Two pumpkin shake recipes, separated by 460+ calories per serving. Was enjoying the thought of the lower, but now am so tempted by the higher.
Pumpkin pie shake #1: the lighter version.
Pumpkin pie shake #2: the oh-that-sounds-so-good version.
And we have cans of pumpkin on the counter….
Our college ministry group is working through a New Testament in a year Bible study. It’s supposed to be 5 minutes a day, 5 days a week. Never seems to be quite that short to me, but, as in any time where I’ve kept pace with studies to help prepare for Sunday school or some such, I’m getting an amazing exposure through it to things I hadn’t considered or learned before.
I’m behind: I should be in John, but I’m working through 1Peter tonight. 1Peter has that passage about wives being submissive to your husbands. It’s not the one in Ephesians (5:22) that folks think of. But I was surprised to run into the same language.
That’s not what sent me to this post, though. I was more intrigued by the work connections I was seeing this evening. Any of the contexts of elders, of slaves, of masters, of governors… all of that advice to folks in those roles suddenly seemed pertinent to me. Sensitive to the idea that I might offend someone in a work context here (no reason folks would find this, but no reason to assume they couldn’t), I’ll refrain from details. I’ve just begun to realize that where the Bible calls out roles and gives advice, often that advice applies more broadly. I end up asking myself: is that insight only applicable to men? To old men? To old women? (etc, etc). Sometimes it seems it may be. But the context of ‘slaves, submit yourselves to your master with all respect’ seems applicable. The context of ‘a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight’ might not apply just to women. Of leading/shepherding ‘not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not greedy for money, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock’ sure would seem to fit a broader swath of folks than just those ordained as elders.
For those who trip across this who’re interested in the Bible study, it’s here, at least as of now: http://www.navpress.com/uploadedFiles/5x5x5_BRP.pdf
First name to look at is referred to in the first verse of the first book of the Bible: Genesis 1:1. ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’. Turns out, that word ‘God’ is Elohim. Even more interesting, that word ‘Elohim’ is apparently only used in Hebrew scripture.
‘El’ means mighty one, strong one, one of many supernatural beings, one more powerful than all the rest, and mythology / creation stories often discuss conflict across the gods. However, ‘Elohim’, being used for its single purpose in Scripture, annotates harmony and peace. There is no conflict when there is only one. (Note: Elohim is actually a plural, reflecting the multiple persons of God although pulling them together into one entity/name; Wikipedia indicated it can also be examined as ‘Hebrew grammar allows for this nominally-plural form to mean “He is the Power (singular) over powers (plural)”, or roughly, “God of gods”.’. There is also reference to ‘elohims’ in other verses [looking for citations] – messiness in my own brain ensues, though apparently the form of the verbs used in combination with the nouns helps clarify the intent.)
This concept of singularity expose attributes or means of reflecting upon God.
* He is personal : He (single, Elohim) created everything. He can’t create something greater than Himself, He created us, we are personal, and therefore some aspect of Him must be personal.
* He is perfect: because he stands alone, nothing can be great enough to influence, change or corrupt him.
* It is for his purpose we are created, or we wouldn’t be here. (single God created, ergo his purpose(s) are what cause us to come into being)
* Some discussion of the eternal reality being harmony
Interesting sermon, though as I reflect back over my notes, looks like I’m somehow missing threads to tie this all together well for myself (which would, of course, also mean it’s probably not tied well together for anyone reading this). I’ll look for the sermon to be posted to the spepchurch.org site and relisten to it / see where my notes don’t follow. Will also post the URL in a comment here. It’s usually a few weeks until the messages are posted.
So much for my resolution to spread the Word – been a few weeks for varying not very useful reasons. However, still think it’s useful and would rather admit my weakness and rebegin than abandon.
Our senior pastor’s begun a series on the names of God. Last week’s sermon was on Malachi 3:16-18, in which the Israelites are talking with each other (about God). Historically, the Israelites were returning back from their exile in Babylon and basically rebuilding and recreating their culture. Israel’s strong history of the government and culture pointing its people towards God was remote; just as America’s culture is steeped in Biblical underpinnings, but those underpinnings have less and less of an impact upon us today. Rather than bemoan that state, Pastor Glenn made a point I found interesting: are we / were we depending on our culture support our Christian faith? Were we / are we reliant on ‘going with the flow’, rather than investing personally and as a faith group? Does it have to be easy to be right?
