Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

Simple churching is incredible. Spending an entire Sunday as a Sabbath is the most amazing experience. Rest. Worship. Food. Scripture. Conversation. Prayer. Recreation. (Did I mention food?)

Until you have spent 12 hours on Sunday with people from your church, unhurriedly going about the business of simply being together, for many weeks in a row, you can’t grasp the peaceful joy that is simple church.

We don’t get stressed by the approach of Sunday morning anymore. This is a big deal. Sundays used to be a constant source of bickering and rushing and hurryhurryhurry and “Whew, it’s over.”. Sundays are now a source of joy, and rest and “Aw, do we have to go home?”.

I’ve gleaned more from scripture in the months of simple church than I have in years. I’m seeing the book of John as a whole rather than being split into little chunks by the necessities of sermon topics. Christ is coming alive through the word.

MrMike and MrsVal lived on a few acres just outside of town. He had a long-held dream to build a log home, and they had purchased a large property about an hour away. This year was the year that they were going to move out to the property and live in a small cabin while the house was built.

This was causing a little bit of panic on our part, but heck, only an hour away? We can do that. Church won’t really change. Then MrMike announced that they had found a great deal on a fantastic old house on a great piece of property that will allow them to move into a nicer, larger house now and perhaps rebuild an old log farmstead in the back. It was a better deal all around. But it was three and a half hours away.

God seems to have hit the pause button on our church.

We had been getting used to the one-hour-away move for a few months and we were dealing with it fine, but in the course of 4 days their house sold, the hour-away property sold, and they closed on the far-away deal.

So now what, God? You told us clearly that this was what we were supposed to be doing. This has been the most upbuilding time of my entire life. Now what?

Well, surprisingly enough if you know me at all, I didn’t stress. I wondered what would happen, but I was rather lackadaisically saying “We’ll wait. I’m not going to struggle and stress and try to figure out a plan when this whole thing is way beyond anything we would have planned anyway.”

And we wait. We’ve had church a few weeks now with other families, and a few weeks on our own. I’m not pleased with doing church alone, I know it’s not that healthy longterm.

But we wait. We have the utmost confidence in our God, and we smile and we pray and we wait.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

For those of you who know me in person, this may not come as a surprise.

I hate superficiality.

Seriously.

When people at church used to ask me how I was, I dutifully smiled and said fine, meanwhile screaming inside of my head that I’m not fine. Yet I knew, I must confess from experience, that if I told the truth I would alienate the dear person who inquired about the state of my life.

And so I hate superficiality and yet feel obligated not to burden those who are not prepared to share the weight of my craziness.

I feel that same way about this blog. I know several people out there read our blog. I know some of you in person. Some of you are complete strangers. And yet I struggle with what it means to be truthful or transparent here in this place. In all honesty, I don’t really want to be completely honest with you all. And yet to be less than honest is not an option. So my little bit of space here on the internet is silent.

I’ve been mulling exactly why it is that I feel such an inability to be truthful. Here are two guesses:

1. I am afraid you won’t read my blog anymore, and somehow that would amount to complete rejection, (even if I don’t know you read it) and though I tell myself that it doesn’t matter, it does.
2. I am afraid that something I might blunder on about will hurt your feelings and you will leave, which honestly would be even worse than the first reason.

And yet I feel some sort of responsibility to share things here, because I can’t help wondering if my own confessions won’t help someone else.

I have great life.
I have a wonderfully compassionate and graceful husband.
I have the best children in the whole entire world. (I realize I may be biased!)
I live in one of the wealthiest nations in the world that is considered in the top five for standard of living.
I own my home and nice clothes and a newer car and more books than I will admit to.
I believe with my whole heart that my Saviour has paid the price for my mistakes and is helping me step by step to learn to be like him, so I can join him in his Kingdom in the next life.

So why does everything in my life seems so difficult?
Why am I haunted by mistakes I have made and might make in the future?
Why am I constantly suffering under the weight of disillusionment and disappointment?
Why do other people not have this all-encompassing struggle with worry and self-recrimination?
Where is the line between sharing our burdens and just sinful complaining?

I have more questions than answers. In fact, I don’t have any answers at all. All I have is a blessed life that I don’t deserve and can’t understand. A bunch of problems I often feel overwhelmed and defeated by. And a Saviour who loves me more than I deserve or can possibly understand and who literally takes my breath and words away with his compassion and care.

Really what more is there to write. If you want to be party to my struggles, let me know. Otherwise, I think my blogging hiatus may continue for awhile.

