The heart, however, must not leap with joy, considering itself blameless; for the beast does not stir unprovoked. It is the constant prodding and poking of habit and banal predictability that causes Ignorance to stir. How small an accomplishment is a sterile lifestyle! Only through spontaneity and consistent marvel in the ill-termed “ordinary” can the beast be slain.

The man whose eyes have been blinded to the beauty in his surroundings can never be joyful. He has become ignorant of delight in the mundane and finds himself without satisfaction in any circumstance. Beauty has no qualifications.

The victims of this beast are piteous creatures indeed. The sweet fragrance of a newborn lily escapes their senses. The heavenly canvas delicately brushed cadmium and yellow-gold, tufted with milky white wisps is lost somewhere between their eyes and their hearts. The whisper of a crickets song becomes mere annoyance and the glistening blade of grass is mown down in the name of habit.

This man, the man who no longer sees true beauty, has removed himself from God’s divine symphony. He moves from performer to observer. Joining in at his own tempo, his own key signature, his own melody, the blind man hears only discord. His own vain attempts at beauty are all that can be heard; and because he has deafened himself to the harmony surrounding him, the beauty and majesty of a world in perfect orchestration play on for others only, and he is left to hum his sad, lonely tune.

Complacency, on the other hand, is not as blunt nor rugged a foe as Ignorance. He has a tongue of silk and entreats his victims with subtle and palatable attacks. Ignorance depends on Complacency, for without a numbing agent, Ignorance is but fleeting. Complacency steps in, rears its beautiful head and slyly presents himself as reason; he uses craftiness and pride to gain a permanent home in the heart of man. His venom is sweet as he suggests that all is well in the mind of a man apart from beauty and truth. He poses as beauty, defending his co-conspirator’s actions as “bliss”. A life consumed by Complacency is crippled so that the road to the grave runs steep, plain, and sure.

So we stand today face to face with these dark ones. Daily must the decision be made to wage war against these foes. Will Ignorance and Complacency rule our lives, or will we fight to rejoice in the simple, choosing to recognized it as profound? Will we make the common uncommon? Bind Ignorance and Complacency; bind them tight and vow to find beauty in the ordinary.

Another hectic day at Jon and Lisa Redford’s house had arrived, albeit not unusual; this had become a common occurrence some time ago. Weekdays gave only enough time for work, sleep, and food, and weekends were jammed with things of little importance that needed doing. They had only been married for a little over five years, but for Lisa it was beginning to feel like seventy-five.

It was one of those Saturdays where sugar-coated cereal and sleeping late seemed nothing but a distant memory, where cartoons and long days of unfettered imagination had become imagined things themselves. And with those faded fables of some younger self swirling about in an overworked mind, and with far too much to do, Lisa glared at the old Hotpoint Refrigerator. It always seemed so obnoxious hulking there in the corner of her kitchen, Lisa thought to herself. So many indescribable things annoyed her about the outdated box. Each time the compressor clicked on, every light in the house dimmed, and IT would grind, gnash, shriek and after its tantrum, let out a long, low mumble. Lisa wanted a new refrigerator, but in a two-income society, they were lucky enough to have this one.

“Honey!” she cried. Where was that man? Lisa hated that she had to call him over and over to get his attention; but that seemed the extent of their relationship lately—nag and yell. He was callous to her lately. Wasn’t it just last week she had sent him to the grocery store for milk, being absolutely sure to remind him three times; and still he came home with a carton of fudge ripple ice cream instead? Why did he have to be so insensitive and care only about his own wants and needs? Was he blind by sheer ignorance or by complacent choice?

Lisa concluded that she would have to move the refrigerator by herself, so she leaned up against it with her shoulder, and shoved. It was much heavier than she thought it would be. She strained and struggled just to slide the beast aside; and just as it began to budge, the sharp base of the refrigerator caught the linoleum floor and ripped it. She growled—very loud and very frustrated—and sat down on the dirty floor.

It was Jon’s fault for not helping her. She worked the same eight hours he did. She came home just as tired and just as fed up with frustrating people; so why should he sit upstairs and watch reruns of old television shows while she did everything around the house? The gash in the floor made her cringe.

She would move the refrigerator without his help. She was strong; she could do it on her own. After all, her early twenties were years of self-sufficiency, and she had learned to cope. That she was thirty-five and married did not make her helpless. With a renewed determination, she stood up, buried her shoulder into the side of the refrigerator, and strained. The linoleum tore even wider.

Before she could react, a yellowed envelope that had been lodged between the back corner of the refrigerator and the wall fluttered to the ground. It landed on its back, and on the front, in faded blue ink were written the words: “My Vow, My Love.” Memories flooded back to Lisa with waves of emotions.

She picked up the envelope and smelled it. It smelled old and musty, but the smell of men’s cologne still lingered in her mind. It had been so long! The memories that came seemed so distant—like a dream. How could she have forgotten that day in June when Jon handed her the very envelope she held in her hand?

The picture was so clear in her mind now. It was exactly one month before they were to be married, and he was so shy and timid when they exchanged personal vows. He shuffled his feet and looked down at the ground like an infatuated schoolboy, all the while apologizing if it sounded “juvenile” or “silly”.

She remembered reading it while Jon sat sat on the park bench, staring at his feet. Tears welled up in Lisa’s eyes as she thought back on those tears not all to long ago. The intense emotion swelled again as she thought of laughter, love and living life together.

The envelope crinkled as Lisa opened it carefully and pulled out the folded yellow paper. It was exactly as she had remembered. She closed her eyes and held the paper up to her lips; then, after a deep sigh, she opened the paper and read it again, five and a half years later:

“Here I stand before you, And vow to you my love. I pledge myself eternal In the eyes of God above. ‘I love you’ man’s divinest words, Though many times misleading, Convey my most elusive thoughts For you, and bear repeating.”

Was the man in front of the television upstairs the same young man who embraced and kissed her in absolute love? Does time change true love? She had become so consumed with the vain pursuits of life that somehow she had grown callous to the treasure before her. The linoleum mattered very little now; the price of linoleum could not compare to the value of true love.

“Lee?” Jon called from the top of the stairs. “Come here for a minute.”

Lisa wiped away the tears and streaked mascara and headed to the stairs. When she reached the top, Jon put his arm around her waist and opened their bedroom door. The bed was made, the top of both dressers was clean, the floor was spotless, and the laundry had been folded and put away.

“Happy Anniversary.” He kissed her gently on the cheek.

MEMORIES are odd things. It’s as if the past is so much more than the present. Our brains store every tiny detail that made each childhood event perfect and globs it together into one big thought of happiness. When we think back on childhood, everything seems so much different or better. Perhaps I change. My wonder was more easily excited back then, and perhaps that is why things seemed so much more alive.

EVERYTHING seemed safe and harmless. Nothing was forbidden. The only taboo was not being adventuresome. Each tree, rock, hill, and slope was a challenge that needed to be faced, and we faced them. Those were beautiful days, filled with sunshine skies, cloudless days and humid nights. Winter would come and add a special frosty coating to the world. The stars always seemed brighter and our stones always skipped further when we were younger. The days of youth were better days.

GROWING up makes me cynical. As much as I strive to remain awestruck with the commonplace and as often as I’ve striven to be childish, the increased knowledge causes my brain to grow accustomed to life. The little spotted salamander no longer amuses me. Vines that shoot upward into infinity have long since lost their charm and power.

BUT was I even that amazed back then? I think that I enjoyed life, but not to the point of overwhelming wonder and amazement. I suppose it’s just that now I stand in the tomorrow of yesterday and look back with—what word describes it? Wonder? Remorse? Almost a sense of melancholy because I can no longer live as I once did. That’s what makes growing up so difficult. My mind still remembers things I loved and yet I cannot live it again. It is sad, but true.

I have vowed, however, that I will be a child always. I will grow in responsibility and maturity, but I will never sacrifice that sense of joy and wonder that a child possesses. Others laugh, but only because they think me foolish. They themselves are the fools, neglecting the best part of life, always trying to be an adult; and then when they are old, they fight to be a child again. How foolish.

THIS is dedicated to those who seek to revive that childhood wonder and that inward reflection of the past—the memories that make us who we are and the dreams that determine who we will become.

They were willing to give time, effort and reputation to seek the Savior-child, and they were not satisfied until the found Him. They knew who to worship and they brought Him gifts that cost them something. If you want to love Him more, give Him that which you value…

Being a wise man means more that pointing at a star in the sky… It means more than standing and watching the Savior… It means giving expensive gifts… It means traveling across great distances… It means RISKING YOUR LIFE to worship the Messiah…

A dew began to settle on his neck, though, and almost unconsciously he realized that he was cold. The peace of the night and the quiet symphony of wheat has brought him here and shown him a repose; but the lights of town called him as a mother calls her child when the sun is setting. “Come and rest. There is time for life tomorrow. Yet another day.” So I make my way home only to find the sun rising the next morning; and I must become part of the town which only the night before I held between my fingers.

But God is no respecter of person, which means that he cannot be partial in his dealings to any one man or woman. Therefore the differences we see from person to person - height, weight, color, race, gender, family status, economic background-are not “unfair advantages”. These variables may give us different standing in the world’s view; but in God’s eyes, variety is rather the raw material for a life of honor to Him. He rejects no one for being “different” - to do so would be hypocrisy for these are His very strokes on the canvas of humanity.

The tiny deaf child speaks in mumbled noises and we shake our head in sadness. A ragged man sits on the curb and bangs his tin can and we look away with a forced smiled. The ever present talker who seems to think of no one but himself follows us like a swarm of bees and we mumble under our breath… as if these “creatures” were any less deserving of God’s love than our pious self.

God forbid. We have grown so self-righteous that in our minds salvation comes to us because of who we are. What we have forgotten is that every righteous deed done in our own strength and for our glory is so vile and so absolutely repulsive that we might better wheel a cart of manure up to the pulpit Sunday morning and dump the entire cart out before the congregation. If we are created for His pleasure and for His glory, to live any other way is rebellion; that is why the wicked are damned.

Listen, Israel, because this is what God says: “Did your ancestors find any fault in me so as to bring you to this vain pursuit of vain things? None of them sought My presence, even after I had brought them through the wilderness—a land of deserts, drought and the lonely fear of death. I brought them—I brought you—to this bountiful place to enjoy its goodness; but when you came in, you corrupted it and made My reputation an outrage. The priests no longer sought me, the teachers no longer knew me, the leaders sinned against me, and even the prophets turned to empty actions and began to prophesy in the name of Baal.”

“And still I plead with you, and with your children and grandchildren. Look over the breadth and width of your land and see if what I say is true. Do you see a nation with new gods? Truly you have become a nation with no God at all! You have taken magnificence and exchanged it for worthlessness. Be speechless, oh bleak sky, and be horrified at this tragedy. For my people have committed two great evils: they have abandoned the unending fountain of life, and they have made for themselves cisterns—broken cisterns—that cannot hold water."

Originally published 10/05/2002

According to the rules of writers, about 75% of what is written (32 words in this post) is worthy of being mashed to pulp and turned to dinner napkins. Hopefully, you will find the remnant of my ramblings just thought-provoking enough to bring you back for more. Until then, here’s hoping…

To truly taste of His goodness, we must step forward into the danger zone and appear fanatical and (heaven forbid) trusting. What person finds a cure for cancer and quietly pours it out into the dirt? Anything important in life is worth getting excited about, and anything worth getting excited about will require either supreme effort or supreme grace. Interestingly enough, we have been given a taste of both.

Dark plumes of charcoal smoke spiraled upward into the midnight sky. A vague moon blistered and wavered above the dances of flames on the roof of the one-room cabin. A small form stood silhouetted against the orange blaze, stood motionless, stood quietly. Tender planks of pine hissed and popped as the rage consumed the walls until at last the roof fell in on itself, sending a shower of sparks upwards. The boys orange face was devoid of emotion while the shadow danced and played on his features. Like a vacuum the emptiness existed in his sunken eyes and he stared into the glowing fury, into the swirling madness, watching the thousands of faces screaming with the whistles of escaping steam.

Much like the greatly-hailed weekend Nor’easter that was supposed to bring all the white fury that winter could muster and leave us buried beneath three feet of snow. The weathermen were “crying ruin like a town crier in Pompeii” and teacher and students alike spent longer in prayer on Sunday morning thanking God for grace and snow days. Noon struck and we scattered from church through the ever-increasing flurries and raced home excited at the thought of being trapped alive in our suburban caverns (with far too much enthusiasm for winter roads).

But we watched out the window as the blizzard subsided and by nightfall teachers were wary, snowplows were idling and the ground was only dusted with snow. Children made sure to say their prayers this night. And somehow, despite the mere frosting, everyone awoke to find school cancelled. That and a dictator’s haggard picture on the morning news. Someone must have wished upon one of those stars.

And yet as the second hand sweeps across the face of time, it hammers into my head the fact that my life is quickly changing, moving, shifting, disappearing like a child’s breath on a cold morning. We lounge around the living room in our pajamas, mussed hair and spent wrapping paper, each one a bit wiser, a bit older, a bit more sore and a bit more foolish. We laugh and play and forget about the first eleven months of the year, bewitched by woodsmoke and frying bacon until all at once we catch a glimpse of something we hadn’t seen or had simply ignored before.

With a laugh, a twinkle, a nod of the head or a raised coffee cup the soul surfaces and like a pleasant aroma we draw it in deeply and close our eyes, wishing it would last forever, knowing it will soon be gone, making a memory for the dark days, the Mondays, the frightening days, the days we forget the truth. But for now the eyes are open and the laughter abides.

The house where I’m staying is on the very summit of one of the Blue Ridge Mountains and I woke up this morning to the sun streaming across the mountains and flooding the bedroom. The drive up was frightening, but well worth the view. Time to run, but I’ll try to fill in everyone in a few days!

The wind whipped around the four of us as if it too wanted us dead. Gunshots popped nearby and with each one the children in my arms winced and cried out. In a few moments they would be upon us and would do God only knows what to myself and the children; but the woman quivering beside me had been one of them. They would be especially cruel to her. Like deer we had been driven higher and higher through the woods until we came at last to the bluff. I told them all that things would be fine, and this was a lie. Looking down at the flaming houses and thickening smoke below, I realized just how ridiculous the lie was.

Somewhere in all of these desperate thoughts I was brought back to my last day on earth by the pleading eyes of the boy. He did not say anything; he just tugged my shirt and with his eyes asked every question I had no answer for. I had nothing to hope. Then, emerging from my doubt like a messenger bursting through the crowd, my faith came back to me. I bowed my head, fell to my knees and sobbed. All three of them were staring at me; I could feel their wondering eyes.

“We have nothing to fear.” I sat back and faced them. “They cannot touch our destiny.” I could sense relief in the children, but the woman still looked fearfully to the woods. “Yes, you too. They have your past.” I gestured toward the trees. “But they cannot touch-”

From the thicket a man leapt with a shout of gibberish and a flourish of his weapon. He laughed violently and fired into the air. As he did, all time seemed to slow. His eyes connected mine; they were so fierce and full of rage and I could not look away so I pushed back toward the ridge. Slowly, unavoidably he lowered his gun and aimed it directly at the woman’s belly. The wind pushed her black hair into her face. We all screamed but our mouths only opened, and the sound of the gunshot echoed off my tongue. I fell back from the present ruin and saw only devastation below. Turning from the hellish landscape to a gun barrel in my temple, I closed my eyes for death and then it was gone.

The world was upside down for a moment. I thought he had shot me, but I saw the woman and children tumbling in the air beside me and this time I could hear them screaming. My stomach was in frenzy and my dead hands and feet clawed out for anything as the swirling back and orange rushed at us. Then darkness.

Read Part 2

Actually, it must have been one hundred years because all of that seemed so far away and insignificant now. The most important thing right now was the pressure on the soles of my feet. That, and the cinder block tunnel we were moving down. I say we - I’m not sure when I was aware of it, but the children stood beside me. The woman did not.

As the eye sees more with each step of the sun over the mountains, so I began to understand, contemplate, remember with each passing moment. The light in our descending platform grew brighter and curiosity began its slow transformation.

Cinder blocks? My old thoughts of heaven came rushing back, the carefully crafted thoughts of diamond-glistening roadways winding through emerald dales hedged in by dizzying golden spires that pierced up through the clouds; and here I was in my blood soaked shirt and jeans watching cinder blocks slide past.

We moved for such a long time that my hope began to fade; it leapt again when the platform clanged, halted and jerked to a stop. My back was to a great light, but the children had my hands and they were gasping and pointing. I turned slowly, eyes closed, afraid of having my hopes dashed, even more afraid perhaps of having them fulfilled.

I opened my eyes to a bright white gate, only able to make out dark figures moving around as though they were swallowed up in the midst of an ivory sea. As the children pulled me through the gate, though, I was immediately struck deeply with confusion and despair. We emerged in what appeared to be an enormous warehouse, filled with thousands of other people, confusion on their faces.

Old vending machines, rusted car parts, lawn ornaments, antique weapons and other unidentifiable metal pieces lay strewn about the concrete floor and some of the children were digging through the piles. As my two ran over without hesitation and began constructing imaginary houses, the dawn of my mind shed its brightest light and I realized numbly that I was those children, rummaging through reality, constructing my own heaven, my own God, in the hope that I could after all control my own end. It had all been a game, a wager, a grasping and clawing as we fell, all of us, toward the swirling black and orange. Then rage.

Read Part 3

“God!” I called out in desperation.

“You must believe.” I turned to see an elderly man in a hospital gown.

“God?” I called out in fear, running from the man.

“You must believe.” A thin, pale-faced woman touched my shoulder.

“God!!!” I cried out in anger.

“You must believe.” I looked down and saw the boy, his eyes no longer pleading for an answer, now only pleading for my soul.

How could they not see? How could they continue to hold this mindless belief even after it had been proven false? They were so programmed in life that even death could not shake this belief. I cursed, partly at their foolishness in death, partly at my naivete in life; and, with a gun I snatched from the floor, I fired two shots into the air. A thousand faces turned to me and I shouted with all my strength:

“Do you not see? Do you not understand?” My chest was heaving and I felt larger than anyone else there. “I did believe and look where it brought me. Look where it’s brought you!” Each person in the crowd turned slowly to face his neighbor - there was a long, silent pause.

Then in unison, they turned to me and chanted, “You must believe.”

I could not take this any longer. In blind rage, I shouted and fired the third shot. Before I could close my mouth or breathe, a mighty rushing win swept through the warehouse and the echoes of the gunshot grew louder and greater until in a flash of white light my vision was gone and a deep, majestic and awesome voice rang out this anthem: “To those with faith, He reveals Himself.” Every nerve in my body stung and the wind continued to move me upward and out until in another strobe of light I was standing in complete silence, looking through a simple window into the most blessed peaceful scene my mind had ever been given.

Truth - I know now He is real. I pressed my hands and face to the glass to feel the warmth, to feel the truth, to steady myself. It had all been true; the world was upside down and faith was the reality. I had in fact chosen my own end. Grasping and clawing I fell toward the swirling black and orange. Then Hell.

Any time the phone rang this late, there was trouble. Last time Lorraine called for dad because her stepfather was drunk and had thrown one of her patio chairs through the parlor window. Dad had brought his gun, but didn’t need it.

I strained to hear what was being said. I heard mom shout something like she was crying; then I heard dad’s voice briefly. Something about an accident, about Jack’s wife, about the rain, a telephone pole. “David, I need you to take me to the emergency room. Mom’s in no condition to drive.” I hung up numb, the light clicked off, and I was left alone in darkness to imagine the worst.

But He does not make it easy. The mustard seed is small, common; when it comes time to exercise faith, however, I’m on my knees scrounging and scrambling for it. Some righteous actions are blessed, others seemingly punished and I’m left to a guessing game with eternal stakes.

I look at it this way… my skepticism is either a slowly-sipped poison that is eating away at my faith from the inside-out, or it is the tiny, unreachable window in my prison cell, the one I can look out and see the world, but cannot obtain it. If it is the poison, I need to drop the chalice; if it is the window, then I am damned to knowing, even in the smallest way, that there is something more and I can only know it and never experience it fully, I can only wander this cross section of the vast landscape with my eyes, never setting foot on anything but this cold and stony cell.

And to think it all comes down to a mustard seed.

All the placebo measures make me sick
   Houdini failed to sell his trick
The slope is steep and growing slick
   And in a tundercrash I’m grasping at the sky

Eliminate seducing voices
Illuminate divinest choices
Drown out the world and all of its noises
Eradicate.

Crystal in the air
   Sweeps across vanilla fields
To join the others.

I could look at all this white like some literary blizzard in which I’ll get swallowed up never to return. But spring has arrived. I don’t think the white space will last long.

“I was given charge of your well-being, and your interests are best served in my care.” Or so it was proclaimed and thereby believed that Lady Elna spoke for me. She had taken the liberty of talking to the judge about the whole thing; ultimately I was glad because I had frankly forgotten to, but I truly resented her stepping into this mess mom and dad left as if I were unable to cope.

Of course I can cope, I told the nurse.

She spared me a glance and a forced smile before losing herself again in my clipboard.

I felt like throwing my geranium at her - Elna, that is.

Once the house was sold she’d be off to Montego Bay or wherever her kind went to get away, and she’d probably even take the dog, although I was his favorite.

I suppose Elna thought of me as a worthless artist with no real opinion but what the liberals were feeding me. How little she knew. You don’t make money writing! And if it really was about the money, she bought ME the geranium! I would have picked a dandelion, in all its Bradbureqsue style, swathed in denim for textures sake. But in she came, facade gleaming and flowery words gushing, geranium in hand.

“You do realize these situations are particularly…” She looked out the window. “Precarious.” Politics as usual. I should have been used to the mindless formalities, the social bureaucracy, but it still annoyed me like fork on plate.

She droned on and on about the crash, and before she was done I was asleep. The nurse said she left the geranium and walked out around nine. She arrived a quarter past eight, so she must’ve stayed a while after I slept. Probably put whiskey in my I.V. One of her groundskeepers told me that’s how her last husband died. It did feel a little warm in here.

It turned out to be one of the best nights I’ve had in a while.  I met Caesar - a 17 year old boy whose father and mother were associate pastors at a church in Texas.  He really didn’t want anything to do with God or the Bible, and I assume that’s because he feels like its been crammed down his throat all his life.  I just but the decision in his hands and let God work away.

What I cannot understand about us is that we see childhood as a pitiful moment that will dry up and blow away not a moment too soon.  When heaven is so full of innocence, our children are yearning, reaching, scheming for an adulthood wracked with guilt and pain.  To a child, every tree, every house, every taste, every smell is new and wonderful and even fear itself is a stranger, calmly met with inquisitive minds.  Untouched (unspoiled) attitudes embrace every stage and every script with gusto, as if it were both their first and last.

Yet each child, each smiling face, will fight the good fight of faith and will one day stop, look back and realize that they have not cried in months.

Oh hang it all.

UPDATE: It ended up being worth it all. The finished product ended up being better that expected.

And so I sit here, torn. I have found my greatest love; she loves me in return. But there, looming on the horizon like a great inevitable desert, is separation – college. The bond we share is strong, but the phone does no one justice and for a man who has spent every day this summer with the woman he wants to marry, it pretty much stinks. And to add to the bittersweetness… its been two months since we’ve gotten engaged.

So, yeah. A dark, beautiful night.

But we have then forsaken the model given us by God. This loving, just and holy God who offers us grace but threatens us with hell. He does not abuse his power, but his position gives him great ability to reward or punish. The greatest threat is eternal damnation. The greatest act of love was the Incarnation, when the strongest Creature reached out to help the weakest Creature. So while the Creator demonstrated his gentleness, make no mistake that he will enact justice upon those who forsake him.

Where does our responsibility fall in all of this? Well, Jesus example was to be meek, humble and to turn the other cheek. But He got fairly violent when it came to the defense of His Father’s house. Romans 13 validates government as the God-ordained rightful bearer of the sword to reward good-doers and punish evil-doers. Even in the Old Testament, pagan nations like Babylon and Assyria were used by God to punish His children when they went stray. Don’t forget, the God of the New Testament is the God of the Old Testament, driving wicked people from their land, demanding national purity and promoting violence as a viable deterrent. I guess that makes God an imperialistic, theocratic (of course), bloody leader! So it is my belief that our national responsibility is to enforce good and punish evil. Of course this is a Biblical principle, so the good and evil (yes, absolutes) are, simply put, God’s moral law.

CBS News (Oct.28, 2004, 5:30pm): MAIN HEADLINE: Bush, Kerry Rock-N-Brawl (includes photo-op of Kerry and Springsteen) SUB HEADLINES: • Springsteen: This Is For John • Kerry Flying High • Ailing Arafat Headed To France • Bush Courts Swing States • Polish Hostage Begs For Life • Explosives Mystery Unravels • FBI Broadens Halliburton Probe Bureau Eyes How VP Cheney’s Ex-Company Won No-Bid Iraq Contracts • IAEA: U.S. Warned On Explosives • Iraq Hostage Drama Escalates • UN Workers Grabbed In Afghanistan

CBS seemed extremely slanted, and has over the course of the last few months. Ironically enough, I posted on my blog about CBS’s issues back in February. Even the headlines here are so pathetically one sided, its amazing its not KBS. ABC News (Oct.28, 2004, 5:30pm): MAIN HEADLINE: Hard Campaigning in Final Days (smug close-up of Bush) SUB HEADLINES: • Poll: Most Voters Confident Vote Will Be Counted • Voters Sick and Tired of Election Anxiety • Break-Ins, Shootings Mar Bush-Kerry Race • Arafat to be sent to hospital • U.N. nuclear agency says it warned U.S. explosives were vulnerable. • Iraq Militants Issue Hostage Death Threat to Japan • Group Claims to Kill Kidnapped Iraq Troops

ABC news seemed fairly impartial, but they also lack the up-to-date stories that drudgereport.com offers. FOX News (Oct.28, 2004, 5:30pm): MAIN HEADLINE: • Candidates Roll Out Star Power (photo: Kerry & Springsteen shaking hands) • Time For Big Guns - explosives still center stage • Hunt for Ammo Clues - defense department analyzing satellite photos SUB HEADLINES: • FBI Probing Halliburton • Ailing Arafat Going to Paris • Group: 11 Iraqi Troops Killed • ABC Holds Off on Terror Tape • Weekly Jobless Claims Up • Fraud File: Fla., Ohio Watched • FEC: Unlimited Recount Funds OK

FOX news (despite what I’ve said before) didn’t seem all that slanted. They had a headline about the Haliburton issue (which seems an unpleasant report for Bush.) They did deal a lot with the ‘missing explosives’ which could be harmful for Bush, and it seemed to take the side of refuting it. I don’t think there’s enough evidence (there is now an inconclusive video that surfaced, with Pentagon claims to the contrary) out there to say either way conclusively. Kerry is pulling a Dan Rather and using it in his campaign despite inconclusive evidence. You go boy. CNN.com (Oct.28, 2004, 6:00pm): MAIN HEADLINE: • Doctor: Arafat has blood platelet deficiency (photo: stocking cap, smiling Arafat) SUB HEADLINES: • Bush, Kerry trade barbs on campaign trail • Militants claim killings of 11 Iraqis • New Hannibal Lecter novel due next fall • Man says live wire in bath was to save marriage

Going to CNN for news is like drinking out of the school water fountain. Yeah, it’s got water, but it tastes terrible and stale.

drudgereport.com (Oct.28, 2004, 6:15pm): MAIN HEADLINE: • WORLD EXCLUSIVE: ABCNEWS TO AIR TERROR TAPE ON WORLD NEWS TONIGHT AT 6:30 EST - TERROR TAPE WARNS OF BUSH, CHENEY CONSEQUENCE… SUB HEADLINES: • CIA, FBI AUTHENTICATE NEW QAEDA TERROR TAPE; ABCNEWS EXECUTIVES CONSIDER POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF AIRING • Russia tied to Iraq´s missing arms; Pentagon: Weaponry relocated before war… • OIL PRICE DROPS $5 IN TWO DAYS… • AP: FBI Investigating Halliburton Contracts… • Documents Show Iraqis May Be Overstating Amount of Missing Material… • Teresa Critcizes ‘Neanderthal’ Attacks On Husband… • Arafat Agrees to Be Taken to Paris for Treatment… • Bush Flips The Bird In Early 90’s Video

Drudge is probably my favorite. He leans to the right, but he consistently puts up stories that would be controversial to each side… and what’s more, his site is great. Updated quickly, first with the big stories, clean uncluttered interface. Definitely my first choice. WhatReallyHappened.com (Oct.28, 2004, 6:00pm): HEADLINES: • Nuclear watchdog insists Iraq explosives taken after US invasion • 179 countries vote against the blockade of Cuba at the UN • Disputed Iraq Explosives in Place After Invasion, Video Shows • 911 : New Cover-up revealed? 9/11 Black Boxes “found” • Russia denies removing explosives from Iraq • Gov. Bush: Poll watchers can, should challenge voters • FLASHBACK: ‘US knew Iraq was WMD free’ • A cross country survey finds that college students support Kerry over Bush by a wide margin. (caption: Students are the ones who will pay their blood for a war based on lies.) • Twelve ways Bush is now stealing the Ohio vote

What Really Happened is blatantly left-wing. It has an occasional good lead, but its so marred with far-fetched, nonsensical sources that it’s hard to know what’s believable, what’s not.

This was it! A closer nail-biter than the Yankees-Sox game 7, but with greater ramifications. And to think, Ohio, the heartlands, the center of normality in this country made the final call who was going to be President of the United States.

