Category: Uncategorized Page 20 of 71

There is no question that Haiti has been devastated. Most of us don’t know what we can do other than send money.

So, we send money, and then forget about it.

Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett, who both teach at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia are offering an opportunity to learn from this crisis in Haiti and from their deep understanding of the realities of poverty and need.

They are offering a FREE three hour web-accessed seminar which will be airing starting Wednesday, February 17. If you have even the least amount of interest in the matters of mercy, need, and poverty, I encourage you to sign up for this and learn what these men can teach.

Click here for more information and to learn how to register.

Fifteen years ago, I would have chafed at the title of this post. Worship is not evangelistic; it is for Christians.

But that was then. That which once chafed I now embrace.

To practice public worship in a way comprehensible to the non-Christian and at the same time in a way that honors the Christian need to exalt his God is not only possible, but essential.

Tim Keller demonstrates and defends this in his helpful article “Evangelistic Worship”.

Bryan Chapell’s Christ-Centered Worship makes a similar case, a part of which is this:

“Healthy worship is one of the church’s most effective evangelism tools; thus, we cannot forget the unbeliever even as we focus on enabling believers rightly to honor their God.”

Not only is the content of worship an important apologetic to the non-Christian, but so is the joy, engagement, and passion of the believer in worship. If the Christian is engaged and invigorated by the worship, if the Christian finds it full of richness and meaning, and if the Christian is renewed at a deep level by the worship, that will be an attraction to the non-Christian who sees that.

If the Christian is significantly and sincerely touched by worship, he will long to bring others into that experience. One cannot expect a congregation to invite those they know to a service of worship they find empty of meaning. To seek to enrich worship for the Christian, even this has an evangelistic component.

Worship cannot help but be evangelistic.

My day started by my spilling coffee all over some papers I was carrying, followed by finding out that I had scheduled a meeting of a committee I chair for next Monday but had failed to inform any of the members of that committee. All that is a problem to me, and represented two messes that I’ve needed to work on cleaning up this morning.

And yet, where is my perspective on ‘mess’ and ‘suffering’?

Last night I received an email update from a man who is serving in Haiti with his wife and family. He is a man I met a number of years ago. He is a gentle, soft-spoken Haitian man with a heart deeply committed to serving Christ.

When I first met him, he was in seminary, adding Greek and Hebrew to his complement of languages which already included French, Creole, and English. He persevered and was eventually ordained to the gospel ministry in our presbytery, our association of churches.

He pastored for a time a church of Haitian families. He loved them and faithfully served them. I met there his lovely wife and their four delightful boys, all of whom remind me of my own son who is, himself, of Haitian ethnic descent.

But he was not settled there. His heart yearned for his native land. Though he could live comfortably pastoring in Florida, he chose to move with his wife and family to the depravation of life in Haiti. He chose this. This is Crazy Love personified.

Our last personal contact with him came last year some time when he was gathering material to replace the personal belongings he and others had lost as a result of the hurricane triggered floods in Haiti. He received what we could give with joy and gratitude, though he had lost nearly everything. He still went back to Haiti.

So, when the earthquake hit, we all immediately thought of him and his family. We were happy to hear that they had survived. We were saddened to hear that they could not reenter their house. Though it had not collapsed, it has been seriously weakened and is now unusable.

Last night, I tried to read to my family an email update from our friend, whose name I’m purposely not using since I am going to copy from that email, and don’t have any way of securing his permission to do so. So he remains here anonymous. But I tried to read the letter, but couldn’t without weeping, overwhelmed with his suffering, with the sense of helplessness, and with the realization that this is what he has chosen. This is where love for Jesus has led him.

Dear Partners in Christ,

There is a new update in our situation here in Port-au-prince. Today at about 1:00PM the principal of the Christian School came to me and my wife and said, “I have made connection to Missionary Flight international for your wife and the boys to leave the country and you have five minutes to be ready.” They had no time to even change and go get some clothes at home. As I am writing this email they are in the air going to Florida to my mother-in-law.

As for me, I am here at the school trying to minister to the people that have lost children, parents, siblings. People whose houses have collapsed. The scene is horrible. The air is polluted with the smells of dead bodies laying everywhere. My kids have seen dead bodies and they are so afraid that they could not even sleep.

Please pray for us for this open opportunity to share the wondrous love of our God. People are dying here because the relief effort of the international community and the government is very slow. There are cities like Leogane that is destroyed at about 80%.

This is a huge thing.I am overwhelmed by the magnitude of devastation and the amount of people that died. Every body, including ourselves, have been sleeping on the streets under the stars.

Please Pray!

Yes, indeed, please pray.

Previous studies on Christmas Eve candles were performed under laboratory conditions.

In real life situations involving wiggly nine year olds and wind currents caused by AC fans kicking on and off, candle burn time is reduced to at most 40 minutes. People get nervous after fifteen.

Still, it is clear that we can burn these babies longer than the traditional three minutes!

