Breathe in Eternity

Signed up for a couple classes at the church. One is Spirit-Filled Living. To make one thing clear about the belief our church has on the Holly Spirit: there are different camps of thought and a lot of Pentecostals tend to be the guilty party of, and that is establishing cliques of the “haves” and the “have nots”. Most are referring to the gift of tongues. Where our church (of Pentecostal roots) is different: we don’t these “have/not” people. We also recognize the many gifts from Holly Spirit; not just tongues. It’s not like we get to come to a buffet and choose from the gifts. In the same breath, we have the freedom to ask for them. I’m looking forward to learning a whole lot more on Spiritual Gifts in the weeks to come.

The other class I started last night is Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. This is based on the book of the same title by Peter Scazzero. I have only read the first chapter before the class started. I know there will be a lot of things to learn. So far some things are: understanding my emotions have played a big part of how I was spiritually. Peter says you can’t be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.. Looking ahead to chapter 8: Discovering the Rhythms of the Daily Office and Sabbath. This caught my eye as it has to do with Stopping to Breathe the Air of Eternity. If we could only imagine, get a glimpse, taste the air of Heaven, then perhaps we would slow down and truly change our priorities

Do you know goodness?

I have been reading Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis and am about half way through the book. His style of writing is very deep and yet interesting. I consider myself a newbie book reader. Seems I have a new passion for books on Christianity and bettering life. Many chapters in this book discuss the ability to identify the difference between good and evil. The chapter I just finished reading has an awesome thought I had never had.

When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.

I know many would disagree with the last statement. Surely most would see some good and some evil, but not entirely to one extreme or the other. In today’s world you could relate this to how we are desensitized to many thinks such as sex and violence on television.

Another MS Monday

Okay so today’s troubles weren’t exactly Microsoft related. I was scheduled along with another coworker to attend an online Made2Manage virtual class. I was first to log in and called in soon after for the voice side of the class. Probably about 10 minutes into the class I loose sound in the phone. So I informed the instructor that I was heading up to the coworkers office to attend from there. Then I found she too was not getting sound. All of the office was down! We could call each other inside the office and receive DID calls from the outside, but no incoming to the main number nor could we pick up an outside line to make calls. So I borrowed a cell phone from someone and call our Executone office and they were going to call back on the cell. Needless to say… this techie could not figure out how the dang thing worked to answer it! I kept bringing up the address book. Then when I got it figured out, it wasn’t the call I was waiting for! Oh well, they showed up and fixed it after some time by just resetting the cards. Learning more and more each time he comes out to fix us up. I was telling him if he kept that up they would become obsolete.

Me and the family went to our home town this weekend. Didn’t want to since we had planned to for Easter too. I figured we’d better now before it got any closer. It was supposed to be a non event visit. Turns out they made it a combined birthday party on Sunday for my daughter and nephew who’s birthdays was on the 22nd. We were only there for about 24 hours. Sometimes those short trips are the best but they also kill the weekend. I’d say most of my weekends feel like three days but this kind of trip made it feel like one day. I had a great talk with my grandmother. She is a devout Catholic/Presbyterian. Attends church both Saturday and Sunday to both churches. She also tithes to both! I gave her the “Purpose Driven Life” book for Christmas. I almost thought it was the most meaningful gift I ever gave her. She expressed a satisfying thankfulness for the gift. This trip I see she has read 7 chapters. Doesn’t have a lot of time to read it she says. Not sure if that is the case but rather a hard to swallow conviction maybe. Her beliefs go deeper into tradition than I could expect her to give up. She thinks the death of so many churches is because of the parents. She thinks having a personal relationship with God means feeling his presence as a physical touch. She prays in memorized prayer. She has a problem with the woman’s position God has given them in the world. This was an awesome opportunity to tell her about what my relationship was like. I told her that the death of so many churches are due to their inability to change tradition to accept younger people. Our church is well aware of this and employs ongoing changes to the music worship ever year. Not to mention many other youth inviting places to server. Having a relationship with God could include feeling his touch, but there is a more indescribable feeling when you are close to Him. Having a continual chit-chat with Him throughout the day. Not getting stuck in repetitive meaningless chants. The Lutheran church we attend there sounds so robotic! Every prayer is written in the handouts and there seems to be no prayer from the heart. Everyone prays with their eyes open reading the words instead of listening. Not going to mention the off key tone deaf singing. But then again God does love all forms of worship! My point here is finding the reason why churches are dying today. If God has answered me, he has mentioned that nothing will save these dying churches. Only new born-again churches will rise. Some will occupy the same buildings, but most will not be of the same denomination. Religion is spelled as “D-O”, what I can do to get what I want. Christianity is spelled “D-O-N-E”, what has been done already. Jesus has already made the biggest sacrifice for our eternity and we can’t repay him. To attempt to repay him is an insult. Like paying someone back for giving you a birthday present! I would be insulted for getting the gift back. So I pray that my grandma would think about what I had said and that God would open her mind to a new rebirth.

