On October 8, I was invited to preach at McKendree Village where I did my field education last year. It was a blessing to be back with so many friends and to see the healing God had brought to many of the people I had visited in the rehabilitation center.
Since I’m taking A.J. Levine’s course on Mark this semester, I decided to preach on the miracles of the feeding of the 5000 and Jesus walking on water in Mark 6:30-52. My focus was on how God has revealed himself to us and how we often miss the Mark. Though we miss the mark, however, there is still hope. As Jesus was patient with the disciples, he will be patient with us. If we, like the crowd, go to the places Jesus will be — among the poor, the sick, the prisoner, the widow, etc. — he will meet us there. If we open our hearts to him, Jesus will be our shepherd.
Read more...Recently I came across the need to automatically update my status in Slack. I have class Monday and Tuesday afternoons/evenings which requires me to leave work a little early. As I’m often rushed, I don’t always remember to set my status. This has, at times, left my team waiting on a response to a message I won’t see for a few hours.
Luckily, using Slack’s legacy tokens and following the guidance of Made by Munsters I was able to use IFTTT to quickly automate the updating of my Slack status.
Read more...For a very long time I’ve hosted this site at Nearly Free Speech. I’ve been happy at Nearly Free Speech, but with the launch of LectServe and other IoT and Serverless projects of mine on the AWS stack, it made logistical and financial sense to consolidate on Amazon.
Moving my Hugo site to Amazon was a fairly simple affair. First I setup a simple S3 bucket to drop my Hugo generated files to. Nothing special there at all. Next, I setup a CloudFront distribution to handle TLS and serve the files on S3. With a simple change in my domain’s DNS record everything worked perfectly. Perfectly except that all my URLs had to end in index.html to work…
This quality, solid wood chest of drawers has been lightly used since 2009. It was bought new at Sprintz Furniture in Nashville, TN and has been used by a single owner.
The chest is 48" high, 60" wide, and has a depth of 20".
There are a few marks of paint/scuffs from the most recent move — see images below —, but otherwise the chest of drawers is in perfect condition.
Read more...Looking at social media over the last several days has been very disturbing to me. Though Puerto Rico lays in ruins, the Caribbean aches in destruction, Mexico City mourns, and our brothers and sisters in Christ in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa face true persecution for the faith, the so-called Christians of the States are hot about folk kneeling during the State worship hymn.
Though there is much to comment on the militeristic symbolism of American football, the troubling words of the State hymn, and Americans’ reverance towards the flag, I’m not going there. Though I choose not to salute a piece of cloth or pledge alligience to the government or people it represents, I understand why many do and I respect their agency.
Read more...Humanity’s adoption by God as his children is a theme throughout Hebrew and Christian scripture. By his own free will God has chosen Israel and the Church established on her foundation to be his children. God’s adoption of humankind gives theological richness to what it means for people to be in relationship to God, to live a life of holiness, and to be free.
Throughout Scripture, God is time and time again referenced as Israel and Christians’ father and parent. In Isaiah the prophet praises God on behalf of the remnant of Israel declaring “thou, O LORD, art our Father” (Isa 63:16, ʀꜱᴠ). In Jeremiah 31:9 God says that he is “a father to Israel” (ʀꜱᴠ). In Galatians 4:6 Paul teaches that believers are God’s children — sons — and that we should call God “father.” Jesus, too, teaches this when he demonstrates to his followers how to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven, ” “Father, hallowed be thy name” (Matt 6:9-13, Luke 11:2-4).
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