The view from South-West Wisconsin.
While teaching Adult Sunday School the previous Sunday I used the phrase "Messiah things" to describe actions taken by Jesus that confirmed or fulfilled prophecy about him being the Messiah, as I think it's a fun way to describe the actions of Jesus during his ministry. I wasn't expecting it to gain any traction, then the following Sunday a couple of people referenced it, one from over the pulpit,…
Ronald Reagan, fortieth president of the United States of America, was known for using the phrase "trust but verify" frequently. He used it in the context of negotiating with the U.S.S.R. for nuclear weapon restrictions, but it can be correctly used in many other contexts too.In the software development world where I used to work, this concept was used frequently, although it was called unit…
I recently learned of The Blind Boys of Alabama and enjoyed listening to a variety of their songs. My favorite one is this wonderful cover of Amazing Grace, with the original words sung to the tune of The House of the Rising Sun. An unusual combination, but it works really well and I love it.
During my time as a pastor I heard many excuses for not praying about a situation. I'll save some of the excuses for other posts, but this time I'd like to address the issue of not praying about a situation because of the size of that situation. I found it interesting that there was no commonality in the size of the situations that caused this lack of prayer.Some folks would not pray about…
Describing your child's age can be challenging, especially when talking to those who have not yet had much experience with children themselves. Every so often I'll see a social media post (written or video) complaining that parents are illogical in how they describe their children's ages. A classic one is wondering why parents switch from days to weeks, to months and then years and sometimes back…
Prayer is interesting stuff. And having said that, I feel like I should immediately issue an understatement alert. Prayer is the art of mankind communicating with God and the moment you include the Lord in any matter, the possibilities become limitless. Prayer, therefore, is a big subject. Entire conferences and sermon series have been dedicated to the subject. Scholarly books have been written on…
I love typography and layout design. I'm not a complete type nerd, but I do know that there is a difference between a typeface and a font, and what that difference is. I was the editor and creator of a state-level church magazine for over a decade, so I also have practical experience to back up my theory. There are many important principles to understand when laying out a document, newsletter or…
Back when I was a young and carefree fellow, I was an enthusiastic member of the canoe and kayak club at Plymouth University. Plymouth, with it's deepwater port and Royal Navy dockyard had a breakwater, but a decent amount of swell for kayak surfing got through and if we wanted even more, we could go outside of the breakwater and find plenty of wave action. All of that was true except for when it…
I thought that I'd written about this before, but upon checking my notes, I see that I'd put this in the "to be written" folder. Now seems like a good time to pull it out, dust off the idea and actually write it.I've written before that as a former pastor, a significant amount of the advice you offer to people is non-spiritual general purpose life principles. Often these come from observing other…
Not only is Peter my favourite apostle, but he was also an important figure during both the ministry of Jesus and the early days of the church. There are many interesting things that can be written about Peter, but this time I want to talk about that time he received the keys of the kingdom of heaven and what he did with them subsequently.To set the context (Matthew 16:13-14), Jesus and his…
Think about how many things you "just know" because you've heard them presented as true multiple times in your life. After 30 years of listening to sermons, I have a massive list of biblical nuggets that I have heard multiple preachers teach. The vast majority of them are true or at least based upon reasonable inferences from multiple scriptures (in the mouth of two or three witnesses – 2…
It's the long Thanksgiving weekend over here in the United States of America. A time to come together with family and friends and be thankful. This is my favorite holiday on the calendar. Don't get me wrong, I love Christmas and Easter, but to me they're holidays where we are thankful for a specific thing. Christmas is a time to celebrate and be thankful for the coming of Jesus our Messiah. Easter…
I have a favourite apostle. There, I've admitted it and it feels like such a weight off of my chest. I don’t even know if I'm allowed to have a favourite. I've never heard anyone else ever speaking about having a favourite apostle. It's kind of a guilty pleasure, not unlike the fact that I liked listening to Abba back when I was a metalhead. Certainly not something you talk about in polite…
Back in the day, people of status would have a calling card that they would leave at a place they visited if the person they sought was unavailable or absent. The card would have their name and appropriate contact information on it so that the person would know who had visited and how to reach them. The closest thing we have in these modern times would be a business card. Hold this thought until…
There are many references to the Promised Land in the scriptures. The Promised Land was an area that the Lord promised to Abraham (Genesis 12:1,7) and all of his descendants. The land area included in the promise was larger than modern Israel. It was composed of both modern Israel and an amount of the surrounding land (Joshua 1:3-4).The scriptures tell us much about the Promised Land and the story…
I've had the opportunity to share this small vignette from my life a couple of times recently, so I'll also share it here in-case anyone else might find it amusing.Before I was in the church, back when I lived in England, I was a bit of a metal-head. I listened to rock and heavy metal music and outside of work lived in jeans and black t-shirts. I had lots of black t-shirts, mostly band tour…
