Mike's Spot On The Wall

• I got a call on Monday from my aunt. I haven't heard from her in 30 years.
  She said there was some property that was being held in trust for us from my Grandfather's Will.
  
  You would think I would be happy about this but... I think I would have been happier if she just called because she wanted to restore ties to us.
  I want her not her property. The whole Will thing just adds a layer of tension and distrust to what should be a joyfull reuinion

Mike's Walk

• The morning prayer group met this morning and prayed. I felt very blessed and touched
  
  I sometimes wonder at the wisdom that wants to use broken imperfect vessals like me to do His will. I wonder "Wouldn't it have been better if you hung around after the resurection?"
  And yet He says "It is better that I go, that the comforter will come"
  
  It is the very mystery of the gospel that somehow Jesus not only substitutes for us on the cross and in the grave but that we are His substitutes here on earth, filled with His spirit and responding with love.

Most of the time I feel like I’m out of sync with the rest of the world. But today I felt like I belonged.

Slashdot of all places had the news of new movie adaptation of The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe that is at the screenplay level. Here’s hoping they don’t gut the analogy to try and please the folks who don’t like religious content. Personal petpeve of mine is how the publishers rearranged the order of the series. Imagine my surprise to find a +5 post about the same thing. I thought it was just me.

In the same story was news of a new movie about Douglass Adams. I just finished the Salmon of Doubt and will post a review soon. Of course it was Adams who said I love dead lines, I love the whoosing sound they make as they go past.

If you hunt through the IdeaJoy archives you’ll see that I’ve posted about Eguene Perterson and U2’s Bono, but who knew there was a connection? bloggedy blog knew.

-Peace

Changes, nothing but changes ...

ok I'm sure you've noticed some changes

new colors (colors from my room when I was a kid, I always liked green)

larger font, to make reading on those hi rez monitors possible

when saints blog - firgured I should show that we are part of a larger community, this list will grow, change

added Bible Gateway to the recommended list

let me know what you think in the comments

-Peace

Mike's Spot On The Wall

• I just read "Call To Arms" and "The False Mirror" by Alan Dean Foster
  
  Foster illustrates man's hypocisy that while we claim to want peace and culture we realy are a bloodthirsty violent species.
  
  Its interesting to see the dichotomy of the desire of man's spirit for enlightenment and peace against the flesh's desire for war and violence in these books.

Mike's Walk

• Feeling a bit depressed today
  
  One of the main reason's I came to Christ was my loneliness. The idea that Jesus would come and live within me was like offering water to someone who had just spent a month in the desert.
  
  Lately I've been feeling lonely a lot. I know we are to walk by faith not by sight, but I still want to wave a big flag around and shout "hey God, over here".
  
  Seems I'm not alone in being alone. David felt the same way: Psalms 13:1, Psalms 27:9, Psalms 69:17, Psalms 102:2, Psalms 143:7


• I've also been praying that God would help me witness to my co-workers, but I just can't seem to find the words.

Mike's Spot On The Wall:

• I just finished reading "The Singer" by Calvin Miller
  
  This is a neat little poetical allegory of the gospel.

Mike's Walk:

• Jesus is still working on me, at least I'm sure of that.

We're now IdeaJoy :)

-Peace

Welcome Steve

More musicians, yeah! hoot hoot!

Mike's Spot On The Wall:

• My cousin is getting married this weekend. I'm very happy for her. Carol and I are volunteering to do the photography.

Mike's Walk:

• Romans 7:19 For what I do is not the good thing that I desire to do; but the evil thing that I desire not to do, is what I constantly do.
  
  sigh, My spiritual sobriety didn't last very long. The hardest thing to do after you fall and you realize that nothing will undo a mistake is to get back up again.
  The blood covers me so that I don't reap what I deserve but there are ripples of consequence that may never heal.


• On the good side after looking at Dave's link to the True North cartoon page I decided I would look for one that I enjoyed a long time ago
  
  And Thophilus was still there and it spoke to me about my issues.
  
  These are the ones that helped: Sketch's Secret Sin and Turning Point gave me hope.

