Josh Griffin | More Than Dodgeball

Josh GriffinMore Posts What’s Inside: Snausages Snawsomes

Easily my favorite part of Wired Magazine, the What’s Inside series this month takes on dog treats. Here’s a clip of what’s inside Snausages:

Wheat Flour
For a doggie treat that presents itself as a twist of beef and cheese sticks, you wouldn’t expect wheat to be the first ingredient listed. Turns out these snacks are closer to soft pretzels than Slim Jims: They’re made mostly of wheat flour and pregelatinized wheat flour — a processed starch that makes food easier to digest.
Soy Protein Concentrate
Because these Scooby snacks are mostly wheat, Del Monte pumps in soy protein concentrate — essentially mashed soybeans with the fats and carbs removed. This brings SnawSomes up to a whopping 4 percent protein — just a touch more than a Twinkie.

Natural Smoke Flavor
Produced by burning wood chips and condensing the smoke into a liquid, this additive creates the illusion that food has been cooked over a flame. A CDC report showed that 92 percent of commercial liquid smoke flavorings contain benzoapyrene, a substance known to cause stomach tumors in animals. Thankfully, there’s not enough here to be a real issue.

JG

Add Comment August 27, 2007

Josh GriffinMore Posts 7 Ways to "Go Green" With Your Car

Enjoyed recording this Who Are These Guys? podcast last night with Tony. We took a giant step away from the usual more serious topics of the show and just had fun talking about the environment and getting better gas mileage in your vehicle.

JG

Add Comment August 27, 2007

Josh GriffinMore Posts God Calls in So Many Different Ways

In the “getting to know you” part of the seminary class, members of the class came up front and shared their faith experiences. Just amazing to see the different ways that God calls people:

A Compton inner-city counselor who found Christ and wants to share Him with others.
A former gang member who turned his life over to Jesus after being caught selling a firearm.
A man who was a “Christian” his whole life but finally accepted Christ as an adult.
A Kentucky revival meeting where an 8-year old heard about salvation through Jesus.
A Korean-American man that was invited to church in his native language and accepted Christ 4-weeks later.
A nth generation Christian family produced a non-Christian son. Until Jesus showed up later in life and spoke to him.
No church was involved. Just a friend who lived and shared Jesus.
A young woman (a Third Culture Kid) came from a non-believing family, reached at a campus ministry to college students.

JG

Add Comment August 26, 2007

Josh GriffinMore Posts The Start of Seminary

OK, my first class starts in 20 minutes … here we go!

Side note: Epistemology was in Microsoft Word’s spell check. Amazing …

JG

Add Comment August 26, 2007

Josh GriffinMore Posts Movie Review: Surf’s Up

I like a movie that takes risks, and this one does with quite a bit of success. OK, maybe not a ton of risk, but it takes the idea from the start of the The Incredibles and lots of nods from The Office and pulls out a documentary-style animated movie that’s quite entertaining.

The story follows an unlikely penguin surfer (what’s with all the penguin movies lately? Please be the last …) who follows in the footsteps of his idol surfer Big Z, who died in a surfing accident some years ago. This is a story really of believing in yourself when no one else does, the importance of friends and ultimately redemption. I enjoyed the movie and loved the style – not sure it’s worthy of a sequel but there was plenty of good values in it for my kids to see and enough humor to keep me entertained as well. Fun. B+

JG

Add Comment August 26, 2007

Josh GriffinMore Posts Movie Review: Shrek 3

The third time is not a charm.

Although all of the pieces are there to make another great Shrek film, the last in the triology falls apart with a thin plotline and more, more, more of the same. Yes, there are some great moments – the little Shreks and baby donkeys are great and when some of the characters switch voices you have to smile, but all in all it falls flat with just a few spots to really laugh out loud. Mike Meyers isn’t his best and Cameron Diaz is sadly underused.

My boys loved it, but it felt like it wasn’t a “Return of the Jedi Last Crusade Return of the King” kind of ending. Worth a buck fifty with the boys last night at the Dollar Theater, but that’s about it. I actually hope they make a 4th so the series can end on a high note. C+

JG

Add Comment August 25, 2007

Josh GriffinMore Posts Hit with a Racquet

Didn’t know racquetball was a ‘contact sport’ until yesterday morning … got wacked with a raquet – it hit just above the ankle and square in the middle of the calf. Two thoughts: 1) should my calves have their own MySpace page, and 2) where do I get a temporary handicapped sticker?

JG

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Add Comment August 25, 2007

Josh GriffinMore Posts My Learnings this Summer

At the intern meeting on Wednesday we went around the room asking what people had been their learnings this summer – there were some really great ones and I thought I would share here what mine has been over the past month or two.

I think I’ve been having somewhat of a mid-life crisis.

I’m just 32, so that either means I’ll die before retirement or perhaps this is all just a bit premature. But I think the concept of death has been a bit rattling to me for some reason, even keeping me up a few nights. I have faith, I believe what Jesus said about eternity, but for some reason this was haunting me.

Maybe it was the fact that we noticed that my life insurance policy needed to be increased because our family had grown. Maybe it was because John Ortberg’s It All Goes Back in the Box message (that I heard 3 times then read the book) had me fixated on it. Don’t know. But I do know I came to some realizations here at the end of the summer.

Every day I am going to live and love. Live for eternity and love people.

Live for eternity – this sounds a bit cheesy, so let me unpack it. Every day I want to make a difference for God’s kingdom. Maybe it’s something small, maybe it’s something big. I added a reminder to Outlook at 10:55 every day asking me if I made a difference in the past 24 hours. Did it count for God or was it wasted? Was someone encouraged, trained, built up, saved, changed because of my life?

Love people – again, perhaps cliche? But my heart is that every day I want to say I love you to my kids. Every day I want to kiss them. Every day I want to love and be loved. I want my wife to know I am madly in love with her. I want to be generous, forgiving and authentic. I want to make people smile, give away touch, smile too often and laugh out loud.

So there you have it – I would think that at the end of my life I would be pretty proud of that if I managed to do both of these things each day.

JG