I think I’m going to just give up on the virus updates. There are just too many to keep up on to mention here. I recommend updating your data files every hour!

Last Friday I determined this SCSI tape drive we have here has a bad motor for driving the tape reals. Talked with Certance, who handles Seagate tape hardware now. The tech said I needed to call their warranty dept for a swap and pay ~$165 for a refurbished unit that has a warranty of 90 days. The gal I spoke with wants $250! So I flat out said she must be pulling my leg because I could get one elsewhere for less without sending them my broken one. Without the core they would charge another $500 something! So I have now found a few sites selling refurbished units for less like I said without having checked, plus some do 90 days and others do 1 year!

Was unable to post Thursday. Bresnan had upgraded some hardware causing major outages and thus changing my IP again. I had a bigger skuff about this with our business account and the fact that we pay for a static IP. I wanted a discount because of this as well. Point being that they missed our account for calling before the outage. I want to make sure they understand that we are serious about keeping the same IP we pay extra for. On the flip side I got a new bill from USA Digital. They charged us $150 for not returning the cable modem the corporate office already conceded that we own and said they would let the local office know. In my talking with the corporate office again, they got that straightened… I wasn’t going to bring it up but now that this communication problem keeps rolling around with them, I had to mention that we have not been getting our $5 discount for the past 2 years then. So she was going to check into that and get back with me. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to keep dragging your feet. I was going to just let it go, but since they just want to milk us I couldn’t resist.

The Search For Yesterdays Software

Got a call earlier this week from a fellow Christian friend wanting my assistance with his Quickbook troubles. Seems during an upgrade to 2004 software left him with a malfunctioning application. In attempts to go back to the previous version, he snapped the CD in half trying to get it out of the case. Bummer! Talking with Intuit via India, they offered to restore him for around ~$700. So today I have been scouring the net for a bootleg copy somewhere. He at least has the license to make it somewhat legal.

Installed the replacement PC for Building B this morning. Problem is the optical mouse is a USB mouse and there is no USB connector on the PC. Dates this somewhat eh? But hey this Dell smoked the IBM with less of hardware even. Go figure. So I am working together a shopping list. I need a couple mice and a 5 port switch. Optical mice run nice in the dirty place we have here. Need the switch to replace the base 10 hub that connects our conference room and Building B to the LAN. The wireless to Building B is a max 11 anyway but the conference room needs much faster with Made2Manage classes coming in there. It run like a turtle when we had our M2M consultant come in last week and that was with just an educational company.

I tried upgrading the firmware using Internet Explorer and that seemed to do the trick. A bit disappointed that they Linksys might require such a browser to do such a simple task. Oh well I seem to be buying less and less of their products these days anyway. Had two 5 port switches go bad on me in less than a year.

My brother called me last night from the Big House in OR. Sounds like he has picked up some interest in Linux! So I think I will send him a book on this OS. We seem to have a lot of the same passions. Now if he would only open his mind to what the Lord has to say. I sent him a three book series of John Elderidge’s. Mostly for the Wild at Heart book. Never got a chance to ask him about it tho. He just seemed very interested in a lot of security and such for computers. Well so do I but it’s very hard to grasp even at my status.