We scored a 2 on the Leader Board. That's more than I would have expected, unfortunatley I don't know where the links came from. So if you link to us let us know, just for fun eh?

-Peace

Hey I'm glad to announce that Steve Jolliffe has agreeed to join the Ideola/IdeaJoy team. Steve is a fellow Calgarian, a husband, new father, athlete and musician. As a worship leader when the Song says "Shout to the Lord", Steve expects you to SHOUT! Welcome Steve ...

-Peace

Blog Notes

OK some quick notes.

added a comment system from enetation Not because of the hords of people not emailing me about my posts, but so that the Three of us (soon to be four I hope) can post questions to one another. Anyone else is free to join in the comments as well. I still need to sync up the two templates. Steve pushed me over the edge on the comment system when we talked last night. He also promised a blog on Abba. Really!

Mike is Back :)

Check out the powered by Tim's logo on Kevin Frank's site. Should we add it to the list at the bottom, let me know in the comments.

Next week I will rename ideola to IdeaJoy. ideola isn't exactly unique on the web were as IdeaJoy is. I'll make the change on Sunday. The new url will be ideajoy.blogspot.com. Ideola was of course the name of Mark Heard's short lived one man band. He did the album Tribal Opera under that name. I've been a Mark Heard fan ever since I got my hands on Tribal Opera back in 1987.

More change to come ...

-Peace

This picture is from a 4-D ultrasound, Wired News has the story. What struck me was how much humanity the picture reveals. We face a constant bombardment of dehumanizing messages about the preborn. An example was last night on The National there was a sound bite from Joanna Manning asking people who are considering returning to the Catholic Church, "What happens when you daughter needs an abortion?" Joanna Manning defines the issue, in that one line, in terms of only one person. If technology like 4-D ultrasound can help animate that there is more than one person involved, that's a good thing.

-Peace

Mike is back :)

Mike's Spot On The Wall:

• A Good Book:
  
  There are some gems in my book collection. These are special books that although I found them in secular bookstores the content is marvelously christian.
  
  I have often felt that all the creativity left our faith when C.S. Lewis died. I mean how many sci-fi fantasy books have been written by christians since? Well Stephen R. Lawhead has restored my faith with his Pendragon series. I read the first one and was amazed, and the second, Merlin, is even better. A first person account of Merlin's life and times, and Merlin is VERY christian.
  This is great stuff and I highly recomend it.

Mike's Walk:

• I had a great holiday
  
  I went to Lethbridge, the Alberta Birds of Prey Centre, The Remington Carriage Museum, The Frank Slide Interpretive Centre, and others (I will be making a web site with pics soon, so everyone can share)


• Those who know me know I struggle with some pretty big sins (not that all sins aren't big)
  But while I've been on holiday I've had the joy of spiritual sobriety. Healing, as I now understand it, is usually a process and I'm nowhere near the end of the journey I can at least say I've seen the beginning of the end.

The Peach of Christ

I realy don't like trusting the Lord. This was my conclusion as I headed to Church on my bike on Sunday morning. My heart was heavy, the news as of late hasn't been good. 6000 people to be laid off at Telsus , people I know from CJUG out of work, I've just come home from a tough assignment in Toronto, thinking I was getting a long term assignment, to find out the big project had been canned, but I could help on a short term project to mid August. So I was thinking, planing to blog, about how I don't like trusting the Lord. I know that security is an illusion, and that we only have security in him, but right then I didn't feel loved, or cared about, I just felt anxious.

The sermon at Church was on Prayer, the story was from Acts chapter 12, about how the Church prayed when Peter was in prison and how he was released. My mood was so black that I couldn't help noting that story begins with the wonderful news

About that time King Herod Agrippa began to persecute some believers in the church. He had the apostle James (John's brother) killed with a sword.

Obviously St. Luke never spent time in the Marketing Department. So we can pray and great things can happen, or we can pray and die by the sword. This was only confirming my line of thinking that morning. Lynn (one of our pastors) continued, talked some more about prayer and asked that someone read a section out of Philippians 4. So having a voice that carries, that's what people say, me I just think I'm loud, I started to read.