I was fairly confident with Bush’s early lead, but found myself a little moist in the underarms during the Florida, Ohio, Michegan, New Mexico races, ad naseum. At 1:00AM, with 81% of the precincts reporting and Bush at a solid 52% over Kerry’s 48%, I feel confident (as do most of the media outlets) predicting that he’ll take Ohio.

That puts him at 266 electoral college votes, which means he only has to take Alaska and New Mexico to become President… and since he’s at 62% in Alaska and 52% in New Mexico, I can go to bed tonight with a great deal of confidence that I’ll wake up tomorrow to a President, not a President-Elect. That and 20,000 lawsuits from ‘disenfranchised’ voters. Boy, am I glad it only took me 30 seconds to vote…

“Franca’s friend, Jeffim Kuznetsov, a 25-year-old student from Russia who lives in Atlanta, said the suicide is evidence of how deeply many Americans were affected by Kerry’s defeat: 'It’s a national tragedy,” he said. “This election is devastating to all who believe in democracy’.”

This is a highlight stroke across the illogical and self-contradictory reaction being spewed out from Kerry supporters dumbfounded that Bush won.

“Devastating to all who believe in democracy?!” Do I need to point out the idiocy of that statement? Bush not only won the electoral vote which ensures the structure of our valuable Republic, but the popular vote which Democrats for 4 years were shouting about.

I suppose much deeper than this “national tragedy” is an oxymoronical sense of political and even intellectual elitism, juxtaposed against a group whose very party name implies that the masses dictate the direction of our country. How can this be? The majority - the god of the democracy - has spoken and has, in a sense, betrayed the same group who claims to have its best interest in mind. Instead of rejoicing for a clear victory for the “popular vote”, they have digressed all too quickly into name calling, accusation slinging and in this case, suicide.

The people, as the early Federalists acknowledged, is powerful and often fickle. That is exactly why we have a “democracy in a republic.” To give the people a voice without reducing it to anarchy.

But the only problem is that war never really is “politcally correct”. It can’t be dressed up in suits and ties. It is the worst of mankind, killing each other and taking life. But it is at times a necessity, and when necessary, it should be done as quickly and as effectively as possible. None of this placating our conscience with a “nice” war. It’s stupid.

Filming began this week in Athens, NY on the set of War of the Worlds, a new movie directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise scheduled for release sometime next year. So I’m driving home up Route 9 just outside of Hudson and I see this other-worldly light beaming across the Hudson mist… And I just had to. I turn the car around, follow the lights like a magi and eventually find myself walking past a police barricade down a side street in Athens.

I’m wearing a black overcoat so I guess I look official. The few cops I see don’t stop me. Just don’t look them in the eye. Hope he doesn’t notice the video camera bulging beneath my coat. Act like you know where you’re going and why you’re there. So I stand in the drizzle about 150 feet from the set and watch.

About 100 feet out into the Hudson River, a number boats and flats had been somehow joined and anchored and from this conglomeration rose what looked like a football stadium light pointed to the far shore. A row of lights across the Hudson indicated the bridge that had been whipped together for this scene. The first two pictures are shots of the bridge. (Yes, I know all of the pictures are terrible. I’ll do better next time.) A couple of people with walkie-talkies are nearby. I take out the cellphone and pretend to make an important call. Mumble audibly to curious passersby, “Yeah, take the deal.”

Walk a bit closer to where all the action is and notice I’m walking through a park. A few loitering people, no one says anything. Black ornate lamposts and studio lights set up but off. Found out later from a Times-Union story about it that “in the town park adjacent to the pier, rescue workers and cops manning medical tents and food stations become as terrified as the residents when aliens come down the street, and they, too, run for the boat.” Must have already filmed that scene. No scared cops. You can see the gazebo in the next two photos (light screen and everything!)

I get up a bit more courage and saunter into town. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any footage of that. I didn’t get up that much courage. (Actually, I didn’t want to lose the tape.) The director has been calling out directions to the crowded main street over a bullhorn: “Background action. Action. Rolling. Walking… walking… good… running now!” After I pass some makeup tents and a few dozen cop cars, I walk into a large group of extras (there must have been at least 300 there) who have just finished a scene. They’re piling into a small diner and getting something warm to drink. I stand near a broken Coke machine and a lady asks me if the machine works. She shoves a damp dollar into the slot and nothing. I smile and apologize for the machine.

A group of 30 or so military men approach, full camo with rifles and night-vision goggles. I push my luck and walk past the fake railroad tracks and stand by one of the store fronts decorated for the movie. From here, I have a clear view down the main street (which is lined with tents) to the ferry everyone is pretending to clamor for. (The last photo gives you a side shot of the street, ferry on the right.) I hear they’re going to blow it up and people will be jumping into the river. Not tonight. Later this week. It’s getting very hard to hide the camera. People waving signs that say ‘A’ and ‘B’, extras all gathering around the sign wavers. One guy warms his hands by the radiator of an important person’s truck.

Then my luck runs out. A Sam Jackson look-alike 180 pound heavier walks up to me and asks me if I’m an extra. “No sir.” He kindly reminds me (doesn’t hide his surprise well) that the set is closed to the public. I fibbed and told him I was waiting for someone. He called my bluff and pointed away from Hollywood into the moist and darkly lit night. Eh. I was tired anyway. And he didn’t even see my camera.

The video clips are available here if you’d like.

• Official War of the World Movie Website
• Villagers Flee to River in Hollywood Invasion
• Villagers Discover 'War' Can Be Hell as Filming Begins

It’s not that the process of transition from Blogger to MT is difficult-it’s just time consuming. I think I came into the whole process with a very different mindset that what I should have. MT is very, very customizable, making it in most ways more powerful than Blogger, but in most ways also more difficult to learn.

Everything seems to be up and running on the Blog, save the banner image background not showing up while running Internet Explorer. Next on the agenda? Subscriptions, plug-ins and a little friendlier style.

One such film I found interesting… It’s a clip of my father about forty years ago. He’s about eight. I’ve included it for your enjoyment, to experience the hypnosis for yourself. Of course, I’ve edited out a shot of him urinating off of Mt. Washington. Didn’t seem appropriate on many levels, really. You can download it here.

Oh and if the projector sound doesn’t work for you, check out “Music for a Found Harmonium” by Patrick Street. Heard it on the credits of Napoleon Dynamite and fell absolutely in love with it. You can turn down the clip sound and turn up this neo-celtic jig, if you like that sort of thing.

But, oh, it feels good sometimes, doesn’t it? Feels like a cleansing – like you’re ready to start again, only this time you’re going to put the good stuff in.

Did you ever notice that after a big rich or greasy meal your body just needs to lie still for a while, not moving, not exercising, just resting? Sometimes anger needs that. A rest.

This can also work the other way around. Finding yourself particularly upset with someone while on the cell? Simulate a “dropped call” and turn off the phone before your upsetter can call you back. Of course, this brings with it some basic ethical questions, like: Is a hang-up immoral? Is the sin in the hang-up or in the lie following the hang-up? Perhaps the answer to these questions seems simple. Perhaps pressing “end” seems the unpardonable sin. But these basic questions steer us to some thornier ones: Is it wrong to imply poor reception (blowing into the receiver, making static noises with your mouth, cutting words out of your sentences)? Am I a sinner for pushing to antenna down, hiding in the corner of my basement and covering myself with a lead blanket?

Tough questions indeed.

Our next stop was Chinatown. As we ascended the steps from the 9 station, we immediately became drops in the ocean. Canal Street was nothing but a writhing, bubbling mass of humans sweeping down the streets and avenues, splashing up against the buildings, swirling and eddying and carrying with it countless bagged and pocketed sale items, paper lanterns, folding fans, jade statuettes, silk kimonos, fat and happy idols, thrown to the horde by merchants. But the wild and unusual items in some of the open-air markets on Mott Street proved most interesting – dried sea cucumbers, bagged squid, puffed fish, almond and sardine snacks, shitake mushrooms. I even felt a tinge of sympathy for the piles of fish in cardboard boxes with their gills still pumping for breath.

Back up to 51st Street. We walked to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and waited in line to catch a glimpse of the decoration. Another sea of people, only this time, they were producing fire and the sight was both spectacular and sobering—thousands of misguided souls. I couldn’t stay for long. Just outside and west a bit we found the enormous tree in Rockefeller Center preceded by a row of trumpeting light angels (announcing man’s glory I assume). Carol of the Bells began to play and behind us on the Saks 5th Avenue store an entire fiber optic snowflake show shimmered in time to the music. At the end, the tree flashed with miniature strobe lights above hundreds of sherbet colored people circling the ice rink below.

Any trip to New York City without a taste of its edgy annoyance would be incomplete, so we found our way to Ellen’s Stardust Diner, waited obscenely long for a seat, sat at a cramped, public table and got harassed by the manager well before our waiter said hello. Then it was off to another restaurant, another line, another hour long twenty minutes, another chance to rest our weary feet and watch countless limos pass by on the street below. A mouthful of steak, some green beans al dénte and baked potato soup before we marched out past a hungry crowd that we could genuinely sympathize with.

Determined not to let dinner spoil our NYC time, we hailed a bike taxi—for those who’ve not seen this marvel, imagine a modern day rickshaw weaving in and out of traffic making better time than the limos stacked four wide and Manhattan deep. A mere twenty dollars to mingle with the automobiles, see Times Square from the dead center and experience some of the most pleasant brushes with death this side of bungee jumping. What a steal! Our driver pulled up to Grand Central and we tipped him handsomely for covering our laps with an old blanket and taking our photo at a red light.

A laser danced around the station’s ceiling as we entered, inscribing in emerald light the word “mistletoe” beneath a poor representation of the same, as if we needed clarification. I thanked aloud the brilliant minds behind the idea and after taking a few photos for couples I did not know, we boarded the 4 and headed back to Woodlawn. Fortunately, we were much less misguided on the trip home and we arrived safely, a little more tired, a little less moneyed, a great deal happier. And we topped off the whole thing with a dollop of It’s a Wonderful Life—a tasty conclusion for any feast of a day.

Travel back to 1982, Faith Christian Academy in Stotville, NY, which just recently closed its doors summer of 2004. My kindergarten teacher Mrs. Fournier was still teaching there until its recent closure.

Third through fifth grade (1985-1987), Columbia Christian Academy (still alive and well under the direction of Pastor Osbourne from what I understand): Last I heard, Philip Perrot was in trouble with the law, but this news is more than ten years old. Billy Baldwin was also in some legal trouble, but beyond that I don’t know much. I’ve heard very strange things about Tshama Wright—something about running off to another country with a child that she did not have custody over. These are all fairly vague rumors I’ve heard blowing in the wind. If anyone knows differently, I’d be happy to find out. Regina Jenner is still up in the Chatham/Hudson area, but may be married and is doing I know not what. Brendon Perkins is also around the Chatham area, but that’s all I know. My best friend from grammar school, Nathan Wolfe, is married now and taught for a few years at Upton Lake Christian School. He left a year or two ago for reasons I don’t know. Jason Covalli moved with his parents to Atlanta where he and his brother David now work at their family’s own pizzeria (with excellent slices I might add). Last we spoke he isn’t married but is heavily into sailing and owns his own boat.

On to Saratoga Christian Academy, which sadly closed its doors around 1996 or 1997 due to legal issues. I went to SCA from sixth to ninth grade (1988-1991). Mrs. Corrine Mulligan lost her husband early in 2004 to a tragic staff infection and her sons Dan and Mike are both on the police force in Saratoga Springs. John and Chris Bujanowski now live in Malta. Mrs. Ball was working at the Bon-Ton last I saw her, but this was quite a few years ago. Michelle Senn and Chris Allen are married. Bob Priest lives in the Saratoga area and works as a network consultant. Mike Stark is an engineer in Troy. Lara (Petteys) and John Priest are married and have a few children. Mark and Susan Nicholson now live in Gansevoort with two beautiful children, Haley and Ryan. Mark released his first CD in 2004. Naomi Nicholson is single living in Florida. Allison Knorr is married with one child and is currently a missionary to New Guinea. Her brothers Tom and Steve Knorr still live in the Saratoga area and her parents are active at Durkeytown Baptist Church. Sarah Knorr (from what I understand) married a devout Catholic man and has since left the family church. Last I heard, Aaron Kingsbury was working as a youth pastor, but that was quite some time ago. Mike Cole is a single dad living in Saratoga raising his two young children.

Tenth through twelfth grade I was home schooled and had a great group of friends at Wilton Baptist Church’s home school group. Tim Jackson met Crystal at Bob Jones University, married her and now teaches Psychology there. His brother Greg lives in Miami and his other brother Josh is married and lives in Wilton. Sonya Irish is currently working on her doctorate degree in Psychology and while she’s not married, I hear she’s interested in someone. Her sister Deirdre Irish, however, is married to Dale and just gave birth to a son. Jen Eaker is a case worker in Florida. (Carl) Nicholas Barr is married and is currently serving as an officer in the Navy. Bethany Hilliard is married and is expecting her fourth child (I believe), her brother Alex is serving in the military and Emily is in college at PCC (and enjoying it from what I hear).

Well, this was the first wave. College and youth pastorates are next on the list. I’m sure I missed a glut of people, so if you find any mistakes, or need to make additions or deletions, just email me and let me know. Thank you for indulging a fool’s walk down memory lane. This is just what I know.

Why must you leave me now?
I never said the words you needed most.
Why was I so afraid?
The fear inside is never worth the cost.
And if I could take back one word,
It would be the word unspoken.

I have no fear, or so I proclaimed,
But deep down inside I was fumbling.
I spoke of the world and the news of the day,
Yet the cross earned him nothing but mumbling.
I cursed and I swore when I mentioned God’s name
And it brought me to tears at the lie I became
When I did not speak Jesus to you,
When I did not speak Jesus to you.

How could I let all this fear seal your fate?
Why was I silent until it’s too late?
Why did I not speak the words that you needed?
Why did I leave my duty unheeded?
Where was the love I professed all these years?
All that I own now is regret and tears.
God for the shame of this selfish concealing,
All it would take was a simple revealing
Of the truth that I claim to believe,
Oh what do I truly believe?

Why must you leave me now?
I never said the words you needed most.
Why was I so afraid?
The fear inside is never worth the cost.
And if I could take back one word,
It would be the word unspoken.

– Gimp Runtime (must be installed first)
– Gimp Program File

For the skeptics, check out the site yourself:

There are obviously some heated debates raging out there about which is better, Photoshop or GIMP. Photoshop has been around for about 15 years now and GIMP has been an open source project for almost as long, so I have a feeling the conversation would go something like the discussion about Mac versus PC. Messy. See what other people are saying about it.

"Its three o'clock in the morning sir!! How are you feeling?" (Say this loudly) "Feels great Sargeant!!" (Say this louder) "Are you ready to run?" (Say this louder than both lines together) "Hooah Sargeant!!!!! (You need to just about scream this)

He’s going to continue to update it as often as possible, even in Bahgdad; so check it out and keep him in your prayers. I know he would appreciate both very much:

Click here to visit John’s blog.

| 10. giant gerber daisy (um…)
| 9. burlgar photos (how 'bout searching for “spell check” next time)
| 8. obedience -dogs (ok, ok… I can see it)
| 7. assyria food food (as opposed to assyria drink drink?)
| 6. move over butter theme (grr… now it’s stuck in my head again)
| 5. flash animation naked (it’s sad how many hits I get off of this)
| 4. safe ant mound drench -fire (this one lost me…)
| 3. deciduous forest’s food web (what the…)
| 2. cinder block robber video (what’s the fascination with thieves?!)
| 1. napoleon dynamite music for a found harmonium (heck yes it’s #1)

As attention shifts to Washington D.C. for Thursday’s Presidential inauguration, attitudes will be cooler than the temperature outside. And what makes this whole situation difficult is that knowing Bush’s reputation as a firm (bullheaded?) leader, you’d think they’d do everything to counter the negativity associated with resolve. You’d think they’d flip open the history book to the section marked World War I and they’d read Woodrow Wilson’s statement that “festivities would be undignified” after his 1917 inauguration. Turn ahead a few chapters to World War II and read the account of Roosevelt serving cold chicken salad and pound cake after his 1945 inaguration.

Desperate times call for desperate measures–the battle cry of this Administration in Iraq, and a palpable one at that. But if that desperation doesn’t somehow work its way into the actions of the commander-in-chief, its seems much more disingenuous. And the desperation I’m speaking of is not a frantic hopelessness, but rather a sobriety that highlights the magnitude of the task before us and the pain of those we’ve lost. I believe that the task in Iraq is important and momentous, but we ought not be so careless as to celebrate victory before the victory is won.

One of the largest debates has been “how human is too human”. Most scientist don’t have a problem with growing human organs inside of animals to harvest for humans who need them. But what happens when you develop a human brain inside a chimpanzee. What moral status does a “humanzee” hold? Would the ever-present but never-quite-serious question posed by movies like Blade Runner and Artificial Intellegence be suddenly plopped on our front doorsteps, or worse yet, our maternity wards?

I am afraid that in venturing too far scientifically, we have, for lack of a better term, bitten off more than we can chew. In this new frontier the possibilites are endless, as are the moral dilemmas. I came across an essay by Mark Rossi on “technical giants, ethical infants” in my readings and thought his summary was particularly profound: “When science becomes God, man is just another beast in the jungle.”

Of course, this digression was a predictable result of evolutionary thinking. I’ve always been amazed that we tell kids they came from monkeys, but then we arrest them for acting like it. Without the basic premise that mankind was created by God, we have a meaningless past, and therefore, a meaningless future. The same force that brought us here (chance) is the same force that moves us forward; so why value life? With a Divine Authority in place, we know our boundaries on this earth. We understand that life is sacred and that humanity has been set apart. In light of evolutionary thinking, however, pragmatism rules supreme and we now add to the old phrase: “All’s fair in love, war and science.”

The purple finger held high has now become synonymous with Arabs who have long been silenced, whose voice is now being heard, even if only very faintly, in this imperfect election. Middle Eastern tyrranies are trembling at the ramifications of this election. Democracy targets the very building blocks upon which their throne is settled; minorities who hold tight reign over their nations are now facing the dilemma–change or be changed.

Natan Sharansky, in his book A Case for Democracy, unashamedly proclaims freedom as the antidote for terror. Sharansky, a former Soviet dissenter jailed for his protests against the Soviet government, compares the autocratic, petroliarchs of the Middle East to Soviet dictators. The battle cry of his book is “no appeasement for tyranny,” and Sunday’s election shook from palace to mosque with the first few notes of that symphony.

Sadly enough, moveon.org mentioned nothing of it and michaelmoore.com had this as their headline: “British Troops Killed in Plane Crash Near Baghdad”–in small print beneath that: “US Predicts More Violence After ‘Great Day’.” What a shame that these self-proclaimed truth-seekers cannot see through their own jaded perceptions to a moment that, depite your left or right leaning, marks the beggining of freedom in an area long imprisoned.

The only survivor of a shipwreck was washed up on a small, uninhabited island. He prayed feverishly for God to rescue him, and every day he scanned the horizon for help, but none seemed forthcoming. Exhausted, he eventually managed to build a little hut out of driftwood to protect himself from the elements, and to store his few possessions.

Then one day, after scavenging for food, he arrived home to find his little hut in flames, the smoke rolling up to the sky. The worst had happened - everything was lost. He was stunned with grief and anger. “God, how could you do this to me?” he cried.

Early the next day, however, he was awakened by the sound of a ship that was approaching the island. It had come to rescue him. “How did you know I was here?” asked the weary man of his rescuers. “We saw your smoke signal,” they replied.

It’s easy to get discouraged sometimes when things appear to be going badly. But we shouldn’t lose heart, because God is at work in our lives, even in the midst of pain and suffering. Remember, next time your little hut is burning to the ground, it just may be a smoke signal that summons the grace of God.

They’ve done it and they’ve done it good.

The information giant puts forward it contender in the map market and as always, Google does not disappoint. Unlike the static click-and-wait interface of Mapquest or Yahoo, GoogleMaps incorporates javascript to make finding your way painless. Dragable sliders, double-click centering all with realtime updates sets GoogleMaps apart from any of the other map sites I’ve seen, and outside of all that, it’s FUN! I mentioned it to a tech friend of mine, and he just kind of giggled and started mumbling about how cool it was. And this site is so beta, you won’t find a link to it (as of this evening) on Google’s site (aside from the tour).

And if that doesn’t impress you - click on the menu item at the top marked “driving directions”. Put in your departure and your destination and Google will DRAW the directions out on the map for you. Still not impressed? Google offer’s their traditional single search box for searching the map. Type in “great sushi in New York” and the map slides to New York and lets you scroll through the great sushi places.

I’m going to go now. This is fun.

The new site I started tonight - I like it. Mucho Grande. The colors are fresh and the lines work well… very moving, very fluid. The little update boxes on the bottom make me really, really happy. (It’s almost all finished…)

The semi-new site I put together - very, very plain. It reminds me slightly of either dry oatmeal or wallpaper paste. Can’t decide which.

Their “old” site - done in FrontPage and ugly as a weed-whacked camel. Anyone want to submit it to Worst of the Web?

Comments?

UPDATE-2/10/05: There was no snow day… gr.

UPDATE2-2/11/05: Site finished!!!

O lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee: Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry;For my soul is full of troubles: and my life draweth nigh unto the grave.

I do not think it was a mistake the psalms that follows:

I will sing of the mercies of the LORD for ever: with my mouth will I make known thy faithfulness to all generations. For I have said, Mercy shall be built up for ever: thy faithfulness shalt thou establish in the very heavens.

After the initial shock of the news, I began to feel a great burning anger. Not so much at the man who sprayed the mall with bullets as the worldview that encourages him stupidly and then stares slack-jaw at its pupil.

I was tempted to call this senseless violence-force of habit, but it was not senseless. A world without God is a frightening place indeed, and “freedom” from right and wrong bring terrific, but perfectly sensible, horror. Throw away the Creator, blot out Truth, and tremble at the directionless hopelessness that remains in its wake, and tremble even more at the actions committed by those who have fallen prey to this abomination.

These actions, as sobering and serious as they seem, are merely the necessary outworking of a philosophy that devalues human life, and prehaps more tragically, absolute truth. Is the gunman who pulls the trigger more to blame than the philosopher who justifies it in his essays? We reard professors who preach moral relativism with unquestioned tenure and the fools who put it into practice with jail time.

There will be no quenching of this fire, no soothing of this hurt, no stopping of this plague until truth is restored and hearts are reconciled with God. Every other attempth is simply seasoning the rotten. And we expect a pleasant aroma?

So I found this interesting script that you can include on your site that will email you a notification everytime a googlebot crawls your site:

if(eregi(“googlebot”,$HTTP_USER_AGENT)) {
if ($QUERY_STRING != “”)
{$url = “https://”.$SERVER_NAME.$PHP_SELF.‘?’.$QUERY_STRING;}
else
{$url = “https://”.$SERVER_NAME.$PHP_SELF;}
$today = date(“F j, Y, g:i a”);
mail(“you@youremail.com”, “Googlebot detected on https://$SERVER_NAME”, “$today - Google crawled $url”);
}

Howard is fighting back, threatening a lawsuit for slander. Apparently, Howard sent a memo of concern about the story before it was aired and Moonves (or perhaps his administrative assistant) ignored it; so all of the statements Moonves has made about Howard’s incompetence are now fodder for hungry lawyers crying, “defamation!”

Either way the axe falls, CBS is in dire straits. When Moonves proclaims his network to be “99% fair and balanced” and promises “to make lemons from lemonade”, the straw grasping is evident. Civil war has this funny way of being neither civil nor beneficial.

Next thing I know, a British man who I assume is the manager but looks nothing like one strolls around the corner and confronts me in a stuffy brogue. He accuses me of pirating the movie. I protest, only to be dragged into a corner office where the contents of my hard drive are promptly searched by a technology-challenged blonde. I kindly explain that I don’t pirate movies, only music, and not often. She lectures me about the cost of piracy and I get mad and kick her mouse. It wraps around my leg and I fall over, then wake up ten minutes after my alarm was supposed to go off.

Steak will do it every time.

Am I alone here? How do you all handle this? I really need a program where I can type in my entries with a spell checker and a fully functional backup feature.

I really need to stop typing now. I’m mad.

Oh, and here’s a good site I was going to reference: https://www.defenddemocracy.org/

You started your post addressed to God by declaring that you meant no disrespect. First, why respect someone you don’t believe in? I think this reveals a great deal of where you’re at. There is a lingering sense of deference from childhood that keeps you respecting something that seems much less than real. You’re like the farmer’s child who wants to be an airplane pilot. You know you’re parents have put so much into the farm, but your heart is in the skies. Only the stakes are much higher and the consequences of following your heart may be more severe than most think.

Which brings me to another important part of your post: “My virginity will have been wasted all because everybody that raised me told me it was true.” I will not deny sex is an enormous part of life, but it is not bigger than life itself–it is a pleasurable sensory experience. So to plead a case of eternal proportions by bringing sex to the table seems a bit shallow. If God is true and hell is real and there exists a parallel spiritual world in which spiritual battles are constantly being waged, doesn’t an orgasm seem a bit trifle? I’m not saying this at all to belittle you or your desires, but to show its relative unimportance in light of greater things. If I am a soldier on a battlefield, the last thing I should be thinking about is my penis.

Of course, that begs the conclusion that we are involved in something bigger than our five senses. And maybe that is both the heart of the matter and our biggest problem. Anything extra-sensory is difficult to deal with, obviously, because we have no way of grasping it. I cannot pour a glass of holiness, wrap my arms around God (contrary to popular Christian music) or see His face. We are challenged, and even the Bible admits this, because those that worship God must worship Him in spirit. The core of Abraham, the core of the gospel, the core of the early church, and even the core of the Protestant Reformation was and is faith. But faith defies materialists.

Love and honor also defy materialists because they exist outside sensory perception (though some put these in the category “chemical reactions”.) The house you picture in your head that burned down last year exists nowhere but in your mind; this is a quandary for strict materialists. It isn’t real because I can’t touch it or experience it. Only you can. This is one of the primary reasons relativism has become so prevalent. Not only is this view easy (no confrontation) but it reduces truth to preference and makes life both gentle and worthless–“nothing to kill or die for” as Lenin so aptly put it.

You also take issue with Christian happiness. “I know plenty of people who aren’t religious at all, and they seem to be happy.” Well, I won’t pull the “oh, but they’re not really happy” shtick that most conventional (and often thoughtless) Christians will. Let’s look at it a different way. When I drink a half bottle of Jack Daniels, I feel pretty good. I get warm and woozy and say silly things. When I run my car off the road and crack open the skull of a ten year old with my radiator grill, I feel pretty bad. When I’m in bed with a mistress, I feel pretty good. Passion is pleasurable. When my wife walks in on us, I feel pretty bad. The ire is in the outcome. So I while I cannot say that Christians are the happiest people on the planet, I believe that their fate is going to be most pleasurable.

Blaise Pascal put forth this dilemma in the form of a “wager”. He said that if Christians are wrong, there is no God and annihilation is all that waits for us on the other side of the hospital bed, what have we lost? A few years of sexual pleasure? A conversation full of vulgarity? The taste of liquor? But if Christians are right, there is a God and we will all be judged for our actions, the atheist will deal with the consequences for eternity. Even the most reasonable man should see foolishness in such a wager.

There are plenty of other things to talk about here. Christianity is rife with hypocrisy (I’ve got a post about that coming soon) and laziness. Christians are afraid of a dangerous God. But before you drop the hot potato of belief, ask yourself this one question—a question that has both plagued and challenged me through the years. Have I lived it fully? When teens come to me and complain that there parents don’t trust them, I usually ask, “Should they?” The answer is usually no. When a person comes to me and talks about the faithlessness of God, I usually ask, “Have trusted Him fully? Stepped out in faith? Sacrificed all?” The answer is usually no.

You ended your post with a plea to God: “Do something.” How do you respond when He asks you that?

Again… this isn’t an attack. Simply an invitation to look honestly and without hypocrisy at God.

I think one of the greatest accomplishments of Satan in recent years has been the denouncement of importance. Nothing matters anymore, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fanatic. The primary target? Our belief system. Faith is to many of us like a game; you try your best, but if you lose it’s not the end of the world. So many people underestimate how greatly their life is impacted by their belief system.

Take, for instance, the ever raging debate in Christendom over cultural influence. For many years a majority of Christians believed that the Kingdom of Christ was to be ushered in by Christian actions; if you wanted Christ to return, you worked hard to make the world more like the Kingdom. This led to the ‘social gospel’ at the turn of the twentieth century.

Enter dispensationalism and the belief that Christ’s Kingdom would not be ushered in but rather usher us out–save us from this wicked world. That subtle shift of doctrine completely rewrote the church’s attitude and we were no longer working to invite Christ’s Kingdom, we were biding our time until His return. So many Christians moved out of the cities and adopted a seclusionary view of society–duck and cover until you hear Gabriel’s silver trumpet.

This did several things. First, a world in need of preservation took a turn for the rancid while Christian’s practiced spiritual lassaiz faire. Second, when the world was in the most need of answers (World War I, World War 2, etc.), those who had the answers were nowhere to be found. This brought an extreme skepticism and distrust of Christianity. Third, and perhaps most devastating, these head-in-the-sand Christians who stood at a distance with a maranatha contempt for the rotten world became nothing but condemning strangers. Instead of reaching out, Christians were reaching up, forgetting that Jesus declared: “whatever you do to the least of these, my brothers, you do it to me.” The world continued on as it has and unbelievers learned that Christians, even by their own profession, have nothing to do with it.

