Well, after 13.5 years on the job at ThomsonReuters, it has been decided that it is time for me to move on. On that note, it seems likely that I will have more time for blogging and keeping this up to date. I’m moving into a new phase of life in self-employment as a freelancer so I’ll be doing more tech writing and the like here.
It’s just been a very busy year with moving the in-laws to Arizona, raising a three year old, changing churches, I’ve not really thought about blogging too much. I’m hoping to get started again, so we’ll see what happens.
Most people don’t realize it, but the moon doesn’t technically orbit the earth. Instead, both the earth and moon orbit around their common center of mass. Admittedly, this center of mass is located within the earth, but that’s beside the point. In fact, because the moon is so large in proportion to the earth, the earth-moon system is sometimes considered a double planet and what affects one, affects the other. And both the earth and moon dance together around the sun.
Our lives as a Christian married couple are much the same. They are intertwined, orbiting a common center and at the same time in a much larger orbit around God. We dance through life, sometimes in joy, others in mourning, all the while reflecting the light of God to our partner. To maintain this, though, one partner cannot have an excess of “gravity” in respect to the other, it must be a partnership of mutual respect and love. Only then can the marriage shrug off the pains and heartache afflicted by daily life. And our orbit about God provides additional benefits, as His influence steadies us and maintains our greater orbit about Him.
The problems come when we allow other “planets” to perturb our orbits. If we allow these outside forces a greater influence on our orbit than our partner or God it’s all too easy for the delicate dance to be disrupted and for one (or both) of the partners to be stripped away. This is especially true when the partners’ mutual influence begins to wane and they draw apart, it becomes easy for another party to slip in and supercede one of the partners.
The Kingdom of God is a mosaic of broken people. Each individual piece is broken and ugly, but taken together they form a beautiful work of art.
Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.
Yesterday afternoon, the boy wanted a “popcircle” (Popsicle). We’ve been working on getting him to say “please” and “thank you” when asking for something, so when he came up and said “I wanna popcircle”, we said “say please”. Now, you or I would simply turn around and without really thinking about it say “I want a popsicle, please” and we’d get one. Not the boy, no way, no how was he going to say please. “I don’t wanna say please!”, “I wanna popcircle!”, accompanied by screaming, collapsing on the floor and just generally throwing a fit. And every time he’d scream “I wanna popcircle!”, we’d calmly tell him, “say please”, at which point a fresh round of screaming and flailing would ensue. This went on for a couple of hours (being a horrible father, I took video of him for a couple of minutes) and he never did say please. He also never got his “popcircle”.
The point of this is, I wonder if sometimes God doesn’t feel like Kara and I did. He wants to give us good gifts and to bless us, but we just won’t ask in the right way. We refuse to say please (figuratively) and scream and throw ourselves on the floor when He doesn’t do things our way, right away. Maybe if we took to heart James 4:3 and stopped asking for things with the wrong motives, God would be willing to cheerfully grant our requests. So, the next time you’re asking God for something, examine your heart and determine why you’re really asking. And always say please.
I’ve been trying to put together a new mix CD for Kara each year with an assortment of love songs and such. And trying to do it without repeating more than one or two songs from the previous year.
This year’s Valentine playlist (try to pin down my musical tastes from THIS list..):
I don’t really do a lot of reviews (actually lately, haven’t been writing much of anything here, need to change that), but decided that since the Twikini folks are offering a free copy of their software (which isn’t all that expensive anyway, $4.95 for individual use or $9.95 for businesses) in exchange for reviews, good or bad, I thought I’d give it a shot. Twikini is a Twitter client, if you don’t know what Twitter is, just go ahead and skip the rest of this, because it won’t mean anything to you. Ok, now that the non-twitter literate people have left the room, on to the review.
I’ve tried nearly all the Windows Mobile Twitter clients, PockeTwit, TinyTwitter, and of course, Twikini and Twikini is the only one I keep coming back to. It’s not any one feature that does it, but rather a combination of things. It’s fast, frugal with memory and pleasant to look at, a nearly unbeatable combination. It has all the standard features of a normal twitter client: friends timeline, reply timeline, favorites, public timeline. It doesn’t support search as far as I’ve been able to divine. It has the fairly unique feature of allowing you to tweet the current song playing in Windows Media Player, not useful to me, but I’m sure it is to someone. The geolocation feature is the only one that’s ever gotten my address right based on my GPS coordinates. When tweeting it supports shortening URLs and posting pictures via TwitPic as well as adding your location from the GPS.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with it. It’s fast, stable and doesn’t take up a ton of memory, three things that are important on a WinMo device.
And no, it’s not that we eat Irish babies. It’s more along the lines of a solution to the whole same sex marriage conundrum. It’s actually very simple: separate the sacred and the secular. Essentially you would end up with the secular “domestic partnership” and the sacred “marriage”. Existing marriages would be grandfathered in, but all new marriages, as performed by a religious organization, would require a separate domestic partnership agreement to be executed by the couple and filed with a government official. This would not involve any ceremony, merely the signing and filing of a document with a local government (county clerk or equivalent), much the same as a marriage license currently. Upon execution of this document, a couple would be legally considered domestic partners. If they then choose to formalize this partnership into a marriage, that would be the responsibility of the religious organization of their choice. By separating the sacred and secular aspects of the marriage, it makes clear that a church could not be forced to perform a marriage that goes against their beliefs. It also answers the problem of special treatment for male/female couples by treating all couples wishing to establish a domestic partnership in exactly the same way.
A lake without an outlet dies, think of the Dead Sea, Great Salt Lake or the Salton Sea. All that pours into it remains even as the water evaporates away, leaving only pollution and corruption fit for nothing. Even so a Christian must constantly pour themselves out to others and accept an inflow from God to cleanse the pollution of the world from their hearts.
He’s getting to be such a big boy now. This is his second haircut and it definitely makes him look like a toddler, not a baby. It’s fun to watch him walk (unsteadily) around the house, chasing whatever animal is in front of him at any given time.
