10 things we don’t mention in worship songs, but that I’m happy God saved me from. « 22 Words

Abraham Piper has a great list of 10 things he is grateful God saved him from, but that we don’t sing about in worship songs.  I wonder why…

So, here is my list:

1. The wrong girl.
2. The wrong church.
3. Being an Architect.
4. Prison.
5. Drowning.
6. Being stuck in the 80’s.
7. Drugs.
8. An early death.
9. Bachelorhood.
10. Childlessness.

Yours?

“I like to call it ‘grajimication,’” said my love, showing her sense of humor that is heavily dosed with silly, but only when you get to know her.

My lovely and talented wife “grajimcates” tonight with a Master’s Degree in School Administration. No, she still has a semester to go in the class taking arena, but they parade across the stage with caps and gowns (that just arrived at the bookstore the day prior, no less) and they do it tonight. I mean, if you are 3/4 of the way through your Master’s Degree, why not get the thing anyway? Right? Surely, you’ll finish.

Well, we can all guess that the only thing she’ll get tonight is a folder where a degree might one day reside, but the honors go out early.

She is finishing this degree at the Tulsa location of the University of Oklahoma, where she had always intended to attend as a young lady growing up in Clinton, OK. That she attended the school loathed by almost every Sooner fan, Oklahoma State in Stillwater, is a mystery. While the Orange and Black still has something for her, the Crimson and Cream has risen to the top and OU paraphernalia is showing up around the house.

Of course, not as much as the “Jenks wear” that everyone has. I think she keeps the Trojan Shop in business over in Jenks, where she now works. That is, she works at one of the schools in one of the top rated school systems in the state, not the Trojan Shop.

Although, if she got a part time job there, she might get some discounts on some of the clothing… Never mind. She buys enough there already that she gets a bulk discount.

What can we say? She’s proud of her school.

Well, here’s to the near matriculation of my love. Congrajifizations.

So, I missed Phriday foto yesterday and today, between working on the power point for my sermon and playing frisbee with my daughter, I thought I would check out this new Web Browser, Flock. I am very interested.

I know, I know. I just got everyone to switch to Firefox!

True enough, but Flock is actually made by the folks that made Firefox, so I though I would check it out. The thing about Flock is that it is made for Social networking. Your Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Photobucket, Magnolia… yes even Twitter… automatically plugs in to the sidebar application in Flock, so you the browser automatically interacts with whatever you are browsing.

It has a media tool bar, a feed reader and some other interesting gadgets I am exploring.

This post is a test of the blog post interaction. I have several ways to post what I am looking at from Flock. This is a picture I took in Vietnam of some future Soccer stars. The downside is that, although it allows tags, it does not post the tags to wordpress but embeds them in the post, it does not allow for me to post in a category you can choose only one category as you get ready to post or do any of the other SEO stuff I have been stressing lately. That means I’ll have to go back in the admin panel and fix it after it is published.

It does have a save draft function, but I am unsure if it saves it in Flock or to my blog. I’ll try and see… Nope. Save it to Flock, so I have to publish it and then rework the backside for Search Engines.

Also, since this is a picture from my flickr account, flickr will get the link rather than when I host it on my own server.

Nevertheless, while blogging from Flock may not be ideal, social networking through Flock seems promising. I have added all of my flickr contacts to “favorites” in the media bar, and when they post new pics, it will let me know with an orange media button and I can click it and surf.

Oh, it also has an rss feed button that will find the feed of whatever site you are in and let you click it to subscribe. The drawback is that you must subscribe in Flock rather than Bloglines, Google Reader, or whatever else you are using. I think this is true. I’ll look for a way to change the subscription default.

Anyway, check it out. You might like it.

Tags: foto, pic, picture, vietnam, soccer

Give up your preconceived ideas.  These guys are techy enough to eliminate their boards from this video.  It’s amazing.

What else might you not know about skaters?

Did you know that more kids skateboard than every other sport in the US?