A pastor is a saint before they are a pastor. I say this because there is tendency to regard pastors (all licensed ministers really) as above the regular folks in the church and I believe that this is unhealthy for church culture. Respecting your pastor and following their spiritual leadership is healthy, but considering them above you just because of their title is bad.For the record, when I use…
Back in the mists of time, when I started as a pastor, I had this dream that the role would be amazingly spiritual all the time. Don't get me wrong, there certainly were spiritual activities. Preparing sermons and teachings for the Sunday and Wednesday services and teaching bible studies at other times counts as spiritual. The rest of the activities, while generally needful and important, were…
The Lord sets the gold standard for power of all sorts.Destructive power. It seems uncontentious to say that Hollywood, and the media industry in general, does not like Christianity or anything to do with God. Freewill and all that. Of course, they are welcome to dislike whatever they wish. That being said, they do seem to spend a good amount of their time referencing it in various ways. The ten…
"Pastor, I just feel that I'm not being fed." This is always a fun thing to be told by a member of your congregation. All that studying and sermon preparation wasted. The first time I had someone tell me this, I was distraught and blamed myself until I realised, looking back, that the issue was that I wasn't preaching what they wanted me to preach. Not going to name any names, but one family were…
While I'm in the mode of sharing observations from my time as a pastor, here's another one. On a number of occasions, I had members of the congregation let me know that they were going to move far away from the area. When it was for a genuine life reason, one example was a young man joining the US Air Force, we wished them well and sent them off with our blessings. Every so often, though it was…
As a pastor, you are afforded a front row seat into the lives of your congregation. Normally this is wonderful as you get to see their growth and share in their positive life events. Unfortunately, you also get to see the negatives and this is where you discover whether they are going to be, spiritually, a fight or flight person.Most people react spiritually in one of two ways to challenging life…
A few years ago my wife and I wrote a bible study called Questions (available on Amazon.com, rush out and buy copies for all of your friends, they'll love it) and this morning while sitting in my favorite coffee shop I was thinking that it would be a good follow up to look at some of the answers we find in the scriptures, concentrating on the answers of Jesus as these are definitive, being the…
Sometimes change arrives like London buses, nothing for a while and then several all at the same time. My life currently resembles the all at the same time scenario. Got a couple of things going on that I can talk about and several more that I can neither confirm nor deny and especially not talk about.A reasonable number of people know that I am no longer working at SWTC. While not my wish to move…
Just wanted to announce that I'm not dead yet.
Is there a good way for a Christian to know if something is a good idea and likely in the will of God? This is a question I ponder frequently, as I strive to live a life within the will of God. I accept my continuing imperfections and periodic missteps (kinda have to as they don't seem to be going away), but I do want to be pleasing to the Lord more often than not, so the bigger the task that I…
So, I was watching this video about British people not realizing how cold it gets in the United States and found it funny and inspiring at the same time, having lived extensively in both countries and understanding where each side was coming from.Allow me to share a few of my winter temperature stories.
An interesting dichotomy is that we are told that you cannot judge a book by it's cover, but every book publisher's marketing department wants you to do exactly that. Back in the day all books were hardback and their covers were typically drab earth tones with the title and author embossed on the spine. It was indeed a truth that you could not judge a book purely by it's cover and the spine was…
Names are important to God. (Trust me that it's an entire sermon to just work through the scriptural principle of the progressive revelation of the name of God, consider that saved for another day.) We see that in bible times people also took names very seriously, sadly not something that has survived the passage of time, with modern names selected for the most random of reasons and from the most…
Marriage is an amazing thing. That two strangers with completely different backgrounds, personalities and goals can come together, become one, share everything, raise mini versions of themselves and live together in (mostly) complete harmony is a miracle.After the creation of everything else in the universe, God created Adam and provided living accommodation, food and an abundant supply of pets.…
We men have such potential to affect the spiritual well-being of our entire families. To this end, Gideon and Noah are an interesting study in contrasts for their effects upon their family.23 And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only…
5 If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.James 1:5Wisdom is a constant topic through the scriptures. The Lord considers wisdom to be an important facet of man's life and being the source of all wisdom is ready and willing to provide to any who feel that they lack.The greatest concentration of wisdom is found…
Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder aloud what the country could do under first-class management.Doug Larson
The whole process of hiring programmers is fundamentally flawed and broken. I could just stop there, but unless you're in the IT industry it's hard to realize how true this is.I am looking for another IT job after being out of programming for three years. I applied for a mid-level Java position thinking that would be a good way to ease back into the industry. And then I was sent a link for an…
I love this shot of the early phase of this morning's sunrise viewed over snow. Everything is grey and dark except for the band of gold that is preparing to launch itself into the sky and bring us light.