Pastor Glenn pointed out how highly God values those who seek him, and pointed to Malachi’s depiction of the scroll of remembrance and of God’s promises to ‘see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not’ for those whose names are written in the scroll of remembrance. (See also the book of life listed in Revelations 20:12, where that book of life is mentioned as being separate from the books describing deeds. There’s talk of judgement based on deeds, but then also sparing based on one’s name being in the book of life.)
So we’re going to spend our next sermon series exploring the names of God, particularly as a means to understand the attributes of God that those names convey. Per Glenn’s illustration, you can only fall in love with a real person, a person you know, by what they’re like, and by their NAME. Or, in this case, names…
“God’s Word is no longer just being heard in a building; it is being multiplied throughout a community. It is multiplying because the people of God are no longer listening as if his Word is intended to stop with them. They are now living as if God’s Word is intended to spread through them.” – part of the text we covered in Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream in today’s Sunday school class. (My son is continually amazed that his mom likes going to Sunday school class.) This was part of a section talking about whether we are receivers or reproducers of God’s Word and discipleship. Gotta admit: I aspire to live my life in a way that glorifies God, through a variety of means. I put particular effort in certain areas where I’ve recognized God’s leading. But I’m not in an out-in-front kind of person, at least in that particular area of life. (Truth be told, I’m fairly quiet in lots of others and have to put a good bit of effort in the areas where my role does involve a certain amount of out-in-front.)
Today, though, I started jotting down notes and scribbles, ideas coming to mind of how to share. How do I share other things? Facebook, Twitter, this blog, maybe Google+ in the future. I spread ideas or pointers to things and let folks consume at their own pace, much as I consume and ruminate on lots of other stuff. Why not do the same? Some of the examples in the book talked about folks who took their pastor’s teaching from Sunday and then shared it more broadly. Why couldn’t I do this here? I don’t honestly believe there’s a lot of traffic here to see this… but putting it out here is a step of faith that God can use this in some way useful to glorify Him.
So, with that intro: today’s sermon was about gossip. Pastor Glenn’s full slides are up on our church’s site, and I’d encourage you to take a look.
Starting text: Proverbs 16:28: “A perverse man stirs up dissension, and a gossip separates close friends.” We’ve been going through themes in Proverbs lately, and Pastor Glenn pointed out that Solomon gives a lot of space to gossip in the Proverbs. We talked about gossip being idle talk or rumor, something that rings true even if not approaching this from a Christian perspective. Pastor Glenn said that it could be harmless or even a good thing: I’d count that as spread of good news. If I mention someone’s baby being born, I’m community-building (I think). If I mention that I think that baby’s Daddy isn’t sure it’s his, welp, I’m pretty sure that’s not doing anyone any good.
We talked about gossip being the opposite of peacemaking (“stirs up dissension”), about it causing folks who are outside of a conflict to take sides (and thus spread the conflict), and Solomon’s wisdom in declaring “The first to present his case seems right, till another comes forward and questions him” (Proverbs 18:17). We talked about gossip being necessarily not full truth, as the full story isn’t there – it’s the truth as at best presented from one side of a story. Thus spreading it is a form of false witness (see Proverbs 21:28 for the outcome there) and encourages us to judge each other based on incomplete information. “Acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent— the LORD detests them both.” (Proverbs 17:15). [That’s not even going near the texts that indicate that judgement and vengeance aren’t mine.]
What about when we’re on the receiving end of gossip’s club (Proverbs 25:18) or are otherwise wronged in a way that causes us to want to lash out through gossip? (Boy, doesn’t that image fit?!) Pastor Glenn described our desired reaction as this: (quoting from my notes, rather than him directly): “God love to rescue somebody who waits on Him to vindicate them, so God can be glorified. If we retaliate through gossip, we lose the opportunity to watch God work through us.” The image that jumps to mind is when one of my kids hits their sibling because they’ve been hit first: sort of makes it hard to punish the original offense.