Ok, if you’ve not heard of twitter, you need to, because it seems to be the new fad in online communication. Apparently it is streamlined blogging with one sentence updates of what you are doing throughout the day.

Now, before I rant, I usually like to clarify what I’m about to say by telling you what I am not saying, so that people don’t misunderstand. I am not about to say that twitter is evil or that people are foolish for using it. I am not about to say that it is not the future of blogging because it may very well be just that. I am not saying that my friends who twitter are no longer my friends or that they are inferior in anyway.

Having said all of that, let me tell you that if you are my friend and you twitter, I AM TALKING TO YOU!

Stop putting your twitter updates in your blog or rss feed to which I subscribe. If you want to tell the world that you are constipated or that you are having a bad hair day…week…life then fine. Frankly, I am skeptical that people want to know this about you, but…  Who knows? There might be stalkers out there who have targeted you and you may very well enjoy helping them to plan their assault on you.

That is irrelevant to me. I care not one whit. I will gladly attend your funeral and will mourn appropriately and will be outraged at your untimely and gruesome death at the exactly appropriate level. I may even offer to adopt your children as a way to minister to your family.

I might just do ANYTHING in an attempt to dissuade you from telling me the minutiae of your existence in a constant flow of information.

I am interested in your thoughts on deeper things, so I put your blog in my feedreader, but to my surprise, I began to find the rudimentary goings on in the lives of people I once thought fascinating and it came in buckets of crushing and yet uninteresting information.

Let me simply say that I love you, but not that much.

My wife doesn’t even want to know that much of my life, and I am pretty confident that I don’t need to know that she put on lipstick at 9:14 am before a meeting.  And we love each other a lot.

Now that I’ve said that, let me encourage you to twitter all you want, but if you don’t take those blasted updates out of your rss feed, I’ll take your rss feed out of my feedreader. I will still love you.  In fact, maybe I’ll love you more from a distance.  But I’ll know much less of what you think about real things and I will actually be the lesser for it.

So for the betterment of me, please, if you love me back, stop rss-ing your twitter. Or at least do it separately so that those who do like to stalk you can do it without my knowing as much as they do.

Have a good day.

Apparently the “Toronto Blessing” or the “Spirit of Holy Laughter” that Benny Hinn is said to keep in the folds of his jacket has its roots in India…

It’s a joke, people.  Laugh a little. 

Last week I took some pictures in a near full moon. If you like these, you can find more on my photoblog.

Click on the thumbnail for a larger picture.

I will be posting more posts in the Better Blogging series.  I have at least two more that will seriously help you, but they will take quite a bit of time to finish and I am tired of staying up all night to write.  I’ll try and polish them off as soon as I am able and post them soon.  Hang in there.

In the mean time, I will be setting posts to drop with interesting links or videos.

Oh, and I am still working on some thoughts concerning cooperative mission efforts and what we can actually do to make things work better.

From the Skit Guys:

Something crossed my mind the other day and I just couldn’t let it go. In a discussion over a year ago on Missional Cooperation, a Seminary Student included this thought in a comment left on my blog:

“by giving to the cp, they are already giving to ‘their mission dollars to missions they themselves are doing.’”

Apr 10th, 2007 at 8:03 am

I really could not forget that statement and the mindset it represents. Finally, I would just like to put it to be by saying a hearty:

“NUH UHHHH!”

Participation in the Cooperative Program is not doing missions. It is paying someone else to do missions. I’m not saying supporting missionaries that live in a context of lost people is a bad thing. Quite the contrary, I think we should be giving much more to the field.

However, sending money is not the same as personal engagement. We need to be a church that is engaging people in Tulsa, North America and around the world, as described in Acts 1:8. Us. Our church.

The CP has done amazing things, but one of the negative consequences is that our people have become convinced that they do not need to actually get up and do something but by sending some money to the CP, they’ve done missions. and. that. is. a. lie.