The Desert of the Real

A fellow participant in #prosapologian shared a link with us today that I think bears reposting here. A small excerpt from this excellent piece follows:

Churches have become hospitals for sinners, haven’t they? They used to be spiritual fortresses built in enemy territory where soldiers for Christ were recruited, trained and equipped for doing battle against sin and evil in society with open bibles, convicted hearts and committed lives.

Today, they’re largely filled with bedridden believers who pass the time in and out small group therapy, languishing over their ills and misfortunes – forever discussing their aches and pains with anyone who’ll listen – lying around moaning and groaning about daily discomforts, inconveniences and “felt needs” while being coddled and cried over by other patients waiting for their turn to be coddled and cried over – each looking at the clock and growing increasingly impatient that their pastor/physician has yet to make his appointed rounds, hold their hand and tell them what a wonderful and courageous patient they’ve been.

In other news, I apologize for not having more of the DLs up. I do have a few more done, but I’ve actually decided that what I was doing, while good, could be better. I’ve designed a small mysql db to hold all the info indexed. Now I just need to write the web interface for inserting and searching for data. When it’s done and everythings in it we’ll be able to search by topic/keywords, by caller name, or by date. With as many DLs as the esteemed Dr White has done I’m thinking it’ll be more useful in the long run than another static page index by year.
I guess only time will tell if I know what I’m talking about. In the meantime I will try to get the more recent DLs up, but no promises.

<inhaling deeply> Ahhhhh! Fresh wood. And, a new project, and new materials usually means….yes….a new toy. ;-) A compound mitre saw this time. Should make building this bed for my son a much quicker and less frustrating experience. A power saw is a wonderful tool, but when making precise cuts on short lengths of wood (like mitred corners on a 2×4 for instance) it can be somewhat frustrating. At least it is for an amateur such as myself.

The cutting begins tomorrow. The plans I have suggest that the average person can do it in 16-18 hours. I’m guessing I’ll have it done by the end of the month. ;-)

I recently volunteered to start putting together bullet points for the dividing lines as I listen to them. Of course, since then I’ve learned that Stephanos is really quite busy, so I thought I’d start posting them here so that they’d be available during the lag between my submissions and their getting posted. In the interest of making it convenient and easily referenced I’ve created a seperate page for it with links to the DL in question on StraitGate. I only have the indexes from the 9th and the 11th of March up right now, I’ll try to get the others up soon.