Category: Stanglin Family (Page 1 of 23)

Pictures of Grandkids

Today is our daughter Valerie’s birthday–she’s 28–and I’ve got pictures! No, not of her. Of our two grandchildren she’s carrying!

Valerie saw her doctor again this week and we got some pretty amazing shots of the twins via sonogram. One of the little units shows up really clear–a little ham! Evidently, the kid on the left side is mainly behind his/her brother/sister and much harder to see. The second picture shows a precious little hand. How awesome is that!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Valerie says this picture below is the best one of both babies at the same time. But the shy one on the left, in Val’s words, is “upside down, so it’s mostly a booty shot.” If the backside is the most prominent feature, then it’s definitely got lots of Stanglin in him/her.

As always, you can click on any picture to blow it up a little bigger. And, in case you’ve missed it, we know from blood work that at least one of these babies is a boy. It’s either two boys or a boy and a girl. It is not two girls. I’m not sure when we’re going to get visual confirmation, but I can’t wait.

They both measured a bit longer than the doctor expected so they moved Valerie’s due date up to July 22. And, again, they’re likely to come a little earlier. Valerie is checking out in really good health and the two babies are in excellent shape and we are deeply grateful and incredibly excited.

You’re going to get sick of me showing you pictures of my grandchildren before they’re even born!

Happy Birthday, Valerie! We love you, girl!

Peace,

Dad, Granddad

Granddad Times Two

We’ve been given the go-ahead today to announce to all our friends and family some incredibly big news. Carrie-Anne and I are thrilled to let you know that our little middle, Valerie, and her wonderful husband, David, are expecting. And we’re not talking about just one grandchild. No, that would be too easy for our free-spirited, unpredictable, anything-goes daughter. They’re having twins!

We are beside ourselves with joy and gratitude. And we really don’t know how to act yet. We’re gushing with anticipation and almost giddy with excitement. The babies — it sounds so weird to talk about this with plural pronouns — are coming late June or early July. From chromosome counts and blood work, we know that one of them is a boy and the other one could be a girl. The only certain is that they are not both girls. And we can’t wait.

Please join us in celebrating with Valerie and David and our family, in thanking God for this shocking and beautiful blessing, and in asking him to protect these four in the coming weeks and months.

And, when Whitney tells you the news, act like you didn’t already know.

Peace,

Granddad (?)

4 Midland’s Christmas Day Message

They managed to scrub all Christian thought and words completely out of the story, but last night’s “Eye on America” feature on the CBS Evening News highlighting our “4 Midland” partnership was still a positive message of unity in our divided world. And I thank God for it.

You know, our Lord told us that if we’ll love one another and come together in him, the world will take notice. Well, there’s nothing more worldly than the national news media, and they have noticed.

They used the word “tolerance” instead of “unity,” and they didn’t use any of what all four of us asserted as the motivation for our worship and service partnership: the fellowship we all share by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We’re not coming together out of a desire for tolerance, we’re uniting because our Lord told us to, because that’s his desire, his will, because that’s what he prayed on that last night, that all his followers would be as united as he is with the Father, so the world will know. That’s all we talked about with the CBS crew, but they didn’t use any of it.

The problem is that you have a very difficult time using the world’s methods to express the Gospel. The world is never going to preach Jesus or the ways of our God. It’s up to us, it’s up to followers of Christ. As we told the reporter, Jason Allen, on camera many times, if God’s people won’t unite in Christ Jesus, who will? As God’s children and disciples of Jesus, we are called, ordained by God, to express this unity in Christ to our world as a divine alternative to the way societies typically operate. I’m disappointed that Jesus was not the center of the story, as it is certainly the center of the friendship between us four pastors and the fellowship we share between our four congregations. Disappointed. Not surprised.

But, we can certainly celebrate small steps, little victories. Overall, it’s a very positive thing. It’s a start. And I’m grateful to Jason and his whole entourage for coming to Midland and spending parts of two days with us in order to tell our story. I pray that this helps affirm the things we are doing at GCR and, by God’s grace, the kind of church we want to become. And I pray the story can serve as an encouragement to our city and, who knows, maybe even widespread parts of the country. It’s a start.

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Here’s a photo of the three of us at the GCR Christmas Eve service Tuesday. We heard the bells! And then we went to Texas Roadhouse before going home to watch Albert Finney’s A Christmas Carol.

