On the Inside

Well... and now I post.

I've been dealing with rebuilding the Ubercart site for the last week at work. Unfortunately, we had an embarrassing backup solution (read, none) that led to us losing our website's database when our RAID system went yonkers. This means all our forum posts, contributions, live site listings, documentation, users, etc... the whole shebang... went the way of the dodo. This has given me a good opportunity to rebuild everything "in the know" so to speak. I've been able to avoid some of the failures of our previous systems with the benefit of a year's worth of hindsight. So it has been all bad... just mostly.

Oh! I finally got a closing date. This means I'll be moving into 528 Camp St. early next week before heading down to Greenville, SC for the wedding. Talk about cutting it close... closing on the house not even a week before getting married! But at least I'll have a house to bring my lovely bride to be home to (even if our bed won't have any sheets and the shower curtain won't be up!). I formally invite you all to come help with the moving and sprucing up of the property.

Finally, this evening I was reading the gift I got one of my groomsmen. (I hope he'll be alright with a slightly used copy of The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell.) It's sort of a collection of apologetics outlines by McDowell that touches on any and every subject you might want to read about. Well, I started by reading an essay included in it by C.S. Lewis which was stellar. Feeling like I was cheating a little I turned to a chapter written by McDowell and read a bit about defenses for the deity of Christ... and I realized it was an approach I'd never read before. I found it to be quite encouraging!

I just wanted to post a link here to a radio show that is once again available from Michael Card's website. This is a rerun, but it's some of the best teaching and music I've ever heard from the book of Jonah. I invite you all to listen to it and post your thoughts!

http://www.michaelcard.com/radioarchive/show275.html

(This show won't stay up forever, so you really should try to check it out soon.)

This is a letter to the global church from the Protestant Church of Smyrna, a story about the recent martyrdom of three men who were teaching the Bible to people in the province of Malataya in Turkey. I encourage you to read it, observing the confidence of men who were slaughtered while believing in the resurrection of the dead and the difference between a religion that justifies such slaughter and one that makes it bearable. I know these Christians aren't the only people in the world suffering, and they aren't even the only people in the world suffering for the sake of the name of Jesus, but their tale is sad and heroic, unfortunate and yet triumphant.

Click the Read more link beneath this description to read the letter.

A friend and I were talking after the Super Bowl (go Colts! ), and he sort of indirectly helped me realize a little more about what it means for Jesus to be a stumbling block. The Bible teaches that Jesus was a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles. "Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles," says 1 Corinthians 1:22-23. The Jews were waiting for the Messiah, expecting him to come and deliver them. What they got was Jesus, and he just didn't fit the picture they had in their heads. He was a humble carpenter from Nazareth. "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" He railed against the self-righteousness of the Pharisees. He lived a perfect life and had the audacity to claim perfect unity with God the Father. He even said He was God. "So wait just a minute," they say, "we're supposed to accept this man as our Messiah when he is a blasphemer?" Besides that, Jesus claimed He could save others, yet He died. He said He was the way, the truth, and the life... but He died. He's a stumbling block... they can't get past who Jesus is and who they thought the Savior should be.

So, I'm kind of curious if heaven's going to be a never ending worship service where we just all sit around and shout out favorite songs we'd like to sing. I was thinking about this while driving home from a Bible study tonight with my friend Coshack. He absolutely loves the song Beautiful, Scandalous Night by Smalltown Poets. It's a wonderful song about being washed by the blood of Jesus and drinking deeply from the waters of salvation. You probably don't know Coshack, but he's been ransomed by that blood and brought into those waters from a life that had him on a hospital bed not just half dead but dead. He had to be resuscitated, and this I tell him is the kindness of God. It doesn't look very kind, but it brought Coshack to repentance, and the Bible tells us it is the kindness of God that leads men to repentance.

This is a wide ranging blog post of a few topics on my mind with no necessary or imagined interconnectivity. However, there is a certain tendency toward insufferability that begs me to try to draw connections for the sake of it... (For those of you who don't know, you can click the read more links under my blog posts to view the whole thing!)

First, I'd love for you all to check out this news story: Amazon boss shows off spacecraft. Ahh, my ticket to the moon. It even has a video you can watch of this cone shaped spaceship lifting off and floating back to earth. Solid ground. Land... oh, I'd love to leave it and lose myself (and hopefully not my lunch) in the weightlessness of space. The other article I have for you isn't as cool, but it's interesting nonetheless: Black hole found in ancient lair. Makes me think a black hole is like a dragon... hoarding its wealth, the glory of the stars.

I studied a lesson for children's Sunday school over the weekend on the parable of the Good Samaritan. In my studies I read a chapter from a book called The Parables by a man named Brad Young that reinforced a thought I've had in the past... this parable goes deep. It is a classic story of doing to others as you would have them do to you, but it is oh so much more. I labeled this post as Part 1, because I'd love to post all the things I've learned from the interchange in Luke 10:25-37. I'm not sure when I would ever stop posting, so I'll just begin and see what happens! This first is a commentary on four men and ritual purity...

I'm preparing for a Sunday school lesson from the Children Desiring God curriculum. The series is To Be Like Jesus, and the lesson is on Worshiping God in Spirit and Truth. This comes from the verse in John 4:24 that says God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth. What is that? It seems awfully hard to understand, cryptic even. If God is seeking worshipers, why does he confuse them with verses like this?

And she speaks convincingly. It is indeed time for a real update and not just another post about a tutorial or piece of software I've written. To be honest, I am going to put a link in the beginning of this post to the Javascript section, including a tutorial on using setTimeout() to add a timed function to a web page. This comes from a forum posting I made earlier today to help a guy get this working properly on his own site.