The college and young singles home group last night was great - a whole lot of them came over (I think we had around 16 to 20 or thereabouts). I love those people! They were talkative, open, we ate, sang, studied, discussed, prayed and played games together. It was a good start.

Jill and I were talking last night, and I remarked that we'll have ups and downs in this thing. Last night was an up, but my goal is to be flexible and persevere through the downs.

I spent the last few hours dragging seventeen years of stuff out of our attic. The garage now looks like a landfill, but the attic is completely cleaned out. Now to start rebuilding . . . the great Garage Renovation of 2010 is in progress. Slow progress, albeit.

No soccer this weekend. Which is a good thing.

I'm almost done with Bloo version 1.32. Will be deploying the 1.31 test version very soon (maybe today). In 2010, I'll be doing a lot more (and more frequent) Bloo releases. This first one is more or less a maintenance release, with a few goodies thrown in. More later.

Soon will get my lesson prepared for tomorrow.

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. - John 6:35

Have a great weekend!

I'm driving Jill's Sebring full time now. Our mechanic pronounced it beyond help a few weeks ago. I'm becoming an expert in working the "feel" of a transmission that doesn't want to shift. Also, the engine sounds like I'm shaking a can full of bolts. So every day's gravy.

Daddy date with Bethany tonight was good. She's awesome. She puts up with a lot too.

Great talk with Molly last night.

I was in a room full of millionaires today. "Room full of millionaires" would make a cool band name.

Lost Premier party tomorrow night at our place!

Cooper lives to have his belly rubbed.

Cooper is our dog, by the way.

I am gearing up to liveblog 24 again tonight. We'll see.

I'm going to weigh 400 pounds.

That is all.

Here's a cool picture of Blake's soccer team, the Dallas Texans - Houston Division Legend '98.



Blake is number 25, in front, giving us his best game face. The cool thing about this picture is that every kid who got a team picture got to be in the front. It's not really a group shot; The photographer took individual pictures of each kid and photoshopped each kid in the front for the shot they purchased. Very nice.

Blake's team played the first day of a soccer tournament today. It was fun, although it was FREEZING out at the fields. His team won the first game 2-0 against Chivas. Blake scored a goal, capitalizing on a great cross from Pablo. Unfortunately, the second game against Tigres was very tough, and they lost 3-0. Tomorrow they face the Houstonians, which is a very, very tough team.

Go Legend!

Update: They tied the Houstonians 2 to 2, which was disappointing (especially since the Houstonians second goal was off a questionable call resulting in a PK) but the boys played their hearts out in the cold and mud. Well done!

Such as they are, for tomorrow (with much help from David Guzik and John Piper): here.

Today I'll finish preparing to teach a Bible study tomorrow, one that I don't deserve to teach.

I almost always feel that way. My words and actions of the past week come back to me (and this isn't false piety - I was a self-indulgent jerk this week at times).

But teach I shall, and I pray God speaks, in spite of me.

Isn't this a beautiful picture?


(click on the image to get a bigger picture}

[H/T the Gospel Driven Church]

Know what this is?



It's a computer hard drive from 1956, used in the IBM 305 RAMAC computer.

The hard drive weighed over a ton and stored a whopping 5 megabytes.

I don't want an iPad.

(even though everyone else I know is going batty over it).

Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”

- Exodus 3:13-14

I'm starting a teaching series in College and Young Singles this weekend on the seven "I Am" statements of Jesus in the book of John. I can't wait and I hope it goes well. I'm going to start with the passage above, as an introduction, with it's surrounding context.

There's so much here. So much. Two things jump out at me on just a cursory re-reading of this passage.

1. The people of Israel are truly without a shepherd. They feel abandoned, and they have no foundation, They don't really know the God of their fathers very well. Moses is concerned, and he needs a name.

Does that speak to you? How alone are you in the universe when God is such a stranger to you? But even in their loneliness and desperation the Hebrews have cried out to the God they barely knew, and He has heard them.

2. In answer to the "What's your name?" question, God answers "I am who I am". I don't have anything very profound to say here, other than just to say that God is cool. And I don't mean cool in the acid-washed, frosted tips, ipod buds in your ears, shirt untucked, tat with a gotee way. I mean it in the "when I read that, my jaw drops and I say 'wow . . . that's cool'" way. God said "I AM", because what better way is there to describe the eternal, omnipotent, omnipresent, creator-God, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End? He is. And because He is, we are.

And the sooner we acknowledge that, the better.

I'm looking forward to this.

I find the show 24 strangely compelling. I live-blogged tonight's episode over at Thinklings if you're interested.

NASA's Puffin, the stealthy, personal, tilt-rotor aircraft.



Now that's cool.

What a great day in the College and Young Singles class! We had more singles there than I can remember in a long, long time. The worship by Molly and Zach was very good, and Charles did a tremendous job finishing up his two-part teaching on stewardship, ending with our stewardship of the Gospel.

It was a really good morning. Very encouraging. We also announced the starting up of HomeGroups in early February.

It was a good end to a pretty challenging and tiring weekend. I think I'll cap it off with some time spent organizing the attic (that's the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of fun, right?) :-)

And, after that, time to get ready for a challenging and tiring week. There are lots of big doings at work and I'm in the middle of some of them. Whew.

Oh, I almost forgot. Congratulations Colts!

. . . but far too often I do.

And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness.

Drat . . .

I am in the midst of the Great Garage Renovation of 2010 (a slow-going process, but a process nonetheless). Currently I'm in phase one, which is the "throw everything I don't need away" phase.

I have trouble throwing books away, but I've been forced to throw some away, while doing my best to keep the gems. But there were two I had no trouble throwing away today.