I’m writing to you from Carley and Collin’s kitchen in Flower Mound, the hub of our continued Christmas festivities. Carrie-Anne, Whitney, and I spent all day yesterday in Arlington with C-A’s side of the family and today we’re driving to Liberty City for quality time with my side. Since Carley and Collin moved back to DFW, their house has become a hotel for us: Kennedy Estates. I’m not sure it’s a blessing to them like it is to us.

Peace,

Allan

Christmas Rage

Every other year, due to the fact that our two youngest daughters are married and have in-laws to whom they feel a certain sense of obligation, we are forced to do Christmas together on the Stanglin side at Thanksgiving. It’s always a chaotic four or five days, trying to cram all our long-held Thanksgiving and Christmas traditions into one weekend. The normally month-long rhythm of specific meals and particular movies and certain activities on specific days and nights gets condensed into a blur of too much, too soon, and too close together. Not to mention that I need to have all my Christmas shopping done by the third week of November!

We managed to pull it off pretty well, even with Valerie and David’s new dog that added a level of complexity.

Thanksgiving is always pretty normal with all the food and football, all the card games and conversation. But then Friday is both the day after Thanksgiving when we typically eat a big breakfast and follow it up with a pancake fight, decorate the tree and the house and watch It’s a Wonderful Life AND ALSO Christmas Eve when we go out to eat, open up the matching pajamas that Carrie-Anne gets for us, and watch A Christmas Carol while eating my pan-made stove-top popcorn and drinking Dr Pepper and eggnog. Dinner was at Ray’s and the intent was to watch both movies. We only made it through It’s a Wonderful Life. Albert Finney’s Scrooge will have to wait another year.

Saturday was Christmas morning. As is our tradition, we woke up the kids to Alvin, Simon, and Theodore turned up to 11 and opened gifts. The highlights for me included a beautiful little turntable and speakers, a very thoughtful gift from my girls and sons-in-law in light of the movers wrecking my antique turntable-stereo when we moved to Midland three years ago. Of course, I’ve already played my Boston “Don’t Look Back” album and Van Halen’s 1978 debut on the new setup. I also received an authentic Dallas Stars hockey sweater, complete with all the logos and an NHL “fight strap” on the inside back. When I put it on, I immediately felt the urge to crosscheck Whitney into the boards. For the remainder of Saturday morning, nobody in my family would stand between me and a wall.

The coolest thing we did Saturday was the Liberty City Rage Room in downtown Midland. This is one of those places where you pay money to break things. The idea is to take out your pent up aggression and rage on flower vases, crystal dishes, large mirrors, glass pitchers, and office equipment. We reserved four rooms for a little over an hour of breaking: a dining room, a bedroom, an office, and a room they just call “Smash It.” They dressed us up like Illumination minions–blue coveralls, hard hats, and goggles–gave us baseball bats, sledgehammers, and golf clubs, and let us loose.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, I can report that it is truly liberating to toss a heavy ten-inch dinner plate into the air and smash through it with an aluminum baseball bat. Exhilarating. But doing it non-stop for 25-minutes to a variety of glassware, punch bowls, decorative bottles and vases, and glass serving trays is an indescribable thrill.

After the first two rooms, it was decided that we needed to put the women in one room and the men in the other. The girls were breaking things in a methodical way, taking turns, hitting stationary objects on a table one at a time. The boys were, as you can imagine, going at it with reckless abandon, full-body, all-at-the-same-time death lunges. Why just break a glass vase when you can get a running start with a bat and follow through with your total body force to obliterate it to smithereens? Silly question.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It turned out to be quite a workout, exhausting. Carrie-Anne’s enchilada and tamale dinner was the perfect interlude between what we did with those mirrors, computer monitors, and oversized bottles and what the Longhorns did to the Aggies at Kyle Field. The perfect ending to a truly wonderful day. Hook ‘Em.

So Thanksgiving has come and gone and, for us, Christmas too. It’s over. We worshiped together, everybody side by side on the same pew, at GCR yesterday morning, grabbed a quick lunch at Texas Burger, and sent the Richardsons and Kennedys on their way home. Weird. Awesome.

We don’t know what to call it. Thanksmas? Chrisgiving? Carrie-Anne hates Festivus because she says we don’t have any grievances to air. I guess I just call it good. Really, really good.

Peace,

Allan

 

ELO Rockaria!