It is a time honored tradition that everyone blames the weather forecasters for being bad at their jobs. In fairness, their general forecasts are reasonably accurate. Although, I've heard it said that you'll be right at least 50% of the time if you forecast the exact thing you had today for tomorrow, so perhaps general accuracy in forecasts is not that big a deal.For me, the biggest trigger of…
A late sunset shot taken when out for an early evening walk with The Queen Of All She Surveys.
A delightful side-effect of driving a school bus is that I am often out and about during sunrises and sunsets and if I am at a safe point to stop, then I can quickly and easily capture a picture. This picture was even more safe than many because I had returned to the depot and parked my bus.
I had used this quote in Wash, Cook, Clean and Iron, but thought that it deserved to also be available in it's own right.A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new…
A blues rendition of I'll Fly Away by Rev. Gary Davis. It's awesome. You need to listen to it.
As I wrote previously, I am learning the Clojure programming language as one of my personal Learning Projects.Previously, I presented my implementations of echo, the classic Unix command-line utility. Next on the list is cat, a useful utility for writing information out to the screen from a file or the standard input. Well, technically it writes to the standard output, but the default destination…
As I wrote previously, I am learning the Clojure programming language as one of my personal Learning Projects.Previously, I presented my implementations of true and false, the classic Unix command-line utilities. Next on the list is echo, a useful utility for writing information out to the screen. Well, technically it writes to the standard output, but the default is that that is the screen, so it…
As I wrote previously, I am learning the Clojure programming language as one of my personal Learning Projects. Naturally I started with hello world because there are a ton of examples of hello world available and just being able to get it working proves that you're gotten your development environment setup correctly.Now that I have moved past hello world, I am ready for the first programs that I…
Computer programming is such a young discipline that it is still very fast moving. New techniques and practices are being discovered regularly. (Unfortunately, also because of the rapid progress, many techniques and practices are lost in the rush and have to be rediscovered on a regular basis.) So many good things. Procedural, object and functional programming paradigms, virtual machines,…
It seems to be a truth, universally accepted, that the armies of the world run on their sergeants and the navies on their chiefs. These non-commissioned officers provide a valuable, nay essential, link between those who do and those who tell. (They also try to keep the new lieutenants alive and out of trouble, but that's a different essay.) It is my opinion that a Technical Lead is like those…
So, for various reasons, I have decided to take a look at Clojure. It is a programming language that implements LISP yet runs on top of the JVM (Java Virtual Machine). For those with long and geeky memories, LISP is one of the programming languages that ESR recommends every programmer learn.It is a requirement that when learning a new programming language the programmer is obligated to write as…
Here's one to wake us all up on a Sunday morning. I love many of the old time Pentecostal church songs, but most of the versions on YouTube are slow and warbly and fail to catch the joy that the lyrics of the song are trying to convey. So when I find a solid, uptempo cover of those classics, I just have to share it.
With some extra time, I've been trying to build and maintain some good habits. Some I already had, but have tried to take them further.Mornings now start by sitting with my wife, drinking tea and reading my Bible. I've completed my reading of the New Testament already this year, so my initial plan of reading through the New Testament twice during 2020 has now been upgraded to trying to read…
The Lord has been talking to me about a big project. Really big. Big enough to make me nervous enough that I've been procrastinating it for longer than I feel comfortable admitting. My mission, if I should choose to accept it is to work on a translation of the Bible. As one does.Now that I've surrendered, this means a number of things. First, there's the matter of learning Biblical Greek. Second…
Expanded notes from my Easter sermon.54 So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. 55 O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? 56 The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God, which…