I keep meaning to sit down and write something from our lives (lots going on at the moment) but when I plan to, something leaps out at me from the world. In this case, it’s a line from a technophile blog called BoingBoing Gadgets.

John Brownlee is a rather snarky contributor to BBGadgets, and he loves his tech toys. So, when a version of the video game Guitar Hero came out that’s aimed at Christians, he was sure to comment. What he has to say is very interesting.

I used to be a Christian. Born of atheist parents, I stumbled upon this on my own. But there was a day my faith disintegrated: it was when I realized that the exact same sensation of God’s love that I felt at Christian gatherings was absolutely indistinguishable from the adrenaline rush and sense of cultural belonging that I felt at a rock concert.

This has been a long-held belief of mine (I’ve alluded to it here before) but it’s interesting to see it outside of the usual Christian navel-gazing blogosphere.

So how do we as Christians deliberately distinguish musical worship from a rock concert? I don’t think you can just say “but it’s about God!” and hope that the congregation can tell the difference. At the time Brownlee honestly thought that the rush he got from the church worship band was “the sensation of God’s love”. No matter how many times you say “The whole service is worship.” and “You can worship anywhere!” they ring completely false because the deliberately crafted mood of “adrenaline rush and cultural belonging” that a leader creates, and the amount of focus and money and time and effort that are spent on the concert part of worship shows the truth lurking below the talk.

We struggled for years with “Well, we just need to educate people.”. But we never did beyond token efforts because really, music was popular. People liked it. New people came because of it. It got people in the seats so we were succeeding and growing as a church. And people could hear the Message.

Question: If we need to draw people to our message with music, what are we saying about our message? What does “We draw them in with the music and then they hear the Gospel.” really say about what we think about our message?

I’m starting to realize as I edit and chop this entry down to size that there are two issues mixed up and blended here: (1) problems with the “church growth” model, and (2) “music as worship”. I’ll leave this ramble with a question: Is it better to have smaller congregations full of people seeking the message, or buildings full of people seeking adrenaline rush and cultural belonging?

False dichotomy, I know. Attractive ministry can bear fruit. But scripturally, is it what the church is called to?

NOTE: I’m going to de-vowel some words in this post so we don’t end up on google searches for unsavoury topics, like we have in the past. Sorry if it makes reading more difficult.

There’s an interesting news story from a Detroit newspaper about a teacher who was apparently unjustly accused of m0le’sting two young boys.

There was no case at all against him, and the investigators didn’t do some very basic things (like question the adults that were in the room where it supposedly happened, etc). But that’s not really what this post is about.

This post is about this paragraph:

At one point, Assistant Prosecutor Andrea Dean tried to argue that movies found in Perry’s home, like “Star Wars,” the “Harry Potter” films and “Little House on the Prairie,” constituted “non-er0tic p0r’n0gra’phy.”

“N0n-er0t1c p0rn0gr’a'phy”. What the heck is that?

And exactly how would this bizarro concept apply to “Little House On The Prairie” ?

It just boggles the mind.

The prosecution actually tried to use ownership of a G-rated movie of one of the most popular books in North America of as evidence that a man is a child-m0lester.

One of my favorite books of all time is The Long Winter, joined on the list by Farmer Boy. We have audio books of both of those, and Little House movies too. We’re even waiting to start watching The Waltons together as a family.

We’re so bad.

Let’s not even get started on Star Wars and Harry Potter.

Well, okay, Harry Potter’s a bit iffy.

I’m popping out of my home school planning frenzy for a quick moment to share a joke
I read on my MOMYS list:

How does a home schooler change a light bulb?

First, mom checks three books on electricity out of the library, then the kids make models of light bulbs, read a biography of Thomas Edison and do a skit based on his life.

Next, everyone studies the history of lighting methods, wrapping up with dipping their own candles.

Next, everyone takes a trip to the store where they compare types of light bulbs as well as prices and figure out how much change they’ll get if they buy two bulbs for $1.99 and pay with a five-dollar bill.

On the way home, a discussion develops over the history of money and also Abraham Lincoln, as his picture is on the five-dollar bill.

Finally, after building a homemade ladder out of branches dragged from the woods, the light bulb is installed.

And there is light.

If you don’t understand it, don’t worry about it, I just need to vent.

Let’s get this out of the way first: I am *not* a programmer. I kick around in code, but the concepts of pointers and object orientation make my head spin. I want to get the basics of a language, get some libraries and code snippets and put them all together into a simple database app.

I wrote a gift list registry program for our family to use, and some other people have asked about using it. It’s not set up for multiple families, so I thought I’d try writing a new version. The first thing I thought was that I’d try something new like Ruby On Rails.