I was eleven-and-a-half years old in the spring of 1978 when Electric Light Orchestra released their album “Out of the Blue” and Z-97 started playing “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” around the clock. I also heard “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” on 98-FM The Zoo and Q-102. In a ten year period from the mid ’70s to the mid ’80s, every radio station played ELO because the music was so good and the genre wasn’t really that certain. It was hard rock and it was really poppy. It was electric guitar and drums on top of violins and cellos. The electronic sounds and synthesizers made it almost (gasp!) disco-y, but the rhythm and chords made it unmistakably bluesy. ELO sounded at once like something from the far away future and something my dad would have enjoyed in the ’50s.

My parents gave me a massive stereo turntable for Christmas when I turned eleven, and the very first 45 I ever bought was ELO’s “Sweet Talkin’ Woman.” It was 89-cents at the Sears store at Town East Mall. The sleeve was solid, thick, slick, and dark blue–no cheap paper sleeve with the giant hole in the middle here–and absolutely pulsing with the bright colors of ELO’s iconic spaceship. The record itself was made of a transparent, purple vinyl that was probably the coolest thing I had ever seen at that point in my life. The B-side was a lightning fast instrumental called “Fire On High.” And I wore that record out.

I wound up buying “Turn to Stone” from that same album a little later that year. Then “Discovery” gave us “Shine a Little Love” and “Don’t Bring Me Down,” singles I also purchased at that same Sears store. In 1980, my sister, Rhonda, and I went in together and purchased the “Xanadu” album, the soundtrack to an awfully terrible movie. It was all Olivia Newton-John on one side and all ELO on the other, including “I’m Alive” and “All Over the World” (listen to the album; don’t ever watch the movie).

I was almost 15 when ELO released “Time,” their mind-blowing concept album about a trip to the future. I bought the album and memorized every line of every song, from the robotic voiceover on the prologue, through the soaring energy of “Twilight” and the tongue-in-cheek satire of “2095,” to the wistful “Ticket to the Moon” and the poignant laments of “The Way Life’s Meant to Be?” and “Here is the News,” to the hard pounding finale “Hold On Tight.” At this point, we were all ELO fans, especially Mike and Todd, my two best friends at church. They had singles I didn’t have. Todd had “Can’t Get It Out of My Head” and “Livin’ Thing.” Mike owned “Evil Woman” and “Strange Magic.” We would sing them all together at the top of our lungs; we knew every line to every song. I had the best stereo, but Todd’s aunt let us play the music louder at his house.

When ELO announced a concert tour in 1981 that included a night in Dallas at the brand new Reunion Arena, we all three knew we had to see them in person. Behind the scenes, we coerced Mike’s dad into agreeing to take us to the show. He would drive us there, sit through it with us, and drive us home. Todd’s aunt gave him the go-ahead, which left it all up to me. I figured I could talk my parents into letting me go; it’s not like we wanted to see Ted Nugent or Black Sabbath, this was ELO!  My parents were very familiar with their music. We would catch dad singing along every now and then on the way to school. But they said “No.”

Once my dad put his foot down on it, Mike’s dad backed out. I don’t know everything that went on between the parents, but we did not go to the concert. None of us. I got blamed for it. And ELO never toured again.

They didn’t tour a lot anyway. Jeff Lynne is a studio perfectionist and it brings him more life and satisfaction to tinker with 18-tracks of strings and drums and beeps and background vocals, to layer them perfectly together into a precise three-and-a-half minute masterpiece, than to play it live. ELO concerts were always rare, especially in the U.S.  And we had missed it. The band put out two more albums–“Balance of Power” in 1986 gave us “Calling America”– and then it was over.

Jeff Lynne continued to write songs and produce records for others. He famously teamed up with Tom Petty, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, and Bob Dylan to record and tour as the Traveling Wilburys. He produced Petty’s “Full Moon Fever” and “Into the Great Wide Open” albums.

Twenty-eight years later, in 2014, Jeff Lynne put ELO back together, sort of, and did some shows in Europe. In 2018, they did a short tour of America, including a sold-out show in Dallas that, somehow, I missed again. I had two girls in college; who knows what was going on.

This past spring, Lynne announced ELO’s “Over and Out” tour, the last chance to see the Electric Light Orchestra live in concert. I bought tickets as soon as I saw the Dallas date. My brother, Keith, had purchased his seats the day before. Neither one of us asked our dad.

