25 Random Things About Me

Originally posted as a Facebook note:

1. I should be ashamed to do this game because I already have a blog, in which I write about my life and people I know, and am starting to get articles about me and Anawim, but obviously I am so self-absorbed that I think talking about me more is fun.

2. I once drove from Los Angeles to Minneapolis in 30 hours straight to go to a missions conference.

3. I have visited Bangladesh and Calcutta twice and Bangladesh is my favorite place to be.

4. I read Bible commentaries and mystery novels for fun.

5. I recently hosted a pretty successful discussion about pornography on a philosophy forum.

6. I was raised a non-Christian, became a fundamentalist evangelical at 13 and am now a Mennonite pastor.

7. My wife, Diane, is my best friend, and she always was from the time we were 16. I know that seems so clicheish, but it's really true.

8. I really enjoy hanging out with homeless people, and one of my highlights of every week is going to Gresham to feed and fellowship with the homeless folks on Saturdays.

9. I would NEVER have gotten a cell phone, but Gordon Smith made me get one. Then he stuck me with the monthly bill. And now, everytime he sees me he calls me "yuppie" BECAUSE I have a cell phone. Great injustice!

10. I love mind-bending movies and I love animated movies-- especially anime. So Paprika and Spirited Away are two of my most favorite movies of all time!

11. I cut my hair once a year, every August.

12. My friend, Jack, kisses me on the cheek every time he greets me and it CREEPS ME OUT. But it's biblical "Greet one another with a holy kiss" so I put up with it with a smile.

13. Everyone born into the Kimes Family is pig-headed, and I certainly share this trait. However, I use it for the Lord :-)

14. My body has, for some unknown reason, stopped producing testosterone. So, if I stop my regimine of vitamins or hormone replacement therapy (read: shots) every week and a half, then I become a grumpy old man.

15. I have eighteen blogs that I started, two FB causes, four places I post regularlly, twitter updates, and two websites. I like to write.

16. I took three years of Koine (New Testament) Greek, and am working on a translation similar to Clarence Jordan's "Cotton Patch" translation. Not because I'm a Greek scholar (I'm not) but because I think that most translations are just too stuffy (KJV) or too wildly innaccurate (The Message). And because I think most of us misunderstand what the NT really says because we aren't in the culture or context.

17. I eat a small handful of peanut M&M's every night.

18. I believe the Bible teaches that only the poor and.or outcast will enter God's kingdom

19. God told me to quit my job and work full time with the homeless in 1996. I argued with Him about it for months before I actually did it.

20. Diane and I homeschool our children. Ian just went to public school for the first time last year.

21. At one point (this last year) we had 16 people total living in our house, many of them formerlly homeless folks. Yet we didn't kill each other! (That number has reduced since then)

22. I worked at a book binder for five years.

23. One of my studies in high school and college was sign language, and I was an interpreter for the deaf for ten years. My children are facinated with my habit of fingerspelling random words I see or hear and always want to know what I am spelling. I don't usually know by the time they ask three seconds later.

24. It has been my ideal the last 24 years to be a minister to and of the poor. Ministering to the homeless and mentally ill in the U.S. AS a sometimes-homeless and sometimes-mentally ill person wasn't ever my specific plan, however.

25. There is nothing in my life more important than Jesus-- not in some sappy, distant-but-almost-romantic way, but finding out how He lived in the gospels and trying to live that way myself in the midst of a church that is so far distant from the life and teachings of Jesus. I don't just love Jesus, I want to be like Him in every way possible, while still being myself.