Christianity, 2005. We try to take back art and music, but it is too little, too late. The very foundation upon which most of our institutions are erected is denouncement of this world. And those who do manage to break free from decades of this mentality come face-to-face with a society that wants none of it. After all, they’re not the one’s who changed.

Now people talk a great deal about being Christians. It’s like talking about being an Italian when you live in New Jersey; you can claim it as a heritage, but it really doesn’t apply to today. Today you live in New Jersey. And I’m afraid too many people are looking at the Bible on the shelf, ‘God’ on their currency, and Christmas on the calendar and forgetting that those things are a heritage, not necessarily a reality. If we are going to effect any change in our culture and become living, breathing, active children of God, we’re going to have to fight compromise and take God’s Word seriously.

The last time I celebrated a milemarker post (100), PlasticMind was nothing more than junkmail with a brain in a jar. Things haven’t really changed much, except now instead of getting my insidious posts delivered to your inbox, you now have to visit plasticmind.com to find out why I sent you this babble in the first place.

But bigger things are in store. I’m working my proverbial head off trying to get PlasticMind cohesive. I’d like to get my blog, a web design center and my portfolio all working together to make things pretty and potent. Ideally, I’d like to get Plasticmind Design off the ground before I move to Philly. Which brings me to my next ‘happenings’ item.

Jess and I are very excited about getting married. After we get back from our Bermuda cruise, we’ll be living in Langhorne (suburb of Philly) while Jess finishes off her degree at Philadelphia Biblical University.

I’d like to get people’s input on the look of my new site. I’ll update this post in a day or so with snapshots of each design idea I’ve got and get a feel for what you all think. Ah… I’ve got to go. My chicken is burning!

Jon Fisher is not only a good friend of mine, he is a chaplain in the Army who is going to be shipped out to Iraq near the end of April. He’s been updating his blog since he started boot camp in January; for those of you who visited his old site, we’ve changed alot. Obviously, things look quite a bit different, but you can also now post comments about the entries, subscribe to Jon’s mailing list or bookmark a live RSS feed of his site.

Lots of interesting things over there. Go check it out:

plasticmind.com/fisher

Ironically, you can also type in ‘chaplinfisher.com’–no, no, I’m aware of the misspelling; unfortunately Jon bought a misspelled domain name. sigh Whichever works best for you.

The other one I think I’ll hold my tongue on–still mulling it over in my head and talking it through with close friends. I’ll be sure to post when the idea matures. Let’s just say its a blend of technology and ministry in a way I’ve not seen it done before. Stay tuned.

P.S. (Any business owners feel free to leave me some tips of starting a small business; i.e. merchant accounts, dba’s, etc.)

On a more serious and less joyous note, I had a job interview today. Before you slap me on the back, let me finish. I walked in for my interview with the manager of FastSigns here in Langhorne. Instead of a handshake and a cordial chat about goals and expertise, I heard him rant to his wife that he couldn’t hold a job until July and that she should just send me away. Any of my students want to guess what I did? Yup. Walked out with a smile.

Went next door to McDonalds to get some comfort food while wearing Mat’s FBI sweatshirt; keep in mind, this is the McDonald’s where noone in the back speaks fluent English, nor do they speak each other’s language. The Asian lady who was frying up my hashbrown glanced nervously at the Arabic woman fidgeting with the register.

“You SBI?” I didn’t get the Asian woman’s question until she pointed at the sweatshirt. “Oh, no, no, no. My fiancee’s brother bought it in Washington. I’m not FBI.” She laughed extremely loudly. “Ahhh! You no SBI!” She looked at the Arab woman and pointed to me, “He no SBI.” The Arabic woman smiled broadly and laughed, “I tink you from FBI.” I laughed and took my food to go.

I must admit that after church this morning, I had little motivation for anything, let alone urban evangelism in cold, grey rain. I was irritable about the smallest things, a sure sign of Satan at work; it’s amazing how dreadful ministry seems before the fact. It’s as if every fiber of my being was sore, my mind keen with excuses for reaching to the pillow rather than reaching to the lost.

But we went, hesitantly and stubbornly, and it was good for my heart. Many years ago my heart burned with a passion to reach inner-city kids, and on this damp, ashy day on C Street, the Spirit swept across the ember and it began to glow again. The graffiti on the buildings, the piles of trash in the streets—nothing compared to the emptiness of the hearts. I even watched a young man hand off a plastic bag full of white stuff in exchange for a wad of bills—one needing a fix, the other needing the cash, both needing a Savior.

So we rounded up some children on this bleak day and bused them back to the church, where the leader explained Christ as the “door”… thirty kids sitting for a moment on the Rock of Ages while a surge of lost souls swirled around us on those cold, cramped streets.

And in true keeping with the Gardner form, he’s a nerd. Upon first arriving at the house, he buried his head in mom’s shoulder. I broke the ice by handing him a cell phone, which he immediately snatched from me, opened and began scrolling through my phone book (he’s eighteen months). At Christmas he even stole Deannie’s phone and dialed one of her college friends. I tried handing him my old stuffed bear; he went for the laptop. The only thing more exciting than his cell phone was my camcorder.

He’s talking now, barely. His intonation is that of a charismatic preacher, but I can only understand one in one hundred words. He babbles on and on, with sweeping gestures and earnest facial expressions, and every now and again I hear my name. Either that or the word ‘disease’, can’t quite tell.

Anyway, on to the good stuff. For all of my lazy readers who come only for the pictures, songs and videos, I put together a fun little snippet of this, the cutest baby ever. Enjoy!

Download the GabeDance Video

When I close my eyes tonight, lay my head on the pillow, dream for the first time the dreams that twenty-eight-year-olds dream, I’ll feel it–that mental grasping where you close your eyes tighter, tighten your muscles slightly and want the future. Want to be married. Want my business to succeed. Want to be a man of God. Want to be outside of these parenthesis.

After months of waiting and saving, a birthday and a tax return, I screwed my courage to the sticking point and stepped boldy into Best Buy, making a beeline toward the ‘Portable Audio’ section. I bought an iPod.

A brand new 30Gb, iPod Photo, to be precise. On it one will find all of my 2800 songs (yes, I hate piracy, ask my students), all of my 1200 photos, every document I’ve ever written, my entire design portfolio and all of my videos, uncompressed. I can wake up to music, go to sleep to music, scroll quickly through all my photos, read documents stored on it, import all of my Thunderbird contacts, to-do lists and schedules, or just use it like a big 30Gb flash disk. If I get bored, it even has solitaire.

And for all those who think I’ve gone off the financial deep end, don’t worry. I bought a four dollar camera case from Walmart to put it in.

We got on the road early Friday morning and drove a good six hours through Pennsylvania, enjoying the farmland, barns and good weather. Uncle Sam nearly ruined the ride with a hefty twenty dollar toll at the end of I-76. Ohio brought more trucks than anything, shaking our poor little Hyundai any time one rumbled past. A dispatcher friend of mine once expressed what he considered the opinion of all truck drivers–all passenger cars should be banned from the interstates. Not too comforting as we passed a double-trailer FedEx truck.

Toledo was small and fairly uninteresting, though the Jeep factory caught our attention with its name stacked in large boulders on its enormous front lawn. We hit Detroit during rush hour as we crawled slowly past a number of large auto manufacturing plants, under a huge unfinished bridge and finally onto I-96. We stopped to eat at a Bennigan’s just outside Lansing, and as we waited for our meal we tried to identify why these people were different than “Yankees”.

First, the women and men were both huskier and better looking. Most everyone there was beautiful and looked as though they could fell a tree before a Northeasterner could even understand what that means. Also very polite. Smiles, head nods and kindness without out all the sicky-sweetness of the South.

We pulled into Cedar Spring around 9:30PM and were dumbfounded by the stars and the silence. Cedar Spring is about thirty minutes north of Grand Rapids, but its solitude feels and awful lot like Maine. We stayed Friday night with the Derek, the youth pastor of Kent City Baptist Church, and his wife Katie; they were so welcoming and talking with them was wonderful.

Saturday morning and afternoon were uneventful. The only exciting thing I discovered was the fact that Michigan’s roads are in a grid, a very large grid, and you can drive them very quickly because there are almost no turns or curves. We drove through Grand Rapids and were impressed with how clean it was. Someone told us that it was still considered part of the Bible belt. In many ways it reminded me of a large, sprawling Greenville (SC).

Saturday night was the rehearsal, Jon’s family goofing off and having fun, Sarah’s family stressing and getting things done. Sarah sent Jess to pick up the food for the rehearsal dinner. Poor Jess got lost headed there, finally got her bearings, arrived at the caterers only to find the meal not ready, waited, headed back and then spilled an entire three gallon pail of chicken noodle soup all over the floor of her car. Fortunately, we all laughed about it after.

Saturday night was late and long and Sunday morning came far too early. The pastor’s message was fantastic; I had been expecting something less that convicting (presuppositions) and was surprised at the fervor and importance of what he spoke about.

After lunch at the Fisher’s, we headed up to the church around three. Snap, snap, snap–pictures for hours while the unusually hot sun made us squint. The photographer made us jump up in the air. She said it would make a great “action shot”. If nothing else it made us sweat. And while we’re on the subject, Jon began sweating bullets as people began to arrive. “Jumping out of a plane would be easier,” said the soldier attired in his dress blues. I assured him that he was making a wise decision and the groomsmen all retired to a room to talk about guns and bodily functions before the ceremony began.

And it began. We marched down to the front of a packed sanctuary and Jon and Sarah were married. Everyone would tease him after about the scowl he had the whole time, but after three months of basic, it was understandable. They exchanged vows and kissed and raced down the aisle to the tune of Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee. The reception was very laid back, but completely enjoyable. I got up first and gave a toast. I mentioned Jon’s courage, come “woman or war”, and raised a glass to a life of service. Other’s got up, some funny, some heartwarming, and then we ate cake. It seemed to be over before it started and after I loaded his car with toilet paper and a “new marriage scent” air freshener, I was in bed and Monday morning was coming too soon.

The ride back was fantastic. Jessica and I laughed the entire way; every day I’m more and more realizing that life with this woman is a wonderful thing. We took PA I-80 to avoid tolls and ended up driving through some of the most interesting towns (like Carbon and Jim Thorpe) on our way back. We were back in time for 24 and I was in bed by 10:30PM.

How did I top off this phenomenal weekend? Thank you for asking. As soon as I arrived at home in Chatham, I went straight to the dentist where he shoved a needle in my gums, drilled holes in my teeth and packed them tight with amalgam. I suppose the upside is that my iPod really will play fifteen hours on one battery charge.

You have brought me a love I am most unworthy of, and instead of lavishing you with praise, I’m living in fear that you’ll take her from me. Oh this life is so full of forgetfulness–I drive at night with music beating you out of my mind and all it takes is a glance from a little girl and a prayer to bring me to tears.

Remember when I was young? Remember innocence? Then I was young and unafraid and my heart was not this pleasant little rock garden that I tend to. Five pages on a legal pad of what I want to do with my life, but the hallways of my heart feel so empty without the King there!

Please God, don’t turn away. Don’t turn me over to the vanity of my own way. I don’t want pharoah’s throne. I want to be worthy of this bride, earthly and spiritually.

Yours?
J

I think of the well-meaning firemen, tear-brimmed eyes, invoking the name of a God they wouldn’t recognize if He came down to earth and died on a cross for them. Then the masons gathered, white aprons around the waist, to read prayers from a booklet. A white apron was laid on the coffin to signify the purity of a righteous life. No spots? There would have been spots on mine. Then a sprig of acacia was placed to signify eternal life.

I think I was sobered by the fact that so many people carry faith like they carry tissues–it’s good for wiping up runny noses. Give me a good day, though, and I’m outside running around, throwing a few back with friends, laughing about nothing while the tissue box sits at home, waiting patiently for sickness and death to make the nose run. Sure, you can wipe your nose on your sleeve, but decorum bids us use the tissue. How like modern faith! Dust off the Bible for a funeral, pass around the Gospel of John when the wife leaves, lift voices in prayer after a school shooting. You blow your nose when it runs, you take asprin for a headache, you order french fries when you’re hungry and you call on God’s name when you’re faced with something you can’t handle or understand.

During the committal, I leaned over and commented to Mat: “You never see an atheist at a funeral.” Maybe they are there, just frightened to come out, scared at the implication of their disbelief. Isn’t there an atheist minister who should be bidding his nonbelievers to pass along the message they offer? Do they scatter to their holes like cockroaches at the sound of death? This is not the time for grinding axes, they argue. What better time to reconcile the foolishness of belief than here at the brink; don’t let the disillusioned wife and children be lied to!

I suspect that most everyone that stands at a graveside is at least imagining an afterlife. Take a flower, sniff it, imagine heaven and picture yourself there–the simplest salvation available. And what American does not want a simple afterlife to correspond to their already simple life on earth?

As I drove away from the graveside, I couldn’t help but imagine all the people who, after witnessing today’s funeral, will simple resume their nominal lives and move ever closer towards theirs, aimless, godless and hopeful of vanity.

Wedding Recessional - (1.86Mb, 2:02) - Enter the bride… I put this piece together for Nancy and Justin Guay’s wedding. It’s a fairly simple piece, but it depends greatly on the resonance of the piano which, sadly doesn’t exist with a Clavinova. (No offense)

Untitled Improv #1 - (5.1Mb, 5:34) - The taste of a summer day with a head full of thoughts… the stream caressing the hand with your eyes turned upwards… This begins slow and thoughtful, blossoming toward the end into a heartfelt and striking love piece.

Untitled Improv #2 - (4.1Mb, 4:26) - Tears fall from a worn dock into a copper lake… thoughts of yesteryear and the pain of losing love… This piece is a complex blend of bitter and wistful, a sombre contemplation that begins as powerfully as it ends.

We predict tomorrows temperature, the gender of an unborn child, the course of a nation and then, all at once we stand high and thrust a prideful glance upward with our false sense of godlike accomplishment. Then, just as easily, we find ourselves shattered by an earthquake or the loss of a loved one or a war which leaves us sobered by the realization of just how small we are.

So as religious leaders argue, politicians debate, protestors march, abortionists kill babies, fanatics kill abortionists, bad people walk and good people die, there is Someone higher who is reaching down with hands of love willing to do anything–even sacrafice His only Son–to set us free from our own sinful selves. And yet so many turn away with a laugh because all they know is the here and now which is so infested with imperfections; they are afraid to accept something different regardless of whether or not its better.

Rene Descartes gave us the adage, “I think, therefore I am” and limited reality by making true only those things that can be comprehended by man. But the question then must be posed: “If men vary in their comprehension of reality, which man determines the correct ‘comprehension’ of the physical world?” It turns into a endless cycle of unanswered questions that we use to confuse ourselves into believing anything and therefore nothing.

So I present to you God Almighty. He created you and me and the world in which we live and sought fellowship with His creation. He gave the first man, Adam, the choice of obedience or disobedience and Adam chose to disobey, plaguing our race with sin. So we sit in this world and wonder why God is not in control. Why do children get beaten by their parents? Why do school kids shoot their teachers? Why does it seem like bad people prosper and good people suffer?

Sin–disobedience to God–has brought this upon us, and yet we blame Him for our woes when He is the one reaching down to us with a divine, incomprehensable love that goes beyond human understanding. Though we scorn Him and blame Him, He loves us and offers us this gift of eternal life with Him–a blissful relationship of love and perfection.

The offer itself is not enough, because He is SO loving that He will not force His love upon any man. So the decision lies with you, my friend. If you are condemned, it will not be because God is cruel. Rejection or acceptance by faith? What will you do with God?

The winding twisting back roads of Ghent took me to some amazing places… I took over a hundred photographs–barns, farmhouses, windmills, dandelions. But the most memorable was a brief encounter I had with a hungry cow and an ornary turtle.

I first passed the cow (whom I will refer to as Ferdy, short for Ferdinand, in loving memory of Ferdinand the pacifist bull) while cruising for barns down a dirt road behind the old Kingdom Hall in Ghent. I pulled over, grabbed the camera and a handful of tall grass from the side of the road. Ferdy approached cautiously at first (photo). When it became obvious that I was not going to grab her udder, she because quite a bit more curious (photo). THEN I showed her the grass, and she let me know she was willing to do ANYTHING to get it (photo). She checked it out to make sure it wasn’t just a handful of plastic straws–they don’t eat plastic straws (photo). I wasn’t going to make it easy, considering I wanted a good shot (photo). Then came the disgrace, yellow tongue flailing, making the most ungodly noises (photo).

I bid them all farewell and made it only a short ways down the road before I came upon this old guy (photo). He was not happy with me. I got some great shots and thanked him before he flipped his tail at me incredulously and lumbered into the woods.

I captured so many great barns and landscapes today that I just don’t have time to put them all up. I’ll have to trickle them in as I find time. They’re processed and ready to post, so keep an eye on the photoblog as there will be a great influx of photos over the next couple of days.

Vive le photographe!

WARNING: SPOILER INSIDE

“Hey Jay, just wanted to let you know that SURPRISE you’re going to be an uncle again. Jessica just found out yesterday. She is 5 weeks pregnant.”

I nearly fell out of my chair! Congratulations! More photo ops for me!

We often look at this truth through only one end of the telescope. We view this truth as liberating to God. He is free from the constraints of time; therefore, the past, present and future are just as tangible for Him as this present moment is for us. A beautiful thought, to be sure. But the beauty lies not is chronological freedom alone; the very control of time itself proves the greater ability.

Have you ever experienced that one moment of bliss–a tender kiss, thunderous applause, enrapturing sunset–and found yourself wishing it could last forever? Our Father is able. Imagine that moment of total fulfillment stretched for years; and pure fulfillment. One plague of time is that dullness or complacency that grows with each passing moment. Even the most wonderful of flavors can make us ill; that tender kiss would grow painful over time.

But perfect contentment and fulfillment–that truest glimpse of heaven–would mean endless satisfaction and enjoyment. That is why finding beauty amidst banality is one of the most divine experiences a man can have.

Just wanted to let you know that I’ve put many new images in my photoblog recently, and if you haven’t been there, check it out. I scanned in, cleaned up and uploaded some of my notebook artwork from days past, thought you might at least get a kick out of it. I’ve also finished posting all of the barn images from my drive home the other day.

Hope you enjoy.

I love picking out a duvet cover and sheets; I hate going to sleep at night alone. I love sitting in the food court with the woman I love; I hate that it can’t be our own living room. I love looking up at the clouds; I hate saying goodbye. I love getting married; I hate all this rigamaroll.

It really was an amazing weekend, please don’t let the sorrow of my words fool you. Not only did Jessica and I pick out 600-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, but it hailed (pictures forthcoming) stones the size of gravel. We ate her father’s amazing smoked chicken and played way too many games of Rummykub.

We met the musicians for the wedding (the Allens) and decided on the music (saw a albino deer while we were there). The bridesmaids will be marching in to Ave Maria and Jess will be coming in to our very own version of Pachobel’s Canon in D. Of course Mark Nicholson will also be singing for us and he’s also kind enough to put together a soundtrack of his song “Threefold Cord” that she and I will be singing. And to what will we march out? None other than the Hallelujah Chorus–fairly appropriate, I thought.

It’s all been wonderful, and I cannot complain for the love we share. But I feel so ready for this next stage of our relationship, and yet the wheels just keep spinning and spinning. I know, Dad, it’ll be here soon. But I’d just like to close my eyes, lay my head down and wake up July 9th. Weddings are fun, but I’m firmly convinced that marriage is better.

Hi, Bob. Looks like he’s busy hunting mice, so we’ll leave him and get back to life. Friday was insanely busy; I played guitar and spoke on temptations in youth group. I miss it terribly, but also feel quite rusty. Next day we skipped out on going to Six Flags in New Jersey, because three and a half hours one way is not (at this point in my life) my idea of a good time. Instead, Jess and I spent the afternoon together, a hint of driving, a dash of yard sale-ing, top it off with a sunset at the quarries with swans beating the air overhead and you have a tough, yet savory day. It’s getting heavy, let’s check in with Bob…

Aw. All this talk of helter-skelter is tiring him out. Let’s talk peaceful. With the sun making long shadows of the gravel mounds, and the geese dragging their feet across the lake, we threw stones at dirt canyons to make the walls collapse. I put my hands in a fresh spring until they went numb, then I sat on some shale and watched the swallows and martins swarm around their nests in the sides of the cliffs like bees. Two or three to a group would fly in dizzying circles around the cliff, then dive to the water, pulling up just in time and skimming across the lake just a few inches above the water. It was hot but the wind cooled us down.

Oh look, I guess I put poor Bob to sleep.

Night, Bob. I guess it’s that time for me too.

QINA#1: Varying Degrees of Punishment

Are there varying degrees of (after death) punishment for sin? In other words, will the man without Christ who lies to his boss face as severe a punishment as a child rapist without Christ? Obviously, both constitute a breach of the law, but are they both equally as egregious?

And if there is only one punishment for every sin, why do we have varying degrees of punishment on the earth? Shouldn’t we have one single punishment for all in an effort to emulate the Kingdom?

And along those lines, consider the fact that the God of the Old Testament gave many different punishments based on the offense.

QINA#2: Sola Christos

If there is no other name under heaven by which man can be saved but Jesus Christ, what of Old Testament saints? Now I know the answer you’re going to give; you’ll say that they are saved by looking forward to Christ. But they did not have his name; so in truth they are really saved by the concept of Christ. Does that then imply that those today who do not know the name of Christ can still be saved by His concept?

QINA#3: Accountable But Not Able

How can a man be held accountable before God by general revelation (nature, etc.) without being able to respond to it? Can a man be saved by the declaration of the heavens? (Ps.19:1) If not, how can he be condemned for not responding to something he is not capable of responding to?

QINA#4: Pompey and the Most Holy Place

Why was the Roman general Pompey not struck dead when he entered the Holy of Holies in the temple? If God was willing to tear apart Uzzah, a Jew with good intentions, for touching the Ark of the Covenant, why would he spare Pompey, a insolent pagan, who claimed the right to violate the Holy of Holies? This was well before the veil was rent at the crucifixion. If the temple was already “empty”, the significance of the veil being rent would be greatly diminished, if not meaningless altogether.

QINA#5: Native American Salvation

We know how God shared His truth and His salvation with the Jews; what of those people who did not live anywhere near the Fertile Crescent? How did people from Japan or Native America get saved? And this then ties into QINA#2 … they obviously did not know Christ or Jehovah. Should we assume then that all are damned? Or should we assume a broader view of salvation?

There are many different styles of preaching today, as was probably the case in Spurgeon’s day. Some were pulpit-pounders, some were screamers, and some just let the truth do the screaming. One of the major differences between the preaching of Spurgeon’s day and now is the enormous amount of truth in Spurgeon’s sermons. Each word and phrase had a purpose and was placed in the message like a jewel set in a crown. Many of our so called sermons today are full of audible ramblings – almost a stream-of-consciousness approach to preaching. Preachers get up and give a constant flow of their ideas, opinions and questions about a verse, instead of filling the message with meaningful truths that can be gleaned.

Truly lack of truth is an important difference, but another one of the major differences is the lack of theology. One of Spurgeon’s sermons was many times filled with more theology than a week’s worth of today’s average revival services combined. He was not afraid to fill each nook and cranny of his sermons with what we would call "deep” theological truths. Too many preachers today would pass off the idea of covering “deep” theological matters as simply nonsense and of no use to the “average” believer. This prevailing mindset of lazy preachers has created a generation of anemic Christians.

There are many negative changes from the preaching of Spurgeon to that of today, but we must not neglect the positive. The strong points of today’s preaching that stems from Spurgeon are the vivid illustrations and word pictures that are painted. Today’s preachers are proficient at making the difficult truths of God’s Word easy to understand, and skilled at bringing theological truths to a definite application.

Much has changed in the area of preaching, and yet much has stayed the same. People, at their core, are the same as they always have been, and despite a busy changing society, we can still learn from great men of God. Spurgeon, the prince of preachers, has left us a sterling example to follow in the presentation of God’s Word.

I am the flag.

Chance, though, is what gives the play it’s power. That element of uncontrollable external circumstance is universal, and it creates in the audience’s mind the thought: “If only”. That frustration of powerlessness makes Romeo and Juliet a truly effective tragedy. Each chance event has such a bearing on the entire play that one small change in any event could have affected the entire play. For example, if Friar Lawrence had only arrived at the gravesite sooner, Romeo would have known the plan and he and Juliet could have been spared.
This brings up another point. The play is so fascinating because it arrests the audience’s attention. The suspense is high because the plot pivots on so many on these chance elements. The audience waits in anticipation to see Romeo get the Friar’s letter, but he never does. So the audience shifts their hopes to chance that Friar Lawrence will be able to inform Romeo of the plan in time. Throughout the play, the audience is left wondering whether or not it will end tragically; so when the end does come, the tragic conclusion is a shock to an unsuspecting audience.

So ultimately, love is not the main theme of Romeo and Juliet; Shakespeare is rather exploring the element of chance and the major role it has in the outcome of our lives. Though over-the-top at times, it help build suspense in the minds of the listeners; thereby making the play as effective as possible and giving us one of the greastest works in the English language.

What a coincidence.

Sitting in front of my desk at home on this, my first day not going to school, I’m feeling rushed but ready. I still have to proctor (not to be confused with proctologist) a few days of NY Regents exams, but the end has basically come and gone.

Oh, and I need to vent. For years I’ve had this nightmare that I’d appear before a great congregation only to find that I was unprepared for whatever I needed to do, speaking, singing, whatever. I worked for weeks on the senior’s dedication video to be played at our school’s graduation; hid it from the parents and staff, played it up for the big day. So the big day came, and I was ready. I watched the video the night before to make sure there were no scratches on the disc or hesitations. I ran it through during graduation practice and it worked fine. The moment came in the ceremony, I hit play and in the first 20 seconds, I knew the nightmare was coming true.

Jumps, pauses, hesitations, 2 or 3 second chunks of nothing between sentimentality and meaning. I tried pausing it and playing it again, to no avail. So I just put my head on my arm and ‘endured’ the next 8 minutes of something akin to Forrest Gump in a blender. After the ceremony, I stayed in the sound room for awhile, to avoid vacuous comments like, “So… the video messed up, huh?” or “What happened up there?” as if I didn’t notice. But I digress.

PlasticMind Hosting will soon have a site online (stop being a perfectionist sir!) where the tired, huddled masses yearning to exist inexpensively can come. Thank you all for your support and interest in this ever-growing venture. The clients have been coming out of the woodwork! Look for a few new sites to be churned out of the PlasticMachine in the next few weeks.

We found an apartment. A bit overpriced, but it’s a place to live. We’re moving most of our things down there this weekend and living out of suitcases for the most part; now that makes the Day seem ever so close.

I also just got a box of surprise for my wedding party today, but can’t tell you what it is until I get back from the honeymoon. We’re giving some very original gifts to the guys and the girls who were gracious enough to spend money to help make our day great. Don’t worry, I’ll let you know, even if it is ex post bermuda.

Which I did.

So now I’m typing with my eyes closed, wondering what makes vinegar different from beer?

UPDATE: I googled around and found that vinegar is made by mixing mother of vinegar (a mixture of yeast and acetic acid bacteria) with cider, beer or wine. Essentially, the bacteria oxidizes the ethanol, creating the sour liquid we know as vinegar. That’s why it comes in such varieties as malt vinegar (from malted barley), distilled vinegar (from distilled alcohol) and red wine vinegar (from red wine). Glad I got that outta my brain.

TWO WEEKS FROM TODAY: The BIGGER Move - Bachelor to Husband

There’s so many thoughts going through my head right now, but at the very core of them all is this absolute excitement that I am getting myself into something wonderful.

Weather for the move? Hot and beautiful. Hard to believe we fit it all on one truck and one trailer! Crammed those drawers tight!

I’ve been thinking alot about those who aren’t going to be able to make it to the wedding, and I want to say, it’s ok. I’ve been at many stages in life, abased and the abounding, and I know what it’s like not to be able to do something you really want to do. The day is going to be a celebration of something very good, but you don’t need to be here to celebrate. Celebrations can take many forms–emails, phone calls, thoughts and prayers. I think I might even consider a tree planted in our honor a celebration.

The point is this–true friendship is a lifetime of love, not just one moment shared. So for everyone who won’t be able to attend, all I ask is that you celebrate for us, and share with us in some way that celebration. And no, I’m not taking ‘celebration’ calls on the honeymoon, so don’t even think about it!

Once the wedding video is finished, I’m going to try to make a highlight reel available online for everyone to enjoy; that way if you can’t be there, at least you can experience it somewhat vicariously. You’ll just have to endure a month or so delay…

Think about it people. Two weeks from today, we’ll be Mr. and Mrs. Jesse Gardner. I like the ring of that…

I covet your prayers this week as I look for work. I have a few good leads, but time is short here and I have much to do in a short amount of time.

Check back soon. More info on the way…

And if you’re reading this in a Panera somewhere, go ask them for a toasted Asiago Cheese Bagel and a little containter of veggie cream cheese. Well worth the $$$.

First, I must give credit to two people who have shaped my view of Christianity more than any others–my father and C.S. Lewis. My dad is an expert writer/teacher, and his resolute-yet-rational conviction.

