comfort of the official Lumpy Places Jeep (which, sadly, just received $1,200 worth of repairs...sigh). Check in often for tales of amazement and wonder (as well as embarrassing snapshots and humiliating videos).

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on the side...







*Greg Boyd *Derifter *Daring Fireball *Bob Hyatt *Evan Marshall *Phil Snider *Dan Kimball *Fake D.A. Carson *Lumpy Places


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