iTune out!
I really like NT Wright audio teachings. He stimulates and provokes and challenges and bridges many a theological gap. I found on the NT Wright page (http://ntwrightpage.com) recently a link to some lectures he did at Duke University's 2010 Convocation and Pastor's School. I happily went to download the free audio teachings and I couldn't get past a page that said that iTunes was not found on my computer. Well duh! Of course it's not found on my computer. I wish it could stay that way!
I detest iTunes and I detest Apple's practice of creating "monopolistic" and "invasive" software. I'm duly convinced that much of what Apple creates in terms of hardware is really good and from a design standpoint is laudable (if stupidly expensive!). However, their handful of offerings that make it to the Windows world are hugely annoying! They're probably just trying to stick to Microsoft for their clunky Mac offerings. Of course the losers in this war are the end-users, not the big corporations.
Having had experience in getting other streaming protocols to finally cough up a standard URL of a standard media file via circuitous editing of a series of downloaded files, I did various "view sources" and tried playing my results in different capable, non-invasive media players and tried changing the protocol from itms to http, etc. None of this worked. So I started out looking for specific freeware players capable of playing/downloading itms files. I failed...
Apple has started this thing (I hesitate to use the word "service" as it does us only a dis-service!) called iTunes U. iTunes U is a corner of the iTunes Music Store universe dedicated to more educational media files. They must make it pretty attractive to participate in. Personally, I find it reprehensible that Duke University would, in essence, force people to download Apple software to play a free academic mp3 lecture. I can't imagine that the bandwidth hit or storage space is any kind of real problem for the university that they just couldn't put their mp3 files up on their own servers somewhere where anyone could easily download them.
Anyway, I didn't succeed in circumventing iTunes completely, but I did find this tutorial on how to install iTunes in a less invasive way: The unofficial guide to installing iTunes 10 without bloatware on the zdnet site. I highly recommend doing things this way if you simply need iTunes for some unique capability it offers and you don't want it to be so invasive or huge. I would add however, this final step: Fire up autoruns after doing the install steps and do a search on Apple. Then you can delete autostarted tasks/services that you don't want.
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Praying while I work
In the latest Online Update Newsletter from Church Production Magazine the question is asked, "Should techs stop and pray during services?" My first reaction to this is along the lines of, "Oh brother! Can we not waste our time on pointless discussions please!?" I know that there are sincere people on the other end, but this rationalistic/dualistic way of "doing church (services)" is so far removed from my reality that I struggle to even wade into the conversation. I read the article however (hoping to find a place where I could fire off my "eye-rolling" comments). Thankfully this article wasn't up for discussion on their site...and thankfully I have my own (barely visited) site where I can comment away.
My philosophical/theological stance on all this is we need to be praying all the time and our definition of prayer needs to expand as well. Consequently a discussion of whether this circumstance or that circumstance should/should not include "prayer" is difficult for me to engage with (other than my judgmental eye-rolling!).
But, I read the article and I think they treated the sincere question well and with much more grace than I would have. For me, personally, I find that my time at the mixing board during a service is ideal time to intercede for the worship and whatever else is going on in front of me. For example, we have a couple of youth worship teams, and I love to intercede for them while they do their thing. They're taking risks and learning how to lead people in worship at an age where I was simply goofy...nothing more! It's stimulating to pick one of them out up on stage and call for more of the anointing to flow through them!
However, this still leaves me with a personal dilemma/question: How do I pray constantly (without ceasing) in other areas? It's all well and good to think "correctly" that I should...it's a whole other thing to actually do it .
This is a constant struggle with me because my work (computers) is cerebral in nature. There are times when I can interject worship and prayer and declaration, etc. into what I'm doing and there are times when I need to focus on something simply to understand it. I don't have a problem with the idea that my focus time is "prayer/worship"; that I'm honoring the Lord in my work. What is difficult is coming out of that deep focus and consciously bringing Jesus into it. I've no problem with the idea that Jesus wants to be in it and that He has great solution ideas for me and that we can commune with each other in my technology work...I just have a hard time doing it consistently; a hard time remembering that He's closer than my skin and desiring that intimacy with me...and not always to the exclusion of my work, but actually in my work!
I like to think back to the Brother Lawrence's example of Practicing the Presence of God where he does the dishes with God (and for God as an act of worship). I think that's great and, in fact I love that example because I already do the dishes with God. Literally, that's where I listen to teachings or pray or ruminate on some scripture. That kind of routine, manual work is such an opportunity for me because of what I can and have gotten out of it. Now, if I could just add that next level of connection in the realm of cerebral work! Help Lord!