What about if we hear gossip? Recommendation was to pray that God glorify Himself and bless those who trust in Him, but leave the particulars of the gossip itself alone. Why spend time in considering the spread of muck? Why “pay attention to a destructive tongue” (Proverbs 17:4)? My favorite verse of the morning: “Like someone who grabs a stray dog by the ears is someone who rushes into a quarrel not their own.” (Proverbs 26:17)
So, you made it to the bottom here of my first attempt to faithfully reproduce and comment upon our sermon from the morning. I’m just “reproducing” : the original sermon will be up on our church’s website within the next few weeks. Looks like the ‘Recent Messages’ area is a bit behind at the moment, but there’s plenty of good material there, from both the series on Proverbs as well as other areas. Would also encourage you to check out the sermon streaming live next week: there’s a link from the front page – the service is streamed at 9:30 and 11:00 (Eastern time, for any of you who aren’t East Coast). I’ll be away next Sunday – we’ll see if I get to catch it that way myself. If I do, will try this out again. Otherwise, planning on enjoying a weekend away with the hubby and a visit with his bro (hopefully catching a ride on the back of his motorcycle) before getting “out-in-front” at the MIL-OSS conference. Somebody write one of these things and let me know what I miss in the Proverbs series, in case I don’t catch it online…
The school year ended about a month ago, which means our high school ministry has a new fledgling crop of high school graduates. Some are planning to leave at the end of the summer to go away to school, some are trying to figure out how to stay home/local but still transition to the next stage, and all seem to be in this odd stage of waiting for a shift. Bad news, guys. There’s no magic shift. On the first day that you’re in your new environment, you’re going to suddenly realize that awkward truth all of us realize when we’re in a wildly different setting with different expectations on us: we’re not ready. We’re mostly hoping to fake it until we either make it, or realize that we’re shooting for the wrong goals. (making it seems to be relative. In some cases, making it just seems to be making it one more day.)
That’s the scary news. The good news, sort of, is that God’s equipped you with lots of us who can relate. Our church is now spinning up a college ministry. We’re counting as an extension of our youth ministry, as there are some sort of statistics out there that say folks are still not yet adult until they’re in their mid twenties nowadays. I dunno about that. I can say it feels odd to be talking to these young ladies and gentlemen, and thinking back to life experiences I had at 18 or 19, that I was dating my to-be husband at 21… I look at one of the young couples in our youth group, at their plans to stay local for college for two years and then move onto their next stages of life together – at first you think – ain’t going to happen (statistically speaking), and then I think – but maybe I’m looking at a set of high school sweethearts who’re going to make it.
We’re still figuring out exactly how the ministry will work. The neat thing is that these guys are an engaging group of “kids”, who are really excited to help form their own community focused on the gospel. The adult leadership team has high hopes of helping these guys set their own expectations of what it means to engage with and through the church, such that we help them set mindsets and patterns that will cause them to help push the church to even more of a gospel community focused culture. Too many of our adults come to church on Sunday as individuals, hear a sermon, worship as individuals, and then leave to go back to their individual lives. We hope that by helping these kids feed their own hunger for something more, we in the end help spread that hunger through the church – both our own and whatever venues these guys may move to as God directs them to new geographies in their lives.
Pray for opportunities, for vision, and for excitement tied to God’s priorities. And, uh, pray that on the 16th (our first meeting) we’ll have at least a few folks there…
Our project at work enabled a community of 1000+ folks to communicate via a closed google group to chat with us about desired software features, any issues, local extensions or patches, etc. It’s this really neat collaboration area that my team of just a few folks spends quite a bit of effort in their care and feeding. Google groups in some ways makes that somewhat hard. Let me put that differently: there are a few things it could do as a core product that would make things much easier, and there are even some extensions/mashups I’d like to make to help me satisfy some local use scenarios.
First stop: google help forums… Can google groups let me identify unanswered messages in some way, or topics over the last x period of time with the most varied set of respondents? answer: uh, those forums aren’t really active anymore, and no mention seen of such features. Next step: any REST APIs to help me put together a solution? Uh, nope there, too.. Feature request out there for such… Lots of comments of ‘I need that, too!”, but no responses from google.
I did trip across mention of ATOM and RSS feeds. Hopefully, those plus some cloud storage of additional metadata may get me to a solution. Aiming for the following: discovery of unanswered messages, discovery of outlier topics (revisited after long time or large number of responses or…), moderator tagging of topics to flag for team, maybe end user tag clouds sorts of stuff…. Lots of ideas, and then the idea of further integrating with some sort of crm kind of system also appeals. (Nope, not proposing writing a crm here. But integrating with one would be useful. Wonder if crms take email feeds or rss or atom feeds to auto handle much of what I just described? Hmmmm….)
Day 3 of iPad adventuring. After getting set up on day1, my kids started asking what games I had on it. First request was for Bejeweled (Callie). Second request was for Angry Birds (Cameron). And then they both clamored for Fruit Ninja. I blame their grandfather for the first two, and their babysitter for the third. I did download a free Angry Birds and spent too much time throwing feathered missiles at pigs. I had had a version of AB on my Android and never been impressed. On the iPad, the user experience worked a bit better – still a pain in the neck game, in my opinion. Though that hasn’t stopped me from spending too much time on it.
