This morning I was reading in the book of Numbers. When most of us think of that book (if we think of it at all), we conjure up dull genealogies and census data. I challenge you to read it again. In the span of four chapters, I found tons of great stuff.
In chapter 9, we find Israelites who come to ask Moses a question about observing the Passover, an important religious ceremony. His response: “Wait, that I may hear what the Lord will command concerning you.”
Can you imagine that? Next time someone comes to you asking for advice, say that. Don’t give good advice. Don’t even say, “Let’s pray about it.” Just say, “Wait, that I may hear what the Lord will command concerning you.” In other words, God is going to speak to me and tell me what you should do.
This relationship that Moses had with God is amazing. That’s the kind of relationship I want with God, one where I can confidently expect God to speak.
I read Jeremiah 23-29 today,1 and the theme that stuck out to me was the contrast between good prophets/shepherds/priests and bad prophets/shepherds/priests.
“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” declares the LORD. Therefore thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who care for my people: “You have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. Behold, I will attend to you for your evil deeds, declares the LORD. Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will set shepherds over them who will care for them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be missing, declares the LORD. -Jeremiah 23:1-4
Here we read a stern warning against those who are supposed to care for God’s people but fail to do so, and other passages from these chapters contrast Jeremiah, the true prophet of God with a false prophet who tells people what their itching ears want to hear.
These words serve as a reminder of the serious responsibility that those in ministry, vocational and volunteer, have. It doesn’t matter if you’re a megachurch pastor or the leader of a three person small group, I believe these words are for you.
So how do we avoid leading God’s people astray? There are obviously many things we could mention, but I think one of the most important is humility.
Humility means that we know our goal is to glorify God and not self, to decrease that He might increase. It means that we do God’s will even if it’s unpopular because we care what God thinks, not what others think, that we place his glory ahead of our own self-interest.
Humility recognizes that we don’t have all the answers, that we must turn to God and wise counsel.
Humility is open to correction.
Without humility, I don’t know how we will serve God or others well.
1For those of you who attend NCC and are following the Bible reading plan, yes, I’m a few days behind.
I’m heading out to grab lunch and then on to the Lincoln Theater for our All Church Celebration. If you’re an NCCer, you really should come out. For those of you who aren’t, for the first time since National Community Church went multi-site, we’re having a unified worship service for people at all of our locations.
I’ve been helping to coordinate logistics, and I’m super-excited about it. If you have a minute, would you say a prayer for the service. My desire is that more than anything, God would be glorified. I would much appreciate it if you could also pray for me. I’m feeling a bit under the weather, and after a long night tonight, I have to come home and pack for a mini-conference/roundtable/seminar that I’m going to in Dallas. It’s a great week, but it wasn’t a great week to get sick.
Anyway, hope to see you all tonight!
Yesterday I found these two beautiful photos of a Christmas tree in Bejing. I know what you’re thinking, “Christmas in China?” According to the description that was provided along with the photo, “Christmas continues to gain popularity in Chinese consumer culture year on year.” Regardless, these are beautiful photos, and I love Christmas, so here you go.
As I was leaving the DMV this morning…
…that will always put you in a good mood. I tend to be quite cynical in such situations, but I was trying to keep positive and managed to strike up a conversation with the lady next to me. We had an enjoyable chat, and the time passed quickly. Anyway…
As I was leaving the DMV this morning I was quickly walking through Georgetown to get to the Barnes & Noble. Suddenly it occurred to me that I hadn’t noticed the Christmas decorations lining the streets. (Did I mention that I love Christmas?)
I was so focused on getting where I needed to go, even though I wasn’t on a deadline, that I couldn’t enjoy the good things around me. Sometimes we don’t even need to take time to stop and smell the roses, we just need to take the mental space to enjoy the good things God has placed around us.
UPDATE: Looks like I was wrong on this one. While cloture is a motion to end debate, on Saturday the Senate invoked cloture on the motion to proceed to the bill, not on the bill itself, making the statement that the senate agreed to begin debating the bill a true one. I should have looked more closely!
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Time for a quick civics lesson! Countless news agencies are misreporting that yesterday’s Senate vote on the health care bill is a vote to begin debating the bill.
From the Washington Post:
After days of indecision, the last two Democratic holdouts — Sens. Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) and Mary Landrieu (La.) — joined their caucus in supporting a motion to begin debate.
From the New York Times:
The Senate voted on Saturday to begin full debate on major health care legislation
From CNN:
the Senate voted to move ahead with a floor debate
These are just a few examples, but you can find countless others on Google News.
The problem?
They’re all wrong. The Senate voted to invoke cloture, a motion to limit debate on a bill or other matter (i.e. nomination) pending before the Senate.
In olden days, you couldn’t actually ever stop debate on a bill if any Senator wanted to keep talking about it. As you can imagine, this meant that if a couple of Senators were really opposed to something, they could just take turns talking about it until the rest of the Senators caved and moved on to the other things they needed to vote on. In an effort to help move things along, the Senate changed its rules so that if two-thirds of the Senators wanted to end debate, they could do so by invoking cloture. Yes, it sounds a lot like closure, and the two words have very similar meanings. They’re about bringing something to an end.
