3.1 OUTREACH

Isaiah 56:3b-5

...neither let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree. For thus saith the LORD unto the eunuchs that keep my sabbaths, and choose the things that please me, and take hold of my covenant; Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.

Could this reference to eunuchs also fit for today's GLBT people? There are also bible verses that speak about people being put out of the synagogues for something, and God opposes it and doesn't want it that way.

As some of you know ( or may not know) I am in the process for the peace corps, and am almost done with the process, to where I will be given a real departure date along with country and program details. This has been a really long and tiring process, and I am not the most patient person. Today, in talking with my father about this, I realized that for a 30 year old man, I am a bit of a control freak. This whole process has been beyond my command. My reaction, as a typical male, is to attempt to control the situation, press my point, get the bureaucracy to listen to me, get respect, get my point across. OF COURSE they need to listen to what I have to say, I'm leaving in January, how dare the world delay my master plan!

(Cue Sarcasm)

This may be typical, but it's certainly not faithful.. if anything it's faithLESS. One of the things I remember from my mission in Kenya is using what's known as the "4 Spiritual Laws" flipbook. This book has text and pictures to explain the need for a relationship with Christ. One section asks the reader to look at 2 pictures, one of a man on a throne and a man with a crown kneeling, the other shows the man with the crown ( God) on the throne and man kneeling. The person doing evangelism asks which one the person being evangelized relates to. Often they pick themselves on the throne. Perhaps I am that person.. the one who believes they can jump onto the thrown instead of letting God run things. This is a problem, and I realize I need to stop this before I become practically agnostic in practice.

Thinking of this, I came to the conclusion that my prayer should be that God would allow me to lose all control, to give it up,to let my careful planning fall ( perhaps even apart) at his feet, to trust that whatever happens with Peace Corps, it will be because it's the right thing, for the right reasons, at the right time.

Lord, Teach me to lose control!!

I posted notes from my sermon on Matthew 22:34-40 in my personal LJ here. You're welcome to read and comment.

Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
5. If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
6. Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)

New FCK fixes rich text editor!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.

Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

Url: http://www.mi2n.com/services/mi2n_press.php3

With a dozen years at the forefront of music PR, Mi2N announced the launch of MI2N-PRESS. MI2N-PRESS provides a complete PR solution for independent artists, labels and music companies, including professional press release writing and the option to combine the service with selected Mi2N Music PR marketing packages.

Everyone knows that the music industry isn't just about music; it's about business as well. Now, more than ever, artists must be able to successfully express their unique brand and convey news about upcoming performances or the release of a new track or CD to their target audiences. As the leading music news source and major online artist marketer, Mi2N has over a decade's experience working with people on both sides of the PR sector and knows what it takes to get results.

"Online PR has proven to be one of the most effective and affordable ways for independent artists and labels to reach out to new fans and industry professionals," commented Eric de Fontenay, Mi2N's Founder and Editor.

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

There's been a bit of light at the end of the tunnel concerning the Christian right to use the word 'Allah' in their literature and services in Malaysia as a translation for the Greek word 'theos'.

The judicial review, which will be a landmark case, for whether the Catholic Herald ought to be banned for using the word 'Allah' has recently dropped eight intervening parties in the case. These eight intervening parties include seven Islamic councils.

It is rare for the courts to make a decision against the Islamic mainstream. This is a small light at the end of the tunnel.

Please keep us in prayer. Thank you.

Hello, recently I've been thinking about the basics about what we believe. How there isn't much to get upset about unless someone clearly falls outside the foundation of the Christian beliefs which seem to involve Jesus and salvation. The beginning and the end seem to paint a more vivid picture of what that means for us today, whether you take the creation story and the book of Revelations completely literally or not. The foundation of what we believe remains tested and true.

I have trouble creating solid opinions on many parts of scripture such as the beginning and the end, because I've heard so many good ideas as to what truth is and then another very good idea that contradicts it. I love the people who make both arguments, and one person's foundation in Christ seems to be just as solid as the other. So I have been trying to figure out what is truly important in life, and loving God and others is the simplest understanding to solve every speculation. Loving in action God and others and respecting oneself.

I'm wondering now what difference all these other opinions make in each one of us, other than revealing our individuality. Are there basic beliefs about creation or end times that flesh themselves out in everyday life? I think the easiest look might be the lifestyle differences between those such as Calvinist, Armenianist, and Open Theist. How these different view points reflect how we live our everyday lives. Whether the views reflect the heart of a Christian homosexual or the Christian man against such behavior.

If statistics can be turned into stereotypes, could there be a clear difference in the lifestyles of many, based purely on opinions about the grayest areas of theology? Afterwards can we work backwards based upon how people act, to what they believe, and figure out the truth? Mostly working on the principle that the fruit will determine the livlihood of the tree. Can we figure out certain gray areas in Biblical truth based on the way people live? Or is the viewpoint on how people live as gray as the most fought over scriptures?

We might then just be left with loving God and loving others and yourself. There are some truths that fall under love, faith, and hope, which can't be shaken, and are shown by God's word fleshed out in the way we live our lives, and these might be judged alone in ourselves first, before anyone else who calls themself Christian.

Have any of you ever experienced any paranormal activity?

Whether it be demons, angels, or spirits of past loved ones?