Thursday mornings I get together with a few guys from our church for breakfast and do a Bible study. We have been reading a chapter a week out of the Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. This is my third time through this book. We often go off on tangents and today’s was on baptism. The oldest in our group seems to be thinking a lot about the purpose for being Born Again as an adult. By this I mean being baptized by water submersion. He, like others in the group was baptized at birth and went through confirmations later in life. Our leader mentioned some one might think this as a scape goat thinking that all I need to do is baptize my kids early and they would be saved automatically. No more worries. Too sad for thinking that way. We all agreed that it’s not required for being saved. I put my thought in saying I did it for two reasons: Worship and as a demonstration of my love for the Lord as a public display. Not as some private back yard hot-tub baptism. I think those who do it that way have a misunderstanding of baptisms purpose. It’s not a form of works! I too was baptized earlier as a child at 8 for the Mormons. I knew at the time I was too immature to understand why I was doing this. So shortly after accepting Christ again back in the Summer of 2001, Kassie and I were baptized again. I denounced the previous baptism based on a disbelief in what I was doing. Besides… my god-parents were split up later in life and were not model godly people. We also spoke about the purpose of god-parents. We don’t do sponsors in our church for dedications or baptism however, but I’m speaking about those churches that do. I often get disgusted when ppl choose ungodly ppl as god-parents for their newborn child. Some even think the purpose is for choosing guardians in the event the parents pass on before the child matures. I find that hardly legal. But today so many ppl choose their cool friends or even their siblings. Not even sure the thought passes their minds as a test. “Do I want these ppl to care for my child after I’m gone?” How does that work anyway if you choose two sisters? Oh the dumb things we humans instill as traditions in our lives!

This afternoon has been fairly productive! Got some petty cash and stopped at the CNC shop to pick up the equipment for USA Digital to cancel the account. Get to their office and find the gal is out to lunch and to return about 2:13PM. That’s just crazy! So I had to pick up a couple switches and a couple mice. Swing through the Arby’s drive thru and get a Jamoca milk shake and back to USA Digital. Had a few minutes to wait yet. Their records state that they own the cable modem! Man oh man! So I get back to the office and try digging up some receipts. No luck. So I figure that with all the troubles we have had with the wireless connections there, they must have switched out our modem with theirs. That could have happened over a year ago. Besides… even if I had the receipt I would need the MAC address to prove. That way they could track down where mine went also. So I called Bresnan to get a leased modem from them before pulling out USA Dig’s. They only charge a $3 lease fee. Besides that Bresnan forgot to not change us the fee anyway. Guess it worked out for him then. So now I have the optical mouse on Building B’s PC and replaced the 10 base hub with the new 100 and bumped the speed for the master port and it’s rocking and rolling!

Tomorrow I need to put my ups in line and test out an old 8mm tape drive out. Just realized it is a 24GB drive! My current one is a 20GB Traven.

Birthdays Galore

Surprise surprise surprise! First thing this morning at work I get an email from a long lost cousin. Not lost actually but just doesn’t respond to email very well. As I was sending a Birthday email wish to a mentor of mine, IN comes the surprise! Was great to hear from him. I immediately sent off a belated Happy Birthday to him as well. His was yesterday. He is one day shy of being a year younger than I. My mother-in-law’s Birthday was yesterday too. Kassie meant to call her along with my kids and we forgot to do so until bed time. Was watching ‘You’ve Got Mail’ ’till 10:30. What a great love story. Been meaning to see that for quite some time. Anyway I talked her into calling and it turned out well. Her mother was not upset and they ended up talking for record times. It seems that it’s been a goal for several years now to escape a Birthday with out hearing anyone wishing me a happy birthday. For the most part I have never been able to but came very close. Got off to work without the wife and kids saying anything, but they soon called later. Only one coworker vaguely said anything. He mentioned that I was looking older. The receptionist asked if I got my hair cut. It was cut Friday, so only three work days late. I like to be a giver not a taker, so not to draw attention to myself is what I want to achieve.

I get off on the cheesiest things. I discovered how to modify Mozilla do color code replied and forwarded email. Also how to change the font in the URL bar to an easier font for such things like copy-n-paste. Sometimes it’s hard to get the drag through just to the right spot. Now what I’d like to do is create a packaged install of my preferred settings. I even have my favorite Orbit theme I started installing. If you’re savvy enough you could find a screen shot somewhere in my Gallery.

Had a great discussion with a friend about Christianity last night. He is somewhat of a Gnostic person. Today in modern times Gnostic ppl of the world tend to create their own system based on their knowledge. I was one… I know. I didn’t believe in organized religion. Based all my beliefs just in what I knew. I reached a point in my life tho where I no longer wanted to seek the answer to unknown questions. I found having faith and a belief system was a huge relief off my back. Don’t get me wrong… this is not blind faith. I am still a sinner and so I still have questions all the time. Sometimes I’d fear final growth but just when you think you have it all under control, a new arena comes forth. New growth to be had.