Regular Expressions in Notepad++
I've always found regular expressions to be a real un-intuitive mind-bender. I've had some very limited success in using them...mostly in a linux command-line grepping situation where I had some very good examples to work from and had no other choice...i.e. I was FORCED to use them. I'm a programmer. I'm a database administrator. I enjoy coding and writing weird SQL! But I've never been able to get my head around regular expressions...never really wanted to. See my blog post about my laziness with regular expressions.
I've been using Notepad++ for some time now and have sort of a love-dislike relationship with it because it's very powerful...but some things, notably macros don't exactly work like I'd want them too...and sometimes, I really think they're buggy.
Today, I needed to take a list of e-mails and, for each email take the part before the '@' and copy it at the of the line with a tab in between.
So, to start with I have a list of emails like this:
lkjshdflkhsf@lkjhsdf.com oiuyeruyq@iuywer.com nbxvnxbv@mnbcx.com
At the end I need lines like this:
lkjshdflkhsf@lkjhsdf.com[TAB]lkjshdflkhsf oiuyeruyq@iuywer.com[TAB]oiuyeruyq nbxvnxbv@mnbcx.com[TAB]nbxvnxbv
If you've ever had to move contacts from one piece of software to another you may have come across this problem to create an import file for the destination. If Notepad++ macros worked in every situation, I'd have been able to use them, but they would simply "malfunction" on me and not allow me to accomplish this. So I played with regular expressions and became aware of how you can "tag" parts of your search expression and then refer to those tagged portions of text in your replacement string to allow you to move things around and copy things. Really good regex info can be found on the Notepad++ wiki here: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/notepad-plus/index.php?title=Regular_Expressions.
So to accomplish this I was able to use the Notepad++ Search/Replace dialog in "regular expression" mode like this:
In the image, you can see that in the FIND expression, you have two sections in parentheses. This is how you tag a portion of a string, by putting the expression within parentheses. For the first piece, it tags the part between the beginning of the line, signified by the "^" (caret) character and the "@", signified by itself. The "dot asterisk" means:
I've shaded that yellow. Then the second section that I've tagged is between the "@" and the end of the line, signified by the "$" (dollar sign). I've shaded it orange.
Now, in the replacement, you can refer to these tagged areas by "\1", "\2", "\3", etc....simply the order in which they appear gives them an ordinal number. You can then refer to them in the replacement string several times if you wish.
I'm still quite the noob in regular expressions and much more can be done with them. But, I found this particular example to be something that I can definitely build on in the future and hope that you can too.
The "structure" of the Body of Christ...a family
I've sort of had a love-hate relationship with Kris Valloten's messages (no offense Kris, if I ever meet you! ). His humor, often self-effacing, is engaging but sometimes one can detect what seems a sort of lack-of-confidence defensiveness in his delivery. I have to overcome that to get to the good stuff of his messages...and there is really good stuff!
At any rate, recently two messages of his were posted at Bethel Church in fairly rapid succession (Bill must have been traveling a lot!) and they really struck me. The first one is on the 5-fold ministry from Ephesians 4:11 and the second was on Fatherhood, which he gave on Father's Day. For me these two messages really dovetailed together with things that God's been speaking to me about.
Several times this spring, I've heard extended teaching on spiritual parents/children and about the generational transfer of inheritance. Tied with that is the honoring of our preceding generation and succeeding generations. Tied with that is honoring the special graces that God has placed on each individual person. Tied with that is receiving God's unique graces through each other. This may be one of the key messages that God is emphasizing in the Body of Christ right now. It certainly is one of the messages that is being emphasized to me and in our community of faith here in France.
There is a sense that God desires to pour out a special "grace", "anointing", "blessing" (pick your pregnant term) on His Body in order to impact our society more significantly. The amount of this impartation is what is in the balance. The amount needed to really facilitate change and advance God's Kingdom is more than individuals can handle...it would crush them. Picture someone with no foundation in their life winning the lottery. We see it over and over again with the real lotteries and with young professional sports "first-round-draft-picks". The enormous blessing becomes a curse. Lives of promise become a parody of success at best and end tragically at worst.
God NEEDS to pour out an enormous blessing on His Church in order for them to be the Kingdom agents He called them to be (way back even in Genesis 1:28!) How does He do it and not crush us? He needs to pour out His blessing "corporately." This is not of course meaning on a "business." In fact if you look at the word "corporately", you see the Latin root "corp-", which means "body".
Sum it up:
At this point then, we're only "saved individuals" with simply a potential to be effective agents of God's transforming power in Creation. It's a pretty good deal, but it's not enough. The kind of power we need to wield in order to affect the changes needed in Creation is simply too much for us as individuals. God desires to pour out His power, but He's made us in such a way that we're unable to effectively carry His power as individuals. He values family and relationship too much to allow us to simply "do tasks" and be rewarded for it...as individuals.
As a corporate body, however...
As a family, however...
That's another story and that's where these two teachings by Kris Valloten come in. I encourage you to learn about the "authority structures" that facilitate the impartations of grace that we need in his teaching on the 5-fold ministry and the "family structures" that establish love in our hearts and honor for one another that cause us to flow together as more than an a well-oiled machine or an organization, but an organism...a body...a family. When this occurs, we become vessels ready for God's poured-out blessing, His anointing, His transforming power. We, as a body, as a family, are then positioned to live as transforming agents of our Father's Kingdom...our destiny all along.
Fatherhood (mp3 24Mb) (link to watch as video on Bethel's site - free registration required)
The role of the 5-fold ministry (mp3 26Mb) (link to watch as video on Bethel's site - free registration required)
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