Category: personal

comment & trackback spam is not a new thing to me but i just received “CHRISTian” comment spam. i have “CHRISTian” in quotes because i’m not really sure that you can call spam “CHRISTian.” anyhow, the post below is about someone doing something very mean and hateful and some businessman/woman decided to use that post to paste their advertisement. it goes like this:

A cool trend discovery tool
I tend to blog about security things, but this amazing online tool can be used for other purposes as well.
Nice post! Visit a ministries site – learn more about ministries

Check it out when you have a chance.

i just really don’t think that JESUS would spam and i’m not sure that we should either.

btw, i removed the comment because i don’t want those scum getting any business from via this blog.

today i read in jordon cooper’s website that things with his diabetes are looking pretty bad, to the point that he might not make it through the whole thing. when i read that i wanted to post a comment of support on his blog and went to leave the comment. when i hit the comments on the post i was amazed to find the following comment from an anonymous poster:

I can’t say I am that upset. Whatever suffering you and Wendy have, you brought it upon yourselves.

i was stunned. cooper makes reference every now and then to some unnamed persons or people who are out to emotionally hurt his wife. i seen this person(s) make a few comments but still i was amazed that anyone could be this callous.

i decided i would check the comments on his wife’s, wendy’s, blog to see if there was anything on it. sure enough the following comment was on it.

It’s day of celebration here. You and Jordon get what you deserve.

again i was dumbfounded. how can anyone be so heartless. my hope that this is not a person that claims the name of CHRIST. for all i know it could be. sometimes i just wish JESUS would come and kick rear because that’s what this calls for.

based on this picture a guess it’s a really good thing that allot of the CHRISTians i know are by no means “free thinkers”. thank goodness they aren’t satan’s slaves. 🙂

awhile back jonny baker mention the ambient music of treefinger. i immediately downloaded some of it and i have really enjoyed listening to it while studying. i’ve also used a song or two as background for some flash animations. they have once again updated their my space site and have new song for all of us to download. if you do anything with video or flash treefinger has some great music to use for background music.

i’m sure all the other ipod users in the world knew this already but i just this week discovered that you can place text files under the “notes” section of my ipod and it will display them. this means that i have been able to place on my ipod all the chord sheets that we use for guitar and then i can view them whenever i want to. i had the chord sheets on the ipod already but only in the fashion of a usb thumb drive. i could view the files on the ipod by connect it to a computer and looking at them on the computer. now with the chord sheets within the “notes” section i can actually look at them on the ipod itself. this means that if i forget how to play or sing one of the waterdeep songs that we use for worship i can just look on my ipod.

sometimes technology actually does help with my life.

it was my wedding anniversary yesterday. pam and i have now officially spent 15 years together in wedded bliss. true romantic that i am i bought pam a lamp. sometimes i amaze even myself with how romantic i am (grin).

pam on the other hand went all out on my gift. we have a general rule of spending no more than $50 to $60 bucks for a gift no matter what the occasion. sometimes we go over a little but we stay pretty close to that range. it forces more creativity and thus the gift usually becomes more meaningful. case in point the lamp. pam quilts constantly. i once overheard her mention something about this particular lamp. i then remembered that random statement and went out looking for it. the lamp then becomes a physical reminder that i listen to my wife.

we do all of our money stuff together. i don’t spend large amounts of money without going through her and she does the same thing with me. about three months ago pam asked if she could dramatically go over the spending limit. she wanted to spend one of her whole paychecks on a gift for me. who am i to try and stop her from buying a gift? so she went to work on this mystery gift. she has been dying to tell me about it for quite sometime. everyone i know has known about the gift and would keep saying how great it is. the waiting has been miserable.

yesterday pam gave me the gift. it’s a two day trip to nyc to see the play “spamalot.” how cool is that? two days in nyc for picture taking and then watching david hyde pierce in spamalot. i have a great wife.

i’m blatantly stealing this from grant, but i’ve always heard that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. so grant consider yourself flattered.

here’s a list of bloggers that i would like to meet, drink some coffee or eat some cane’s with, go fly fishing with, and/or basically hang out with for an afternoon.

