Presidents and Politicians

Every time an election rolls around, I get a sinking feeling in my stomach. As I survey the furiously paced and often palpably desperate campaining, the following thought regularly crosses my mind: a successful campaigner does not a good president make. In other words, the qualities of a candidate that gets him or her elected do not necessarily translate into qualities you'd want to see in the Oval Office. An unfortunate weakness of our system, I guess.

State of the Blog Address

My fellow blogosphereans...

Thank you to those of you who have stopped by to read my blog over the last year. I'm grateful that a) you found my thoughts interesting enough to read, and b) some of you actually took the time to enter into a discussion or two with me. My main purpose in starting this blog was admittedly selfish, but that selfishness itself had a selfless goal. I wanted to stretch myself, to grow through the discipline and practice of communicating my thoughts in writing ,and through exchanges with other minds on the various views I've presented (hence the caption below the blog title, and the title itself). But the chief end was not to grow for myself; it was to grow to be of better service to my Lord. I think that has certainly happened this year.

Embedded in that goal of self-growth for service, however, were some personal goals for myself that I found to be more challenging to achieve than I had anticipated. I feel I have failed to fully live up to one in particular: namely, posting as frequently as I would have liked with contributions of substance. I would have liked to have posted more developed entries with greater regularly and frequency, but writing is hard work, particularly when the demands of a career, family and church often eliminate my time for blogging for long stretches. There's also a weird love-hate thing that develops between a blogger and his blog, which I didn't understand before, but totally get now. If you blog, you know what I mean. Suffice it to say that a strange sort of psychological intimidation has sometimes kept me away longer than I would have liked.

All that to say, it really has been a rewarding experience, and my thanks go out to those of you who have helped it be just that. It's time now, though, to look to the future. What will 2008 mean for this blog?

Well, my intent is to keep it going, but there's been one major change in my life that will probably impact my expectations for The Crucible. I'm going back to school! Next week I begin classes towards getting my MA in Christian Apologetics from Biola University. Specifically, because of my location and family commitments, I'm doing the Modular Program (a distance program that combines online classwork with summer on-campus residencies) which will probably take me around three years to complete.

I'm very excited, and I know that this is a great next step for me as I seek to develop my gifts for service to the Kingdom, but the demands placed on me will most definitely impact my blogging habits. I hope to be able to incorporate some of what I am doing in my classes with my postings here, but I'm not quite sure how that's all going to play out yet. I've also entertained thoughts of bringing another author on to the blog to help out. I'm not sure yet, and I think I'll just have to wait and see how things go.

After a year here my desire to grow and for this blog to be a vehicle for that has not changed - if anything, the former has grown. Please bear with me as I figure out just how this new facet of my education and growth will affect the latter. And thanks again for reading.

God bless.

Happy birthday, blog!

Whoops! Looks like I missed it by a day. It's been a year of up-and-down blogging for me on my trial run of this thing, but overall I'm glad I did it. I'll save the rest of my reflections and future plans for my next post - my "State of the Blog Address." Stay tuned!

Red and Blue Block Addiction

I didn't think it would be, but this is terribly addicting. I'm up to 20.797 seconds. How about you?

What is it that makes something like this hard to stop? I think it's the "if I try it just one more time" impulse.

Why I Read the Bible

I suppose there are several ways I could put this, but one of the main reasons I read the Bible is captured well in Peter's response to Jesus in the end of John 6:

And He was saying, "For this reason I have said to you, that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted him from the Father." As a result of this many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him anymore. So Jesus said to the twelve, "You do not want to go away also, do you?" Simon Peter answered Him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life. We have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God." John 6:65-69 (emphasis added)

I read the Bible because it is life - the words of life from the One who is the true life, spoken to the creatures he made to receive that life from their Creator. Separated from that life that one has by believing in and knowing the Holy One of God, Jesus of Nazareth, a man is dead even though he lives. Once made alive by God, though, a man hungers for the words of the One who, being rich in mercy, made him alive together with Christ.