Reading

• Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Need for the Holy Spirit – Francis Chan – What a solid book. I’m only about halfway done, and I almost feel like I’m getting punched in the face while I’m reading it…in a good way. I’m really liking Francis Chan lately; see below.
• A Million Miles in a Thousand Years – Donald Miller – You would be foolish to not buy this book. I finished it at an astonishing pace—I could not put it down. Having read it, I now want to save the world. No big deal.

Listening

• Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast and North Point Community Church Podcast (iTunes links) – Some awesome teaching. But you already knew that.
• Cornerstone Simi Audio Podcast (iTunes Link) – The only thing better than Francis Chan’s books: his sermons. What a passion for God.
• Everything is Different – Shane and Shane – What an awesome CD. Another home run for the Shanes.

Watching

• American Violet – Just watched this movie yesterday. It’s a true story that you probably remember from the news about a woman who was unjustly arrested. I don’t recommend watching it if you are looking to be in a great mood afterwards, but talk about a challenging movie.

I have a ton more, and I considered adding in some blogs I’ve been enjoying lately, too, but I figure you’ve got some things of your own you’d like to share. Inspire me!

Photo Credit: dtsomp

Ed Young

“The radically rescued should radically rescue.”
“Everyone wants to reach people until you start reaching people.”
“Church work is brutiful.”
“You want to get deep, you begin to rescue. All rescues happen in the deeper water.”

Dave Gibbons

“When there is personal revelation of your weakness, it releases the power of the Holy Spirit.”
“The Lord allows us to go places where we feel cut off from Him so that we can produce a holy seed.”

Chris Seay

“It’s so important that we allow God’s story to intersect our stories.”
“We love the Bible not because it is an object of joy, but because it points us to a relationship with a loving and living God.”
“Too often we read the Scriptures as a set of propositions like it’s someone else’s story.”
“We thrive when we’re on mission, and we whither in anger and dissent and institutionalism.”
“Until we bring the whole gospel to the whole world, we’re missing it.”

John Ortberg

“The invitation of the Bible is to keep dreaming because when we quit dreaming we die.”
“The invitation of Scripture is to quit being obsessed with my little story and to be a part of a bigger story.”
“Die to your own story and make it part of a bigger story.”

Nancy Beach

“The Gospel is a tragedy, it hurts. But it’s also a comedy. It’s got a good ending.”
“There’s a child in each of us even after we have been beaten down, and we persist in knowing that fairy tales happen.”
“Tell your stories as truthfully and as beautifully as you possibly can.”

Stacy Spencer

“Telling your story is not about you trying to tell people about how smart you are, it’s about getting behind Calvary…all you’re supposed to do is tell the story so that people can see Jesus talking through you.”
“Knowing the book is more than necessary, but knowing the God of whom it speaks is more important.”
“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
“You gotta have a Bible in one hand and an iPhone in the other.”

Mike Foster

“We’re censoring our stories when we only think about our success.”
“If we would just allow our canvas of brokenness to be placed in God’s hand, what a beautiful picture He would create.”
“A chapter of our life is not the end of our life.”

Donald Miller

“A story is a character that wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.”
“What’s meaningful in a narrative is meaningful because it’s meaningful in life, and what is fearful in a narrative is fearful because it’s fearful in life.”
“What’s true in story is true in life.”
“Story has an unbelievable power to engage the human brain.”
“There is something a character has to do to make a good story: the character has to sacrifice something on behalf of others.”
“Success doesn’t necessarily tell a very compelling story. You have to do more than succeed. If you win…you could come to the end of your story and have it be a letdown.”
“A character is not who they feel like they are, who they want to be, or who they wish they were. A character in story…is only what they do.”
“If the protagonist doesn’t want something, the story doesn’t work.”
“Conflict is the only way a character changes in a story.”

Think about this for a moment with me. Before Facebook, a birthday would bring lots of cards and phone calls from friends and family. To wish someone a “happy birthday” took effort, and it was received as a sign that the birthday-wish-recipient meant something to the birthday-wish-giver.

Today, however, that’s irrelevant. No one knows when their friends’ birthdays are. Few people have birthdays written on their calendar. No, instead the average person notices the day on their Facebook sidebar that a friend’s birthday is approaching. On that day, they click the name of the lucky person, write “happy birthdaaaaay!!!!” and close their browser.

Comparatively, the latter means a lot less. To be fair, each person probably gets a lot more individual “happy birthday”’s because of Facebook. Many would argue that this method of spreading the news of people’s birthdays is helpful and successful. But—do birthdays celebrated in this way mean anything? And what larger cultural patterns do we see here?