• grant english – reading his blog is kind of freaky because we seem to agree on so much and we even have a connection from the past – his sister was in the church where i first started my experiment in youth ministry.
• ian mcdonald – pam and i are planning on going back to england some time in the next few years and when we do i have got to meet ian. his blog is great. on top of that i want to see his shed.
• jonny baker – again when pam and i go to england (years from now) visit with jonny baker is a must. i wonder how he’ll feel about a strange american just showing up at his house for supper?
• shane yancey – shane is a youth minister in eufaula, alabama (about 45 minutes away from where i grew up in dothan) and i really like reading about the stuff he is doing at his church. if we ever would make it over to see my wife’s sister in dothan it shouldn’t be too hard to meet him. of course, i haven’t been to dothan in 9 years so i don’t see it happening soon.
• ty siscoe – it’s a flickr thing.
• underbunny – again a flickr thing.

of course, there are others that i would also like to meet but those are on the top of the list. i also have a list of bloggers that i have met that i would like to spend more time with – len evans and marko top that list.

so thursday i got back from taking some members of the youth ministry to diriamba, nicaragua. this was the third year that i took some people to diriamba. usually we go there are hang out with (basically build relationships and play) the street kids who live in the shanty town. this year we did a kind of “retreat” for some of the kids who are a part of the church we work with, helped feed kids who live in the dump, and continued to hang out with the street kids. on a whole it was a pretty good week. it was definitely cool to see some of the stuff that is now happening because of our “hanging out”. last year one of our number was so overwhelmed by working with the street kids that he/she went into the process of developing a school for teaching them crafts. this year we got to see the property on which that is going to happen. it was great to know that our spending time with these kids was going to lead to an opportunity to help them work their way out of the shanty town that they presently live in.

for me the big thing this year was something i have been struggling with for three years. the first time i went to nicaragua i wanted to see the dump in managua. i was completely blown away. last year i took the youth through it and again it was simply too much. last year i was convinced that i had to be apart of making a difference within the dump. i’ve been struggling with how to do that and as of going to diriamba this year i still had no idea. this year we had the opportunity to work within the diriamba dump – same types of situations and problems only on a smaller scale. this was eye opening. suddenly huge problems became small enough to grasp. i still don’t have the answers but i realized within these visits that the diriamba dump present a small enough evil to act as “trial run” for helping some of the people. when we figure out what will work within the diriamba dump i’ll at least have a starting point for working within the managuan dump.

while i don’t have any real answers right now i do have a couple of things that i am going to start working on. first, we ran into one easily fixable issue in the dump in the fact that some of the kids didn’t have bowls, plates, or anything else to put their daily free meal in. if you don’t have a place to put the meal in then you don’t get a meal. i saw kids bringing plastic grocery bags and cereal boxes to have their meal placed in. they had found these within the dump itself. so our first step as a youth ministry is to start raising bowls.

the second thing i am going to start working on is stolen from tony campolo. i once heard dr. campolo talk about some of his students developing a strategy for teaching haitian street kids to make and sell shoes made out of old tires. i’m convinced the same thing could work within the diriamban dump. i’m presently trying to find out as much as possible about how to do this. this may not be the answer for us but it is at least a step in the direction of learning what can work.

all i know for sure is that i don’t feel that i can stop trying to correct a situation that smacks of evil. that’s what it is. it is just plain evil for someone who was made in the image of my GOD to be reduced to living in a pile of trash.

bbc sport | fun and games | pained and shamed

the above is a bbc article on strange british sports injuries. a few of them are doosies.

white privilege: unpacking the invisible knapsack

read this article. my wife pointed it out to me and i think it is incredible. it is all about the privileges that i as an anglo recieve simply for being anglo. it’s not a bash on the white people article. instead it is simply a good reminder of what others have to overcome.

here are a few of the mainly unperceived white privileges:

Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.

I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.

I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.

I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.