The topic of sin is an interesting thing. On one hand I think your common person on the street would quickly answer that they know exactly what sin is. It’s something you’ve done that’s bad or maybe something that you’ve done that hurts another person. But, I think if you press most people to start defining what bad is and even when something crosses from good, to neutral, to bad; you’ll start to see how complex the topic of sin actually is.
Read more...Yesterday morning when I came out of my office, Rosemary asked me a very important question. Knowing that I was working on my sermon, she asked me, “Daddy, how do you write a sermon?”
It’s an important question, because I think a lot of people have a certain idea about sermon preparation that’s actually a good bit different from what happens. (At least for me.)
I’ll pull the curtain back a bit and fill you in on my process. First, I pray. Then I read the lectionary readings for the week. Then, I pray again. Then I stare out the window. I wait for the Holy Spirit to give me a faint starting idea. Then, I write and listen. So often, the place I’m taken by the end of the sermon is very different from what I’d have expected. So often, there’s something in the reading I hadn’t noticed before. More often than not, conversations and readings from the last several weeks come into focus and I realize that God was preparing my sermon for me weeks in advance.
Read more...Recently I’ve been working with secure data sharing in Snowflake.
We’ve not yet shared our data using a normal private share to another Snowflake account, but I’ve tested everything. Using SIMULATED_DATA_SHARING_CONSUMER and setting the consumer id to my expected account, I was getting data back from the share and everything was working fine.
Today, however, we got a request to share our data to a managed reader account. I created the account, logged in, copied the share into a database, and could see all of my secure views. But, when I went to query the view, some of the views that were previously working, suddenly were not. All I got back was an ominous “Error in secure object.”
Read more...While 2024 was a year of great things in ministry1 and my personal health2, it was also a year of a lot of stress and change in all areas of my life.
Because of this — and, naturally, my deep sinful nature — many of my good morning habits fell to the way side. Though I had banished social media from my phone, set it to B&W, disabled recommended videos & shorts on YouTube, and quite a few other things, by the end of 2024 my mornings were rubish.
Read more...As is pretty apparent, I’ve been thinking a lot about digitmal minimalism here lately.1 This morning on my walk, I pondered a little what my perfect device setup would be, and I think I’ve got it. Here’s what I want.
The more I think on it, this would totally solve my many problems.2
Read more...Over the last two years, I’ve completely rethought my use of technology and done a lot of work to simplify my life and avoid distractions and unnecessary stress. A major component of this change has been rethinking how my iPhone is configured.
As it stands today, I’ve deleted all social media apps1, disabled all notifications, switched the phone permanently to silent, disabled the web browser, removed badges from app icons, and uninstalled Slack. Further, until 8a each day, my phone is set to black & white. As configured right now, I’ve pared my phone down to be an engine for sending texts, referencing e-mails, checking the family calendar, reading RSS articles, and taking photos.
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