I got the latest version of Ruby and Rails and got started. Well, it turns out that 99% of the books, tutorials and sample code is written for version 1.x. I stupidly listened to the guys on the Ruby site when they said to download version 2.x. 2.x has been out for over a year and there is very little in the way of practical help. The geek-manuals (which are deliberately written so that only people who already know what they’re talking about can understand them) were useless to me (see paragraph 2). Version 2.x is incompatible with version 1.x, but only subtly so. I spent 90% of my time trying to figure out how to translate the basic “hello world” type examples from one version to the other, and trying to figure out what the error message on my screen means when (I am serious here) there are TWO google hits for this message, and both of them are to the source code for Rails. So, do I develop a site in a deprecated language and just wait for the mandatory rewrite?

Just like my multiple aborted Linux installs, I just gave up.

Fast forward six months. I want to get this program going so I decide I’ll stick with PHP. I have a passing knowledge of PHP. The original gift thing is written in PHP4, so I thought this would be the easy way to go. A bit more labour intensive perhaps, but stick with what I know.

Well. PHP5 is out, and of course you’d have to be a slobbering neanderthal to use PHP4 (at least that’s what the developers seem to imply). I try to upgrade my web host to PHP5. After all, it’s backward compatible, right?

It took 2 days to get the move from PHP4 to PHP5 to not break my existing website installs (sorry Lyndon).

That got sorted out, and now I had a shiny new piece of paper to scribble on. I started out by going to look for libraries to help me do some of the heavy lifting: user management and data presentation. I looked at bunches of user authentication scripts (sidenote: SourceForge really needs to clear out the “haven’t been developed in over 7 years” projects).

It took forever to get one to work on my shared-hosting server, because I don’t have access to the PHP directories, so I had to figure out how to manually install the package, getting all the pathing right, in a subdirectory of my site root and then get the environment to find it.

I started looking for a data presentation library, and PEAR::DataGrid seems to be an obvious choice. There are two ways to access a mysql database in PEAR, PEAR::DB or PEAR:MDB2. DB is deprecated. There are dire warnings everywhere about how it isn’t developed anymore and it has been superceded my MDB2. No one, however, has told the rest of the internet about this.

In a situation that exactly mirrors the Ruby on Rails upgrade fiasco, there are next to no practical tutorials on how to use MDB2. All of the sample code uses DB. All of the downloadable libraries and source code are for DB.

After another couple of days of whacking away at it, I actually managed to get MDB2 and PEAR::DataGrid to work together. I saw my data in a nice table. YAY!

Then I decided to try using PEAR::Pager to split it into pages.

In another wonderful example of communication, the developers are the only ones who seem to care that DB is deprecated. Try to find a good example on the net of using ONLY MDB2 to display an entire database table in PEAR::Structures_Datagrid using PEAR:Pager. (Don’t be a smartypants and post links. Yes, I know there are one or two, I found them, and they stink.)

I did get it to work. I actually got this whole silly table in a web page with 10 records per page, sortable headers and pagination links. YAY!

Then I tried to add in the authentication libraries.

Whoops. They use DB. All of them. So, I can mix and match a deprecated connection library with the “correct” one all through my app, or I can rebuild the whole app using just the deprecated connection library despite the doom and gloom warnings of the PHP developers, or I can just put a gun in my mouth and save myself the effort.

I honestly don’t think I have ever felt this completely helpless. This should be a total no-brainer application. 15 years ago I would have had it running in FoxPro in 3 hours. Now I feel like I’m fighting the tools the whole way and the tools are winning.

Bah.

A little bit of keyboard trivia has improved my life more than I care to admit.

Did you know that if you type something into the URL bar of your browser, you can hit CTRL-ENTER and it will add “.com” and go to the site?

It’s true!

Just type “cnn” into the URL bar, and hit CTRL-ENTER and you go straight to “http://cnn.com”.

If you use Firefox you can make it even easier by hitting CTRL-L to go to the URL bar, then type your word and hit CTRL-ENTER. You don’t even have to move your hand to click the mouse! This has saved me at least 50 calories a day worth of energy expenditure, I’m sure.

Places like Lifehacker (that’s CTRL-L, lifehacker, CTRL-ENTER) are always touting the benefits of keyboard shortcuts for commonly used things, but I really haven’t caught on much. For some weird reason, though, this one has made me very happy.

Yes, a keyboard shortcut gives me a little bit of glee every time I use it.

Hi. I’m MrPages. I’m a geek.

Anyone have any other little-known favorite keyboard shortcuts?