Yesterday a few friends and I got on the subject of speaking in tongues. This is something that I don't know much about, and in the past has generally been something that makes me uncomfortable when people do it in church (I've been told now that it is something you're supposed to do in your quiet time only, not in public because it can confuse others). While some things about it were put much more in the right perspective, I still have a lot of questions about it.

Is speaking in tongues something that anyone has the ability to do, or only if you happen to have that spiritual gift (speaking and hearing)?  When a person does speak in tongues, do they know what they are saying and able to control the words coming from them or does it just kind of rush out? Have you ever had any experience with it personally?
 

Here is 3 lyric icons of the Christian Rock band, Storyside: B.

  

Dear Jesus,

You are the key to my happiness. You are the key to my life. You are the key to my future. I have heard You knocking and I'm opening the door. Please come into my heart and guide my every thought and move. Bless me and make me a blessing to others. In Your precious name, I pray.

Amen.

Dear God,

Your Word says "those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint" (Isaiah 40:31). Please renew my strength; help me to run this race of life and live for you without becoming weary; help me to stand for what's right, to walk forward and not faint. Thank You for Your promises. Thank You for lifting me up and sustaining me. In Jesus' name. Amen.

Humans' limited ability to empathize is for our own good

It would be superhuman, in the grandest sense, to truly and deeply suffer with those who are burying a beloved son in an Ohio graveyard, with those who saw their home and entire community washed away by a typhoon, with those in the world who are being tortured right now. It would require an unfathomable omniscience and immunity to time.

The essay doesn't mention this at all, and I'm not sure if it's intended or not, but when I got to this point in the article, I couldn't help but think about Jesus, and that God has exactly that perspective on us and our experiences. It's a little odd to think about it this way, because everyone seems to think that we should always be more caring about everything, but it is a blessing that we aren't, that we would be paralyzed with sadness and overwhelmed with the enormity of the problems and unable to do anything about it, whereas with some detachment from the emotional connections we are actually able to do work that will help. Balance is key, as always.

When you picture yourself with God, what do you see? Do you picture the two of you playing catch in the park, or swimming in the ocean?

We were asked this question in church today, and for the first time in my life I was able to answer something other than "I have no idea."

( First time for everything :) )

For those of you who don't mind sharing, I'm curious as to what you all see as well when you picture God. Is it something you've ever thought about before, or have ever been able to come up with an answer?

Would you please pray for a little baby boy named Jared? He's very sick, apparently he cannot eat right now and he's just not doing well at ALL and is in the hospital.

Thank you.

In response to the Holy Father's recent call to use the internet as a means of positive communication of the Church's mission, I've decided to start offering an occasional, perhaps weekly podcast. I just uploaded my second one, which discusses the relationship between vocation and prayer. If anyone is interested, it can be found here.

Warclub Radio - episode 21 is now available and streaming!!

FEATURING:

THE WAY SECT BLOOM
BROKEN FLESH
BECOMING THE ARCHETYPE
KINGS X
DEMON HUNTER
FOCUSED
CHATTERBOX
WITH BLOOD COMES CLEANSING
WAR OF AGES
AP2
MEWITHOUTYOU
SELFMINDEAD
NINETY POUND WUSS
SCHALIACH
SAVIOUR MACHINE

Now available for your listening audio pleasure:

http://www.veilofdisdain.com/radio.html

OR...

CLICK HERE TO STREAM IT DIRECTLY!!

This past Thursday, Fr. Ted Tack, the former Prior General of the Order of St. Augustine, gave a talk at Villanova University on the spirituality of St. Augustine and his relevance today. I attended the talk and it was quite excellent. I recorded it and have made it available online. If anyone is interested in listening, you can find it here. From that link you may either listen to it online or download it to your computer. Enjoy!

I've stumbled across some interesting snippets talking about Intentional Community in an Anglican Emergent context.I find this very exciting, having done intentional community before and having a keen interest in how relational Christian practice is formed. Some links might be interesting, including this Anglican "order" from New Zealand:

http://www.oss.net.nz/about.html

The Anglican Intentional community movement has been bigger in the UK then it has been here int he US, but it's growing rapidly with some rather amazing results. I think for any Christian, while community means different things, it has the potential to bring about a real transformation. My community wasn't amazingly intentional, and we certainly had our ups and downs, but we still had a cohesiveness and a prayer-life that produced some amazing growth, healing, and change not just in me, but in the others in the house. We weren't an "Anglican" community, but rather an Episcopal Intern Community with members of various denominations, who followed spiritual disciplines and a rule of life that was based on an Anglican framework.

Vineyard, the church movement I identify myself with and have been a part of, is very relational in terms of small cell groups, but does not have the capacity for intentional community. My goal now, rather then focusing on being in a physical community sharing a physical space, is to be more intentional about my relationships with those I worship with, and to hone my own rule of life in a way that allows me to harness some of the basic elements that were so life-giving when I lived in community.

Here's an interesting Welsh community and a link to the better known Iona community:

http://www.colegygroes.co.uk/community.htm

http://www.iona.org.uk/

If any folks here from the UK know of any to add to this list, please do! Some day I would love to travel around the UK and perhaps visit one of these communities. I don't think I'm the only person here to see a need for intentional communities.