C. S. Lewis

I love Lewis because he takes some of the most complex issues that man can face and he presents them honestly (A Grief Observed) and rationally (Mere Christianity). He is master of the explosive understatement. Some Christians doubt his faith; yes, he was steeped in Anglican tradition and caught up with the Darwinism of the day (along with men like Warfield and Strong), but I have been strengthened immensely by his words. His clarity, depth and honesty never cease to amaze me.

J. Gresham Machen

I also have a great deal of respect for J. Gresham Machen, a man virtually unheard of in Christian circles, and unfortunately so. Machen was the president of Princeton Theological Seminary for years, but stepped down in the 30’s when the school abandoned the Scriptures as the foundation for their doctrine. He even chronicled this debate in his book Christianity and Liberalism, a must read for any orthodox Christian.

Modernists were doing something much greater, in Machen’s estimation, than denying the supernatural element of theology; they were forsaking core values of Christianity and still claiming to be Christians. They were, in a sense, hijaacking the name. To the Modernist, terms were no longer important and everything became a symbol of something larger, broader and more vague. It was against this that Machen flung his words, “This temper of mind is hostile to precise definitions. Indeed nothing makes a man more unpopular in the controversies of the present day than an insistence upon definition of terms … Men discourse very eloquently today upon such subjects as God, religion, Christianity, atonement, redemption, faith; but are greatly incensed when they are asked to tell in simple language what they mean by these terms.” But I digress. I’ll save it for an extended entry devoted solely to Machen.

As for my writing skills, I’d have to point to several authors who have impacted me greatly. Ray Bradbury and E.B. White certainly appear at the top of the list. It’s an ironic duo, too, because Bradbury’s works are saturated with metaphor and White is the king of clarity.

Ray Bradbury

Ever since my lime-vanilla ice encounter with Dandelion Wine my senior year of college, I have not been the same. With religious fervor, I find myself visiting and revisiting Green Town and living again my childhood vicariously through Doug Spaulding. I can recall several papers marked blood red with professors scolding me: “this is dripping with adjectives!” or “too much metaphor… I’m lost!” And I cannot help but smile and think of Mark Twain’s advice on figurative language: “When you catch and adjective, kill it.”

E. B. White

While Bradbury appeals to my imagination, White appeals to my sensibility. The powerful simplicity in his pen stroke is positively moving. He can describe something as rudimentary as the death of a pig with such humanity as to bring a butcher to tears.

Consider this excerpt from White’s essay (he’s a phenomenal essayist) On A Florida Key:

"Althought I am no archaeologist, I love Florida as much for the remains of her unfinished cities as for the bright cabanas on her beaches. I love to prowl the dead sidewalks that run off into the live jungle, under the broiling sun of noon, where the cabbage palms throw their spiny shade across the stillborn streets and the creepers bind old curbstones in a fierce, sensual embrace and the mocking birds dwell in song upon the remembered grandeur of real estate's purple hour. A boulevard which has been reclaimed by Nature is an exciting avenue; it breathes a strange prophetic perfume, as of some century still to come, when the birds will remember, and the spiders, and the little quick lizards that toast themselves on the smooth hard surfaces that once held the impossible dreams on men. Here along these bristling walks is a decayed symmetry in a living forest--straight lines softened by a kindly and haphazard Nature, pavements nourishing life with the beginnings of topsoil, the cracks in the walks possessed by root structures, the brilliant blossoms of the domesticated vine run wild, and overhead the turkey buzzard in the clear sky, on quiet wings, awaiting new mammalian death among the hibiscus, the yucca, the Spanish bayonet, and the palm. I remember the wonderful days and the tall dream of rainbow's end; the offices with the wall charts, the pins in the charts, the orchestras playing gently to prepare the soul of the wandere for the mysteries of subdivision, the free bus service to the rainbow's beginning, the luncheon served on the little tables under the trees, the warm sweet air so full of the deadly contagion, the dotted line, the signature, and the premonitory qualms and the shadow of the buzzard in the wild wide Florida sky."

Prose perfection.

Etc.

There are many more. Thoreau, though rife with pantheism, awakens the awestruck boy in me running headlong through the woods. Muggeridge’s bravery impresses me. I’m also impressed with Piper’s level-headedness (fueled by his obvious devotion to Christ). I love Shakespeare’s vocabulary and characters. And of course, no list would be complete without Roald Dahl, a strange and clever man who has impressed me far more than Seuss ever could.

Of course, admiration is by no means attainment. I just write what I know. And my goal is something greater than fireworks.

In the words of Bradbury, scolding a panel of film makers once:

"You do fireworks. And I love fireworks. I love to be in Paris on Bastille night by the Eiffel Tower, with all the fireworks going off, celebrating the failed French revolution. But when the wind blows, the sky is empty. All that lovely fire, all those lovely cathedral patterns, blow away in the wind. That's you. If I can write a short story about putting on the first tennis shoes of summer, and make you remember what it was like when you were a kid, when you could run away from all your enemies, and run to your friends calling you up ahead, when you could bounce over houses and trees, and even people and so on, if I could make you remember that, that's better than fireworks."

I’ll be working with both aspects of the job, design and production. FastSigns does work for all sorts of companies. They do signs for PBU, Sesame Place, and a host of other churches and restaurants. What’s interesting about the job is the fact that they produce most of their own signs, using gigantic twelve foot wide printers and vinyl cutouts; so I won’t just be burning holes in my retina, I’ll actually be on the floor, physically creating these signs I design.

Speaking of design, we got the apartment looking alot less like a dorm and alot more like a home. I even did a high-speed fly through for my blog readers, appréciez!

APARTMENT FLYTHROUGH VIDEO (double time to avoid boredom)

Or you could just go see the pictures yourself.

MENSA USERS: Please click the pictures on the top photostrip, thank you.

Good looking but amazingly flexible, the site is powered by Movable Type, and every piece of text you see on the site is editable by the owner from any web browser anywhere.

The new site allows ADVMR to post new job positions as soon as they come in, and the website is immediately updated, everyone on the mailing list is notified, and they are assigned a category and filed in a searchable database. All this with a simple click of a button.

And the beautiful thing is, they can do all updates and changes themselves, with complete control over every part of the site. Imagine not having to send changes to a web designer who charges $40/hour to enter text. The end result is a website that is fresh. If it’s easy to update, it’s updated more often. And if it’s updated more often, it’s more valuable. And if it’s valuable, people come back.

Let me know if you’re interested in a site like this that can make your life easer.

*BTW: For those wondering why the name is so strange… we haven’t got the name servers pointing to the right place yet, so this is just a temporary domian name. When it’s changed over, the name will be https://www.advancedmedicalresources.net.

It’s always hard to say goodbye.

We spent alot of time together in younger days, and I know there were a few years when I was off having fun without you. But these last few years have just been great together. I’ve enjoyed so much my early morning drives, watching the sun come up over the hills of the Hudson River Valley, and the journey home again with the tangerine sunlight spilling across the Catskills.

I loved the little secret moments we had, little hidden spots that nobody but you and I knew about. I could spend hours, lost in your beauty, amazed at your complex symmetry and slender lines. Thank you especially for your barns… I think I’ll miss them the most.

I’ll miss the craziness of your City. From Radio City Music Hall to Les Miserables to Joes Shanghai, the place is just rife with class and curiosity.

Some of my best memories are with you. Maybe I’ll come back, maybe I’ll stay away for the rest of my life. I guess time alone can tell. Just wanted to say thank you for making my stay a great one.

I experienced something rare and beautiful tonight–a great rehearsal! We kicked the evening off with my mom’s lemon chicken and the rest followed suit. Laughing, chatting, goofing off yet getting things done–certainly nothing like the nightmares I’ve been having about forgetting big things on this our biggest day. My father led the affair, with Jessica swathed in a crumpled sheet (makeshift train) holding a flower arrangement from the dinner table.

I am enjoying these days. No stress. No doubts. No fighting. Just the joy of friends and family and the excitement of a green future. Jumping from the stage, tango during the charge and a swoop-and-carry exit… nothing could be better! After most had gone, Jess and I spent some time in prayer, ever so thankful for this, a minor miracle.

The rain will fall tomorrow (90% chance) – but there will be sunshine inside, because I am pledging my life to the woman I love, and she in turn will do the same. Here I stand… I can do no other!

PS: For all of you who read my blog and can’t be here at the wedding, check back here after 3pm tomorrow. I’ll have a surprise for you on the site…

I couldn’t have been more impressed by everyone. My groomsmen looked great and were so helpful, especially Mat and Nathan. So many times I asked, “What about…” and they had already done it. Jessica’s bridesmaids (bridesmaidens?) were really the life of the party, rockin’ to oldies in the limo and doo-wop-ing in the recieving line. My two sisters especially looked good (pics to come). Both parents were unbelievably supportive, and the day was priceless. You can’t buy days that good.

Jess and I talked the day before what our ‘story’ (unplanned misfortune) would be that day, because everyone has a ‘story’. We made it through the whole day without one (unless you count dad forgetting to pronounce us and let us kiss); and then as we climbed into the car after the reception, we realized that my luggage was still back at the church in my car, 20 minutes the opposite direction from our hotel… and the pastor (unreachable by cell) had the keys to it. So that’s our story… not too bad, really.

One of the most special moments for me was hearing the song that Mark Nicholson wrote us. His depth, kindness and ability to frame the day in timeless perspective really covered the day in magic. I’ll try to post the actual .MP3 file when I get home, but the words are the power:

THE LEAP (possibly the first song ever inspired by a blog)
*This is a story about a boy and a girl, and a date that became a lifetime…

Rushing in like fools despite the angel’s warning
Climbing to a higher place to fall
The perfect starry night became the perfect morning
     And found us standing high above it all
Ready now to fell the wind go rushing through us
But at the edge you hesitate afraid your wings will fail you
     Once again
          So take my hand
          Let your feet slip away

Didn’t our hearts just stop beating
Didn’t we leap for the sky
Didn’t we dare fall down higher and heavenbound
Didn’t we just learn to fly

Eleven crimson roses tell a hundred stories
And a single kiss can dry a thousand tears
A simple summer path can show us countless glories
     And a promise made today can cross the years
Ready now to take the leap of love before us
But at the edge we hesitate drinking in the beauty
     Of this day
          So take my hand
          Let your feet slip away

Didn’t our hearts just start beating
Didn’t we outrun the wind
Didn’t the world just go silent and wait for us
Didn’t we just learn to fly

A huge thank you to everyone who helped. I’ll certainly be writing more about the day, but we have a cruise to catch!

Am I different? Not really. Well, sort of.

There is an amazing new sense of freedom, a sense of belonging and the necessary human experience of being appreciated by someone. I used to think looking for this appreciationg was dangerous, but i’m convinced now that as long as it’s the pleasing of another that is the goal and not self-promotion, i’m ok. Longing to be adored by my wife is not sin; desiring to push myself above the crowd is.

I’ll take a break from the psychoanalysis for a moment to chronicle the first full day of our honeymoon cruise to Bermuda. The food here has been outstanding. Dining is on our schedule, so we caught a small brunch of omlette and raspberry yogurt. Hunger struck again during our rummy tournament, so we called room service and enjoyed a pizza, salad and a chocolate mousse that must have been scooped from some ethereal chocolate cloud.

After spending a better part of the day with Lori Wick and C.S. Lewis, we headed to Le Bistro for glazed asparagus, escargot in a garlic butter sauce, spinach leaves with pine nuts and goat cheese, a $23 bottle of virgin wine and the most tender, hollandaise-smothered filet mignon this side of the Prime Meridian. And I thought last night’s tiramisu was good!

Tomorrow we get up early to meet Bermuda head on!

I think all the stress, running around and lack of sleep in the weeks before the wedding are finally catching up with me. I slept almost nine hours last night with two forty-five minute naps in the afternoon and I still feel drained.

The few conscious hours have been amazing though. We docked in Hamilton today and took a boat out to the North Reef for a bit of show and tell, the tell being now. And what a show! After donning fins (that blistered our toes) and goggles (mine leaked), we were Lewis and Clark of the Atlantic, just off the coast of Bermuda. Clark got a bit “concerned” about the gigantic jellyfish (the larget about the size of a cherry tomato) and steered clear of any close encounters. I, on the other hand, moved in for some closer looks.

The Admiral, a small tiger-striped fish floated lazily around the purple fan coral while small translucent fish the size of guppies darted around us in massive schools. As the sun broke the clouds, it filled the reef with strobes of light and color, though not as vivid as I had imagined. The yellow brain coral blazed and flashed against the foot-long rainbow parrotfish that moved slowly in and out of the reef’s cover. I got almost as many beautiful underwater photos as mouthfuls of saltwater.

I’ll post the photos soon; I’ll spare you the saltwater.

After a harrowing bus ride through Somerset (yes, worse that Somerset, NJ), we arrived at Horseshoe Bay, famous for it’s pink sand beaches. Bermuda is almost completely surrounded by Coral Reef that protects the island from hurricanes and has sent many ships to their grave. This pink coral gets washed ashore on the south beaches, giving the sand a pink hue. Further up the beacch the coral is bleached by the sun, creating a gentle transistion from pink to white, the opposite of my back, which has quite savagely transformed from white to pink.

The pristine beaches are punctuated with porous, sandstone-like rocks that create secluded grottos that begged to be explored. This time Clark took the lead, scrambling up precipices and over boulders while Lewis fumbled with his cameras.

There is a gigantic storm cloud menacing us about 30 miles off the coast. Maybe rain?

…

Rain. Hard, pelting rain that felt like hail on our toasted backs. It ran down warm and we wouldn’t have even cared if it weren’t for the cameras we had with us. After a long, squeak-and-slosh trek up the hill to the bus stop, we found out from some locals that a fire at the only power plant on Bermuda had caused an island-wide power outage. That would explain why the bathrooms were all locked closed at the beach.

In a way it was good for them. The Bermudians can’t dig wells because the limestone the island is made of can’t hold a water table, so they drink rainwater, literally. All the houses in Bermuda have white roofs; they paint them with a limestone based paint that acts like a filter for the rainwater, retarding algae growth and filtering out acids. The water is then channeled into large underground holding tanks where it is pumped up when needed. So the rain was a welcome end to a month long drought they had been facing; you don’t want to hit the debris on the bottom of your water tanks.

On the other hand, no power is no power. And no power means no tourism. And no tourism means no money. Enough said.

But still their indubitable courtesy kept them laughing, waving at friends, punching knuckles with chums and stopping to take a picture of tourists who could head back to the cruise ship and take a nice, long shower. That’s kindness.

Like a march of titans against a powder flame sky, the mountain clouds move in the east, accompanied by tin can salsa music and the Crown’s low rumble. In near suspended motion, the titans move and stumble on themselves, crashing down imperceptably while new cloud gods climb over their backs, reaching for the wispy spirit clouds miles high in the great slate ocean above.

As the earth turns, the largest of these heaps is set ablaze, immediately a pink ember, growing brighter with each breath of balmy ocean air. The ashen shapes outlined in molten lava, moving inward until the mountain of suspended water molecules burns bright with the odor of pleasant fire.

To the west, an enormous continent the color of sheet metal and magma fills the sky and hangs just above the horizon, painted hot by the hastening sun.

The entire eastern procession is now outlined in flame, with beams of fire exploding from the top. Finally, the sun makes its brilliant appearance, with the panache of Midas, turning great heaps of cloud to gold.

To give you an idea of the picture, I’m here at the email lounge at PBU posting this while Jess unpacks at home. You understand why I don’t write more? Thought you would.

But take heart. I have hundreds of video clips and photos from the wedding and hundreds more from Bermuda. Some of the shot from Bermuda you just will not believe… they are gorgeous.

I also want to again say thank you to everyone who made the wedding possible. I’ll elaborate more when I get online at the apartment, but suffice it to say ( and it certainly doesn’t come close to sufficing) that everyone has been so very gracious to us both. Thank you.

For those that want to get in touch, our new address and phone number is:

Box 234
200 Manor Ave
Langhorne, PA 19047
215.741.4809

Give us a call! We miss everyone greatly and look forward to visits. We are definitely a very social couple (as is being evidenced as time marches on) and can’t wait to enjoy a visit from you.

Shout outs to Chris Rose… he took my advice and planted a tree in honor of our wedding*!!!*

Check back soon. You’ll find lots more stuff to see here shortly…

UPDATE: I’m backdating all of my journal entries from the honeymoon, so this entry will appear before all the honeymoon entries. Roughly translated, you’ll have to scroll down to find the new honeymoon posts!

Now don’t get me wrong. I cling tightly to the fundamental teachings of the Christian faith–the deity of Christ, the infallibility of God’s Word, salvation by faith. But the unpleasant odor of contention has crept into the movement as a whole, and frankly, it stinks. What began as a measured response to the German Rationalism of the late 1800s became a full-forced pendulum swing to the other side. Reason (or what rationalism claimed for reason) was the traitor and fundamentalism shot it in the head and put faith on the throne–an ideological coup de tat.

Unfortunately, the dynamic duo of faith and reason were separated and sola fida was twisted to mean something much different than what Luther meant. Without reasonable exegesis of the Scriptures, faith alone becomes a very fluid concept. Sometimes men believe the truth, sometimes men believe a lie; but always they believe. And with reason in a bloody mess, this is all that matters. (Ironically enough, reason often gets resussitated just enough to prove a point, never enough for a full discussion.)

What does this have to do with contentiousness? Quite alot. If you believe what you believe simply because you believe it, and reason is not working hand in hand with faith, there is no room for discussion. Discussion, you see, involves reason. And reason is the traitor. So dialogue is often considered tantamount to treason. This was a very common sentiment at Pensacola Christian College, a self-proclaimed haven of fundamentalism. During one of our senior Bible seminars, Dr. Greg Mutsch explained that the problem with liberals is that they just wanted to “dialogue” about everything instead of just believing. (After all, look what happens when you put the cross {t} and reason together {treason}.) To them, discussion equals unbelief; which is an odd approach to take considering most of the fundamental doctrines of the faith were cemented by councils of the early church in which many men with many different opinions would come and debate their understanding of Scripture until they hammered out a creed.

Some will argue that an unwillingness to dialogue is important when dealing with the fundamental doctrines of the faith; more often than not, though, what gets argued about in fundamentalist circles is not the virgin birth or the deity of Christ. Too often its about issues of practice, not doctrine.

Consider for a moment two or three Christian churches in your area that hold fast the fundamentals of the faith. Set aside drums, denomination and The Purpose Driven Life–simply consider the five key doctrines put forth by those that started the fundamentalist movement: the inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth of Christ, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and the authenticity of His miracles. Now think of a self-proclaimed fundamentalist church in the same area. Is there fellowship and cooperation? Or are there feuds and separation?

A few verses come to mind. James 3:13-18: “Who among you is wise and understanding? Let him show by his good behavior his deeds in the gentleness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your heart, do not be arrogant and so lie against the truth. This wisdom is not that which comes down from above, but is earthly, natural, demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every evil thing. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without hypocrisy. And the seed whose fruit is righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.”

A wise man will demonstrate that wisdom in gentleness by his good behavior. And consider the context; verses one through twelve deal with the dangers of the tongue. The implication here is that while it is easy to destroy with the tongue, a wise man will gently reveal his wisdom by his actions, sans tongue.

Also notice the juxtaposed motives for not demonstrating gentle, quit wisdom–bitter jealousy and selfish ambition. I challenge every professing fundamentalist to examine all motives the next time the bell rings and the fight is on. So often our professed righteous indignation is just thinly veiled pride; we’re flipping over the money changer’s table so we can be the hero. But every man or woman greatly used by God fears the spotlight, because being the hero means you get the credit for something God did. If you love the thunder of applause, you’d better take off those boxing gloves and leave the battle to the Lord. (It’s His anyway.)

“For where jealousy and self-ambition exist, there is disorder and every evil thing.” I wish that this could be printed and handed out at every business meeting.

You may be balking at this, imagining a milquetoast Christian silent in the face of heresy. Not at all. Verse seventeen makes clear our priority–“wisdom from above is first pure.” There can be no truth without purity, and it is the pure, undefiled Word of God that exemplifies holy wisdom. But let us not forget the rest of the list: “peacable, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy, unwavering, without hypocrisy.” Fundamentalism’s strength is its purity, but at what cost? It’s weakness comprises the remaining list items. And notice that the scurrilous traitor reason is on there as well, so lets not be too hasty to pull the trigger.

Please realize that I’m speaking in broad strokes about some dangerous traits the fundamentalist movement as a whole has taken. Not every fundamentalist is anti-reason and liberalism itself is a formidable foe (an essay for another day). But this knee-jerk reaction to rationalism by fundamentalism has torn some important tendons, and as a fledgling fundamentalist who holds dearly to God’s Word, I’m urging fundamentalists to admit the injury and bandage the knee. It’s the only way healing can occur.

And yes, Angela, Allen, John and Pam … you’re next.

Oh, and a little dance-of-joy tidbit: My total comments are about to surpass my total posts on this site. Here’s to you, my great, massive (chuckle) readership.

CURRENT STATS (as of this post)
TOTAL POSTS: 262
TOTAL COMMENTS: 253

Chapter 1: Prelude to a Kiss

Once upon a time there was a very lonely boy.

“I’ll never get married.” he complained to everyone, including the girl’s parents. You see, he knew the girl’s parents very well, but did not know the girl. He had only heard about the girl, and thought she must be very nice indeed with such a nice family. But the girl was off at college, and he was back at home teaching in a small school.

Christmastime came, and the boy found out that the girl was coming home! Oh joyous day! Now he could finally meet the girl that he had heard so much about! He scratched his head and tried to think of an excuse to see the girl. He didn’t want to frighten her, but he did want to be friends with her.

At Christmastime, everyone gives gifts. The girl was getting a guitar from her parents, so the boy decided to make a book of songs that she could play with her new guitar. He put together the book with a nice folder and brought it to her house on Christmas break. He even taught her a special way to play a ‘C’ chord. The boy was very happy.

But when the boy went home, his mother told him news that made him sad. She said that the girl’s mother had called on the phone and told her that the girl liked someone else.

“I’ll never get married.” he complained to everyone, including the girl’s parents.

The girl went back to school and winter settled in. It was cold and the boy was lonely. But the boy found a way to talk to the girl over the computer – just as friends, of course. He was lonely less and less. They talked almost every day and became friends. One day, the boy tried to let the girl hear his voice on the computer, but it was broken. So he typed her this message: “I could call?”

The boy and girl began to talk on the phone and before long they were very good friends. They talked about food and family, school and church, smelly things and happy things. Everything they thought of they talked about. She made him laugh and smile at the same time, and almost every day they found something they agreed about.

Then one day the boy went on a trip, and his trip took him near the girl’s college. Maybe he could see her! He thought and thought and thought and finally got up enough courage to ask her: “Would you go to dinner with me?”

To his surprise, the girl said yes! They went to the big city and walked around. They went to old stores with lamps and mirrors and statues. They even went to a special restaurant where they didn’t have a menu and the waiter poured water on their hands. By the end of the night, both the boy and the girl had big smiles on their faces.

The boy knew then that he liked the girl. So he asked the girl’s parents if he could date her, because he liked her so very much. And they said yes. So he visited her at college and asked her: “Would you be my girlfriend?”

She again said yes! They drove many hours back and forth to see each other and spent their days going to the park, walking in the woods, playing the guitar, skipping stones and eating sandwich cookies. Then summer arrived and the girl came home from college.

Each and every day they spent time together. They played volleyball in the rain and watched goldfish swim in the pond. They stayed up late swinging on the front porch swing and talking about what life together would be like. When he was sick, she took care of him. When she was tired or had a long day at work, he gave her a hug and let her talk about it. There was not one day that they did not spend time with each other.

Then one day, the boy had a big thought. “We should get married.”

on to chapter two…

Chapter 2: The Secret

The boy wanted to marry the girl, but he kept it a secret. He did tell his parents, but only to ask them what they thought about the whole idea. They smiled and said yes!

So the boy scratched his head and thought and thought and thought of how and when and where to ask the girl to marry him. Then he remembered that he had to go to up north to play the piano at another wedding. He could ask her there in Maine, where the sky is more beautiful and the mountains are taller than anywhere else. It would be perfect.

And if the place was to be perfect, the ring had to be even more perfect. So the boy went to the jewelry store and picked out a very special ring, made of white gold with one sparkling diamond set on top. He knew it was exactly what the girl would want. Then the boy had to do one of the hardest things that any boy anywhere has to do. He had to ask the girl’s parents if he could marry the girl. So he bravely went to the girl’s house when she was working and asked her parents the question. Could he, perhaps, maybe, if they thought it was ok.

Four hours later, the boy was smiling even though his hands were sweaty. The girl’s parents were smiling, too. They had said yes. They all laughed when the girl came home and was upset because she had a bad day at work. If only she knew!

The boy asked the girl to go to Maine with him, but he didn’t say why. She said yes, of course, because that’s what a girl in love does – spends time with her boy.

As the day grew closer, the boy began to worry that the girl knew about the secret. He had to find a way to make sure she didn’t know. So the boy tried something so brave but so risky that everyone he told said “Oh my!” He took the girl to the jewelry store to look at rings. “But he already bought the ring!” you say. That is true. But the boy had to be sure she didn’t know. “But what if she picked out a different ring?” you ask. She might. But the boy was certain that he knew her well enough to know what ring she wanted. Sure enough, she picked almost the same ring as the one he already bought.

When they went home that night, the girl told her parents about their visit to the jewelry store. Her parents (who knew the secret, of course) pretended like they were surprised that the boy took the girl to the jewelry store. “You need to ask us before you start to think about getting married!” her mother exclaimed. She winked at the boy. The girl had no idea.

Then the day finally arrived to leave for Maine. The boy and the girl climbed into the car and drove a long, long way until finally they came up over the last hill and saw the lake where they were staying. After a glowing orange sunset with dark blue striped clouds, the girl went to a friends house and the boy fell asleep in an old camper.

This was it! Today was the day! They were supposed to get up at five thirty and have their kayaks in the water by six, but the boy was wide awake at four with so many thoughts running through his mind. He was scared that it might rain and nervous that he might say something silly, but mostly excited that the girl he loved might soon be his fiancée.

They made it into the water at six, with the sun already coming up and a beautiful morning already starting. As they paddled out to the middle of the lake, two motor boats raced along the north shore. The girl did not notice. The two boats stopped at the cliffs and after about five minutes, one took off back up the north shore. The girl did not notice, but the boy did. He headed the kayak toward the cliffs.

on to chapter 3…

Chapter 3: The Leap

Before long, the boy and the girl made it to the cliffs. The girl did not ask about the motor boat sitting on shore. They pulled their kayak out of the water and stepped onto the mossy bank. The boy whispered something to the girl and then squeezed her hand. She followed him with a question mark look on her face as they climbed the rough stone.

As they came to crest, the girl saw something. “Someone’s sleeping here!” She ducked and started to turn back down the hill. The boy pulled her up. “It’s for you.”

At the top of the cliff, there was a red and white checkered blanket spread out across the rocks with an old brown basket and a bouquet of roses on it. The girl looked up at the boy in delight and disbelief. “For me?” He nodded and then she pulled him close and hugged him.

The two sat down on the blanket and looked out at the lake. The water was so very calm that it reflected the mountains and the sky like a mirror. The boy, though, was not calm at all. His mind raced and his hands were still sweaty. This was the very moment, the moment he would remember forever, the moment which would become this story.

The girl poured him a glass of bubbly cider and gave it to him. His hand shook as he tried to take a drink of it. She asked him if he were all right. The boy told a fib. “I must be hungry.”

They opened up the brown basket and it was filled with apples and kiwis and muffins which the girl ate, but the boy just nibbled on. It was time.

He leaned over and took the bouquet of roses in his hand. There were eleven red roses and one white rose. The white rose wasn’t snow white; it actually looked like it came out of an old photograph, almost like an antique, and it sat right in the middle. He took one red rose out of the bouquet and handed it to the girl.

“This is for our very first guitar lesson.” She smiled and thought about the time the boy came over to give her a guitar book and how he liked her even back then. He handed her the second rose.

“This is for our first phone call, when the computer wouldn’t work.” She smiled and thought about how much they tried to get the computer working. She wondered now if he had really tried that hard.

“This,” he handed her the third rose, “is for coma girl.” She laughed. Before the girl and boy started dating, he used to call her ‘coma girl’ because she always yawned and was always sleepy. She knew, of course, that he liked her and was only saying it because that’s what a boy does when he likes a girl – he teases her. He held out the fourth rose.

“This is for the blue tongue.” She laughed again. On their very first date in the big city, the boy had eaten blueberry ice that made his lips and tongue blue. She thought about the antique store, about the big metal statues, about the restaurant with the big blue door where they washed your hands before you ate.

“The hills.” He smiled and handed her the fifth rose. Way back behind the girls house, through the woods along a path lined with daisies and Queen Anne’s lace, lies a beautiful rolling field with grass as green as emeralds. When the girl was home from college on Easter vacation, they walked together through the hills, when the sunset was making everything golden orange.

The next rose was for the time they visited the mansion on the hill. Sitting on the hill outside the mansion, they looked down at the farms and orchards. The boy told the girl that he would very much like to be her boyfriend, if her parents agreed to it. She said she would like that very much.

Rose number seven. The perfect number for the perfect day. They had both gone to the park to walk by the lake. When they got to the park, they found great big piles of sand scattered all along the shore. So the two spent the day jumping from sand piles and pushing each other into the water. He handed her the next rose before she could remember that he lost his wallet that day.

This rose was a very special rose. This was for the day he asked her to be his girlfriend. They were walking across town, looking up at the few stars that were visible through the streetlights. He stopped in the middle of a parking lot and shuffled his feet. Not a very romantic place to ask such a question, but he asked anyway.