What is the manufacturer’s estimated MPG (Minutes Per Glow) on a Christmas Eve candle?

I don’t know. No where does the box indicate. So, we have to do our own experimentation.

I put a ‘candlelight service’ type candle in its sleeve (with sufficient candle below the sleeve for a hand to hold). I placed this in a cup on my desk and let it burn.

The picture shows the progress at the 40 minute mark.

I’d say we are looking at an MPG of at least an hour or more under laboratory conditions.

As they say, results may vary. Especially in the hands of a six year old….

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Note: If you would like to try this under real-life conditions, join us for our Christmas Eve worship at Hope Church Thursday night at 6:00 PM!

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UPDATE:
At 60 minutes, the candle entered the ‘twilight’ stage.

At 75 minutes, the candle entered the ‘somewhat iffy’ stage.

At 90 minutes, the candled entered the ‘seriously iffy’ stage.

At 94 minutes, the paper sleeve caught on fire:

I stopped by Lov a Da Coffee to meet someone the other day and sat in a comfy chair near a speaker. As I worked and waited, my attention was captured by the music that was being played. The arrangements were classy and the singer’s voice was captivatingly pure and beautiful. She sang fascinating arrangements of the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” and of the Monkeys’ “Daydream Believer”.

When she began to sing “I Dreamed a Dream” from “Les Miserables” my curiosity began to form a hypothesis, later proved correct. This was Susan Boyle. The frumpy, homely, Susan Boyle from “Britain’s Got Talent” and YouTube fame. The Susan Boyle whose singing silenced an auditorium full of mockers. If you are one of the three people in the world who have NOT seen her performance on YouTube, you must.

Her dream was to be a singer, and as unlikely as that dream might have appeared at one time, it is no longer. Her album I Dreamed A Dream is now available for download or purchase.

I know that much of the quality of this music is attributable to quality arrangements. But she handles those arrangements so well. How could she have remained in such obscurity for so long?

Later that night, I stopped by a friend’s house to take care of some things, and he had some music playing in the background. It reminded me so much of what I had heard earlier in the day that I plopped down at his computer to bring up the Amazon link to play some Susan Boyle samples for him.

“That’s good, Randy,” he said. “Sounds a lot like this” and he held up her CD. His wife had bought the CD for him and that is what was playing. No wonder it reminded me of her!

She’s good. In the end, I decided she was not $10.99 good. But she’s good nonetheless.

I watched the video again just to watch the judges’ jaws drop.

Priceless.

I am known in my family and to a few close friends as the guy who was sick one day, and bored, and in order to pass the time took his temperature every hour and charted its variations in Excel.

So, to those, the following will come as no surprise.

Bacon, you might notice, is much smaller when it is cooked than when you pull it from the package. But how much smaller?

To find out, I cooked 8 ounces (227 grams) of Publix regular bacon on a hanging rack in the microwave, which does not leave the bacon in its own grease as it cooks. I weighed the entire apparatus when it went into the microwave (408 grams) and the whole when it was done cooking (296 grams). I assumed that the difference between those two weights would be accounted for by water in the bacon that had turned to steam and dissipated (112 grams). I then weighed the bacon itself after cooking (47 grams).

Yes, one starts with 227 grams of bacon, but only 47 grams of it ever gets eaten.

Putting it all together, we are left with these facts. Out of every pound of bacon you buy at the store:

* 49% will evaporate
* 30% will stay in the pan
* 21% will make it to your plate.

More graphically, if the package of bacon is ten inches long, you can mentally chop off eight inches and toss it away. You only eat two inches.

Hmmm. I think I’ll be buying less bacon.

[Of course, every “scientific endeavor” is subject to peer review. Though this is hardly scientific, and though I don’t imagine there is anyone out there as obsessive about these things as I, I would be interested to hear if there are!]

I’ve tried, but can’t come close to matching this work of word-smithing: writing a whole column without depending upon any form of the verb ‘to be’. I read this years ago, and was referred to it again recently. It is classic.

[I tried to think of an economical way of expressing the sentiment of those last three words in e-Prime, and could not do it. Who can help me? Anyone?]

ITunes is giving a way a CD sampler of 20 ‘holiday’ songs absolutely free. I resisted Amazon’s offer of 99 tracks for $5, but this one I had to go for. Obviously, when someone else is choosing the tracks, there will be winners and losers. In the latter category I’d put Rascal Flatts singing “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen”. But Sarah Mclachlan’s rendition of “Silent Night” is a very beautiful thing and, we might add, worth more than the price of the collection! And Weezer doing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”, well, you have to hear it. There is some good and interesting stuff here. Christmas music stuff.

UPDATE: Okay, so now I’ve heard the whole thing, there may be no more than two or three you will listen to a second time, but hey, it’s free!

For all our friends up north who are worried about your robins and whether they made their flight successfully, I can assure you that they have arrived and appear to be in good condition.

At present, they are using the retention pond behind our house to take their post-migration baths.

They’ll work on sending postcards later.