The first was Widow of the South by Robert Hicks. I read this one a year or two ago; being a Civil War enthusiast, I thought it looked intriguing. Instead it was just . . . well, extremely anachronistic. I have no doubt most of the historical details were true, but the attitudes and thoughts of the characters were post-modern and strange to what I know of 1860s thought. I tossed that one in the trash with no problem.

The other one was a fatherhood book I never read. Not that I probably didn't need to, but the introduction to the book was a long dissertation about why fathers would rather not be in the delivery room when their kids are born. What the? Being with Jill as she delivered our four children was among the greatest privileges of my life.

That is all.

Blake and I are watching the Chronicles of Narnia. We just watched the scene where Father Christmas comes upon the children and the Beavers in the wood beyond the frozen field.

I'm such a sap . . . I found myself misting up as Lucy looked with joy upon the bringer of gifts. Redemption came upon them suddenly, and in that moment they were granted the tools they needed to persevere. A dagger, a bow, a sword, a horn to bring help, a healing elixir.

That spoke to me.

The reason why we must hope in God is chiefly the fact that we belong to him, as effect belongs to cause. God does nothing in vain, but always acts for a definite purpose . . .

— St. Thomas Aquinas

I love hope.

[H/T The Anchoress]

Nastasya Filippovna turned with curiosity to Myshkin.

"Is that true?" she asked.

It's true," whispered Myshkin.

"Will you take me as I am, with nothing?"

"I will, Nastasya Filippovna."

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

[H/T The Oxford Inklings]

Dinesh D'Souza has put out the first in a three part series on Life after Death. His argument appears to be built on a somewhat Lewisian appeal to the human sense of morality. Should be an interesting series.

I was intrigued especially in this first part by his treatment of the anticipated skeptics' objection that he is only appealing to the "God of the Gaps". His take on Gaps is one I've never considered before. Some excerpts:

Before we launch into our discussion, I need to anticipate and answer an objection that will already be surfacing for a certain type of reader. Skeptics will at this point be reacting scornfully to my claim that there are certain features of human nature that seem to defy scientific explanation. The phrase that will be dancing on their lips is “the God of the gaps.” What they mean is that I am appealing to God and the supernatural to account for things that science has not yet explained. As Carl Sagan wrote in The Varieties of Scientific Experience, “As science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do.” For the skeptic, the appeal to gaps is a completely illegitimate mode of argument; just because science doesn’t have the answer now, that doesn’t mean it will not have the answer tomorrow, or at any rate someday. In this view, the God of the gaps is the last desperate move of the theist, who searches for the little apertures in the scientific understanding of the world and then hands over those areas to his preferred deity.

. . . while the skeptic typically fancies himself a champion of science, his whole line of argument is no less unscientific than that of the creationist. For the skeptic a gap is a kind of nuisance, a small lacuna in scientific knowledge that is conceded to exist as a kind of misfortune, and is expected soon to be cleared up. True scientists, by contrast, love and cherish gaps. They seek out gaps and work laboriously within these crevices because they hope that, far from being a small missing piece of the puzzle, the gap is actually an indication that the whole underlying framework is wrong, that there is a deeper framework waiting to be uncovered, and that the gap is the opening that might lead to this revolutionary new understanding.

Gaps are the mother lode of scientific discovery. Most of the great scientific advances of the past began with gaps and ended with new presuppositions that put our whole comprehension of the world in a new light. The presuppositional argument, in other words, is not some funny way of postulating unseen entities to account for seen ones, but rather is precisely the way that science operates and that scientists make their greatest discoveries. Copernicus, for example, set out to address the gaps in Ptolemy’s cosmological theory. As historian Thomas Kuhn shows, these gaps were well recognized, but most scientists did not consider their existence to be a crisis. After all, experience seemed heavily on the side of Ptolemy: The earth seems to be stationary, and the sun looks as if it moves. Kuhn remarks that many scientists sought to fill in the gaps by “patching and stretching,” i.e., by adding more Ptolemaic epicycles.

Copernicus, however, saw the gaps as an opportunity to offer a startling new hypothesis. He suggested that instead of taking it for granted that the earth is at the center of the universe and the sun goes around the earth, let’s suppose instead that the sun is at the center, and the earth and the other planets all go around the sun. When Copernicus proposed this, he had no direct evidence that it was the case, and he recognized that his theory violated both intuition and experience. Even so, he said, the presupposition of heliocentrism gives a better explanation of the astronomical data and therefore should be accepted as correct. Here is a classic presuppositional argument that closes a gap and in the process gives us a completely new perspective on our place in the universe.

Similarly, Einstein confronted gaps in the attempt of classical physics to reconcile the laws of motion with the laws of electromagnetism. Again, there were many who didn’t consider the gap to be very serious. Surely classical Newtonian science would soon figure things out, and the gap would be closed. It took Einstein’s genius to see that this gap was no small problem; rather, it indicated a constitutional defect with Newtonian physics as a whole. And without conducting a single experiment or empirical test, Einstein offered a presuppositional solution. He said that we have assumed for centuries that space and time are absolute, and this has produced some seemingly insoluble problems. So what if we change the assumption? What if we say that space and time are relative to the observer? Now we can explain observed facts about electromagnetism and the speed of light that could not previously be accounted for.

Einstein was able to test his theory by applying it to the orbital motion of the planet Mercury. Mercury was known to deviate very slightly from the path predicted by Newton’s laws. Another gap! And once again there was a prevailing complacent attitude that some conventional scientific explanation would soon close the gap and settle the anomaly. But in fact the gap was a clue that the entire Newtonian paradigm was inadequate. Einstein recognized his theory as superior to Newton’s when he saw that it explained the orbital motion of Mercury in a way that Newton couldn’t.

An interesting and new (to me, at least) way of looking at gaps. A good read, and recommended.

Just because . . .


Annie Lennox - Into the West