He pulled the ninth rose from the bouquet and put it in her hands. Then he touched her hand. “This is for the porch swing.” She blushed. The very first time he held her hand, they had been swinging on the porch swing.

The tenth rose was for the park where they skipped stones and stepped in mud up to their ankles. The girl was so sweet that she even brought sandwich cookies and milk to enjoy alongside the stream.

Rose eleven had more thorns that the other roses did, and the petals had brown near the edges. The boy thought back on their first fight. Neither of them could even remember what it was about, but they both looked at each other through watery eyes. That was the day they learned how important “sorry” is.

The boy took the final rose and held it up. He quietly handed it to the girl. “What is this rose for?” She looked at him and still didn’t know.

“For the memory we’re about to make.” He knelt down and pulled a velvet green box from his pocket. “Jessica Marie Clum—“

She did not move, just stared, mouth open at the boy.

“Will you marry me?”

She blinked a few times, pulled at a rose petal, mouth still open.

Not sure she heard him, the boy said again, “I want you to be my wife.”

Shaking herself from shock, she smiled and blinked a few more times. Then, surprise of all surprises, she said yes! The girl he loved so much just said yes, she wanted to marry him! He slipped the ring on her finger and told her all of the things that he had been keeping secret for so long—about how sly he had been, about her parent’s sneakiness, about the ring and about the motor boat that would take them back across the lake.

And just as the sun broke through the morning clouds, the boy and the girl kissed for the very first time high atop the cliffs alongside the lake in that great big place called Maine, the very same place where the boy left his girlfriend, and brought home a fiancée.

Once upon a time there was a very happy boy…

Ah, how life twists and turns and forces us to cling tighter to Christ! Some very interesting upheavals this week leave Jess and I standing here quite in need of faith; but God is good. We prayed for an answer to something difficult in our lives and we got an answer immediately, only it wasn’t quite the answer I was looking for. So now we have a new difficulty with another amazing way God can answer. I’ll fill you all in on it a bit later, when the storm calms down a bit.

Which reminds me… I had a strange dream about Jess and I holding each other in the middle of this raging storm, where you could hear the buzzing of the lightning it was so close and planes were falling from the sky and boats were being blown ashore. As I recall she lost a flip flop and I ran back to get it. Alex DiCarlo was there and he was painting the word ‘Ghent’ on a monument in rainbow colors. Strange.

Alright. Don’t visit my site tonight, please. Save it for tomorrow. I’m transferring everying–plasticmind.com, the Blog, the Forums, the Photoblog and Chaplain Fisher–over to my new PlasticMind Hosting server; so things may be down when you visit. But they will be up soon. Then you can get back to enjoying this site way more than you should.

So I was back to the job hunting, which around here feels a lot like deer hunting, without the pleasure of being in the woods. Lots of sitting and waiting, and when one does come along, it’s not nearly what you’d expected it to be. BestBuy offered me $8.50/hour and kept me waiting over an hour for an interview. Ugh. I’m also waiting for a call back from Bucks County Headstart about a teaching position.

Not to worry, though. Quite literally, in the last week, I’ve gotten enough web design work to pay for two months here. So perhaps you’ll forgive the silence as I’ve been glued to the laptop, frantically throwing the digital ink around… I currently have Photoshop, SmartFTP, Firefox, Dreamweaver and Thunderbird open… and that’s just the laptop. (The desktop is pumpin’ out the iTunes… ‘Starry Eyed Surprise’)

To give you an idea of all that’s being done here at Plasticmind Design, check out the list:

• PJ McGlynn's Steakhouse
• Angela Tuttle, Photographer for Hire
• Movable Tweak: My own geek journal about the ins and outs of the Movable Type CMS

As well as a couple of other projects (Hudson Valley Blogs, Computer Visions, a brand new Plasticmind Site) that are soon to be launched. It’s an exciting, new time here. And as I insinuated earlier, married life is great. To put it in the immortal words of Pastor Joe Roof, “Being married is so much better than being engaged.”

Oh, that and I’m going to try to upload some more picture before the weekend.

I’m sure we all do it in some regard or another, whether its behind a screen or behind a desk. Often I think it’s what keeps us sane. Hoping that another shares the same thoughts and feelings, daring to think that someone else cares enough to read and sympathize. Sometimes I write just to “get it out of my system”, as if it were some kind of twenty-four hour bug that I just need to vomit up and rid myself of. But writing is an incurable madness, fueled still greater by the blog.

A bit pretentious even, no? The assumption that you care about what I say may even border on amusing if it were not so prevalent. But then, it’s all an irony, ironing these thoughts out and hanging them on the wire for the world to see. I’m like the man protesting about freedom of speech, writing an essay about the evils of ink with a flourish of my pen.

I suppose a virtual following is along the same lines of an anchorman’s following or athlete’s following. They still have to tuck their kids in at night, they still have to deal with inlaws, eating and irritable bowels. I’m afraid I’m starting to put myself on the same level as a sports or news hero–let me make it clear that my bowels are just fine.

And with that humbling admission, I’m going to take a shower.

We got adventurous today and puttered up to Bethlehem, PA for the afternoon. After a stroll through a Salvation Army and more than a few bank signs with three digit temperatures, we arrived in Bethlehem in the middle of MusikFest, a wild, ten day festival spread out across most of the historic district. Now when I say wild, I mean wild in a Lancaster sort of way. Country singers trying to sing reggae, moist women selling food-shaped candles in 104 degree weather and a piano-like contraption made of bronze bells. And to top it all off, we saw a tree that was around during the signing of the Constitution! Wild and CrAzY!

We had to just recover tonight, which we did and did well, I might add, with bacon pizza, root beer and a movie. Ahhh…

Removing the extra characters in the main_index.tmpl of your default_templates directory should take care of it no problem and ensure bug free template refreshing.

David Raynes’ MultiBlog is a must have plugin for anyone interested in content aggregation, but it’s uses are far greater than just sharing text.

Take for instance storing a master stylesheet in your main blog and sharing it with other blogs (i.e. a FAQ blog) on your system to keep your look consistent. You could also share template modules across an installation, giving you the freedom to structure different parts of your site uniquely while still being able to share common elements (header, search box, category list) painlessly.

Consider this example, where I’ve shared the header modules from blog 2 with the blog I’m currently working on:

<MTMultiBlog include_blogs="2"><$MTInclude module="header"$></MTMultiBlog>

Now I can easily make changes to the header without needing to worry about the other blogs, other than a simple rebuild.

And it isn’t limited to the body. You can use MultiBlog tags in the head as well:

<MTMultiBlog include_blogs="2"><$MTBlogName encode_html="1"$></MTMultiBlog>

I can make changes to the title (or description/modules/categories for that matter) of the master blog (blog#2) and the add-on blogs don’t need to be changed.

Search Templates

I’ve found that this trick works especially well in search templates, because according to the Movable Type documentation:

You can also use the <MTInclude> tag in your search templates to include template modules or external files. In a template, the system needs to know which weblog to look in for the module named Header. If there are search results found, the system will look in the weblog that is earliest alphabetically; if there are no search results, Movable Type will simply try to load a weblog from your database (the determination of the weblog that is chosen is undefined).

Undefined and controlled look/feel do not go hand in hand. Using MultiBlog to specify a stylesheet or template module ensures that the blog pieces you want to appear are the ones that appear.

As most of you know, I’m a die-hard Movable Type fan. MT is the most powerful content management software available today (IMHO), doing wonders for blogs and website alike. Believe it or not, it’s the framework upon which I built northerndutchesschristian.com, advmr.net, pjmcglynns.com, plasticmind.com, plasticmind.com/pix, plasticmind.com/pcc, www.chaplainfisher.com and a whole slew of new sites I’m releasing shortly.

So because I’m such an avid fan, I thought I’d chronicle my pragmatic bangings and clangings. Not a definitive how-to site to be sure, but a great place for anyone looking to get more out of Movable Type.

And for those of you who could care less about the 0’s and 1’s, this will get most of the technobabble off of my personal blog and make this a simpler place to be. :-)

Cheers!

That’s right, the new Movable Type 3.2 User’s Manual has just been released. You know what that means… MT 3.2 Final is just around the corner! The manual is long, but most importantly, it’s USEFUL. About the only thing I ever learned from the old manual was Melody and Nelson; this finally presents you with real-life scenarios that help make installation a little less painful than it is and makes those people who make money installing MT a little uneasy.

They even have the manual open for moderated comments and a Beta Blog where you can catch all the latest news about MT 3.2 and file bug reports. Kudos to the entire SixApart team!

Two Roads Diverged…

I’ve been working on a new blog in which I want to sort the categories in order other than alphabetical. Now, there is an quick and ugly solution, and there is a time-consuming and beautiful solution. First, we’ll look at the ugly way of sorting your categories of the U.S. Presidents:

The Easy, Ugly Way

Create first category for Washington, only call it 01:Washington. Create second category for Adams… name it 02:Adams. So and so on through the U.S. Presidents. When Movable Type builds your page, it catches those initial numbers and puts them in order by number. A solution, but an ugly one, because you’re list is uglied by those darn digit prefixes.

The Difficult, Prettier and Ultimately More Rewarding Way

The second, cleaner solution requires you to install Brad Choate’s MT-Regex plugin. It’s a simple plugin that’s oh-so-powerful because it gives you the ability to search and replace using Unix-style regular expressions. In laymen’s terms it’s going to allow us to find the 01: before Washington and 02: before Adams and get rid of them. “So why put them in there in the first place if they’re just going to be deleted?” Because it removes it after Movable Type has processed the category, meaning it sorts by the 01:, 02:, but erases them before they appear on the page, giving you the power to sort the way you like.

Now to the time-consuming (unless you copy-and-paste, which is really why you’re here, right?) part. First, you need to define the regular expression that will tell MT-Regex what you want taken off your categories:

<MTRegexDefine name="patt2">s/..://gi</MTRegexDefine>

You’ll probably want to put this right before your categories code on your page so it doesn’t get lost. What you’re doing is defining a pattern named “patt2”. The ‘s’ indicates that you are performing a search, after which you would place a forward slash (/) followed by your what you’re searching for. In this example, we want to search for two digits followed by a colon. In regex, you can use a period (.) as a wildcard for any single digit. So the ‘…’ will find 01 as well as 99. If you have more digits preceeding, just be sure to have one period for each digit. Next we place another forward slash followed by it’s replacement. In this example we’re just erasing them, so we have nothing, not even a space. We close the replacement with a final forward slash followed by ‘gi’, indicating that we want the search to be global and case insensitive (neither of which really matter too much in this example). Next we need to call to the search pattern in our template. Let’s use the front page category module for our example:

<MTSubCategories>
    <MTIfNonZero tag="MTCategoryCount">
    <MTIfMatches var="CategoryLabel" pattern="m/(..:)/i">
        <a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>" title="<$MTCategoryCount$> Entries"> <MTCategoryLabel regex="patt2"></a> |
    <MTSubCatsRecurse max_depth="3"></MTIfMatches>
    <MTElse><MTCategoryLabel regex="patt2"> | </MTElse>
    </MTIfNonZero><MTSubCatsRecurse max_depth="3">
</MTSubCategories>

If you followed the explanation earlier, the code here should make sense. We’re using the <MTIfMatches> tag to make sure that the pattern is in the category label before we load the search-and-replace function. If it exists, the pattern that we defined (patt2) is loaded and the numeric prefix is removed from the category, leaving us with a correctly sorted yet clean category list.

For more information about regex searches/syntax/possibilities, visit the Perl operators and precedence page.

Disclaimer

When your category directories are built, they will contain those first two digits. For example, your Washington directory would be /01washington/ and your Adams directory would be /02adams/. I’ve tried calling to the regex plugin in the archive file template, but it doesn’t seem to work:

<MTRegexDefine name="patt3">s/..://gi</MTRegexDefine><MTIfMatches var="CategoryPath" pattern="m/(..:)/i"><$MTCategoryPath lower_case="1" regex="patt3"$></MTIfMatches>/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.html

All it does is take the entire category off and put the individual archives in the root directory. If anyone else has had luck with this, please leave me a content and let me know the trick…

Beta Build Issues

Also, with the new way that beta-4 handles archive file templates, I’m not sure that this old trick will work. They’ve provided ‘pre-dirifeed’ archive file path specifiers (see manual) such as %f (archive filename with the specified extension) and %c (the entry’s primary category/subcategory path passed through the dirify global filter). I still haven’t determined if mixing and matching these with normal MTTags is kosher…

I’ll post a link here to beta-5 when it gets released. Not that you’ll be able to download it today with the fifteen-billion beta testers in line to snatch it up the instant 6A’s RSS feed say’s ‘go’. Of course that will pale in comparison to the d/l-frenzy when 3.2 final gets released (some time early next week?). It will be like 14.4k modems all over again.

Verse 12 of Hebrews 4 is one of those cliche-busting verses that you read once and understand then read twice and really understand.

Initially, I pictured the soldier, clad in the Ephesians 6 armor, weilding the blue blade of the Spirit, ready to strike down God’s enemies. But upon careful examination of the contect, I was shaken. The Sword is piercing to the very soul and is cutting away pretenses. A very different picture to be sure.

The backdrop for this steely reality is a nation of people, chosen by God and given a promise by God, that never entered into His reast because they did not believe His promises. His Word cut right to their hearts. Sure, you can cross the Red Sea when the armies of Egypt are hot on your trail. But will you walk into a land of giants when the only driving factor is your faith in His promises? You know the story–ten were bad and two were good.

And I think that’s really why it’s so important yet so difficult to immerse yourself in the Word of God; not because You’ll always learn something new or even something new about yourself. You’ll be faced with a choice. And that’s exactly why verse 11 tells us to labor to enter into that rest. Not an attempt at dead works (which are condemned in 6:1), but an intensity of purpose followed by an intensity of effort toward the realization of that purpose, every ounce of which is powered by Jesus Christ (see v.14-16)!

One key principle of interface design is not to overload your users by dumping every choice available on your site right there on the front page. Users don’t mind drilling for information that needs to be drilled for. Important stuff should be readily and easily accessible, and category archives falls into the category of important stuff, especially since they’re one of the primary ways someone navigates your site. But for anyone who posts on a regular basis, your category section can become rather large and unwieldy, very quickly falling under the category of “choice dumping”. Fifty-one categories and seventy-two months listed on your sidebar may be intellectually impressive, but certainly aren’t going to help the newcomer figure out your site.

The category-based combo box really solves a lot of problems, because the information is there, hidden only in a simple form element which most users are comfortable with because they’ve used these in other applications. A simple click of the button and your categories or months are displayed; another click and they’re off to that page. A useful tool that’s made even more so by Movable Type’s publishing capabilities.

How To Do It

What we’re going to do, essentially, is create a combo box that uses a bit of javascript to load the URL from the value of the selected option. The options are generated just like you’d generate list items (<li>) inside of an unordered list (<ul>), using the <MTArchiveList> tag with the archive_type qualifier set to “Category”:

<form action="">
    <select name="CategorySelect" onchange="if(options[selectedIndex].value) window.location.href=(options[selectedIndex].value)">
    <option value="#">Browse by category:</option>
    <MTArchiveList archive_type="Category">
    <option value="<$MTArchiveLink$>"><$MTArchiveTitle$> (<$MTArchiveCount$>)</option>
    </MTArchiveList>
    </select>
    <noscript><input type="submit" value="Go" /></noscript>
</form>

Let me point out the most important part of this code: The <$MTArchiveLink$>. Without this value in your option tag, you’re browser ain’t goin’ nowhere, Batman. That tag tells MT to place the link as the value of the option and the <$MTArchiveTitle$> provides an easier translation of that for the user. I’ve put the category count in with the option, but that’s completely optional (pardon the pun). You can just remove the parenthesis and the <$MTArchiveCount$> to taste.

You can also change the flavor of this combo box to “Monthly” simply by changing the archive_type qualifier in the <MTArchiveList> tag to “Monthly”. Movable Type will do the rest.

An important note: The first option I’ve set up is “Browse by Category” and cannot be chosen (or rather, it is the default state so you cannot change to it). However, if a user visits a category and uses the browser back button, some browsers will have that category option still selected. So if they (for whatever reason) choose “Browse by category:” it’s going to send the value “#” to the browser, basically telling it to stay on the current page.

Accessibility Issues

To ensure usability for those with scripts disabled, we’ve wrapped a submit button inside of a <noscript>. One extra step for those users, but if they’ve disabled scripts, they’re probably used to that.

Be aware that this drop down box doesn’t quite work with subcategories. If you’d like a thorough explanation of how to put a hierarchical dropdown list of category archives on your page, check out David’s Raynes article on it.

The beta testing went on for a while, but really it was worth the wait. I’m rarely opposed to waiting for a program to get better; and I wasn’t disappointed. The end product is a versatile program that adds both strength and flexibility to it’s already powerful core.

And functionality! Some of my personal favorites:

• **Plugin Central:** Plugins add a great deal of functionality to Movable Type's already powerful core. But installing plugins to previous versions would sometimes go forgotten because once the files were copied over, you'd never have any indication that they were there (like Scripturizer or MTRegex). Now any plugins you add show up on a "Plugins Overview" page.
• **Designer Defaults:** Anyone who's ever installed a brand, spanking new weblog with Movable Type knows the look I'm talking about. Dull, lifeless blue on the fence between powder and corpse, the header in pasty white Trebuchet. Everyone, as quick as they can after pressing "Create New Weblog", goes straight to the CSS and changes those colors. Well, 3.2 gives you the power to create your own custom defaul pages, so when you click "Create New Weblog" it's using *your* styles instead of ... *yawn*
• **Easy to Install:**As I've mentioned before, I am a *pragmatic* designer, so easy is good. And upgrading to 3.2 is fairly easy. Just drop in the files, and go. Of course, I hit a snag with one of my plugins (had to remove my plugin_data table before it worked), but that's why I said "fairly" easy and not "really" easy.
• **Tastes Great:** One look at the main screen and you *know* it's a winner. Sleek new interface with alot more at hand. Icons that look good and make sense all at once. It really is a beautiful interface. AND they've simplified your entry and template listing so that selecting and perusing entries becomes much easier.

There’s alot more, but I suspect I’ll be ranting about this one for a while. Another great thing I did forget to mention was that you can either pick up a $39 personal copy for yourself (support included) or you can just get the free one-author, unlimited-site license. Go ahead. It’s much more entertaining than reading my blog, promise.

Oh and if I’ve convinced you to make the switch, tell everyone else by getting an official MT 3.2 badge for your site – or one of my unofficial ones.

Now that THAT essential step is complete, I’ve put together a compilation of the most important Firefox Extensions (an extension is an add-on that enhances the functionality of Firefox) that you should get:

VITAL:
* Google Toolbar for Firefox - many, many more features than the standard searchbar (you can also get google suggest here)
* Super DragAndGo - Drag a link to a new tab, text string to a new search tab by throwing it anywhere
* Disable Targets for Downloads - prevents download links opening in a blank window
* Single Window - keeps external links from opening new instances of Firefox
* Tabbrowser Preferences - lets you set MANY options about tabs (honestly, there may be some overlap between plugins, I’m not sure)
* User Agent Switcher - This might not sound important, but it is… if you come across any site that (like Windows Update) that requires Internet Explorer, you can just click the User Agent and tell Firefox to pretend its Internet Explorer.
* Web Developer - absolutely essential for any web designer; I use it every day; it is amazing the CSS and HTML stuff you can do with this extension!!!

NICE:
* downTHEMall! - lets you right click and download all of the images with a user-defined extension; great for sucking down tons of fonts or images or sounds or whatever.
* SwiftTabs - move to the next tab or the previous tab with a key
* ColorZilla - page zoom, eyedropper, image magnification, etc.
* Bandwidth Tester - tells you the bandwidth of your current internet connection
* Measure It - add a built-in pixel measuring tool to firefox… this is a great one!

Ingredients

We’re going to need two important things here. First, a handy DHTML script from Xin Yang called Chained Selects that’s going to power our linked list boxes. The script that you’ll be dropping into your directory is called chainedselects.js.

Second, a javascript file that we’ll call to from our form for the list of categories and entry titles. Movable Type will be generating this file.

Pros and Cons

Dealing with multidimensional data can sometimes be harrowing, especially if you’ve got alot of categories and entries, which we do in this example. The beauty of this process is that once we create the basic structure of the data file, Movable Type will handle all the complexity. Your users get a simple yet effective drop down menu.

There are some weaknesses to using DHTML, namely problems for those who don’t have javascript support; however, other options (that don’t involve massive programming skills) require all the data to be included in the HTML, which is really out of the question considering the amount of data we’re dealing with. But we’ll deal with some of those concerns at the end of the article.

The JavaScript

Our first step is to download the Chained Select script. The only file you’ll need from the .zip file (as mentioned before) is chainedselects.js. Upload this to the same directory your form will be in.

Next, we’re going to use Movable Type to generate a javascript data file. It’s easier than it sounds. Log into your MT installation and create a new index template. We’re going to name is ‘classes.js’ because in our example it’s a list of classes. You can name it whatever you want, just be sure it has a .js extension and remember the name later when you’re calling to it from the HTML.

We’re not going to need HTML headers because this file is basically just going to be generating/populating our menus:

// var hide_empty_list=true; //uncomment this line to hide empty selection lists
var disable_empty_list=true; //uncomment this line to disable empty selection lists
addListGroup("titles", "cat");
addOption("cat", "Select a category", "", "", 1); //Empty starter option
<MTCategories>
    addList("cat", "<$MTCategoryLabel encode_js="1"$>", "<$MTCategoryLabel encode_js="1"$>", "<$MTCategoryLabel encode_js="1"$>");
</MTCategories>

<MTCategories>
    addOption("<$MTCategoryLabel encode_js="1"$>", "Select class", "", "", 1); //Empty starter option
    <MTEntries>
        addOption("<$MTCategoryLabel encode_js="1"$>", "<$MTEntryTitle encode_js="1"$>", "<$MTEntryTitle encode_js="1"$>");
    </MTEntries>
</MTCategories>

The two options at the beginning of the script var hideemptylist=true; and disableemptylist=true; allow you to hide or disable the second list (respectively) if a category has not been chosen. I’ve simply disabled it, as a disappearing/reappearing form element can be confusing to users and a headache to designers. A // starts a comment in a script file, so if we want the browser to recognize this line, we’ll just remove it.

There are three functions (defined in chainedselects.js) that we’re executing in this script: addListGroup, addList and addOption. The addListGroup function creates the “root” group, almost like a root level directory. In this example, we’ll only be using one, because we’re only creating one set of selection boxes. The addList function defines lists so we can attach options to each list. Think of this function as a “folder” into which we’ll place options. The addOption function is then creating options to attach to each created list, much like “files” in a “folder”.

Don’t lose me. Let’s get back to the code: After the initial commented/uncommented options, we’re creating our “root” list. This is essentialy a name for the list. The function addListGroup(“titles”, “cat”); will create a list group called ‘titles’ that we can call from the HTML and ‘cat’ will be the name we’ll use for the primary list box. Don’t get confused. This isn’t the name we’re using in the HTML, this is what we’ll use to add options to that primary list box next.

Now we start to add options to our ‘cat’ list: addOption(“cat”, “Select a category”, “”, “”, 1); //Empty starter option. This is just a dummy option that shows “Select a category” if they’ve not yet chosen one.

<MTCategories>
    addList("cat", "<$MTCategoryLabel encode_js="1"$>", "<$MTCategoryLabel encode_js="1"$>", "<$MTCategoryLabel encode_js="1"$>");
</MTCategories>

If you’ve followed me this far, this bit of code should make sense. We’re basically adding options (and in this case, because it’s the primary list, sub-lists) to the category (‘cat’) list. You’ll notice <$MTCategoryLabel encode_js=“1”$> three times in a row. Here’s the breakdown: addList(“first-list-name”, “option text”, “option value”, “sub-list-name”, default-selected). First, we identify that these options (all the categories from your blog generated by MT) all belong on the ‘cat’ list. Next, we use the <$MTCategoryLabel encode_js=“1”$> tag to define our option text (what the user sees), the options value (what gets passed to your form) and the sub list name, for adding options later in the code. Please be sure to use encode_js=”1” in your <$MTCategoryLabel$> tag! Your entry titles and javascript don’t usually get along (especially if you like ampersands in your titles).

<MTCategories>
    addOption("<$MTCategoryLabel encode_js="1"$>", "Select class", "", "", 1); //Empty starter option
    <MTEntries>
        addOption("<$MTCategoryLabel encode_js="1"$>", "<$MTEntryTitle encode_js="1"$>", "<$MTEntryTitle encode_js="1"$>");
    </MTEntries>
</MTCategories>

This is probably the most confusing part, but really shouldn’t be. We are using the <MTCategories> to create populate the second list, the one that’s dynamically linked to the first. We first defined our sub lists, now we are adding options (notice the addOptions?) to those sub lists. Please notice that we are adding options and not lists, because we’re done with sub lists. This script is powerful enough to create more sub-lists, but for the sake of what we’re trying to accomplish, two levels is enough.

The <MTCategories> envelope will loop through all of our categories, and the <MTEntries> envelope will loop through all the entries in each category. We’ve put a addOption(“<$MTCategoryLabel encode_js=“1”$>”, “Select class”, “”, “”, 1); //Empty starter option before the <MTEntries> envelope because we’re creating a dummy selector for each category. Then we loop through all the entries in that category and add each class title as an option. Note: If you recall the breakdown for our syntax, addOption(“first-list-name”, “option text”, “option value”, default-selected), you can fill in the option value with whatever MT tag you’d like, entry ID, keywords, predefined user field. This gives you some real flexibility and power.

The HTML

Almost done, promise.

We need to do three important things to the HTML file we want the dynamic linked list boxes to appear in. First, in the header of the HTML we need to simply call to the chainedselect.js file and our MT generated javascript file. For instance, something like this should appear in the header of your code, where ‘classes.js’ is the name of the MT index file you created earlier:

<script language="javascript" src="/chainedselects.js"></script>
<script language="javascript" src="/classes.js"></script>

Next, we need to add an onLoad to the body tag so we can associate the data from our MT-generated script file with our menus when the page loads:

<body onload="initListGroup('titles', document.forms[0].Category, document.forms[0].Course, 'cs')">

First, you’ll notice ‘titles’. This was the list group we created at the beginning of our script file. Next, we’re initializing both of our list boxes. If you’re creating deeper (third or fourth level) list heirarchies, you’ll have a document.forms[0].SelectNameGoesHere for each list box. I’ve named the two I have ‘Category’ and ‘Course’, but you can name them what you want; just make sure they match with the names of the list boxes in your form. The ‘cs’ is an additional feature of the chainedselects.js script that uses a small cookie to remember the last selected entry in case the user reloads the page. Consult the documentation included with the .zip file for more information about that.

Lastly, we’re going to put our list boxes into our HTML:

<label for="Category">Category:</label>
<select name="Category" value=""></select>

<label for="Course" class="mandat">Course:</label>
<select name="Course" value=""></select>

Don’t forget that these need to go inside a form. What you do with them (pass data to an email, search form, URL jump, etc.) is completely up to you.

Caveats

As we said earlier, there are some weaknesses behind a form like this. Someone who disables javascript will be faced without a second list box. I’ve worked around that by allowing users to also register directly from an individual entry, in essence giving the users another way (though longer) to accomplish the same thing. That’s why I can risk a form that doesn’t work.

The other option, as is outlined by A List Apart in an article called Complex Dynamic Lists gives a straight HTML solution, which may be more appropriate for pages with less data to incorporate (menus, etc.) If anyone has comments/suggestions about integrating MT with the ALA menu structure or perhaps a better solution via PHP, please feel free to share. It will bide my reader’s over until I can come up with an article about it.

Example In Action

You can see this in action at https://www.compvisions.com/register.php — the list boxes in the registration form filled dynamically with the most current class titles via Movable Type.

That’s it. Under the ‘Hurrican Katrina’ header, that’s it. No relief effort. No call for students to help churches a mere 3 hours away. No offer to house evacuees in the spacious Sports Center. Not even a paltry “we’re praying for the victims”. Just wipe your brow and whew thank God it missed you.

Now that’s religion right there.

There are many, many ways this can be done (plugins, php, etc.) and even more ways to implement it (mutliple author highlighting, specific images for certain commenters, etc.), but we’re going to look at two important facets: static and dynamic.

Static vs. Dynamic

This is a debate which we will leave to the professionals. I will only go so far as to say that there are some static publishing options for this trick that you don’t have with dynamic publishing. For instance, I first tried using Kevin Shay’s MTCompare to check the author’s comment email with a preset string; this works fine with static publishing, but dynamic spits out an ugly smarty error that says it doesn’t like playing with your tag.

So what we’ll do here is outline two ways of accomplishing the same thing: one is clear and simple for static publshing (though it requires Kevin’s MTCompare plugin) and the other is smaller though just a touch more complex (if you’re a novice with PHP, as am I) and perfect for dynamic content.

Option #1: MTCompare

First, if you have not done so, download and install Kevin’s MTCompare plugin. This will give you some extra tags like , and that puts some conditional power in your hands.

Next, create a special class for your highlighted comments. All of my comments are wrapped in a generic ‘.comments’ class with a simple border and background color. So I created a new class called ‘.mycomments’ with a slightly different border and background color so they stand out from the rest.

