Author: jason

First Century Emails

First Century Emails

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Chris is a friend of mine from church. For good or ill, our senses of humor run along the same lines in many ways. What you’ll see below is an email exchange he and I had in regard to a ticket to our church’s annual Men’s Dinner, written in lofty language and following the pattern we see in the Pauline epistles. It’s good stuff. I’ve added a few links to help explain some of the “inside” humor. Enjoy! 🙂

The Righteous Reverend Jason Lee,

Greetings in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!

I have heard, through Senator Hobbs, that you are on the mend from surgery. I pray that God’s healing will come swiftly to your body.

I wanted to ask if you had any interest in attending the Men’s Dinner this Thursday at 6:30 p.m. I have purchased a couple of tables for the purpose of recruiting single men, and I have been mostly successful. However, I have a few tickets remaining.

Would you be interesting in coming? I’m even offering a $1 discount from the regular $10 rate, and I promise the quality of fellowship will be sensational or I’ll give you your money back!

Let me know if you’d like to come,

Chris

Greetings brother. Your fellow bond servant in Christ salutes you. I am humbled that you have taken an interest in the well being of your lowly brother, and cherish the inquiry. I am, indeed, faring well, as God has been kind to hold me in His strong right hand and work a healing upon my form. Many thanks be to our Heavenly Father for His innumerable mercies. Amen.

Brother, I am more than happy to avail myself of one of your remaining tickets to the Men’s Dinner this Thursday evening. I look forward to our repast with much anticipation, and fully expect that the fellowship and breaking of bread to be a boon to body, mind, and spirit. Thank you for your generous offer. I shall recompense you this evening, should you be able to join us for the teaching of our Father’s Word. Should you be unable to join us, I shall be sure to bring adequate funds for you Thursday evening.

Dear brother in Christ, I must now close this brief missive and attend to the work in which our Lord has placed me. May the Father shower you with mercies this day as you labor and travel. Hold fast to the Faith. Greet the brothers with a holy karip. Amen.

—
Jason

An excellent pontification you penned in your response, dear brother! Your amanuensis represents you well.

I am filled with exceeding great joy that you have accepted my offer and that you will be gracing us with your presence tomorrow evening.

Alas, I do regret that I will miss the gathering of believers to heed the apostles’ teaching this evening. But I will be ministering unto the commoners who come in mass to witness the battle being displayed by the Hornets and the Sonics in the great coliseum known as the Ford Center.

I praise God for the opportunity of fellowship we will share Thursday evening. May all our fellow saints who come be edified and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ receive much glory.

I will look diligently for your presence tomorrow evening. I know you don’t see the large letters I write for I have been graciously allowed to key my response.

The Lord bless you and give you perfect peace!

Hello

Hello

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Well, I think this is where I’ll stick my blog for now.  Self-hosting isn’t a real good option as I don’t want to pay for another domain, and a sub-domain of an exisiting one reveals too much personal information.  I didn’t like some of the other blog sites I’ve looked at, but this one seems to be OK.  I’ll try to copy over any content that might be of interest, as well as making this look a little better.  The colors are blah, that title is pretty dumb.  Once I get over this surgery, hopefully I’ll have time…

Another Reason to Use Mozilla/Firefox

Another Reason to Use Mozilla/Firefox

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If you’ve ever talked to me about web development, you know I’m a hard core Mozilla/Firefox fanboy. Mozilla and Firefox are faster, safer, and more standards-compliant for starters. Something else I really like about the browsers that has really been climbing the scale for me is useability. From the features builtin to the browsers to the plethora of extensions available, the browsers just can’t be beat (for the curious, I run FireFox). One such feature is the keyword functionality in bookmarks (I don’t know if other browsers have it. I haven’t looked, and really don’t care if they do : ). For example, I’m a pretty big Linux Today fan. Of course, I have the site bookmarked, but I hate switching back and forth between the mouse and the keyboard, so I add the keyword "lt" to the bookmark, and I can noew go to the site completely from the keyboard: I press CTRL-L to switch to the location bar, then type "lt," hit enter, and voila! Linux Today is loaded. While I think that’s a pretty snazzy feature, it gets even cooler. My phone at Hobby Lobby had caller ID on it, which was handy when trying to avoid salesman that kept pestering me. Sometimes, though, a number would come up that I didn’t know, so I’d want to look it up and see who it is before I answered. The problem is, of course, time. It takes too long to go to the site, type in the number, click the button, etc. With Mozilla/FireFox, my aversion to taking unwanted phone calls gets easier. From using the reverse lookup site, I know what the URL for a lookup looks like, so I can take that URL, replace the number I used with "%s" and use that as the bookmark. Now, in my location bar, i can type "phone 123-555-1234" and the browser inserts the number I typed where the "%s" is and loads that page, giving me quick and easy access to the reverse phone lookup.

