This morning my wife and I were abruptly woken by someone pounding on our door…at 5:30 a.m. I shuffled out of bed, grabbed my glasses and went downstairs to see who it was at our door. I spoke through the door, which was double locked for those concerned, and asked who they were and what they wanted. It was a guy I’ve never seen before and he wanted to come inside and sleep. He looked like he might be high or possibly homeless – or I suppose both. I told him no, then he offered to pay me $5 and again I turned him down. Then he asked for socks, so I grabbed a pair of socks and through them out a window for him – I wasn’t about to open the door for him. Then I asked him to leave and he did.

He probably wasn’t violent or dangerous, but I was cautious nonetheless. I always feel conflicted about these types of situations. Christ tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves and that he is the “least of these”. Where do you draw the line between being faithful and cautious. It’s not like homeless and/or poor people suddenly became dangerous in the past century. I’m sure there were some who were dangerous in Christ’s day. I’m pretty sure we did the right thing and we’ve subsequently prayed for the guy, but is that all just rationalization to make ourselves feel better about turning him away?

I could go on and on about this, but I think the point is out there. How and where do you draw the line between compassion and caution?

I spent a good deal of this morning trying to figure out a way to randomize or shuffle our Netflix queue.  I found a bookmarklet that worked OK, but Netflix was always flagging an error that duplicate numbers were being entered.  Seeing as I don’t like errors, I took it upon myself to make a better bookmarklet that doesn’t repeat numbers.  So without further ado I present to you the Better Netflix Queue Shuffler. Simply drag that link to your bookmarks bar. The next time you’re looking at your Netflix queue, click the bookmarklet and watch your queue get shuffled.

Caveats

• - You have to put the cursor in one item and then hit the ‘Update DVD Queue’ button for the shuffle to be finalized.
• - After shuffling, make sure that any TV shows or movies that are in a series are in the order you’d like them to be.

UPDATE [4/18/10 12:57 pm PST]: Updated the shuffler so it automatically updates your queue after the shuffle.

I went to college when Promise Keepers (PK) was huge.  During my sophomore year of college PK had a huge rally on the National Mall in  Washington D.C. on a Saturday in October.  On that particular Saturday I was scheduled to play pep-band for the homecoming soccer game. I begged the director of the band, who was also an active participant in PK, to let me go.  He eventually let me go, but he wasn’t happy about it.  The reason it was so important for me to go was because it was hyped up as an event that would make history.

In the end it was a big event, but not necessarily historical – in the sense that it would be written about in history books. There have been several events like this one where I felt the need to be part of them because they would ‘make history’. Thankfully, I’m older and wiser now and the lure of making history doesn’t motivate my participation in events any longer.

As I have been listening to the back and forth banter regarding the healthcare legislation that is trying to move through Congress, I can’t help but be reminded of my former motivation.  If you listen to Ms. Pelosi speak on the topic, nearly every time she’ll mention that they’re going to make history with this bill – in fact nearly everybody that favors the bill will mention it. While it’s true that this bill will make history, not passing the bill would also be a historical event. In fact they could do they hokey-pokey and it would be historical.

The problem with this motivation is that it causes people to skirt their responsibility in favor of delusions of grander.  Just like I skipped out on my responsibilities in pep-band to be part of something that ended up being big deal for the 2 days following. The Congress by pushing, what pretty much everybody accepts as, a bad bill in order to make history is also skipping out on their responsibilities.  Responsible healthcare reform is a great idea, but the way they’re going after it in order to make history has dropped the responsible from the equation.

If they were going after healthcare reform to actually make things better rather than as a way of showing they’ve made history, then they’d be willing to slow down and focus on what is being done.  Back room deals and strange procedural hacks are not the sign of someone trying to be responsible, they’re the sign of someone desperate to make something happen no matter the consequences.  They need to drop the goal of making history and focus on making changes that everybody accepts will help.

Earlier this week Glenn Beck made waves by urging Christians to leave any church that supports social justice.  Promptly after he made these statements, prominent Christians all over the country reacted negatively and started to urge their followers to boycott Beck.  While I understand the reaction, I’m wondering if it was the correct one.  After all, this wouldn’t be the first time Christians made a knee jerk reaction and made the wrong move. Read the rest of this entry »

As someone who works in the field of information technology I am fascinated by the concept of Open Source Software (OSS) development.  OSS is primarily the principle that by allowing anybody the chance to work on your source code you’ll end up with better code. Another name for it is community based development. Sure there is the possibility that someone sabotages your project, but most people that care about the project will treat it with respect and actually help to make it better. The thing that makes OSS work isn’t that it’s (largely) free software, it’s that communities develop around specific projects and these communities work together to make the project better.