Don't worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. If you do this, you will experience God's peace, which is far more wonderful than the human mind can understand. His peach will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.

As I read this I couldn't belive what I was reading. As I read I was filled with the sense that God was speaking to me, through my reading this passage. He broke through my cynisim. God wasn't promising that we wouldn't face the sword, or that we would always get set free, he was promising his peach to guard our hearts. (ok the peach was a typo that Chris or Lynn made, must send them a link to Bible Gateway) In the time it took me to read those few words, my entire attitude changed. My prospects haven't changed, I just found out today that a woman I've had a great working relationship with was laid off. But try as I might there is a sense of Joy and Peach that I just can't shake. Evidence, I keep coming back to the peach thing. :)

-Peach

PS to the cynics both Christian and otherwise, I know this subjective stuff doesn't prove anything, but it a record of my experience. I know I could dismiss it as an emotional reaction to random events, and yet that is not how I experienced it. I also know you can reduce anything, including existence to random events, or as Douglas Adams puts it "What ever happens, happens". While I don't base what I believe, simply on subjective experience, it is what brings my faith alive.

One of the things that drives me nuts about Kim is that she like things like Tuperware for Christmas and Birthdays. I just drives me crazy. Carol Lay has a Story Minute on the subject, I guess it's not just Kim. Sigh, 10 years of marriage down, and so much understanding still to go.

-Peace

OK I'm jadded, about a lot of things. One of the things I can be jadded about is the spiritual need of our culture. I know it's there, it's just hard to think anyone else knows it's there. We got a new pastor today, and he started his sermon with Stillness of Heart by Lenny Kravitz. Here the last verse and the chorus:

Where's the love?
What is this world we live in?
Where's the love ?
We've got to keep on giving
Where's the love ?
What happened to forgiving ?
Anyone ?

All that I want is
Stillness of heart
So I can start
To find my way
Out of the dark
And into your heart

The quip "If Jesus is the answer, what was the question?" always bugs me, perhaps because I don't have a quick one line answer. So here's Lenny Kravit asking the question, and it seems obvious to me that Jesus is the answer. That makes me a little less jadded.

Looking to the week ahead, I'm glad Mike will be back, I've missed his spot in the blog.

-Peace

Is Honesty Always Honest? John Trott reflects on the Christian call to be a role model whether we like it or not. He's pondering things that Bono had to say during his interview with Charlie Rose.

-Peace

PS while trying to track down the mentioned interview I came across this cover of One by Johny Cash on U2 Audio

Salon is running a brief story titled Remember when we had no e-mail? It's an interview with James Gleick who's new book "What Just Happened" covers the net revolution. What I like about this piece is that points out how fast we absorb things like email. Try explaining the idea of a net revolution to new grads and they just don't get it. The net just is, like power or the telephone. I use the following story to try and explain the change.

In 1994 I did two terms as a coop student with Public Service Commission. At the time the big question was could we get the various Federal Departments housed in Canada Place talking via email? There was no good answer, each department ran it's own email system with it own proprietary protocol, CC Mail, MS Mail, Banyan Vines email. Getting them to talk was very expensive. Flash forward to 1998 and my sister comes back from doing work with CBM in Brazil. She brings me a bag of coffee. I don't know Portuguese so I can't read what is printed on the bag, but I do recognize the email address for comments by the now ubiquitous @ sign. So in four years we went from not being able to send email between departments in the same building, to being able to say "What Great Coffee!" to company in Brazil.

Lest we get to wraped up in all this tech change, one of the great things about reading the Bible is you get to see how little we've changed over three thousand plus years. This morning I read the following proverb

If a man loudly blesses his neighbor early in the morning, it will be taken as a curse.
Proverbs 27:14

Showing that even 2700 years ago, being too cheerful in the morning was annoying.

-Peace

Fellow Canadian Jordon Cooper has a link to Bono on CBC where Bono talks about the Church starting to wake up to issues in Africa. Choice Quote

there are 2,300 verses of scripture about the poor. It's the central message outside of personal redemption, the idea of dealing with the poor

-Peace