I will admit that this use of the feature is pretty juvenile, but that doesn’t detract from the utility of it. Since discovering this feature of the browser, I’ve created several more of these types of bookmarks, all of which get used rather frequently. The point of this rambling article is two-fold. The first is to make Mozilla/FireFox users aware of the feature (and perhaps give those still holding on to IE yet another reason to switch). The second is to give you the list of the bookmarks that I’ve created and found helpful. So, without further ado, I present to you my Keyboard Shortcuts Bookmarks.

Shortcut Description URL
acroynm Look up an acronym at AcronymFinder.com Right click and copy
define Google Definitions Right click and copy
groups Search for a phrase at Google Groups Right click and copy
local Find a specific business or type of business using Google Local (be sure to change the URL to use your city) Right click and copy
dict Look up a word’s defintion at One Look Online Dictionary Right click and copy
phone The afforementioned Reverse Phone Directory Lookup Phone Number Right click and copy
wiki Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Right click and copy
yp Find a business’ phone number in the Yellow Pages Right click and copy

These are some of the bookmarks I have set up that I though might help someone. If you have some good ones or find some to add, please leave a comment and tell us what it is so we can all share. Have fun!

Get FireFox

What are we doing about it?

What are we doing about it?

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Brian’s a good friend of mine. He and I are a lot a like in many ways. Both politically and theologically, we’re very similar, with only what I consider to be minor differences of opinions. One area in which we are in lock-step agreement is our opposition to the scourge of abortion. We both find it to be a repugnant and repulsive destruction of human life. As such, our conversations often drift to that topic. This morning was such an occasion. Brian related to me a conversation he had with a former college professor, and challenged me with a question with which this professor challenged him: What are we doing about it?

That’s an exceedingly interesting question. As Brian and I discussed, as Christians, we seem to be placing our hopes in Supreme Court justices, lawyers, and/or activists. Our hope is that someday, we’ll have enough justices on that bench to overturn Roe, and that a brave lawyer will step forward to push a case all the way through to the Supreme Court. Someday, someone will step up to the plate and make something happen. That’s all well and good, but the question still stands: What are we doing about it?

More often that not, we prefer to sit back and let someone else do the work. Whether it’s evangelism, discipleship, discipline, or protecting the unborn, most of us are not comfortable with getting our hands dirty. The reasons for that are many, and, in this context, completely irrelevant. Regardless of reason, we as the body of Christ will continue to marginalized and ineffective as long as we’re sitting on the sidelines. If we want the world to take notice and to realize that our Faith does have something authentic to offer the modern world, we actually have to do something.

On a practical level, in this context, what does that mean? Do we picket abortion clinics? Do we write letters to politicians? Do we volunteer at pregnancy centers? Do we adopt "unwanted" children? I don’t know. Those are all fine suggestions, and there are likely many more (though I staunchly oppose opposition that involves firearms, thank you very much, Mr. Rudolph). The answer to that question, though, will vary from person to person, so each Christian should carefully think about that question: What are you doing? What does God want you to do? It’s time that we quit sitting on our hands and waiting for someone else to do something, and get involved ourselves, whether the issue is abortion, gambling, or something else entirely. Being a change agent for Christ is not someone else’s responsibility. It’s ours. It’s yours. Now, what are you going to do about it?