Recently I’ve been thinking about the development of the church in terms of open source.  Initially the two seem to be polar opposites, church and software development, but the more I’ve thought about it the more it makes sense. Read the rest of this entry »

Coming into our first home study day we had very little idea what to expect.  We knew that there would be lots of personal questions, but that’s about the extent of it.  Well it turned out that we were right about the personal questions, though we were unaware of just how personal the questions would be, there were also lots of questions about what type of child we would want and a house walk through.  With all that said here’s how it went down. Read the rest of this entry »

No doubt you’ve heard about the kerfuffle surrounding Miss California in the Miss USA pageant on April 18.  If you haven’t then you are truly a blessed person and I’m going to introduce you to it – and thus remove your blessing I guess. Basically in the Q&A section she was asked whether she thought states should allow homosexual marriage.  She answered honestly and happened to say that she did not believe in homosexual marriage. She ended up as the runner-up – many people say she would have won has she answered the question oppositely. I really don’t care about her answer, which I thought was oddly phrased and not well thought out, but hey she was nervous and probably expecting a question about world peace or something. My problem is with the questioner, a well known tabloid personality, who happens to be very pro-homosexual marriage.  He asked the question thinking that he would get a particular answer based upon his bias and he didn’t get that answer.  Ever since he has ravaged this young lady at every opportunity, because she did not answer the way he would have liked. Read the rest of this entry »

Who does not like a parade?  If you had asked me a couple days ago I’d say a lot of people.  In fact I was of the opinion that parades had gone out of style.  They just don’t seem like something that people are really into anymore.  I mean we have Twitter and text messages, movies and TV and a thousand other things that seem much more interesting that waiting on the side of the road to see endless numbers of floats, marching bands and who-knows-why dignitaries from who-knows-where.  Mark me as surprised on Saturday when I went to photograph the local Daffodil Festival parades and there were hundreds, if not thousands, of people along the parade routes to watch them.  I’m sure that, as an outsider, I don’t fully appreciate how big of a deal the Daffodil Festival is in this area.  Still, there were a lot of people out there at 10 a.m. on a Saturday to watch a parade.  The second parade was even more well attended – I had trouble finding a place to stand where I could take decent photos of the event. I don’t know why so many people like parades – they’re not my cup of tea and maybe that’s the point.  My own bias against parades prevents me from truly understanding why people enjoy them so very much. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a long time since anything has been written about the adoption, so in this post I’ll try to update you with everything that has happened since I last wrote about it.

The PRIDE weekend was good.  I went in feeling a little nervous about what kind of people would be in the group.  Fortunately my worries were unwarrented. The people in our class were some of the nicest people – all of whom cared greatly for children and really wanted to be parents.  We covered a lot of stuff over the course of the weekend. I could barely start to tell you everything that was covered, all I can tell you is that there was a lot of scarey stuff that, oddly enough, made me want to adopt a child out of the foster system even more.  I can’t believe some of the stuff these kids come out of — and worse yet that the parents actually think it’s acceptable or worse yet the parents have no idea what’s happening because they’re too drunk or high or delusional to even realize.  The part of me that feels compelled to rescue people is so strongly activated that I actually ache for the kinds in the foster system. Anyway… the weekend was good and left Jen and me much more dedicated to adopting. Read the rest of this entry »

There are those who would like to say that Christianity is easy.  Receive Jesus into your heart and you will be saved!  That’s it all that is required to be a Christian.  There is very little indication that life change is required, that there is supposed to be a peculiar aspect to the followers of Christ.  Risk is not even considered when discussing the implications of faith.  How did this happen?  Suddenly, or not so suddenly, we’ve melted Christianity down to a short prayer and weekly church attendance – wait scratch that – monthly church attendance.  I know that many in the evangelical wing of the church would (and will) disagree with me, but I think that’s wrong.  How can Christianity be simply simple?
Read the rest of this entry »