Now, we’ll need to make some changes to your Individual Entry Archive (or wherever your comments are posted). Find the tag that starts your comment envelope. If you haven’t already done so, wrap your comments in a

What we need to do now is add a conditional to the

Let’s compromise. Let’s create a password in email form. For instance, if you wanted to use ‘foobar’ as your password, lets just use ‘foo@bar.com’. It’s just as easy to remember, and it has all the security you’d find in a password, without having to disable the email check.

Now that we’ve decided on a conditional, we need to put it into our template. Let’s replace that starting

Unfortunately, doesn’t have an else built into it, so we have to run another statement. There are other ways around this (put the conditional in the class of the actual

What’s happening is we’re comparing a and b, a being the tag that MT passes along and b, your predefined password. ( requires that any MT tags be passed to it with [] instead of <> and single quotes instead of double quotes.) If they match, a

Save, rebuild and comment using your new ‘password’ in the email comment form. Your comments should now stand out.

You can put anything else in these conditional statements (photos of contributing authors, additional text, scripts, etc.) The possibilities are endless.

Option #2: Blessed PHP

In some ways this solution is a better one. Though it’s relatively more complex (programmatically), you don’t have to rely on a plugin for functionality and it’s not as semantically redundant.

First, realize that with dynamic publishing you can’t put an MT template tag inside a PHP statement. Why? Consult the book of MT!

Harumph. It’s a fine solution for our static friends. All they need to do is compare the with the predefined email ‘password’ we talked about earlier. A simple replacing of their opening

Movable Type fills in that first part of the conditional and a simple check is performed against it. If the email field had “foo@bar.com” in it, the class is “mycomment”, if not, the class is “comment”. (Oh, don’t forget to ‘escape’ your quotes (put a before them) inside of the echo statements… you’ll confuse PHP if you don’t. Find out more here.)

Sadly, as we mentioned before, this won’t work for you if you’re using dynamic publishing, because Smarty (MT’s dynamic compiler) will try to compile those tags in the PHP statement and make a mess of things. So what we must do to compensate is capture to value of the tag in a simple string and then make the comparison against that string:

What I’ve done is I’ve captured the MTCommentEmail tag data through PHP and compared that with my predefined passcode, ‘foo@bar.com’ The final comment section in your Individual Archive Template should look something like this:

Now when you post comments to your own site, enter in your passcode in the comment email field and your comments ought to stand out!

Final Thoughts

Movable Type 3.2 has some very powerful global search and replace capabilities, giving you the option to search and replace specific fields in your comments. You can choose comments > limit fields > comment email and perform a global search and replace of ‘your@email.com’ with the new passcode ‘foo@bar.com’. That way this comment highlighting is retroactice.

Only problem is the global search and replace hasn’t seemed to work for me in the comments section. I check the “Search & Replace” radio button, type in the new address, check all of the entries and click “Replace” – and get a “No comments were found that match the given criteria.” in red. A basic search again and my old address is still there in all the entries. I’ve tried it with other comment addresses and still no go.

It was worth a shot.

Movable Type gives you an amazing amount of control over your content, but one of the things that it sorely lacks is the ability to make massive changes to all of your entries at once. Oh sure, you can edit the basics in power editing mode—categories, authors, dates and titles—but we want more. Being able to make massive changes to the extended, excerpt and keyword fields can become almost a necessity if, like me, you’re using those fields for something other than their original purpose.

For instance—Customer A is using MT to store course listings. The extended entry field contains the dates offered, the excerpt field holds the price and the keywords field stores the length of the class in days. Now, admitedly, the data could be altered using SQL, but MT’s biggest draw is its usability. So we need a hack that will list those fields for editing in our power editing list.

NOTE, PART THE FIRST: The following is a hack and will call for changes in core MT components. Make sure you’ve made the appropriate backups before trying this one out. Also, realize that if you upgrade your MT installation, these changes will be lost. (Which is a bad thing if your customer relies on this functionality.) Best suggestion is to add a AltTemplatePath ./alttmpl to your mt-config.cgi, create a /mt/alttmpl/cms directory and put your edited tempalte modules there. But then, you already knew that if you’re making drastic changes, right?

NOTE, PART DUEX: This specific hack will not work versions of MT previous to 3.2 (probably guessed that with the mt-config.cgi instruction). It’s doable with the older versions, but I’m not going to take time here explaining it when you really should have upgraded. Please email me if you really need help with the older versions. The major difference is that MT 3.2 moves all the power-editing functionality to a new template module called ‘entrytable.tmpl’, whereas before, the power-editing form was integrated with ‘listentries.tmpl’. The separation of it into its own template module makes perfect sense.

NOTE, PART THE LAST: Hopefully after all these caveats you’ve realized that this hack really needs to be tailored to your own use. I’m going to explain how I used it, but you’re big boys and girls—you can make adjustments as necessary.

Step 1: Changing the Entry Form: Editing ‘entry_table.tmpl’

As stated before, MT 3.2 moved the power-editing mode into the ‘entrytable.tmpl’ (located in /mt/tmpl/cms/) instead of previous versions where it was integrated with ‘listentries.tmpl’. It makes much more sense now, considering we’re not just ‘listing’, we’re editing as well.

In your ‘entry_table.tmpl’, find the part where your table headers are defined—somewhere around line 23. Scroll down until you find:

<th id="en-category"><MT_TRANS phrase="Category"></th>
<th id="en-date"><MT_TRANS phrase="Date"></th>

Right after this code (and before the ) insert the following lines:

<th id="en-text_more"><MT_TRANS phrase="Extended Entry"></th>
<th id="en-excerpt"><MT_TRANS phrase="Excerpt"></th>
<th id="en-keywords"><MT_TRANS phrase="Keywords">

This will add three columns after your date column any place your entries are listed. If I were creating this for my example site using MT to list courses offered, I could change the <MT_TRANS phrase=“Extended Entry”> to simply “Dates Offered” (no quotes). Keep in mind, this will hurt accesibility because the MT_TRANS tag is inserting translatable titles, allowing multi-language support. Chances are though that if you’re customizing this screen you’re probably not too worried about that.

Next, we need to populate the columns with either editable input fields or the actual values themselves, depending on whether or not the list is being pulled from power-editing mode. In your ‘entry_table.tmpl”, look for the following (around line 118):

<td><TMPL_IF NAME=IS_EDITABLE><input name="created_on_<TMPL_VAR NAME=ID>" value="<TMPL_VAR NAME=CREATED_ON_TIME_FORMATTED>" /><TMPL_ELSE><span title="<TMPL_VAR NAME=CREATED_ON_TIME_FORMATTED>"><TMPL_IF NAME=CREATED_ON_RELATIVE><TMPL_IF NAME=DATES_RELATIVE><TMPL_VAR NAME=CREATED_ON_RELATIVE><TMPL_ELSE><TMPL_VAR NAME=CREATED_ON_FORMATTED></TMPL_IF><TMPL_ELSE><TMPL_VAR NAME=CREATED_ON_FORMATTED></TMPL_IF></span></TMPL_IF></td>

This is the code for the date column. Lets insert the following codes between the code you just found and the </tr> right after it:

<td><TMPL_IF NAME=IS_EDITABLE><input name="text_more_<TMPL_VAR NAME=ID>" value="<TMPL_VAR NAME=TEXT_MORE>" /><TMPL_ELSE><span title="<TMPL_VAR NAME=TEXT_MORE>"><TMPL_VAR NAME=TEXT_MORE></span></TMPL_IF></td>
<td><TMPL_IF NAME=IS_EDITABLE><input name="excerpt_<TMPL_VAR NAME=ID>" value="<TMPL_VAR NAME=EXCERPT>" /><TMPL_ELSE><span title="<TMPL_VAR NAME=EXCERPT>"><TMPL_VAR NAME=EXCERPT></span></TMPL_IF></td>
<td><TMPL_IF NAME=IS_EDITABLE><input name="keywords_<TMPL_VAR NAME=ID>" value="<TMPL_VAR NAME=KEYWORDS>" /><TMPL_ELSE><span title="<TMPL_VAR NAME=KEYWORDS>"><TMPL_VAR NAME=KEYWORDS></span></TMPL_IF></td>

Let’s pause for a moment and look at what’s happening here. Three columns are being inserted (beneath the headers we just created). A TMPL_IF tag is inserted because if we’re in power-editing mode, we want editable fields, if we’re simply looking at the entry list or the system overview, we just want values, no input fields. One important thing to note with our input fields—be sure to include the textmore or keywords_ with the <TMPL_VAR NAME=ID> attached no matter what you’ve named the column. This will be important for our next step because it’s how we tell MT which field and which entry to save changes to.

Go ahead and save your ‘entry_table.tmpl’ template module, preferable in your /mt/alttemplate/cms/ directory.

Step 2: Getting MT Ready to Save New Fields: Adding Variables to ‘CMS.pm’

Modifying core Perl modules should always be done carefully and with hesitation. The changes we’re making here aren’t taking any functionality away or even changing current functionality, we’re simply ADDING functionality. If you remove the custom entry table template module we created earlier, MT will function the same way it always has. At the very most, you’d notice a performance hit when saving via power editing mode, and if it matters enough to you you can just remove the following changes.

MT doesn’t expect extended entry, excerpt or keyword data to be passed to it from the power-editing mode, so we need to change that by adding those variables to the save_entries subroutine of ‘cms.pm’.

Open ‘/mt/lib/MT/App/CMS.pm’ and find the following lines (around line 5084):

sub save_entries {
    my $app = shift;
    my $perms = $app->{perms}

That’s the beginning of the subroutine. Scroll down about 20 lines until you see the following:

    $entry->author_id($author_id ? $author_id : 0);
    $entry->status(scalar $q->param('status_' . $id));
    $entry->title(scalar $q->param('title_' . $id));

We want to add those values we included on the new power-editing template to this list so MT will actually save the data entered in those fields:

    $entry->text_more(scalar $q->param('text_more_' . $id));
    $entry->excerpt(scalar $q->param('excerpt_' . $id));
    $entry->keywords(scalar $q->param('keywords_' . $id));

Save, upload and give it a try. Keep in mind, if your ‘Excerpt’ field is blank and your site configuration is set to auto create an excerpt with the first 250 words of your entry, the power-editing form could get LONG. For the example of my class, since I’m using the excerpt field for the price of the class, I’ve set the auto-excerpt to 0 words so if the field is left blank, it will stay blank.

As I mentioned earlier, this hack isn’t for every situation, but it’s perfect if you’re pushing the MT envelope and need the ability to edit more fields than is customary.

Actually, the problems started the end of last week. My DSL speeds have never been all that high. I’m paying for 3M and I was only getting around 300k. But I wasn’t complaining.

My upstairs neighbors were, though. They share my wireless internet with me and were constantly losing their connection. Then I started to as well. I was routinely getting bumped probably 8 or 9 times a day, and my rates were consistently hovering around 50k (about the speed of a dialup modem, and that was down… i was only getting like 8k up!)

Then Monday it was disconnecting for LONG periods of time. So long in fact that I picked up the phone to call Verizon. Not 10 seconds after I dialed the phone, my connection was restored. It was horribly slow, but it was restored. This happened four times in a row. I even joked with Jess that I was scaring it. Then it struck me.

What would cause it to connect only when I used the phone? Well, when I dial out using the phone, the voltage of the signal increases. AHA. I was also noticing SEVERE interference and static on the phone. AHA! I immediately pulled out my screwdriver and took the face plate off the phone jack. Inside was a tangle of wires reminiscent of steel wool, as brittle as desert carcass, connected to nothing in particular. These I cut and threw away. The wires actually connected to the jack were barely doing so. The positive was spliced and held together with a twist and a slice of scotch tape. The negative was spliced and connected through a corroded conductor. Oy.

So I respliced and capped both sides, making sure everything was connected correctly. Put the plate back on, connected the modem and router and tested my speed–1.5M. Ah… Much better.

Haven’t been down since.

And why the curtain? He is a fool who will not struggle against the dark veil said Disraeli. I feel like a fool, an ambitious fool. The Indian man speaks of a moral law invoked, if God is unjust, what is justice? You say evil like you believe in good. You invoke the moral law like you believe in a Lawgiver. But the very question you brandish cuts to ribbons the premise on which you stand. Standing on the promises, no, no, follow ME. Tenors, again, if you can’t hit the E, stay on the B. It all fits into the chord.

A threefold chord is not quickly broken. What a cord it is! The slow rise and fall of her form as she takes in the air, warms it and releases. Her eyes open though I cannot see them. The hand reaches out and touches my face. Facing tomorrow is so very much like facing yesterday, nothing like facing today. Today takes courage, yesterday takes prisoners. But tomorrow, tomorrow I have bills to pay. Tomorrow I can see the signposts, the arrows this way and that. Happyville to the left, Comfortown to the right. Just a few miles if these shoes hold out. I’ve been wearing them now for a while. What happens if I go straight? Sit down? Take off my shoes?

Take off your clothes. Show me you’re telling the truth. NO. You’re just a guy in the mall who called me a liar because I have no cell phone. I’m not stripping for you. The reception is terrible around here, and there’s a hundred foot antenna whose shadow lands on our building. Building frustration. Why do I need a cell phone I ask him. It’s a story says he. His disbelief is my story, this is my song, praising my Savior all the day long. Altos, look at ME. Fortissimo!

Those faces. They need. I need. We all need, and we all hold those masks so well. Raise them and sing the tragic chorus. Antigone feels the struggle between civil law and the higher law, but then she’s assuming a moral Lawgiver says the wise Indian. They found her hanging in a cave. Swallowed by conflict.

I swallow hard. Life is good, hard, tough, conflict. Staring out the glass, I am a goldfish waiting for wings. Lean on my hands and watch the sun rise and set, rise and set on my mortality. Shall I go here? Shall I do this? Oh the voices, the voices, they surround me in harmony, dissonance, together now in unity the man with the baton cries. The elderly gentleman beside me went flat, but he sang with all his might. It is this very might that I can feel, welling up in my muscles, the tensing, the bouncing foot, ready to walk, to run, the embrace the unknown, to sing the part I’ve only heard briefly in my dreams.

Solutions. Precious commodity these days.

Rest my voice, rest my eyes, rest my soul and remember that at day’s end, Creon had nothing left but order.

• **The Leap** by Mark Nicholson (.MP3/4:06/3.71Mb)

I’ve also updated the photoblog [https://plasticmind.com/photos] with quite a few more photos of the wedding.

Follow me. Money doesn’t grow on trees, and if it does, these hurricanes have certainly blown it out to sea with 100+mph winds. A great deal of time, money and effort are being spent on dealing with these natural disasters that have literally shut down entire sections of our country. Oil production is sluggish at best and gas prices are higher than the water level on a New Orleans building. In short, our attention has turned inward with such magnitude that foreign affairs seem to fade into the peripheral. When was the last American soldier killed in Iraq? How long until Iraq drafts a constitution? Did we already pass that deadline?

That’s not to say that those things aren’t important. I talk with Chaplain Jon Fisher almost daily, and he is constantly in my thoughts and prayers. But then, so is Renee Doiron, a Katrina survivor and close friend. And like a giant, slow swing of the pendulum, I feel the inertia slowing in the Middle East. These things seems important, but they don’t carry the same weight that they did 4 years ago.

Is terror a threat? Yes. Do I wish for peace in the Middle East? Absolutely. Would I love to see Iraq become a stable democracy? With all my heart. But those all seem so distant, so unattainable, so insignificant in light of tragedy on this continent. At a funeral, I don’t think about work, I don’t think about grocery shopping. I grieve, I embrace, I remember, I grow.

Someone once said that American soldiers cannot fight long battles and offered Vietman as proof. We’ve been in Iraq coming up on 3 years and I know many who are weary, fighting for the freedom of a people so long repressed that like the Israelites in their Exodus from Egypt, the future seems both difficult and unbelievable so they just want to go back. Wasn’t it just the other day an Iraqi police force handed British soldiers over to militant fundamentalists? Perhaps this season of such tremendous natural disaster is just the thing to bring our soldiers home.

Some will say that this is just an admission of weakness; some will say that pulling out now equals failure. At any other time in history I may have agreed, but our country is reeling from its own enormous national struggle and we need our men home more than ever now. Now more than ever there is a need for mending divisions in this country, and a good place to start is by bringing Jon Fisher and his crew home to help the people on the Gulf Coast. There is never failure or weakness in salvation and unity.

I always chuckled at the music rule at my almamater–a self-proclaimed bastion for fundamentalism–that stated if a soundtrack was less than nine years old, it was illegal, even if it was purely orchestral. Sorry John Williams, that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Not to mention the dilemma they faced in that I could write music on my computer without a MIDI keyboard. How do you handle music creation that exists completely within the digital world! Ahh!

But I digress. On to the discussion at hand.

##### Music In The Public Worship Service

The basic question seems to be finding the distinction between the sacred and the secular. It’s a question as old as the tabernacle. Certain elements were set aside as sacred even though they appeared elsewhere in life. Goat skins, lamps and gold were not inherently sacred, though they became that when sanctified or set apart for the greater purpose of the Lord’s use.

So there were some base elements that could be used for both good and evil (gold used in idols and to cover the mercy seat). It would be foolish to curse the gold of an idol when it was the use of it for idolatry that was the sin. When Moses came down from the mountain and saw the people around the golden calf, Moses did not curse the gold or the craft of goldsmithing, he confronted Aaron who had done the deed and the people who had called for it.

And the real problem came when God’s people took common items and used them in the same way as the pagans did. For instance, setting up groves for worshipping, etc. God doesn’t hate trees or statues, he hates the worship of other gods which these things represented.

We’re going on and on talking about music as if it were the thing itself, when in reality it’s the use and intention that matters. Don’t curse the drums or the organ, don’t curse the saxaphone, the electric guitar or the turntable. It’s very easy to do that, because we have images in our mind of long-haired, face-painted, crotch-grabbing ‘artists’ grinding against electric guitars to a throbbing, drugged-up crowd. But those people are not wrong for playing an electric guitar just as much as they are not wrong for using their voice. You might as well fault them for using microphones or convening in an auditorium.

There is a problem that goes much deeper than what instrument is being played; but the electric guitar or drums are often vilified because they take center stage. But taking away the electric guitar from the rocker is like taking a gun away from a killer. He’ll find another way, a knife, a rope, a letter opener, a box cutter.

And now it gets personal. I play the drums. I play the piano. I play the electric guitar. I’ve operated a turntable and tried my hand at scratching (not very good). I enjoy writing purely electronic music where there are no instruments to play, only textures to be controlled–simply an oscillator with filters and effects. And lest you think that all electronic music is driven by a throbbing bass (which ironically isn’t that 2/4 off-beat so often preached about, it’s ususally every beat that’s emphasized), much of my music is ambient, which simply means it doesn’t have a bassline, it simply morphs and changes shapes and tones, etc.

Believe it or not, I much prefer hymns to praise and worship, though I do like both. And generally what I do is rewrite hymns with different music, because if you know anything about music, you know that hymns are very predictable. And if you know anything about songleading, predictable music is very easy to follow. And if you know anything about people, you’ll agree that familiarity breeds contempt. More people than we’d like to admit find hymns dull and boring. Don’t get me wrong! The message is vital, and the lyrics to most great hymns of the faith are confessionals themselves. But the music is so predictable, its easy to check your emotions at the door, attach a spring to your jaw and let your mind wander around a Sunday morning.

As a very important aside, I will say that there is a familiarity that should not be forsaken with hymns. Many people I know have held tightly to hymns that have helped them through hard times. God bless them and let us not forsake all hymns! But let us use the same sensibility we do with preaching, Sunday school teaching and youth meetings; let us keep people’s attention and hit them where they’re at while still remaining true to God’s Word.

The more I think about it, the more the example of preaching becomes pertinent. Preachers study about the best methods to reach the congregation. Some preachers use object lessons. Some preachers use Powerpoint. Some preachers move around. Each preacher tries different methods of communicating with the congregation, but all (hopefully) with the same goal–getting God’s Word into the hearts, minds and lives of their flock.

And so worship ought take that same approach. The instruments are simply vehicles by which worship is raised to God. Some older folks don’t ‘get’ newer instruments and so worship with those vehicles is awkward at best, hindered at worst. Some younger folks are used to expressing their hearts with newer forms of music, and feel like their worship is stifled without them. The difficult balance for any worship leader or pastor is how to effectively reach all ages; but then, this is not a new task. Pastors have been wrestling with that for ages in their sermons. Your sermon to farmers would probably be a bit different than your sermon to businessmen; but the core of your message would be unchanged. God is the great equalizer, no doubt. But not everyone speaks the same language.

Let me share a personal example. I attend a highly conservative church with a piano and an organ. During our Lord’s supper while the elements were being distributed, the organist played a few hymns. The throbbing 8’ flute was drilling into my brain and it was everything I could do to concentrate on the sacrafice of Christ on the cross. The organ is a vehicle of worship that means something to some people, but to me, the organ is reminiscent of funeral homes. I certainly would have been more at ease with a classical nylon guitar rendition of Great Is Thy Faithfulness. But the relative incongruity was not worth making a fuss over, because I knew it was meaningful for someone else. I wouldn’t have even mentioned it if weren’t relevant to the issue at hand.

The goal, then, is to find music that provides a vehicle of worship for the broadest possible audience. After all, God doesn’t need anything at all, so worship music is really a way in which we are both preparing our hearts and directing our attention to Him; so the best worship music will do just that. For you, it may be the piano and organ. For me, a cello, acoustic guitar and synth pad will do the trick. For some, drums and electric piano work well.

Music Everywhere Else

Of course, this just just a discussion of the worship service. I’ve not even attempted to discuss modern music in our everday life. Should God be featured in every song we sing? Was that ever a question debated in our family! It seems to also cause contention on any Christian forum, but let me just quickly say this. Many of you talk about sports. Where is God in that? Many of you talk about cars. Where is God in that? Many of you talk about the Internet. Where is God in that? Many of you talk about art. Where is God in that?

Glorifying God is more than just saying the word ‘God’ or ‘Jesus’ in a song. It can be as subtle as promoting the goodness of the world He created and as explicit as “God want’s to save you today.” Something to think about next time you criticize a CCM band for not being able to tell it was ‘Christian’ music in 5 minutes. If I listened to you while you expounded on the Seattle Seahawks for 5-10 minutes, would I be able to tell that you were a Christian? If I read the book of Song of Solomon for 5-10 minutes, would I be able to tell it was God-breathed? Context is a might powerful thing.

May borrow a quote from Lewis?

“I believe that any Christian who is qualified to write a good popular book on science may do much more by that than by any directly apologetic work. The difficulty we are up against is this. We can make people (often) attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible. We must attack the enemy’s line of communication. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects–with their Christianity latent.”

Replace the word ‘books’ with ‘songs’ and you’ve got my thoughts on non-worship service music in a nutshell.

One of the most powerful and well-supported content management systems turns four years old today, and we have a host of people to thank for it, not the least of which are Ben and Mena Trott, the founders of the MT engine and Six Apart. Also, kudos to Jay Allen, 6A product manager who really gives the company a professional yet technical edge that sets MT apart from other CMS-type solutions.

Here’s to you!

With the release of the impossibly small iPod Nano just a few weeks ago, all of the geeks (including me) were saying it wasn’t going to be the rumored video iPod. Everyone’s hunch was a brand new iMac G5. Well, guess what boys and girls? They did both!

In a bold, unexpected move, Apple has now introduced a brand new iPod that can store over 150 hours of video and they’ve launched iTunes 6 that allows you to purchase music videos, television programs and short films that you can either watch on your iPod (same size as always) or hook up to your television and watch. For instance, you can download iTunes 6 right now and for just $1.99 you can purchase the season premiere of Lost for only $1.99! Partner that with their brand new iMacG5 and a handy little program called FrontRow that turns your computer into the sleekest, easiest entertainment center this side of tomorrow–talk about a match made in heaven!

The only drawback is that the video is only 320x200, so even with a television hookup, quality is poor. But I would not be surprised at all to see this catch fire the way podcasts have. Major players like CNN, MSNBC, NPR and even the MLBPA have their own podcasts. Why? Because the overhead generally associated with broadcasting is completely removed, so everyone wants in. Now with the barriers virtually smashed for video broadcasting (enter video podcasters) the possibilities ae endless. Who wouldn’t pay $1.99 to watch their favorite show whenever and wherever they want? I’m currently downloading some Pixar animations for kicks and giggles.

Anyone else want a bite of Apple?

And then there’s those orange nights when the train whistle blows and the mind wanders the shiny black streets and brims with so many big indescribable things. The compulsion to write is as strong as the compulsion to walk, to think, to dream, to wonder. Launched to the sky with amazement, still tethered by reality. I want to remember this day, this thought. When my brain is old and begins to forget, I want this moment remembered as vividly as I feel it today penning these words. This isn’t for you; this is for my tomorrow’s sake.

I’m lying beside the woman I love, amazed by the very rise and fall of her form. Every day new reasons to love her blossom like a dogwood in spring and make my life more beautiful. I can hardly keep track. I think it’s very much like the journey through childhood. Children are filled with a bright wonder at each new experience, and every encounter, every contact forges their perspective of the world. Even the most subtle family dynamics affect a child’s personality. Mom loves to hug and so does Susie. Dad is shy and Junior has a hard time making friends. All of these interactions shape the way a child looks at life and slowly makes him who he will be.

So I lie here, visibly changed. Certainly I would miss her if she were gone, but the weaving process has begun. I cannot stop it. My life’s roots are intertwined and as we grow deeper, stronger and wider, we cannot help but grow more inseparable. People who divorce after forty years can do so only because they did not weave together the saplings at the onset. You can’t fell a tree that has been fused to another; taking one down will take the other. Separation is only possible if unity was never complete.

Another funny thing about love is how often it proves you wrong. Someone once said that they’d like to meet the man who wrote the book of love and shake his hand. I suggest that man doesn’t exist, or if he does, he is a madman revisionist. Every time I’ve attempted to scrawl my own passage into the book of love, I read it the next day only to find it passé. Standing on that stage July 8th, 2005, swearing my vows before God and everyone, I felt that my love could grow no stronger, my heart could take no more. I even wrote something like that in a frequently outmoded journal. Was I ever wrong!

So why write this, if today’s love is only going to be eclipsed by tomorrow’s greater love? Why make the effort to write if the information will be cold tomorrow? Because despite indications to the contrary, this journal is more than mere ramblings and meanderings—it is a history book entitled Cross-sections of Life. Isn’t that all we have anyway, at least for the present?

My mind flies up and across the ever-hastening midnight to catch a glimpse of the fleeting sun in his dappled sky, borne up by the rising form beside me. A pause. Then the breath slowly escapes her lungs and I close my eyes to sleep.

Speaking of rambling, I got this fun little list off of my friend’s site and thought it might be nice here. Oh don’t roll your eyes at me.

1. What is your full name? Jesse David Gardner
   
2. What color pants are you wearing? None (red shorts, sicko)
   
3. What are you listening to right now? The whir of my computer fans, but usually a Ravi Zacharias podcast
   
4. What was the last thing you ate? Hand-picked Melrose apples and peanut butter (the p.b. wasn’t hand picked, just the apples)
   
5. Do you wish on stars? No, but I tell people that I do
   
6. If you were a crayon, what color would you be? Red—first to be used up
   
7. How is the weather right now? Gorgeous
   
8. Last person you spoke to on the phone? Sarah Elizabeth
   
9. Do you like the person who sent this to you? Yep, she’s cool.
   
10. How old are you today? 28
    
11. Favorite drink? Pennsylvania Dutch Birch Beer
    
12. Favorite sports? Those two don’t go together
    
13. Hair color? Dirty blonde
    
14. Do you wear contacts? Nope
    
15. Siblings? A brother and two sisters, all younger
    
16. Favorite month? All except February
    
17. Favorite food? Jessica’s Chicken Cordon Bleu
    
18. What’s the last movie you have seen? While You Were Sleeping
    
19. Favorite day of the year? Christmas
    
20. What do you do to vent anger? SARCASM
    
21. What was your favorite toy as a child? Transformers
    
22. Summer or winter? Yes, thank you.
    
23. Hugs or kisses? Backrubs
    
24. Chocolate or vanilla? Dark Chocolate
    
25. Do you want your friends to e-mail you back? Yes, I find my self-worth in my inbox
    
26. Who is most likely to respond? Renee
    
27. Who is least likely to respond? Andy Martin
    
28. When was the last time you cried? I never cry, though I did get a little choked up watching While You Were Sleeping
    
29. What is under your bed? Computer cables, a Minidisc recorder, a Peavey phantom power box and the mirror for our dresser
    
30. Who is the friend you have known the longest? Who reads my site and isn’t a sibling? Probably Tim Jackson
    
31. What did you do last night? Played pool and Scattergories and ate stromboli with John and Sarah
    
32. What are you afraid of? Alzheimer’s, playing the piano in public, the first 3 minutes of almost every social setting, snakes, cutting my finger on a cheese grater, porous surfaces like anthills and brain coral, performing CPR
    
33. Plain buttered or salted popcorn? Slathered with butter and covered in salt
    
34. Favorite car? The one I never had
    
35. Favorite flower? Cornflower
    
36. Number of keys on your key ring? 1 (lost the other)
    
37. How many years at your current job? 3 months since I started PlasticMind Design
    
38. Favorite day of the week? Thursday
    
39. What did you do on your last birthday? Nothing worth mentioning.
    
40. How many states have you lived in? 7: ME, NC, SC, NY, PA, FL, NJ (oh and Japan)
    
41. How many cities have you lived in? 12: Beuford, SC; Somewhere, NC; Okinawa, JP; Ghent, NY; Gansevoort, NY; Pensacola, FL; South Plainfield, NJ; Somerset, NJ; Spencertown, NY; Greenville, ME; Chatham, NY; Langhorne, PA
    
42. What is your favorite football team? The one nearest my hometown the day of the Superbowl
    
43. What is your favorite candy? Dark chocolate covered pretzels or Reese’s PB Cups

There, aren’t you glad you came? Yeah, well, you get what you pay for.