The bar for invoking cloture was still so high that it was nearly impossible to do. Getting two-thirds of the Senate to agree on everything is like getting two three-year-olds to eat all of their vegetables. In fact, cloture was only invoked five times during the next 46 years. Consequently, the Senate changed its rules to require only three-fifths of the Senators to vote for a cloture motion in order for it to pass.
I hope this little history and civics lesson has helped you understand what the Senate voted on last night. The fact is that the news agencies weren’t reporting what really happened. Cloture takes a bit more to explain well than can be put in a news article about another topic, so they took a shortcut. The party in control of Congress (currently the Democratic Party) sets the agenda and can debate whatever they want. They didn’t have to win a Senate vote to debate health care reform, they had to win a Senate vote to put an end to debating health care reform so they can actually vote on passing the bill.
How do I know so much about cloture? Well, I used to work for a Senator, so I learned a lot about what it was and how it worked. I didn’t really know the history part, so I looked it up on Wikipedia, and Wikipedia pointed me to two articles on the Senate website that give the history of cloture.
http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Cloture_Rule.htm
http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/RL30360.pdf
I have a bad habit of starting too many projects. I started another one last night called Recessions Aren’t Funny. Of course, it’s tongue in cheek because the site is full of recession jokes. I’ve still got a lot of work to do on it, but for now you can go vote on your favorite recession jokes.
If you have feedback or ideas about the site, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Of course, as I said, this site is in it’s early stages. I built it in about 3 hours last night, so it’s pretty rough around the edges.
Originally Posted on PoliticLOLz
This post will probably only interest you if you use MailChimp to send enewsletters.
A few days ago I signed up for a MailChimp account so that I can publish enewsletters for my political humor website, PoliticLOLz. One of the features that they offer is an “evil popup mode.” Basically, the first time you visit a website, a box pops up that encourages you to sign up for the email newsletter. When you close the box, a cookie is set that tells the website that you’ve already visited and seen the box. This way, you won’t be bothered for a year or until you delete your cookies.
However, there is a slight problem with the code. If you’re having trouble with the box popping up more than once, you should change the following line in the code that MailChimp gives you.
Original:
document.cookie = 'MCEvilPopupClosed=yes;expires=' + expires_date.toGMTString();
Fixed:
document.cookie = 'MCEvilPopupClosed=yes;expires=' + expires_date.toGMTString() + ';path=/';
That should fix your problem. You don’t really need to know any more. However, if you’re curious as to how this works, read on.
Basically, when a cookie is set, it is given a particular path that defines the scope of the cookie, (i.e. which pages the cookie affects) and the path defaults to the path of the page being viewed. For example, if you visit http://yoursite.com/games/new, any cookies that are set will have a default path of /games/new, meaning that they will only be used on that page and its subpages (i.e. /games/new/top).
Of course, you can give a cookie a different path when you set it. Thus, by adding ” + ';path=/'” to the code, I am setting the cookie’s path to the site’s root, meaning that it will be used for all pages on the site, not just the page that was visited and any subpages it may have.
I hope this helps you out. Let me know if you run into any issues.
UPDATE: And just that fast, it seems to be back up again. Early reports on Twitter indicate that it only went down for Comcast users.
I know this is crazy sounding, but Google has actually gone down. (Twitter users confirm.) I have no idea how long it will stay down. It may actually even be up by the time I publish this post, but I haven’t been able to get to Gmail or google.com. Blogspot seems to be running very slowly, and worst of all, my sites that implement Adsense are loading very slowly. If others are having this problem as well, it could mean there are millions of websites on the Internet that are nearly inaccessible.
I was walking home from an early meeting this morning when I thought to myself, “Well, it’s a balance.” I was thinking about my responsibility to serve and care for those around me. In other words, I was saying to myself, “Yes, you need to serve people, but it’s a balance. You can take that too far.”
Then I realized, Jesus wasn’t balanced. Jesus was on a radical mission, living as a wandering teacher and prophet who was crucified because he upset the religious establishment.
When we think about serving God and serving others, we like to look at the times that Jesus stepped back from serving to pray or to spend time with his closest friends. He did this in spite of the fact that there were unmet needs among people around Him.
But there are two things that make this different than our situations.
First, Jesus stopped serving to pray and to fellowship with and teach the people closest to him. NOT TO WATCH TV!
Second, Jesus practiced balance in a radical context. As I said before, He was on a radical mission. He was out to redeem the world and restore the broken relationship between God and creation. He consistently lived that out. He had no permanent home and spent his life serving others.
We want to practice balance in a life of incredible comfort and ease. We want to go to work and come home to our comfortable and luxurious surroundings and not be bothered. (Yes, my small, old apartment is luxurious by most of the world’s standards.) We want to spend our weekends lounging around and caring for our own “needs.” And then we’ll throw in a little service. If we’re asked to do more we’ll say, I’m already serving, and…
It’s a balance.