Jesus, God’s Name, and Gay People

Jesus, God’s Name, and Gay People

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Every day, there is a set of web comics I read. I even have an application setup on a server at home that aggregates these comics on to one page to make viewing these comics easier and faster. One such comic is Player vs. Player, one I’ve read for years. While the strip is consistently funny, it is occasionally a little off color, and sometimes downright offensive. One example actually spans two days. The first day (warning: this is likely to offend) is where the offense started. For those of you that didn’t click the link (Trust me. You’re not missing anything) the last panel has a talking cat taking The Lord’s name in vain. As can be expected, some PvP readers were offended and wrote in to let the author know, which led to the second and possibly more offensive of the two strips (This one is "safe" and this post depends on your knowledge of it). Over the next few paragraph’s, I’d like to explain why Scott Kurtz is wrong. …

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The Wall of Separation Canard

The Wall of Separation Canard

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One of the greatest canards in modern public life, in my opinion, is the alleged "wall of separation" between church and state. The idea is that The Framers wanted a government devoid of any religion at all. I think history adequately shows, though, that that’s not the case. What they wanted, rather, was a religion without a state government. That is to say, they didn’t want any one religion to gain the official backing of the government of the land and then be forced upon the populace, as was the case in England.

Everyone now and then, like this case, we see this faulty idea of separation applied at the local level. I think the people that do this are either uninformed with regards to the Constitution, or are being intentionally disingenuous. While these people bow at the altar of the First Amendment, they gloss over the 10th Amendment, which states that any powers not expressly granted to the Federal government are reserved for the states and the people. So how is this relevant to the South Carolina case? The First Amendment says this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Note the emphasis I added. "Congress shall make no law…" Now, couple that with the Tenth Amendment, and I think you can make a case that the First Amendment does not apply to local governments. If a municipality, acting according to the dictates of its constituents, decide that they wish to acknowledge Jesus Christ in their town hall meetings, I think the Constitution grants them that right. The same goes for Allah, Buddha, or whatever religious figure one might choose. What we have in this case is the tyranny of the minority, where a single person was able to assert her will and overrule what is apparently (from the lack of widespread support of the plaintiff) the will of the local community. If you add in a Supreme Court that seems to have forgotten the Constitution they’ve sworn to interpret and uphold, and you have the federal trampling of states’ rights. Just one more in a long line.

I have turned in my notice…

I have turned in my notice…

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Well, I finally did it. Last Thursday, I gave my notice to Hobby Lobby. As one might expect, my boss wasn’t too excited about it, but he said he wasn’t too surprised. He’s known that I’ve not been too happy for a while. Part of my discontent was the adoption of .Net. The rest (and maybe the majority) was the installation of Peoplesoft Enterprise 1 (also known as PSE1, JD Edwards One World 8.9, and probably something else as soon as Oracle finished its acquisition of Peoplesoft).

Hobby Lobby made both of these decisions, as it felt that they were the best decisions for the company, which I can understand. Obviously, I disagree with the selection of .Net as the development platform. Peoplesoft, though, I supported and recommended (though it’s not like the whole decision hinged my opinion. They did, though, ask for it, so I gave it). I was led to believe by the salesmen, though, that we would interact with the system, as developers, via a Java API. However, as one might expect from salesmen, that picture wasn’t quite accurate. Not only will we not be using the API, there is no API. All interaction is done by reading from or writing to "Z" files and running programs. Not that the absence of a Java API would matter, though, as we won’t be using Java.

I spent some time doing development in both environments to see if I could enjoy my job. To be honest, though I am opposed to .Net for reasons I’ve discussed elsewhere, I could probably be happy enough doing C#. PSE1 development, however is a bunch of click here, double click there, type in a variable name on this line, drag this over here. Ick. The only way to see everything the program is doing is to print the "code." I just did not enjoy that (beyond learning it. Once the new wore off…)

So, I’m off to another company here in the metro. It’s a bittersweet decision. I’ve made some good friends here at Hobby Lobby over the past 3 1/2 years. It will be hard to say good-bye to them (though I’ll only be a few miles away from them and I go to church one of them). I wasn’t enjoying myself though, and that made me miserable at work, and the quality of my work suffered. That’s not good for them or me, so it’s probably best for everyone that I move on. Only time can tell if I’ve made the right choice. Right now, it feels right, and I expect that it will be…

Jesus and the Democrat

Jesus and the Democrat

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A little political/religious joke. Enjoy! 🙂

A Republican in a wheelchair entered a restaurant one afternoon and asked the waitress for a cup of coffee. The Republican looked across the restaurant and asked, "Is that Jesus sitting over there?"

The waitress nodded "yes," so the Republican requested that she give Jesus a cup of coffee on him.

The next patron to come in was a Libertarian with a hunched back. He shuffled over to a booth, painfully sat down, and asked the waitress for a cup of hot tea. He also glanced across the restaurant and asked, "Is that Jesus over there?"