It happened this past Friday night. Carrie-Anne and I met Keith and Amanda for some pre-concert shuffleboard at a trendy place in Deep Ellum and a hearty dinner together at a lovely downtown Dallas diner. We hustled over to American Airlines Center with 21,000 other fans and thrilled to 95-minutes of back-to-back, wall-to-wall, non-stop ELO magic.

 

 

 

 

 

The stage was dominated by that spaceship, a spinning centerpiece of lights, lasers, color, and effects. The orchestra was Jeff Lynne and 13 others on violins, cellos, drums, guitars, keyboards, and backup vocals. Everything was perfect, down to the smallest of details. It was evident that Lynne wanted everything to sound exactly like it does on the records, because it did. Precise. Crisp. Clean. Nothing lazy or sloppy about it. At 76-years-old, Lynne’s not moving around a lot on the stage but, again, he never did much of that anyway. His voice has lost two or three of the highest parts of his incredible range, but it was barely noticeable. It was an hour-and-a-half electric singalong with some of my all-time favorite songs. Twenty of them. Loud. Spectacular. That unbelievable blend of guitar and cello, violins and drums–it’s mesmerizing.

 

 

 

 

 

There was a mix of hits and deep cuts to start the show: “Showdown” and “Do Ya” in between “Evil Woman” and “Last Train to London.” I was almost overcome with delight when the opera singer in the back began belting out the opening lines of “Rockaria!,” one of my all-time favorite ELO songs that emphasizes their unique blend of classical symphony and hard rock blues. The last eleven songs went like this, in order, back-to-back: Strange Magic, Sweet Talkin’ Woman, Can’t Get It Out of My Head, Fire On High, Livin’ Thing, Telephone Line, All Over the World, Turn to Stone, Shine a Little Love, Don’t Bring Me Down, and then Mr. Blue Sky as the encore. Are you kidding me? I was exhausted. And hoarse. And grinning from ear-to-ear. It’s the best concert I’ve seen since Bad Company with Paul Rodgers in Austin five years ago.

In between songs, Lynne never said much more than “Thank you” and “You are so kind.” He seemed genuinely overcome and humbled by the continuous ovations. And I was reminded again of the power of good music and the way it connects us to our memories and relationships, the way it brings joy and laughter, the way it soothes our hurts and pains.

I forgive you, dad. We’re good now.

Peace,

Allan

You Will Come to Life

Things don’t always seem really great. Things don’t always go the way you thought they might. In fact, sometimes, things are really rotten. Things at home. Things at church. People in your family. Situations. Issues. Sometimes it can seem hopeless. Sometimes it can be overwhelming. You don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. You can’t believe it’s possible for this or that to work out for good. There’s no way.

“Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone.” ~Ezekiel 37:11

Have you looked at the cross lately?

You know, we live by faith, not by sight. We live by the Spirit, not by the flesh. We serve a Lord who has already defeated every single thing that would ever come between us and our God-ordained potential and purpose as his children living in his eternal Kingdom. Our God looks at his Son dying—deader than dead—on that cruel tree and sees hope. He sees possibility. God looks into the darkness of the tomb and sees eternal life. He looks at Sarah’s barren womb and the 100 candles on Abraham’s birthday cake and sees an entire nation of millions of his people. And our God looks at your life, he looks at your church, he looks at the mess that is you and/or the people around you, and he sees great promise. He sees things we don’t see.

“I will put breath in you, and you will come to life.” ~Ezekiel 37:6

The things happening to you or around you—whatever they are, they are not a joke. It’s nothing to be taken lightly. I’m sure it’s all quite serious.

But the cross of Christ and that empty tomb remind us that it’s also nothing to worry about. It’s nothing to lose sleep over. It’s nothing to sweat. The power of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus takes away all doubt and fear and replaces it with holy power and confidence.

God’s power is made perfect in weakness. And you are weak. You are so pitiful. So am I. We are, together, some of the weakest, most pitiful people around.

And that, my brothers and sisters, gives me great courage and hope.

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Here are a few pictures from the second night of our own personal World Series parade in Arlington. Carly and Collin joined us Friday at the ballpark where we received free promotional giveaway championship hoodies, which are short-sleeved and weird; took pictures with the World Series banner, which looks tiny and insignificant next to that massive video board;  the World Series trophy, which was displayed inside Chuck Morgan’s P.A. booth and brought tears to my eyes; and the huge World Series championship ring that was just meant to be climbed on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peace,

Allan

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