Our primary goal is to create pages that are both easy to manage and easy to update (so we’re not quite talking about static pages). There are many ways to handle individual pages, I’ll deal with two:

via Archive Mapping

This only works well in certain situations, and you’ll see why as we go along. First, let’s start a new blog from scratch. In the archive (publishing) settings of this new blog, you’ll delete all but individual entry archives. Then down where you can customize the output path of this individual entry archive, choose custom and use the following formula:

<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$><MTIfNonEmpty tag="MTEntryCategory">/</MTIfNonEmpty><$MTEntryKeywords dirify="1"$>.html

If your put the word ‘steakhouse’ in the keywords field and set the category to portfolio, your entry would be saved in /portfolio/steakhouse.html — So just put your site “skeleton” in the individual entry archive template, the file name you want this page named in the keywords field and the category (directory) you want it placed in. Obviously if you don’t specify a category, it will be published in the root. So an entry with no category and ‘index’ in the keywords field gets published as your front page. This allows you to keep headers, footers and sidebars in the individual entry archive template and the content (whatever you deem that to be) as individual entries. You can even be creative with the leftover fields and the <MTIfNonEmpty> tag. I’ve used the entry title as the page title, the extended entry as an additional part of the page. Lots you can do here.

And also, as a side note, I usually create a blog for the main structure of the site using this method, then I create another blog for the additional information that would need to be added in the traditional MT way. For example, a restaurant’s pages could be generated using this method. Then you could set up a second blog that would publish to the site’s /menu/ directory and use MultiBlog to share modules, stylesheets, entries, etc. I explain this in my article Using MultiBlog to Share More.

Pros: The page is published automatically, because it’s considered an entry. That means to rebuilding. The pages are easy to change.

**Cons: ** You’re probably still going to need to include a bit of HTML in the entries themselves, but it will only be minimal (h1, h2, etc.) You’re fairly limited with only one individual entry template, so most of your pages will look the same. The pages are easy to change.

Raynes’ MTEntry Plugin

This isn’t quite as beautiful, but it sure is simple and can seriously cut back on HTML in your archives. Download and install David Rayner’s Raynes’ MTEntry Plugin. This allows you to use a <MTEntry id=”###”> container tag in place of <MTEntries>. So it should then be obvious how to use it. Create index pages for each of your “static” pages with just the structure (header, footer, sidebar, whatever) of that page. Then create the content you want on that page in a new entry. Save it and check the entry ID (you can usually find this in your URL bar at the top). Now go back to the index page you just created and where you want your content to appear, just use a <MTEntry></MTEntry> container to include just like you would a <MTEntries> container.

You can be creative. Your <MTEntryTitle> could be the <h2> on your page. The <MTExtendedEntry> could be an additional picture. Also, you don’t actually have to publish the entry for <MTEntry> to include it on your page. <MTEntry> will pull unpublished and published entries. This is nice because then these entries don’t have to show up in your list of published entries. And if you don’t assign them a category, they won’t appear in your category archives either. So essentially you have editable static pages without disrupting the flow of your normal entries.

Pros: Much less HTML because your Templates can be much better customized and your <MTEntry> container can be placed more specifically. Extremely versatile.

Cons: Having the content listed with all of the other entries can get confusing for a user. Also, if you’re not using dynamic publishing, your index pages need to be rebuild after an entry save to see any changes made. Sometimes this is a headache for the users. Additional static pages aren’t generated automatically.

Conclusion

Essentially, you’ll have to decide which option is best for the site you’re working on. Breaking out of the core functionality of Movable Type always presents some issues, and you’ll need to weigh the complications with the benefits. The key here is not just to make things work, it’s to make things work well and be sure that your customer (or you) will be able to quickly and easily make changes to the site. If you have to go back through your entries each time to see how you formatted the last one, you should probably go back to the drawing board.

It’s not the Katrina Recovery effort, but it does say something about their desire to help. Kudos to them!

Through frosty lenses, Kyle watched. He hugged his tattered yellow quilt tighter and watched the outside world through a solitary window; the cold inside hurt more than the biting draft. His tiny frame quivered instinctively. A mop of sandy blonde hair fell and hid his puffy eyes. Kyle sniffled then rubbed at the flowing tears.

At times he paused, lusting for a chance to live; desire, however, was quickly driven away with Gertie’s stick. Gertie always said that “a boy should na’ be foolin’ with such fiddelry as runnin’ like mad in tha’ cold.” Kyle knew it was more than just the cold. Gertie—she never let the townsfolk see him because of his cripple leg. She was his only relative and after his parents were killed at sea she was forced to take him in.

He paused for a moment. The children outside continued to run and laugh and play and throw snowballs and build forts and make angels and live their frosty childhood out while he sat in loneliness. He looked down at the straight black crutch on the floor. “If only I could…”

“Wha’ is this?” Kyle jumped at the witchy voice and turned. All three hundred pounds of Gertie stood impatiently in the doorway. Rounded wrinkles pushed and shoved as she furrowed her brow. Her tattered dress revealed her folds.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I was just resting.”

Gertie squinted her tiny eyes so they gleamed black. “Restin’ is far nighttime. Does it look a’tall like nighttime to ya’?” She crossed her arms and stared at him with a grim, hairy face.

“No ma’am.” He examined the cracked plaster on the wall.

“Now go an’ get us some mahr wood far tha’ fire. Ya’ could freeze tha’ devil ‘imself it’s sa’ cold in here.” She turned her gigantic form around and stomped down the hallway, muttering profanities.

He wiped at his eyes for a moment, then picked up his wooden crutch and limped down the hall.

Outside, Kyle looked up at a black-tailed hawk in the sky. How he longed to be like that hawk, soaring and swooping on the frigid wind. The same wind that blistered and colored his cheeks and nose lifted the bird high into the eternally blue sky. What must the birds feel suspended high above this dreariness? Do they realize the wonder it is and the beauty of the rolling hills and sparkling water below? Do they marvel at the canvas of miracles below as they hang between earth and heaven?

All of this was silliness, he scolded himself. There was no magic in staring all day at the sky; nothing could bring him what he really wanted. He sat down on a slice of maple and cried. The tears warmed his icy cheeks, but he quickly wiped them away; he buried his face in his arms as if to hide them from the snow. The battle raged inside - the desire to dream crushed by the grown-up within that knew better.

A hiss interrupted his sobs. He looked up with tear-brimmed eyes, scanning the yard. A few feet from where he was sitting, a small hole dotted the uninterrupted whiteness. Kyle hoisted himself against his crutch and crunched over to investigate. A small glimmering object no larger than a jellybean had dissolved the packed snow away to bare grass. Kyle peered curiously down into the hole, and after much debate, pulled the silver jellybean from its icy encasement.

An embedded reporter with the 48th in Iraq has been following this man around and has just published an article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about his courage. His name is 1st Lt. John Fisher.

When the Army called him to go to Iraq, he stepped forward without hesitation. When the time came to leave the comforts of his job, his country and his newlywed wife, he went. When his men (his terminology) were killed by a roadside bomb, he stepped forward and volunteered to recover their remains. When he had his cheek bone shattered and the doctor suggested he fly back to the states, he protested because he wanted to get back to his men. Time and time again his God-enabled courage has been tried and proven and the once uneasy guy has become an honorable man.

And let’s not forget the other hero in the story. After losing her husband to a strange land and a difficult calling after only 3 weeks of marriage, Sara Fisher has continued to love and support her husband though half a world apart. Without her love and loyalty, Jon would not be the man who is today.

Let’s take just a moment and thank God for these two heros who have set aside the comforts of life for a mission greater than themselves. Thank you God for these who are “what others do not want to be”.

No, no, it’s not busyness, though I’ve been fairly busy. And it certainly isn’t that I’ve got nothing to write about… nothing could be further from the truth. It’s dumb, really, and I probably shouldn’t be playing it up as I am.

Well, the other day as I was working on someone’s site, I made some gigantic changes to their Movable Type templates, rebuilt the site, and was slighty miffed when I visited the site and saw no changes. I’m not sure exactly when it sunk in that I had overwritten the code on my PlasticMind Blog. pounds head on desk Well, so then comes the busy part. I just haven’t had the time or the energy to fix it, and therefore couldn’t post anything until I did. So now it’s fixed and I can resume my (quasi)regular blogging schedule.

On a similar topic, I think I’ve decided to trash the PlasticMind Podcast as a means for conveying information. Really, I don’t think anyone wants to listen to me talking to myself or reminiscing about old times. realizes this constitutes much of this blog Well, let me rephrase. My PlasticMind Podcast will no longer be a radio show.

I am however planning to turn it into a music blog, if everyone is ok with that. I’m always doodling on the piano, guitar and synth, so I thought what better use for a podcast than music. So look for that coming soon.

And one more things before I wrap this up, I’ve decided to create a central location for all things PlasticMind: all.plasticmind.com. It’s not entirely done yet, as in all the links don’t work and I’m going to work on some DHTML (similar to my portfolio) to make it a lot nicer. Once that’s done, I’ll link to that from my forums, my design site and the blog.

As the landscape outside the car window blurred more rural, less urban, I felt the inner child crying out for the leafy green safety blanket. True, in the city I can fulfill nearly every need within a five mile radius; every need except that unnamed longing to breathe woodsmoke and stand in the shadow of snowy mountains.

Wednesday night the clouds gave us a few inches of snow, which I promptly ran outside and photographed. It was wet and sticky and dissolved almost entirely by noon.

The table was set with all sorts of Thanksgiving dinner standards–turkey, potatoes, green beans, creamed onions. We braved hunting season for a few sprigs of evergreen to decorate the table.

It was a good day, it was.

The absolutely hilarious part about this (and you’ll get it after listening to the first 2 minutes) is that this thing is about 37 and a half minutes. Why is that funny? When I used to teach school, the periods were 38 minutes long; now I’ve got this Pavlovian habit to speak publically in 38 minute chunks. Ha.

• **The Power of God's Promises** - https://www.oxfordvalleychapel.org/Sermons/112705.wma

And if you’ve imagined this picture,
This portrait of colorless art,
You’ve pictured so clearly what life would be like
Without you there to color my heart.

Happy Birthday,
Jessica Marie Gardner
Love of My Life!

Times like this I’m apprehensive, much like I felt with the movie adaptations of Tolkein’s works. The books mean so much to you, you couldn’t bear for a poor representation for your imagination. It’s almost like it’s disjointed. Like when you imagine someone famous but then you meet them and they’re nothing like you’d hoped.

And Lewis’s works have always meant so much to me, I almost didn’t want to go watch it. That’s as close as I get to purism, folks. But I went.

Fade in from black to what looked like a WWII air raid on England. I’m confused. Edmund, Peter, Susan and Lucy all make for a bomb shelter with their mother. Ah, they’re sent to the Professor’s house because of the war, right, I remember now. And so the make their way on train through gorgeous landscapes and rolling credits to a manor that does Lewis’s imagination justice and more.

I have to admit. I was a bit skeptical at first of the children cast for the role of the Pevensees, but what initially annoyed me is what I eventually grew to love about them–their simplicity and innocence. These children are not pensive narcissistic Dakota Fanning’s or Haley Joel Osmond’s. Georgie Henley (Lucy) especially shimmers with simple charm. One scene in particular exemplified this so perfectly for me. It was a small, almost insignificant (I can’t even remember the context) scene; but she giggled as she spoke to Susan. It was so pure and unrehearsed that I felt like this was a neighbor or friend. That’s perhaps what made the movie so powerful for me, much like the journey of Sam and Frodo. These are heroes we can all relate to: small people who found strength to stand in dark times. After all, aren’t most of us small people facing dark times?

Another thing I must add–it was true to the book but more importantly, it was true to the Message of the book. While no pulpits were dragged out and no altar calls were made, the stunning beauty of sacraficial love takes center stage and is portrayed with such sobriety and magnificence that a gospel parallel is unavoidable. Aslan’s ascent to the Stone Table and talk of fulfilling the Law were reminiscent of The Passion, complete with angry mobs and tetelestai. The demands by the White Witch for Edmund’s death–according to the Law–and Aslan’s substitution brought new life and meaning to the Real Myth (as Chesteron calls it).

And then to top it all off, if being true to the book and it’s message weren’t enough, the film was just very well done. The special effects were phenomenal, on par with LOTR. The animals were so believable my wife couldn’t distinguish which was real and which was CG (unlike Star Wars…), then to see these animals engaging in conversation, interacting with each other, fighting in a war; it was truly a visual marvel. And Aslan was perfect. When he appeared, I half-expected a rough, growling voice (Liam Neeson); but it was stately and strong, measured while still mighty.

There were a few minor flaws. I thought the music could have used some work, and at times the pace slowed a bit too much. Some of the character’s dialogue didn’t fit the “fairy tale” feel: the fox and wolves’ gangster-like cliches and perhaps Mr. Tumnus’ emotional meltdown at the beginning. But overall this movie was a real gem and I’d encourage everyone to see it, especially before Kong dominates the theatres next week (as it will). Narnia is a classic the likes of which we’ve not seen since Return of the King hit the big screen. While I’m sure Lewis would have made some changes, I think this movie would have brought a grin to his face.

Picked up the phone and called Comcast. I’d like to check on the price of cable at my new address. Nope, we don’t watch television. Just internet access. $57*!* A month? And that’s just for internet alone? Turns out it’s cheaper to get basic cable and internet together, but it’s still going to run around $60. I was getting 3Mb/down on a dedicated line for $20 a month through Verizon. Now I get to share my internet connection with all 1500 residents in my complex for $60 a month. Erogo ergo sum.

A friend gives me a good idea to try Vonage. I can keep my current number (and business cards) and the number moves with me. It’s also $25 less than Verizon.

I call up Verizon first and tell them I’ve had it. I want my number canceled in a week, because I’m going with Vonage. The lady kindly informs me that my DSL will be going down any day now. WHAT?! I did a conversational backflip. No, no, I laugh, we can keep the DSL up until next Monday, when the phone service goes down. No, sir, you don’t understand, when you called and cancelled last week, they put in an IRREVERSIBLE SHUTDOWN ORDER. She didn’t call it this, but it was something just as permanent, frightening and ridiculous.

(DAYDREAM INTERLUDE: Situation room of the White House, the President issues THE command. We’re gonna blow those Russian b… Mr. President! The Russian president on line 1! Say what? It wasn’t you? Admiral, cancel the nukes! Now! I’m sorry, sir, we can’t… we’ve issued an IRREVERSIBLE SHUTDOWN ORDER! Fade to mushroom cloud over Red Square…)

Sir? Why can’t you just not turn my DSL off? It’s not off now? Sorry sir, the orders been given, we can’t. Well, I need a solution–this is how I pay your bills. Well, I suggest dialup until you get to your new place. (Little demons in my head pound spears on the ground and dance half-naked around a fire chanting, dialup, dialup, dialup) SIGH OF DESPAIR Alright, can you set it up for me? Yup. That’s $9.99. (The demons stop chanting) You’re charging me $9.99 for your mistake? (The demons are also perplexed) She appeases them by crediting my account $10, but reminds me the whole time that she doesn’t have to do this.

RING Hello? Yes, I’d like to set up a Vonage account. Well, let me preface by saying my brother had sent me a Vonage reference email that if I clicked on would give him two free months, and let’s just say he could really use the free months. Can I do that on the phone, I ask? My operator assures me I can both keep my number, save money and get my brother 2 months credit. SIGH OF RELIEF

After a painless signup, we’re good to go, I’m happy, I get transferred to customer service to take care of the two months credit for my brother. Twenty minutes of listening to poorly chosen hold music kinda takes the edge off of the glee. An irritable woman irritable answers and informs me irritably that the person who signed me up was wrong and she can’t give him the credit. I’m irritable. I explain to her that it was the company’s fault for misleading me and that my brother really needs those two free months. She irritably (she called it courtesy) conceded one free month and put me on hold. Next thing I’m listening to is the dial tone. Now I’m really irritable.

I call back the signup number and asked for the guy who signed me up. The lady either doesn’t recognize the name or has been ordered not to pass the phone around. Blah, blah, blah, recap of my situation, end with a fairly strong: “I’ve been hung up on by one of your employees.” Apologies galore. Feeling so bad that she assures me this will be escalated (is that a word) to a superior. I really should call back customer service, she says. What, am I supposed to shake hands, hug and talk about old times?

Then another sinking feeling hits me. The guy who signed me up told me that in order to transfer my number, it would have to be active for 20 days. I move in 5 with a disconnect set for next Monday. Well, I’ll just have to call Verizon and ask them move the number over to the new place until Vonage makes the transfer. Oh nuts. Verizon can’t transfer this number over to the new place; that’s why I called Vonage in the first place!

Frustrated, I call Vonage again. A sweet southern belle named Michelle answered and I explained (rather listlessly) my situation. I didn’t tell her the part about the President and the naked demons though. She gives me a temporary number where people can reach me after we move (215.310.1374) until the new number is up and running. I thank her profusely and hang up.

The only hurdle left is to call the landlord and make sure I can keep the current number active at this apartment for 20 days. The new family isn’t moving in until early January. Sweet.

So after all of that, I’m going to be able to keep my number and my brothers going to get his credit.

I’m just glad my DSL didn’t drop out while posting this entry.

UPDATE: I just recieved an email from Vonage telling me that I can’t transfer my old number because I have DSL on my current line… ARGH!

UPDATED UPDATE: Vonage basically wanted me to prove that I cancelled my DSL, so I had to call Verizon and get my IRREVERSIBLE SHUTDOWN ORDER number. Oddly enough, the operator who gave it to me had a Russian accent. Vonage said I’m good to go. In the meantime I’ll have a “virtual phone number”, so if anyone would like to give me a “virtual phone call” we could have a thoroughly invigorating “virtual conversation”… I’ll post the number at the end of the week…

This past Sunday I preached again in church. My message was taken from John chapter 6 and dealt with the idea of putting the spiritual ahead of the material, finishing up with Jesus “will you also leave me” and Peter’s resounding reply—“to whom shall we go, you have the word of life.” These verses hold particular significance in my life (thanks to my father) and so I prepared a message that was both near to my heart and meaningful for today’s church.

Then I got up and bombed it. I stumbled over my words. I forgot my transitions in mid-sentence. I didn’t explain some important distinctions and left out several key points. If you’ve ever preached before, you may know what I mean when I say I was standing outside myself being critical. The clock reached 12 and I remembered that this was our evangelism emphasis Sunday and I hadn’t said a word about the gospel. So I transitioned to a salvation call like shifting from fifth to second and ended with a show of hands, of which there were none.

I sat down with a strange mix of feelings—disappointed and upset. I responded smugly to all those who came up and congratulated me. I must not have prayed enough, must not have prepared enough.

A friend from church (Mike Randall) told me the sermon was up on the web and I said, rather curtly, that I certainly wasn’t linking to it from my blog. “It was that bad?” he asked. I laughed.

So this morning I get a call from the pastor. My wife actually takes it; I’m shaving. Seems as though someone had filled out a visitor card and had requested information about salvation. So Tuesday evening some people from the church to talk with him, and I quote: “We walked in, and it was like the Phillipian jailer: What must I do to be saved?” The angels rejoiced as a new member was added to God’s family, even as I sat sulking about my failure.

And so I say once again, “Wherefore I take pleasure in weaknesses, in injuries, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.” Thank you, God.

• **To Whom Shall We Go** - https://www.oxfordvalleychapel.org/Sermons/121105.wma

I must begin by saying, that I did a smash up job painting the living room. We decided to paint one wall a sort of burgundy/late tomato mix that really helps accent the drab that is our carpet, our linoleum, our window sills and our walls. I bought this roller that actually sucks the paint up into the handle from the bucket so you don’t need to use a roller pan. I was skeptical, but really worked out well. I’ll be sure to post pictures of the detailed trim work.

In defense of the apartment, we’ve got a really long hallway that makes it seem like a journey–an adventure–going from one end to the other. I love journeys. (Ask me if I love it next December…) And closet space! Wow. One of the hall closets is so large I’m going to lock Jess in Jessica can set up a craft room in it. We also set up the Christmas tree to make all the people from OVC helping us move feel comfy (after lugging our sofa up three flights of stairs.)

Speaking of the third floor, there are drawbacks. I pulled up the shades in the living room for a first glimpse of our view, only to be greeted by the urban sprawl/gouge-in-the-earth that is Interstate 95. I can literally see people’s faces in their trucks and cars as they drive by; I can see hands busying just before hearing the downshift. To the left is another road going beneath 95. To the right (oh blessed variety) there’s a big green billboard reminding me that I live in Glen Hollow. At least if I ever forget the number for the main office, I can just look out the window. The key is to look straight down, where there’s a tiny strip of grass and a few grumpy squirrels arguing around what appears to be a pond but is really just a rain-filled low point in the front “yard” (forgive me Father, for I have sinned).

I’m afraid I’ve painted a much darker picture than I intended too. This place is home, and we’re more than happy to have one.

I was doing the right thing and avoiding the computer Christmas Day. With all of the family here and many goings on… going on, I felt much better laughing around the better social network that is the family, the one that can’t be deleted, hijaacked or spammed. As much as I appreciate my readers, if you were here yesterday looking for a profound post, you were sorely disappointed (and may I say sadly alone?)

My Christmas splintered this year. Our long-held traditions went through major upheaval with the integration of another family and with December 25th falling on a Sunday this year. But the splintering was more like the division of a cell than a broken vase. Our Christmas celebrations traditionally began Christmas Eve with the exchange of a single gift (generally Mom gives us all a pair of pajamas) and continues through to Dad’s once-a-year breakfast, the reading of Luke 2 and the exchange of gifts Christmas Day.

This year was much different, with Christmas being spread out across several days. Our first Christmas was at the Clum’s house December 24th. We woke up late, dumped out our stockings and opened all our gifts. After a great big meal, an acapella version of Lo, How a Rose 'Ere Blooming with the choir at Grace Bible Fellowship and a strong duet of O Holy Night with my wife, we visited my family and got the traditional Christmas pajamas. December 25th, we went to Calvary Baptist Church for the morning service, then we came home for Christmas #2. Christmas #3? Jess and I will be celebrating together this Wednesday.

So I say all of this to say, though times change and traditions splinter, we can all find hope on that one constant, the greatness of God’s gift.

I would say this startling fact needs no commentary, but since I found it on the front page of a major news outlet, there are obviously enough human beings who need the obvious pointed out. Let’s ask ourselves 3 questions:

Question #1:** Who gets to decide what constitutes a malformed foetus? Abortion rights advocates will share with you extreme cases of children born without internal organs or vital life signs. But any honest study of abortion will admit many, many abortions based on a number of prenatal tests, including tests for gender (see China’s dilemma) and genetic defects. So now we add ethical complexity to the already frightening role of playing God–now we can choose to end a life on the basis of our own limited knowledge and in the process declare all handicapped people worthless (I’d kill you if given the choice).

Question #2: ** Who gets to decide a physical threat? The authority placed in the hands of a doctor and a woman is immense, not to mention the fact that a child’s life is suddenly put on the same level as a virus.

Question #3: ** What is mental health? Many parents’ mental health is put on the line because of their teenage children; does this constitute a right to take their lives away? “Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, I know that Timmy has been giving you grief. So we’re going to bathe him in a powerful salt solution until his skin is eaten away; that, or we could just take a scalpel and dismember him, it’s really up to you.”

I am disgusted at both the moral pragmatism and senselessness of our society.

Battles on the island mind wax and wane,
    With strangers dressed to play the part
    Of paraclyte, conscience and the hostage held.
    The hallway clock, now tick, now tock, strikes the fatal cut,
    Thrusts the time-worn blade.

Beyond I hear the sirens wail, phantoms cry,
    As deep within emotions fail
    And morning’s certain tastes like midnight’s tear.
    The sun is set, now gray, now black, shadows fill the eve
    Save the smoking flax.

The PHP Solution

First, create an new index template (a template module won’t process MT tags, unlike an index template, which can be set to rebuild every time an entry is saved… you decide which best works for your situation) with the content that you’ll use again in other templates or blogs on the same installation. It’s good practice to precede the title with “Module:” so they all get sorted together and it’s easier to find and edit later. I generally have a single header template that includes the <body> and <html> tags along with all of the <head> information, including the title, meta tags, javascript and any CSS needed. You can even go so far as to put the code for your header and main menu in this template module - don’t worry about customizing things like the <title>. We can address this with PHP variables. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I also usually have a footer module, and depending on the nature of the site, a sidebar module. All of these modules are then linked to files in a template directory (tmpl/header.html).

Then you can use a:

<?php include “/home/user_name/www/tmpl/template.html” ?>

in any of your blogs and they will be updated as soon as you make changes to the module. Be sure to replace the path with the appropriate path to root. If you’re unsure of this, you can find it under Settings -> Publishing -> Site Root from your MT main menu.

A Caveat: .htaccess

The only prerequisite here is that you get your server processing your html files for chunks of php… all it takes is a little .htaccess magic:

RemoveHandler .html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html

Drop that in the first line of your .htaccess in the root of your site (be careful to leave the other stuff) and your server (as long as you’re running Apache) should now handling html files as if they’re PHP.

Variable Solutions

The beauty of this is that you can then even pass information via variables to those includes. For example, say you put this include in a category archive template and lets say you needed to pass the name of the category to the include. We’ll also pass the blog name in a variable in case you’re using this include in a separate blog and want to preserve the naming. You can do this:

<?php $category = <$MTCategoryLabel$>; $blogname = <$MTBlogName$>; include(‘/home/hrkennel/www/tmpl/header.html’); ?>

Then in your template module you can simply use a:

<?php echo $category; ?>

or

<?php echo $blogname; ?>

to fill in the contextual category or blogname. If you want to be really snazzy and want to put code in there that might mess things up if the variable is empty, you can wrap it in a PHP if statement and check to see if the variable is empty:

<?php if($category) { echo ’ | ’ . $category; } ?>

The if($category) simply checks to see if the variable is filled, and if it is, it echoes the pipe and the variable. This is much cleaner than:

| <?php echo $category; ?>

in your code because if for some reason a category doesn’t get passed, you’d have a pipe sitting out there all alone cluttering up your page. This method will help you share information and keep things consistent across multiple templates and even multiple blogs.

Visit the site and you’ll find humongous type and a free-spirited blurb about the way the web should work, but what is Flock and should you be excited about it? It claims to be one of the first browsers that emphasizes the internet sharing experience, allowing you from within the browsers interface to add and share del.ic.ious links (cf. my post about that), post to and manage your blog(s), add and share Flickr photos and act as a fully functioning RSS news reader. Those are some ambitious goals and certainly some vital needs in this new age of Internet.

Internet Explorer essentially has none of this functionality built in. Opera has a decent news reader built into their mail client. FireFox has some decent plugins that can do some of this. But no major browser really integrates these tasks that have become the core of Web 2.0–sharing, integrating and expressing. I just got the golden ticket today to download the 0.5 Public Release of Flock, rife with warnings about bugs and such. So how does it live up to the hype?

My impressions upon first launch were weak. Aside from a fairly clean interface, it was really just Firefox in Socks. Cruise the menus, much of the same. Until I hit the favorites menu. Star and tag this page? Hmm…

Seems as though Flock allows you to create “collections” of websites that can be easily opened as groups into tabs. They also integrate cleanly with your del.icio.us links and you can tag sites directly from your browser:

Unfortunately, you don’t have that cool Ajaxy functionality of del.icio.us that recommends tags for your pages or shows you what other people are tagging the page as. Those are vital when trying to standardize your tagging, and they’re certainly missed in the interface here. Perhaps a plugin later could include that functionality.

One of the better features of Flock is the ability to then take these collections and aggregate the news feed from them into a single list, all powered by Flock. For some reason, the aggregation window was extremely slow and didn’t like being made any smaller than 1024x768.

Then I moved over to the tools window and found paydirt–the ability to post to a blog directly from the browser. Since I use Movable Type, setup was easy. Just enter my MT installation directory, user name and password. It imported all of my blogs and all of the entries. There was no evident way to work with multiple blogging platforms. (Once you log in, the setup options disappear and can only be changed in options.)

A “Blog Bar” appears across the top with a “Drop Zone” that you can simply drag and drop things from your Flock window to and it will create a new post about it. Very handy, though a drop zone for local files would be nice as well.

Creating a new entry was also simple. A nice WYSIWYG editor pops up and lets you type away and publish with the push of a button. Tags are supported here as well, though I’m not sure how well they interact with the actual blogging software. You can also change the “Blog Bar” with a “Flickr Bar” that interfaces with your Flickr account and lets you easily drag and drop images into new posts. I’m sure this is a life saver for bloggers with Flickr accounts.

I dug around some more but really didn’t find anything else of note, except perhaps the shelf. Think of it as an enhanced clipboard, allowing you to drag anything from Flock–links, images and whatnot–onto it for later perusing. Not sure how handy it could be.

The final verdict? Well, it’s tough to say at this point because of it’s professed alpha-ness. The download page screams that changes are on the way, and I believe them. But the first impression is really nothing more than a “huh” and an eyebrow raise. Flock’s value is not so much in it’s groundbreaking technology, it’s really just in the convergence of many elements that traditional browsers overlook. Instead of requiring plugin and extension downloads and installations, it’s part of the core of the program (at least in theory).