The waitress nodded, so the Libertarian asked her to give Jesus a cup of hot tea, "My treat."

The third patron to come into the restaurant was a Democrat on crutches. He hobbled over to a booth, sat down and hollered, "Hey there, honey! How’s about gettin’ me a cold glass of Miller Light!" He, too, looked across the restaurant and asked, "Is that God’s boy over there?"

The waitress once more nodded, so the Democrat directed her to give Jesus a cold glass of beer. "On my bill," he said.

As Jesus got up to leave, he passed by the Republican, touched him and said, "For your kindness, you are healed." The Republican felt the strength come back into his legs, got up, and danced a jig out the door.

Jesus also passed by the Libertarian, touched him and said, "For your kindness, you are healed." The Libertarian felt his back straightening up, and he raised his hands, praised the Lord and did a series of back flips out the door.

Then Jesus walked towards the Democrat. The Democrat jumped up and yelled, "Don’t touch me! I’m collecting disability!"

Gambling for Education

Gambling for Education

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Here is a letter I mailed to The Daily Oklahoman concerning the upcoming vote regarding Governor Henry’s Gambling for Education proposition:

Oklahoma voters are being bombarded with commercials admonishing us to vote for SQ 705 and 706 to create a state lottery. According to these spots, this lottery will save our schools, hopefully much better than liquor by the drink and parimutuel gambling. What they don’t tell you is the impact the lottery will have on the local economy. For every dollar spent on the lottery, that’s one less dollar that goes to a local retailer, which pays for such things as salaries and health benefits. For every dollar spent on the lottery in Oklahoma City, that’s 3.875 cents that doesn’t go to the city in sales tax, which pays for such things as policemen, firemen, etc. It’s also 4.5 cents that the state loses in sales tax, which supports a myriad of state programs. A vote for the lottery may be a vote for funding education, but it’s also a vote against funding our local retailers, and our police and fire departments.

Christians are different, right?

Christians are different, right?

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One of the things you hear preached is that Christ changes a person from the inside out, and I believe that to be true. In my own life, I can see the change being made, little by little. That change, though, is not wrought solely by the work of the Spirit. There has to be a decision made on the part of the Believer that he *wants* to be different. Sadly, we see many Christians who have either not made that decision, or have long since given up on it. To be fair, it’s a *hard* life. Whoever thinks that Christianity is for the weak needs to take a closer look at the faith, but I digress.

What makes me ask this question, are Christians truly different, is a discussion I was party to after Sunday School one SUnday morning. One of the ladies in my class commented on the length (or lack thereof) of the skirts and shirts in church (how’s that for quasi-assonance? :). Our (some would charge delicate) sensibilities were a little put off by the amout of skin that even Christian teens were showing. As we were lamenting this problem, a perfect example walked by: a skirt so short that bending over in public would not be decent.

While I realize that style of clothing is currently en vogue, we are called to a higher standard, and I need to be completely fair about this. This idea of setting ourselves apart a la Romans 12:1-2 applies to *every* area of our lives, public and private. Just as much as the racy dress of our youth is sending a bad message is the Christian body’s acceptance of smoking, excessive drinking, profane and immoral music and cinema, etc. We should strive to set ourselves apart from the culture’s decadence as part of our surrender of our lives to the high calling of Christ.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Being different for its own sake is pretty foolish (if blue is popular, wearing nothing but red proves nothing), and personal freedom is far too complex to boil down to my miniscule missive completely, so there are many factors to consider when pondering the point I’m trying to make. Take alcohol, for example. Personally, I don’t have much of a problem with it. If a Christian is a recovering or struggling alcoholic, he should probalby avoid it. In the words of Ted Kirkpatrick, "Just because it causes you to fall don’t [sic] mean it tempts me very much at all." However, since there are those who may stumble if they see me imbibing a "potent potable," I choose not too (see Paul’s discussion of meat sacrificed to idols in I Cor 8).

If we are to show that Christ’s indwelling is efficacious, if we are to show that Christianity is not a farce, then we *must* allow Christ to reign in all areas of our life: our clothing, our music, our movies and television, our dietary habits, etc. I don’t want this to sound like a call to legalism; I think legalism is a weed that chokes the life of out of the abundant life that Chirst brings. However, just because we are *free* to do something, does not mean that we *should* do something. The world needs to see that Christ does indeed change a man. Let’s get out of the way and let sanctification have its way.