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You can help yourself, but don’t take too much

28-Mar-06

Rouslan, I’d agree with you on that assessment that the Christian God is a parent. If you read the New Testament, God is referred to as a “Heavenly Father.” It’s no longer just being a follower, as in the Old Testament, but about sonship: (”Beloved, now are we the sons of God”, I John 3:2). The goal is to foster a father-child relationship with God. We are first encouraged to be followers of Paul (”be ye followers of me”, I Corinthians 4:16), then of Christ (”be ye followers of me, as I also am of Christ”, I Corinthians 11:1), and ultimately of God directly (”Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children”, Ephesians 5:1).

However, I don’t think that’s the sole reason for the happiness of a Christian person. There certainly is comfort in the idea that a God is always watching and taking care of you, but at the same time I know plenty of people that would rather they were independent of a parent who is constantly looking over your shoulder. At the same time, the Bible encourages maturity (”that we may present every man perfect [in the Greek, mature] in Christ Jesus”, Colossians 1:28; “that ye may be made perfect [mature] and entire, wanting nothing”, James 1:4) rather than blind followership.

I’d point to a few other things that would contribute to a Christian’s happiness: grace (”Being justified freely by his grace”, Romans 3:24), peace (”Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God”, Romans 5:1), love (”Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us”, I John 3:1), freedom from guilt (”There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus”, Romans 8:1), among others. You could certainly argue that some of these stem from God as a Father, but they certainly aren’t limited to that context.

It’s definitely an interesting point you bring up though: if the Christian God weren’t a father/parent figure, would this change the foundational happiness of a Christian? I’d have to think about that one.

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It’s a nice day to start again…

24-Mar-06

Damn! Let me be the first to say (read: blog) congratulations, Kyle and Stacy!

On a similar note, I hereby threaten bodily harm (read: I’ll IM you alot) to anybody who doesn’t come to the COSI Reunion Extravaganza. I’m specifically hinting towards the illustrious clarkbw and the distinguished Mr. Steve, who have gone mostly sight unseen these past few months. Considering I could probably throw stones at Bryan’s office, and I interviewed in Steve’s department, a caravan of vehicles (a carpool, if you will) of sorts could be arranged to said reunion.

I’ve recently been working on the magic of Eclipse Perspectives. Interesting way to lay out a UI. Though it can be painful. Because it’s Eclipse.

I also recently installed Fedora Core 5 on my lappy. As shiny as the Ubuntu install was that I had, I missed being able to upgrade packages outside of their bugfix releases. The install crapped out the first time through (python errors!) but went fine the second time around. What impressed me the most was the fact that suspend worked right out of the box, as well as an install of Beagle. Major kudos to the guys who worked that out. I need to “dirtify” my install by putting an MP3 codec and DVD playing stuff on there… anybody have links to good info on where to find repositories for that kinda stuff? For that stuff, and Banshee.

Life otherwise is good… busy juggling work, ministry work, and my giant timesink. Though it’s all good times. For those of you that didn’t notice, my sisters visited here recently — so I have some semi-decent pictures up of it. Hopefully I’ll get around to updating captions for them soon.

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johnsobm > You

06-Feb-06

From #cosi (censored for those feint of heart):

[16:47] * Quits: ziggy (F*CK EVERYBODY. I QUIT.)
[16:50] * Quits: johnsobm (Success)

Hide your wallets!  johnsobm is coming!

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See, here I’m now by myself, uh, er, talking to myself. That’s, that’s chaos theory.

06-Feb-06

If any of you have ever read Dinosaur Comics before, you know it’s pretty random. Well, it gets more random with their magic RANDOMIZER! You can basically create your own comics based off of three panels from other comics. It can be surprisingly deep, whilest very funny at the same time.

A few others that I thought were deserving:

Regret
Utopia
Advice
Cars

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I hate waiting.

02-Feb-06

The gallery is fixed! Yey. I just upgraded Apache and PHP on Spence’s box since he didn’t have time to do it. Apparently they needed reverse proxy support that they didn’t have for some “secret project” that he won’t tell me about that involves Sykpe or something.

At any rate, I finally have internet in my apartment. After waiting a month. After 2 visits from Verizon and 5 from Comcast. I could have had Verizon FIOS (fiber) really cheaply but they didn’t believe that I was able to get it in my apartment (even though my landlord’s office, which is in the building right in front of mine, can get it). They made a request to the “engineering department” (i.e. those who control The Database of Homes and Apartment that Does Not Lie About What Services are Available to You) to update my record and they came back saying it would take another 3 weeks (I’d been talking to them on the phone for 2 weeks already) for them to do it. And even then, they couldn’t guarantee that I’d be able to get fiber. Bah.

So I call Comcast. Not a very different experience, really. They got really hung up on the fact that my building was new and had never had cable service before. They sent out 3 service guys before it got through their head. Each time they came, they went “oh, you don’t have a line running to this building.” And every time I would reply “I know, I told you guys this over the phone. Every time I call I tell you this.” Finally I got in touch with the local contractor who would actually be doing the work and they got it straightened out, and they said they would be coming to run the line and install my cable. The lied. They had trouble fitting a cable line down a 4 inch PVC pipe and they blamed the 1 inch Verizon line in it. Go figure. Comcast sent out yet another contractor on yet another day to install the line and I finally got service two days shy of a month after first calling them.

Now I just need to get some more furnature (and rugs!) for my apartment, which incidentally breeds, raises, and pastures dust bunnies.

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