Sorry for not writing over the past few days but I have been traveling. I got to go to a meeting of pastors and elders in our denomination. It was a great time and I got to meet several more people interested in partnering with us on our adventure. Now I am studying for my Old Testament final. I have to quote the professor of my course as I find it so enlightening but also very funny:

Holiness is not contagious. That’s a principle. It does not happen automatically. You can’t accidentally get holy. You can’t say, ‘I don’t know what happened…I was sitting on the bus next to this guy with a reverse collar –he must have been a priest or something–and when I got off the bus, I was less sinful.’ It just does not work that way…there has to be a transformation of you.

–Dr. Stuart

This is a problem we have in the Church today. People say, “Well, I went to church.” But are their lives changing. Just sitting, going through motions does not bring you closer to God. It’s taking the truth and making it a part of your life that brings you closer to God. I’m not saying this to discourage anyone from doing just that but more to say to the Church about what it is we are doing. Are we speaking the truth in ways that a person going through the motions will hear and want to transform their lives? If they are in the church going through the motions, its obvious that they are somewhere in their hearts searching for that way to get closer to God but are we meeting them to help them along their journey.

Are we the church going to just sit next to a person who is spiritually wanting, never reaching out to them but just content to have them in the church building?

I have to say that my son is growing up way too fast. Like many other parents, I am sitting here remembering when Alex was born; how we held him so. Today however, he lost his first tooth. My boy is growing up. Tonight the tooth fairy is going to show up and he’ll get a quarter in exchange for his tooth. Luckily, he thinks a quarter is a lot of money. Now he is trying to knock out his other teeth. Yes, he’s my son.

~ Home is where you hang your @.
~ The e-mail of the species is more deadly than the mail.
~ A journey of a thousand sites begins with a single click.
~ You can’t teach a new mouse old clicks.
~ Great groups from little icons grow.
~ Speak softly and carry a cell phone.
~ C:\ is the root of all directories.
~ Don’t put all your hypes in one homepage.
~ Pentium wise; pen and paper foolish.
~ The modem is the message.
~ Too many clicks spoil the site.
~ The geek shall inherit the earth.
~ A chat has nine lives.
~ Don’t byte off more than you can view.
~ Fax is stranger than fiction.
~ What boots up must come down.
~ Virtual reality is its own reward.
~ Modulation in all things.
~ A user and his leisure time are soon parted.
~ There’s no place like http://www.home.com.
~ Know what to expect before you connect.
~ Oh, what a tangled Web we weave when first we practice.
~ Speed thrills.
~ Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the Net and he won’t bother you for weeks.

Special thanks to Mikey’s Funnies for this humor today.

Sorry for no post yesterday. I had hoped that I would have been able to post something about the Carolina Panthers football team going to the Super Bowl but that was not to be. So I left yesterday empty as a kind of moment of silence.

Today as I am still in a football mourning stage, I just wanted to babble about things that come into my head like “Is light a particle or a wave?” (Sorry to those of you that don’t know about this great debate - research it and stay up at night thinking about as I do). Oh, I did come to a conclusion though - Yes. (For those of you that know Boolean logic).

I also wonder how some things are invented. I know Post-It notes were an experiment gone bad. They tried to make the next great adhesive but it didn’t work. Then they figured out that it sticked just good enough but didn’t leave residue or make a permanent bond and 3M said, “Wow, that would be great on little pieces of paper.”

But how did spandex get invented? And why? Could they de-invent it?

I also wonder how people don’t get excited in reading Scripture. I mean, I was reading tonight about how when the Israelites were lost in the desert, God provided food from heaven on a daily basis. The Israelites called this food manna. You know what manna means - “What is this?” because that’s what they said when they saw it. (Exodus 16:15) For the longest time, I thought manna might mean something like “Gift from Heaven” or “Food from Heaven” or “God giveth” or something profound. But no, it was just the Israelites response as God provided for them on a daily basis and their response - “What is this?” I guess if you live with miracles every day like living through the plagues, parting of the Red Sea, following a cloud/tower of fire around the desert, then some nice food falling from heaven every day (except the Sabbath but the food was doubled up the day before) is no big deal.

It reminds me of that old candy bar - “Whatchamacallit”. Which makes me think - How did they invent chocolate? Never mind but I just want to say “Thank you!!!!”

From Yahoo.com –> Tailor made for you - RSS

Did you ever wonder why I have all those button across the bottom on the website? What is that orange “XML” or “RSS” box on all these websites anyway?

RSS stands for Real Simple (or Standard) Syndication. That means that the content from those websites is put into a special format that can be imported into other websites or things call RSS Aggregators.

This technology allows you to monitor the content of a multitude of websites all on a single page. This is such a growing technology, that the next version of Windows (“Vista”) is going to have RSS reading capabilities built into it.

Personally, I use “My Yahoo” as my RSS Aggregator. That means on a single page, I can see the headlines from my favorite bloggers (Write some more djchuang!!), the latest photos uploaded from Ken Liu, what is shipping next from our Netflix queue, and the sermons from my home church, Lake Forest, and our sister church Warehouse 242. Anytime I see a headline that I am interested in, I just click on it and it takes me right to that post on the website.

So if you are a person that goes web surfing and finds a site that you really like - instead of adding it to your “favorites”, add the RSS or XML feed to your Aggregator so you not only know about the website, but can see instantly if there are any new articles that are worth reading/hearing/or viewing.

Read the article from Yahoo to learn even more about this way of experiencing the web.