Typing this blog post from my laptop for no really good reason – I pulled out the laptop to do some Javascript development. So I now have my Android in front of me, updating its apps and downloading Google Voice to let me do some voice command trickery I saw on LifeHacker; I have the iPad in front of me that I’m using as my eBook kind of thing to read ‘Learning Ext JS 3.2’. And, of course, I’m typing on the laptop for my blog. I type all right on the iPad – it’s just that I type faster on a physical keyboard as of yet. Appreciating some of the niceties of the on-screen keyboard: if it knows I’m entering in an e-mail field, then the ‘@’ sign is part of the primary keyboard; as I shift to type a punctuation mark, after I type the mark, it returns me to the main letter keyboard. However, it doesn’t do that if I’m typing numbers – very smooth.
Did finally set up a cellular plan on the iPad. $20 / month for 1GB data. I figure if I primarily use the thing at work and at home, both have wireless connections. But the $20 gets me accessibility in other places, without relying on wireless networks that I worry may be less secure. That reminds me: I need to find some sort of virus and other network protection software for the iPad.
Having a very funny geeky weekend!
So, I’m connected up through iTunes, registering my new iPad. I worked a few years ago for a cellphone company, and as part of our website, we had folks register their phones. There was always a question of how to get the information we wanted from our customers without annoying them with all of the information we wanted, and how to confirm that the information for key fields like serial number was typed correctly.
iTunes iPad2 registration experience: I typed in my iTunes id (gmail address) and password, and got taken to a screen that had my address, my phone number, and my serial number, all already populated. For everything but the serial number, those fields were editable. They had my phone number wrong, but I first corrected it, and then actually deleted it. Not sure I like that they had a phone number for me. It WASN’T the phone number I gave the Best Buy guy yesterday, or any mistyped variant of it. Not sure where they got it. Slightly weirded out. Really appreciative on the serial number thing, though: that info was amongst the set of common errors when registering cellphones where folks would fat-finger.
I skipped the set of questions they ask (what I do for a living, how old I am, primary usage purpose, etc)… It always bugged me when our end-users would skip those questions, but here they’re not listed as required: interested in seeing what Apple does with my “non-compliance”. Oooh, it does require my phone number – not liking that. Giving ’em the fake number run-around. Whoever has number 366-2273, sorry: your number also maps to “FooBard”.
Did set up the ‘Find my iPad’ feature. I’ll trade potential loss of privacy here (explicitly granted, instead of just likely going on anyway) for the reward of being able to find my lost device.
By the way, impressed that the keyboard on the iPad counts the ‘@’ as part of the alphabet keyboard, rather than the symbol keyboard. Nice touch.
After too many conferences where my options for staying in the loop with my team were (1) lug a laptop around all day, including powerpack, etc or (2) receive/type emails on a phone keyboard while not being able to get to all of my filed emails (probably solvable with better software), decided to go for the iPad. Then the choice became: Wi-Fi only or Wi-Fi + 3G? There’s a reasonably significant price difference between them, and of course the 3G requires a service plan with a carrier, which usually goes against my cheapskate side. But this time had a bit of extra cash at my disposal, so decided to go for the gusto. Because the iPad isn’t subsidized by any of the carriers in the same way a phone might be, there’s not the same requirement to lock-in to a contract. In other words, pay a bit more for the ability to do 3G, but not locked in to paying month over month necessarily. OK, workable.
Next choice: which carrier (AT&T or Verizon) – you have to determine which when you buy your iPad. Just like phones (grumble, grumble), the equipment varies based on which carrier you’re going with. Having an existing contract with T-Mobile (being bought by AT&T) and not being entirely happy with that (lots of dropped calls lately), decided to test out Verizon.
Next choice: how much space – options include 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB. I don’t intend to use this as a heavy entertainment platform, so opted to go for the 32. Probably still more than I need.
Next choice: I was at Best Buy, so they wanted to set me up with a Geek Squad policy. Listened to what they covered, listened to the price ($120), opted to pass.
Out of box experience: you get the thing, it has a 2×2 inch instruction sheet that tells almost nothing. You turn on the iPad, and it shows two icons with a line between them. The first is a drawing of the connector for the iPad with a line connecting to an icon for iTunes. Really? They’re really counting on knowledge of iTunes being ubiquitous for their customer base. I didn’t have iTunes on my work laptop (I’m a Pandora fan, and usually listen on my phone rather than eat network bandwidth at work), so installed it.
Once it’s installed and started, with iPad plugged into my laptop, iTunes recognizes the iPad device and starts me up for registration. Looking forward to fun here – just really amused by the out-of-the-box experience.