In a nutshell, it brings alot of handy things together. Will that be enough to “revolutionize” the web? Not in the Firefox sense, but we’ll have to see.

See for yourself. (Shhhhhh…)

It’s pouring rain outside. Through the droplets on the screen I can still see the trucks thundering by. Strange, it wasn’t until day 3 that the weight of the new year hit me.

I’m facing a vote next month to become associate pastor at our church. The process began late last year. The pastor wants me to start a ministry to the young adults, college and career, as it were and in a few weeks, the people will vote. And with that the courtroom drama (brain war) really begins.

My heart is in ministry. I attended college to become a minister to God’s people. After a year in Maine and three years in Jersey, the focus was refined and I realized that I love the youth. The gargantuan hurdle called growing up, the pressure of unlimited horizons, the wicked framework that is our world–then holding them up, walking beside them and fixing their eyes on the greater, Divine light. This thrills my heart and the sceptics who despise youth can tie a millstone around their neck and jump off a cliff. But that is not the need at this church.

Enter web design. After starting my own design business out of necessity six months ago, the business has grown to the point where I can see a strong future in it. I am good at what I do. I enjoy what I do. I don’t feel inadequate. My lips don’t fail me. Pharoah doesn’t threaten me. I don’t need an Aaron. But I sit all day, staring out rain-soaked windows, longing for human interaction. I feel like I’m watching sheep, alone, wandering around, lots of time to think.

The prosecutor stands again and introduces a new argument. Working with young adults? he asks. I have no experience there. There is no fire in my bones. Teaching a parenting class? Sometimes you have to do things you’re not too keen on when you’re a leader. Have I been too long at my own business that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to put the needs of others before my own?

Then I look around at the city and a verse of an old poem comes back to me: “My heart’s in the highlands, my heart is not here.” How long can a man be without his home? How long does he operate with the desire to build a cabin on a lake somewhere and escape from the madness that is this urban sprawl? And yet who ever changed the world from the loft of a log cabin?

Some very interesting news came across the wire today, a sort of one-two punch for the giant noone thought could die.

First, the Financial Times is reporting a deal currently being worked between Google and Wal*Mart to distribute Google PC’s with Google’s very own operating system. This would be huge because Microsoft’s biggest foothold (and moneymaker) is the fact that Windows is preinstalled on virtually every PC that hits the market. A monopoly by necessity as it were. If Google used their newly found strength to release their own operating system, they may have a chance to oust Microsoft and take the throne.

Of course, there are several things that would still need to happen. Google has a very weak software offering at this point (no office suite for instance) and would need some serious applications for people (and businesses) to take it seriously. Also, Google’s operating system would most likely need to be Linux-based if it’s to have any chance in the mix.

Speaking of chances, the second part of this knockout is a huge Windows vulnerability just announced yesterday. Essentially, hackers can now inject malicious code into an image. While before you were only in danger by downloading or executing a file, now just viewing the infected image, whether in an email, an IM or on a web page infects your computer. Every Windows system since 1990 is vulnerable and Microsoft isn’t releasing a patch until January 10th. Microsoft is telling coporations to wait on the official patch, while security companies are begging people to use unofficial patches to fix it now. Microsoft is not on anyone’s happy list today.

If anyone’s going to take down Microsoft, it’s Google. They have the size, the resources, and now, with this new vulnerability, the opportunity.

About an hour ago, the CEO of the Sago Mine in West Virginia announced to hopeful families that only one miners of the 13 missing was found alive. This after cheers and revelry broke out earlier in the evening when an erroneous report that all 12 had been found alive was leaked from the rescue command center.

My heart goes out to all those who lost their loved ones in a West Virginian coal mine last night. The unbearable spectrum of emotions they must have felt is awful; I am praying for them.

[Key Events In The West Virginia Mine Explosion]

Hawking over Jess’s shoulder during a hearty round of Taboo. I’ll have you know the guy’s won, many times over.

Another very, very strange shot of my sister with her patented Merr?© face. What can I say folks, I love them still!

But I am a kind human being, not willing insanity on anyone else (having tasted it myself as a junior high teacher); so I will reveal the dark secrets of PlasticMind. Why Plastic? Why Mind? What nightmare-inducing drug, you ask, were you taking to come up with such a name? I’m afraid, like many things in life, the reality is much less exciting than the imagination or anticipation of it.

It all started five years ago, as an assignment for a graphic design course I was taking in college. I needed to create a brand name, then advertise it. So I drew a blonde-haired bowling-ball and thought (oddly enough) of myself and the plastic-like state of my mind.

And that’s it.

You must all be disappointed; I suppose could make up something more creative. But, ah well. No “converted drug-pusher” story. No “Lassie saved me” story. Just a guy and his PlasticMind.

Went to this barber today, and he was top notch. He did that sweeping motion of scissors and comb that only barbers can. And then he did the whole shaving cream and straight razor thing on the back of my neck. Can’t beat that. Well worth the $4 tip, even if he did babble on and on about Jimmy Buffet.

Tomorrow I teach the over 45 class and essentially have a question and answer time about what I plan for the young adult fellowship. I think I’ll be talking about the relationship between Israel and Moses and the danger of having a man in the place of God.

My facial hair is really annoying me. Glaciars would cover New England before a beard would grow in, but my moustache grows like a Frenchman’s armpit hair, leaving me looking like a child molester. sigh

Oh and four times today I tried to work on the wedding video (in four different programs, Adobe Aftereffects, Nero Movie Maker, Showbiz DVD and Microsoft Movie Maker) and it hung my computer. This is certainly not starting off on the right foot.

I’m not a big fan of decaf. Dunkin’ Donuts decaf is like pizza without the cheese. Just doesn’t do anything for me.

Oh and did you realize that it’s not kosher to put two spaces after a period anymore. That was one of the biggest shakeups I’ve had in a while. Don’t think I’ll be able to break myself of it.

Ok, I’m done.

Is it any wonder that to this day this Galilean is too much for our small hearts?" – H.G. Wells, The Outline of History

It’s an interesting thing to be convicted by an atheist.

Like when you go to Dunkin Donuts and you expect them to have donuts. Sure, it was 12:30 am when the two of us had a hankering for donuts, but come on… the sign says Dunkin Donuts, not Dunkin Bagels or Dunkin Muffins. Why in the world would you throw out a batch until the next one comes in? I don’t care if they’re an hour old, when you need a donut, you need a donut!

Or when you walk towards an automatic door at the grocery store and you expect it to open. We stood there a good 5 seconds before we realized it wasn’t opening. We just stood there. My wife even poked her finger at the door, as if to wake it up. We must have looked pretty stupid standing there, wondering what to do next. Not sure who saw the big “Use Other Door” first, but I’m glad it was 12:30–fewer people to witness our idiocy.

Or when you answer the phone and you expect it to work. Hello? Hello? Yeah, I’m here. Hello? Yeah, I’m here. Helllloooo? Presses buttons on the phone I can hear that, but I can’t hear you. Is it working now? Hello? Click. Stupid Vonage (vo-nij). Honey, we need to do something about this Vonage (voe-naj) thing. Actually, dear, it’s pronounced Vonage (vah-nij)? I don’t care, it sounds French.

Speaking of the French… isn’t it interesting that Chirac is leading the charge against Iran’s nuclear program? Quite a turn from their position on Iraq. I have a sneaking suspicion that the riots led by a predominately Muslim crowd might have swayed public opinion a bit there. France has experienced first hand what a group of angry Arabs look like. Perhaps they’re imagining what a group of angry Arabs with nuclear weapons looks like and it’s given them some incentive.

And did you hear about the wrath of the liberals Chris Matthews has brought down upon himself? He compared Michael Moore to Osama Bin Laden. Well, that’s just absurd. First, the two look nothing alike. Secondly, Moore’s movies are much more exciting. And third, Michael Moore doesn’t like guns (see Bowling For Columbine) whereas Bin Laden can’t seem to address his people without having a few strewn about. As ridiculous as his comparison is and as justified the liberals are in calling for an apology, I can’t help but wonder what these same liberals are saying about Harry Belafonte calling Bush a ‘terrorist’ and the Department of Homeland Security the ‘Nazi Gestapo’. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I didn’t see any links to a “Tell George Clooney He’s Wrong For His Crude Jokes About Jack Abramoff’s Name” websites. But then, I’m not usually clicking around liberal websites… too many porn popups.

But what can you expect when freedom of speech gets decoupled from personal responsibility and absolute morality?

No doubt we are shaken to the core, but why? Well, it’s hard to see anyone fall, and people who we’ve elevated as heroes or trusted voices fall hardest for us. Also, no one likes to be misled, and these things are nothing less than a betryal of our trust. But perhaps most disturbing is that the corruption has been covered up with a facade of righteousness and we were powerless to help because it was hidden from us. Not only have we been lied to by the person who claimed to love us, but we were stripped of one of love’s greatest abilities: to help.

Throughout the Scriptures, God has spoken out harshly against hypocrisy. In the books of the prophets and especially in the life of Christ, nothing brought such indignation as those who claimed righteousness with the lips, without having it in their hearts. Jesus, our gentle Savior, lashed out at the scribes and Pharisees in terms that certainly couldn’t be considered unifying. He knew their hypocrisy was self-serving. All hypocrisy is self-serving. They can’t find out, can’t rock the boat, keep the gears turning, the machine running. Too lazy to follow hard after Christ, too proud to let anyone else know that. You want, as they say, to have your cake and eat it too.

In Matthew 15, Jesus makes one of His most poignient remarks about hypocrisy. The Pharisees are bothered that His disciples hadn’t washed their hands before eating; how could they ignore this important tradition? And Jesus, in an almost “it figures” tone, refers to Isaiah 29:13, pointing out that they had grown close to Him in their speech, but their hearts were far from Him.

Take a look at Isaiah 29:9-16:

Perhaps even more convicting is what God tells Ezekiel in Ezekiel 33:

I cannot think of a better description for the state of our churches today than this 3000 year old message. We may not be hiding an affair or abuse, but where are our hearts when the preacher speaks? The state of your heart on Sunday will be the state of your life on Monday.

Let’s ask a few more pertinent, perhaps more difficult questions. What would bring you to a church? What would drive you away? How many of you walk out of a church service impressed by the show? How many won’t go back because the preacher was monotone? What is it that really matters to you?

Commercialism, hypocrisy and complacency–it’s a deadly concoction, and one that we have all too quickly embraced in the name of relevance. But I’m afraid that, more often than not, relevancy is just a subtle way of saying that Christ alone isn’t enough.

As soon as you start adding things to Christ to make Him relevant, you take away the full power that He brings. Ninety percent Christ and ten percent something else leaves you with only ninety percent of that which really matters. So people get a watered-down Jesus and in turn see little or no change in their lives. They become disillusioned with Christianity and face a crossroad: pursue the pure, not-from-concentrate Jesus; denounce Christianity altogether; or do what so many have done, disconnect the life from the lips and become hypocrites.

Starting At The Beginning

Initially, I had written a very basic PHP mailer script that slurped the data passed from my contact form. It looked something like this:

<?php    

    

$sender = Trim(stripslashes($_POST[‘Email’]));    

$recipient = “jesse@plasticmind.com”;    

$subject = Trim(stripslashes($_POST[‘Subject’]));    

$message = Trim(stripslashes($_POST[‘Message’]));    

    

$body = “PlasticMind Designn”;    

$body .= "You have a new message from " . $recipient;    

$body .= "Message: " . $message;    

    

$success = mail($recipient, $subject, $body, “From: <$sender>”);    

if ($success){    

    echo “<meta http-equiv=“refresh” content=“0;URL=/”>”;    

}    

else{    

    die(“Something bad happened!”);    

}    

?>

In my contact form (a separate page than this code you’re looking at) I would post my data to this form with a simple <form method=“post” action=“contact.php” name=“contactform”>. When a user fills in the fields on your form and hits send, the data gets “posted” to the file “contact.php”. If you have have an input field on your form for a user to enter their email address (<input type=“text” name=“email” />
), the name attribute will then be what’s posted to contact.php. For instance, if someone typed bob@plasticmind.com and pressed ‘Send’, the variable passed to contact.php would be email=bob@plasticmind.com. Actually there might also be slashes passed, because some characters need to be escaped. Don’t worry too much about that, just know that the stripslashes command cleans them out.

So essentially what this simple script did was pull out the sender’s email address (via $_POST[‘Email’]), strip any slashes that may be in there, and assign it to a variable ($sender). It does the same for the subject and the message. The recipient is me, so that’s fairly straightforward.

Then, we start putting together the actual body of the email in a variable we’ll call $body. For PHP newbies, the .= command isn’t a typo, it’s a concantenate (join) function. And the n specifies a new line–this guy will actually be a big culprit later on. But we’ll get there. Notice any text gets put in quotes, and variables are not. Also, notice that period keeps popping up again. We’re using it to join things again.

Lastly, we run the mail function by assigning it to a variable. If it runs, then $success is true and a <meta http-equiv=“refresh” content=“0;URL=/”> gets put in the document, which is essentially a redirect to your root directory. If the mail doesn’t send, we die with the message, “Something bad happened.”

Simple Simon Met a Spammer

This code was functional, but customizing it was a pain, as well as it not being very helpful to users. (“Wha? Did my form go through? What just happened?”)

Worse yet, I found out that the evil SP-MMERS were trying to hijaack it by inserting false headers into the subject and sender fields and essentially use my contact form as a relay for their spam. This is where the little ‘n’ varmint shows up again. Obviously, they couldn’t change the primary recipient of the email. That is set up by the variable $recipient at the beginning of the code. Ah, but let’s not forget CC:, BCC:, etc. In the email address field, for example, instead of entering friendlyuser@plasticmind.com, they’d enter maliciousspammer@plasticmind.comnbcc:unsuspectingvictim@movabletweak.com. The new line character fooled my script into thinking we were sending the email to unsuspectingvictim@movabletweak.com as well as jesse@plasticmind.com. Sometimes they’d even get elaborate and enter MIME types and other mail headers such as:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=“us-ascii”    

MIME-Version: 1.0    

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit    

Subject: scornfully tis foolish. iver    

bcc: charleslegbe@aol.com    

e3dfcabdd3ee3a1ac7f2668893284676

Problem.

Then I remembered a sage web proverb: Never trust a user’s input.

Step 1: Javascript Validation

We’ve got some serious PHP validation to do, but first things first. Let’s help our users out with a little javascript validation on the actual form page:

<script Language=“JavaScript”>    

    function CheckInput(contactform)    

    {    

        if ((contactform.Email.value == “”)||(contactform.Subject.value == “”)||(contactform.Subject.value == “”))    

        {    

            alert(“You must fill in all required fields. (*)”);    

            return false;    

        }    

    }    

</script>

This is a very basic form validator that simply checks to see if the mandatory fields are blank. Make sure you’ve entered the name of the form in the parenthesis after the function name (contactform). It also shows up at the beginning of each validation. Also, be sure that the name of each field to be checked is included in this list. (i.e. formname.fieldname.value).

While this is a functional script, I admit there’s a lot more you can do. For instance, this script doesn’t check to see if it’s a valid email address. For more indepth ideas on validation scripts, check out the following articles: Code Toad - Versatile Form Validation Using the DOM or Javascript Source - Complex Email Validation.

The post originated with this blog entry that Andy linked to which essentially said that because God created everything, we can revel in everything. I responded that at the gist of what he was saying was that God created evil. Jeremy Killian then chimed in on the discussion and we had a go of it: (I’ve made my comments red to make reading easier, not because I’m a megalomaniac)

Me: Didn’t you see the comment I wrote on Josh’s blog? Here it the gist: “So is it safe to assume that the long and short of what you’re saying is that since sin is in the world, we should revel and find meaning in it because God put it there?” I realized right away that he was calling sin beautiful because it’s all part of God’s “grand scheme”. That’s a great way of mixing Taoism into this whole discussion, but I’m not buying it. Why don’t we just slap a ying-yang on our pulpits and say that everything, both good and evil, is ordained and maintained by God? Oh guess what? I just made a new best friend, and his name is Judas… I mean come on, he didn’t have a choice! His betrayal was predestined! That great big Bully in the sky pulled a Charlie McCarthy and violated His own holiness by proxy.

Jeremy: Now you’re on to something completely different. God’s creation of everything, even evil…that’s kind of something that I am still very uncomfortable in addressing…although, at some points in Isaiah and in Amos, God comes very near saying this about Himself. I think I’ll let Him speak for that one. I also need to address something that you referenced to in your “Tao…pulpit” statement. Saying that God created evil is not Taoist. As a matter of fact, it is just about as far as one can get from Taoism. Taoism states that Evil and Good are forces that must exist in order for the other to exist. They are dependant on one another, and equal in power. Is that the same as a transcendant being creating His opposite? I hardly think so.

Me: I think you understood where I’m coming from, though, and that’s a start. You mentioned that Taoism states that Evil and Good are forces that must exist in order for the other to exist… if God created Evil, as a Calvanist, wouldn’t you say that He feels it necessary for it to exist? What makes you so confident that God doesn’t need Evil to exist, especially if you believe God created it? Now, admittedly, this doesn’t make Evil equal in power to God; but it is certainly a silly charade if He doesn’t need it and keeps it around just for no reason.

Jeremy: I think that I recanted Calvinism a few comments back…but nevertheless… So, you think that Evil exists outside of God? Like to hear some evidence for that one. I’m not being sarcastic here, honestly, if the evidence exists, please fill me in.

Me: Romans 5:12-14: “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned—for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.” (Adam introduced sin into the world, and if Evil is a part of God’s nature, then God would have been incomplete without it having been introduced yet. Ok, this says sin “entered the world” through Adam, but it could have existed before “outside the world”–keep reading…)

James 1:13-15: “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” (notice that sin springs forth from the womb of lust, not the hand of God)

I John 1:5: “This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.”

Jeremy: Again, I don’t say that Evil exists as part of God…that is heresy, based upon the Scripture. but I do think that there is a difference between the abstract concepts of Sin and Evil. So, I don’t agree that man was the cause of evil…Don’t forget, God created the Choice.

“16For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: 17And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.”-Colossians 1:16-17

I think this passage not only speaks of physical “things”, but of intangible concepts (visible and invisible). Dr. William Lane Craig taught me about two categories of existance in the universe: things that exist because of a prior Cause (integral to the defense of the Kalaam cosmological argument), and things that exist upon necessity of themselves (numbers and other related abstract concepts). I think that Evil falls into the first category. God does not need Evil to exist, but to say that it exists outside of God’s reign I think is an opening to all kinds of heresy. To say that man created Evil gives man an ability that apparently God could not have (in your view–I think).

Andy butts in acts as a kind host: Ah, this is like having two guests over who commence to holding a heated discussion at my table, as I serve them tea and biscuits. One lump, or two?

Karla: Okay, not planning to jump in on this whole debate, but I had one little thought regarding Jeremy and Jesse’s conversation. I’ve always seen evil like darkness. God created light, not darkness. He separated them after light was created, but darkness is just the absence of light. Evil would then be the absence of righteousness. God created perfection, and when man deviated from that, evil existed. Really, I guess the beginning of that would be when Satan rebelled. However, evil existed because a choice was made, right? God didn’t say, “Let there be evil!” Quoting Jeremy: “So, you think that Evil exists outside of God? Like to hear some evidence for that one.” Evil is the absence of holiness. (True holiness = God) His holiness demands that evil be absent, just as light demands the absence of darkness. Evil in our hearts, as humans, stems from the sin nature we received through Adam, and as our “old nature” causes us to be susceptible to sin.

Jeremy: Great thought, but have you ever considered where you get the concept of “opposite” from? Before the creation of the universe, nothing existed but God…not darkness…nothing “he is before all things; and by Him all things consist…” God was the only thing there.

Maybe this analogy could help (not sure if it is totally viable, but it’s worth a shot): Let’s say that you were placed into a room that was entirely illuminated, completely covered by light. No shadows existed in this room at all. It would be difficult to navigate this room, wouldn’t it? You see, the shadows help us appreciate and see the Light for what it is…clarity and truth.

Maybe that’s why God allowed (let’s not say created anymore) the abstract concept of Chaos or Evil into the universe. I firmly believe that God is so big that he transcends this concept: not that Evil is a part of Him (as Chesterton subtitled The Man who was Thursday, a Nightmare—rabbit trail, sorry), but that He has indeed perpetuated Entropy to allow for freedom of the Will. So that we might perceive Him in all his Holiness.

Evil will end. God will not. I also think that this is another important distinction from Taoism.

Me: Ok, I follow, Jeremy. (whew, almost missed the comma before Jeremy… what a mess THAT would’ve been!)

There is a HUGE (say it slowly) difference between saying that God allows evil to happen and that God created evil. You’ve backed away some from your “God’s creation of everything… even evil” sentiment and I agree that all things exist inside of God’s reign. Of course, just what that entails is a whole 'nother discussion. And we don’t to overstay our welcome at Andy’s blog.

Let me just quickly ask you this in reference to your shadow analogy: If we perceive God’s holiness best by His allowance and perpetuation of evil, will our perception of His holiness be dulled when we’re in Heaven? Was Adam and Eve’s perception lacking?

Two lumps, please.

So… any thoughts?

Oh, and this has nothing to do with anything, but I did karaoke for the first time tonight in front of about 50 people at a coffeehouse a local church was putting on. It was probably once of the worst moments of my life those few seconds when I realized “My Will” was about 6 steps higher than I could reach. Like a wasabi moment. Kicks you in the face, you want to cry, but when it’s over, you’re like, heh, what a rush. I felt like William Hung. I did almost the entire chorus in falsetto, and my Kevin Max impression on the verses left MUCH to be desired. My wife hid in the back behind a sofa. But it was worth it, man… I won a Seattle Seahawks pillow.

Miguel’s son woke up from his coma this morning. He just opened his eyes and started talking. My mother asked him what sport he was going to excel at when he got out of the hospital–soccer football.

I’ve confessed a sin that’s been stealing my joy (and others I suspect) for the last few days, and it’s like a burden has been lifted off my chest.

I held in my arms tonight my wife of 7 months.

God’s grace… isn’t it amazing?

Oh, alright. I’m avoiding the topic at hand. I spent two and a half hours at H&R Block today. Let’s just say I owed about $2000 less than I thought I did, but that the tax prep fees nearly made up for the savings. Seriously, though, it was worth it… after about 30 minutes of forms, I felt like I was in an episode of “Eh, Steve!” Can we not talk about it any more?

One more thing. Maybe this is too much to share, but it’s a strange new experience for me… well, sort of new. I keep having this haunting feeling that something bad has happened to Jessica. I hear sirens outside and quickly glance at the clock to see if she’s on the road. I guess the feeling is akin to what I used to feel when I was in elementary school and I was afraid my parents were going to leave me. It was never a reality, but the love was so strong that with it came the fear of loss.

Oh now there I go being pensive again. Let’s end with a funny story.

Jess and I had just finished watching Red Eye, which needless to say scared Jessica pretty bad (she’s a tender lil’ guy). Afterwards, she went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. I stood outside the door, just around the corner and waited until she came out. Well, she nearly hit the ceiling when she saw me. But before I could even laugh, she punched me so hard I fell to the ground, where she continued to pummel me. Don’t believe me? Maybe I’ll scan in the bruises on my arm. One day you’ll see me, all broken up in a hospital, on the news, but by then it will be too late…

Well, this is one of those things that has more to do with my business than my personal life. But then a.) since I own my own business, they are one and the same and b.) I’m not getting paid for this. Essentially, several friends of mine from the Movable Type community approached me and asked me to help them put together a style contest so that people who use Movable Type, LiveJournal or TypePad could some high quality styles to choose from for their site. And as much as people groused that Six Apart (parent company for all three of these projects) charged for their services, one of the benefits is that they can offer a lot of prize money–we’re talking thousands of dollars here.

The goal is to have a huge collection of top-notch styles that people can then use on their own site. And we’re currently working on incorporating this whole process into StyleCatcher to make upgrading the look of your site as easy as selecting a style you like.

The wheels are turning fast now. I’ll let you all know when we’ve got more nailed down!

The snow really seemed to bring out a different side of the suburbanites… I almost detected a hint of folksiness in the friendly back and forth banter over snow shovels and ice scrapers. After all, we’re in this together. It’s us versus the white stuff.

In the spirit of true country folk, we jumped over the roadside barriers across the street and blazed down to the frozen river where some ducks were kicking single file around ice flows. We were blinking huge flakes out of our eyes as we tumbled our way up the shore a bit to the interstate overpass, which gave us some art of its own.

The snow seems to forgive the harsh lines of the city, if only for a few days. Everything is given a coat of beauty, making us forget momentarily the age and corruption beneath it.

Best of all, Jess and I had some special times today. We screwed up the courage to meet our neighbors, tested out a fantastic hot-wings recipe, watched The Fugitive and bummed around the local Wal*Mart. She beat me in Scrabble (first time for everything) and I reformatted her computer. It was a wonderful Nor’easter Sunday.

Moses, go tell Pharoah to let my people go, and here’s a sign… Joshua, I’m giving you Jericho, but you don’t have to do anything… Gideon, you’re going to fight this seemingly unbeatable army, and here’s a sign… Prophets, here’s a vision… Disciples, here’s a boatload of fish… Thomas, My hands, My feet…

I know about the verses that say faith is so much better, but why do you think God, who saw fit to punctuate His greatest plans with a supernatural action, has for the last thousand years left us dry? You can point to many things like healings or salvation, and while I do believe those are important actions by God, they are not things that can only be ascribed to God’s supernatural intervention. A healed lung may baffle scientists, but there are unsaved people who have their lungs healed. People are saved from sin, but I’ve met many a reformed unbeliever.

So in this age of science, where nearly every natural phenomenon is categorized and documented, doesn’t it seem like a supernatural display would be most effective now? Break the shell of science and demonstrate that everything you think you know doesn’t even scratch the surface of the Divine. Instead, we’ve seen just the opposite. God is strangely silent.

Why? Do you think we’ve become so jaded that any miracle, no matter how supernatural, wouldn’t faze us? Perhaps God is waiting for something, like the 400 year silence between old and new testament? Or maybe He’s just changed how He deals with man, and if that’s the case, why did miracles play such an important roll in ancient times only to be done away with now?

You know the skeptics say that science has killed the notion of God. Miracles, they assert, were not miracles, they were just undocumented natural phenomenon and we now know better. So where does that leave those who believe in miracles? Are we resigned to Mary appearing on a grilled cheese sandwich? Any non-materialists (or materialist) out there who would care to share their opinions on this one?

Part of me wonders if this is the satanic opression that comes when you try to stand up do something right. Or perhaps I’m afraid of stepping out again after being hurt in the ministry before and that fear is gnawing at me.

The blanketing feeling that’s smothering me is this overwhelming sense that nothing I do matters; a sort of theistic fatalism if you will. I know, I know, I’ll get a hundred comments to the contrary. But I think there’s something to be said for realized how big everything else is when compared to you. I suppose that’s one of the great comforts of the Christian faith is knowing that we are investing ourselves in something greater than ourselves, that will live on even when we’re gone.

But have you ever felt like we’re on the downward swing and we can’t stop it? Only a fool doesn’t see the pendulum of history as it makes its slow arch. I think about what it must have been like to be emergent–breaking out of intense darkness to let glorious light shine forth. To be a part of the Protestant Reformation, frightening as hellfire but the world was changing for the better.

I feel like we are apples, lying in the sun, fragrant wind blowing, picturesque hillsides. But we are rotting, and there’s nothing to be done. Our foundation is slowly being eroded until we, like the Catholic Church in Luther’s day, kill the men of God because we’ve meandered our way into damnation and can’t tell sinner from saint.

The pastor asked me today how the job was living up to my expectations, and I told him honestly that I had been depressed–not at the job, because I love working there at the church and I love ministry and I love the people. But being in the ministry gives you more opportunity to focus on reaching the lost and building up the church and in turn makes you keenly aware of just how deep a void there is. I guess it’s like Jonathan Edwards said, the greater your understanding of God’s holiness, the more repulsed you are by your own sins. For me, it goes: the greater my passion for reaching the unsaved, the more overwhelmed I am by the staggering sea of faces.

I spoke on the book of Joshua to a sparse handful at prayer meeting tonight, examining the dual themes of obedience and courage. Then I led the Awana kids in a rousing rendition of “With Jesus In The Boat You Can Smile In The Storm”. But as I drove home down Route 1, I couldn’t help but think about the kind of courage and obedience it would take to reach them all. If only we had the faith and fervor of Caleb… toss the cane and take the mountain…

These four brothers and sister in Christ took two weeks without pay to visit us from Komsomolsk, Ukraine and spend time learning how to better their ministry and deal with questions that they, as fairly new believers, and most Ukranians, as a fairly new mission field (since the collapse of the Soviet Union), have been facing. Yesterday, I had the great privelege of spending the day talking with them about ways that they can better their youth ministry. We discussed a Biblically based philosophy of youth ministry, then we talked about some ways to capture the attention and minds of the children of the Ukraine. After they spent a while shopping (they couldn’t believe the size of our malls) they returned and we finished the day off with a question and answer time; this ultimately led to a discussion of how to deal with rebellious teens who don’t want to follow Christ.

What really struck me was how wide and wonderful is God’s love that I can sit with strangers from half-way around the world who can barely speak my language and enjoy them thoroughly because of the cross of Christ! Thank you God that, in Christ, we are one body, celebrating one faith bound together by the one hope that carries us all!