The mysteriously constipated ADSL router
Recently I've experienced reeeeeeaaaaaallllllyyyyy slow load times for anything at wordpress.com and wordpress.org, including all wordpress.com individual blogs. They would finally load but with no formatting. So obviously something was getting gummed up in the works. I've solved the problem finally and so I'll share my experience in hoping that it will help someone else.
Here's my process of discovery and solution:
Process of elimination points to our house and not a specific computer or operating system in our house. What's left? My Neuf box (SFR) ADSL router. Everything looks fine in its web interface, including its ability to ping and traceroute. It caught my eye that the uptime for my router was 51 days. This problem with WordPress I had noticed, maybe 2 weeks ago. In the past, I've had speed issues every once in a while and have discovered that rebooting the router can fix some of them. So, on a whim I thought I'd just reboot the router.
That fixed it. So I'm not sure exactly WHAT was the problem in the router that screwed up HTTP traffic to a single IP but not other traffic, but perhaps this will save you some time if you encounter something similar.
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Eschatology and God's Beauty - Keep the meat, spit out the bones
I've been wanting to express my frustration and excitement for some time now with respect to some of the revelation distributed to different places in the Body of Christ:
Of course we all do it! I was just in a church meeting Sunday afternoon where the diversity of perspectives, personalities and communication styles was exhilarating...which at first blush means: "Dang I wish they'd just shut-up!" I was seriously exhilarated and pleased by the diversity, but I was also seriously annoyed as a first reaction! As another example, just yesterday I was in the parking lot of a local supermarket waiting on Angela and Olivia who were inside shopping. While waiting I observed the stream of people arriving and leaving. One car caught my attention as it maneuvered slowly, directly in front of me, into it's parking spot with its three occupants. You could see the visible signs of brokenness on what I supposed was a family. You could see where they needed a radical change of perspective and the gracious healing that only Jesus could bring. Unfortunately all of this "hindsight description" that sounds so spiritual manifests itself in my heart initially simply as "Ewww! What a depressing sight!" So, I admit, I put labels on people and I don't do it with amazingly objective compassion and love.
That being said, when it comes to how we perceive God and His Kingdom I really think it's important to realize that at the same time that we are being stunned by the depth and breadth of some revelation, our perception, our perspective, is really amazingly limited and small. I've attempted to represent it with an image in this mashup of clipart (ugly but I think it gets the idea across):
God and His Kingdom are so vast and multi-faceted that eternity will not be long enough for us to understand and experience everything. What I see/hear when I listen to/read about various revelations of who God is, how He acts, what His Kingdom is all about, etc. is more like this following image:
In this image, there is the logical realization that others do hold different perspectives, but over-simplification distorts reality and there is a tendency to lump all other perspectives into a few clearly defined camps that are then easier to dismiss. What happens then is that group "A" presents arguments as to why perspective "B" doesn't really work. Group "A" will have some good points about their objections, but will neglect the fact that "B" is not really summed up that easily and that there are groups that they've lumped into "B" that hold to certain facets of that perspective but are really based on perspective "C", etc. The fact of the matter is, that one needs to sink deep into the perspective of the other to see what they see and understand what they understand. I think when walking a mile in another man's moccasins, we often stop after about 100 yards and are pretty sure our conclusions won't change...forgetting how many miles we had to walk to gain our perspective.
So with that little soapbox dealt with, I want to present two different series of teachings. One is Martin's Scott's fabulous, line-upon-line presentation of a "framework" for developing an eschatological perspective broken down into 40 (that's right 40! ) 15-minute podcasts. Both the podcasts and their transcripts can be found on his great and lively blog site (worth connecting with): http://3generations.eu/blog/?page_id=2640
The other is one of Mike Bickle's many teaching series. Mike and the worshiping intercessors at IHOP in Kansas City have focused a LOT on eschatology in the last 10 years. They have come to many different conclusions than has Martin (who is more interested in creating a healthy framework for interpretation than to be rigid in interpretation). There are many other series specifically on the End Times on Mike's site, but I chose one called "The Beauty Realm of God", which is 8, 1-hour messages specifically on Revelation 4-5. The reason is that this series lays the foundation for the IHOP "framework" of how they view eschatology. So you kind of have two different "eschatological interpretation frameworks" if not really two different rigid eschatology theologies. I think they are both valuable to explore... deeply ...as they both include rich, rich truth not presented in the other. You'll have to deal with some unresolved tension however as there are definitely conflicting aspects to what they've concluded based on their perspectives.
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