With that, I created a pretty basic theme based off Brian Purkiss’s Whiteboard* theme framework, and I’m pretty proud of it. It’s awfully basic at this point, but it definitely does the job. Here are some of the unique features I’ve included:

• With the functionality of Search Everything and Addicted to Live Search built in, has a powerful live search widget.
• Has special functionality for posts in the “Links” category. Turns the post titles into links to URL specified in a custom field, and it formats them to noticeably differ from other posts.
• Has custom options built in to the Add Post page to allow for specification of the author, source, and even the type of speaker (author, speaker, pastor, etc.). These appear at the bottom of every post. (Unfortunately, they’re not searchable at this point. I’m working on that.)

That’s basically what I’ve got so far. Like I said, it’s pretty simple at this point, but I have some ideas to make it a bit more powerful.

My question is: is there an interest for this? That is, I’m obviously using it (and I like it a lot!), but would it be worth my time to release something like this to the public? Give me your thoughts, and here’s a few screenshots:

*If you’re into Wordpress and developing themes, you really should check this out. It’s basically a blank slate on which to build themes, but it’s got basic functionality built in so that you don’t have to re-type the same code every time.

What a terrible idea.

Why would a website require me to take several extra steps (create an account, probably activate it via email, sign in) to promote their content? If you want your content promoted, make it easy for me to do it. No questions asked.

I’m certainly not angry at them—and I ended up emailing my dad a link to the article without registering for the NYT—I just think they’re missing out on some opportunities.

As a sidenote, why the heck is there no Twitter button? Talk about missed opportunities. Oh well. It could be worse, I suppose.

Lots of developers have created userscripts which add, modify, or delete stuff on Facebook, and I’ve gone ahead and selected some of the better ones. You’ll find several other lists, but the majority of them list multiple scripts that do the same thing. I’ve tried to isolate unique ones, so you could easily install all 11 without having any competing functionality. Also, I’ve tested these on my own, so I’m pretty sure they will all work. Enjoy:

1. Facebook Fixer – This script is first for good reason: if you install no other scripts, install this one. It’s a combination of several other scripts by the same author, and it does a ton! Check it out, I won’t take the time to list all of the many features here.
2. Facebook remove app requests – Adds a button on the Requests page to get rid of all application requests at once.
3. Facebook View Photo in Album – Adds a link on photo pages to albums from users with whom you are not friends (unless, of course, they’ve got privacy settings that would block your access).
4. Facebook – Poke All – Poke better, poke faster. You can thank me later.
5. Facebook Beautifier – Hides application messiness from the News Feed, spammy invites, and ads.
6. Remove Facebook Ads – Hides ads—even the ones AdBlock misses.
7. facebook-multiuser-login – Adds a dropdown to the login page. Great for multi-user computers.
8. Facebook Friends Checker – Checks frequently for newly un-friended friends. (I couldn’t actually get this one to work, although it looks like other people have had success.)
9. Facebook Mass Accept Requests – Adds checkboxes to the requests page, making it easy to accept all requests at once.
10. Facebook to Google Calendar – Allows for a simple export of Facebook events to Google Calendar.
11. Facebook Image Download Helper – Simplifies the use of download managers with photo albums. Works great with DownThemAll!
12. Facebook Highlight Birthdays – Puts a yellow highlight behind today’s birthdays. Simple but helpful.

If you’re looking for more, check out Userscript.org’s list of scripts tagged with “Facebook”.

“MAN! That’s a cool lookin’ [product]! I would love to have that! How much does it cos…ah crap. I don’t really need it. But I want it so bad. Hm. Well, I bet I’d use it to bless people by doing [crap]. Yeah, I would! I can sacrifice $[lots of money] to bless other people!

And there you have it. I am pathetic at justifying my purchases. Often I want to buy the latest thing, but I just don’t have any good reason besides that. For instance, I once justified the purchase of my iMac by telling myself that I would use it to make other people gifts (pitiful, right?). Curious as to how many gifts I’ve made with it? By my count, 4.

But why do we have to justify our purchases? Why can’t we either not buy something or simply take responsibility (read: man up) for the things we purchase.

I read a New York Times article a while back that got me thinking about this topic (I’m pretty sure the title was what really got me thinking—the article was alright). It got me thinking about excuses lots of people make, like that their new iPod will encourage them to exercise more, etc. Why do we do this? This is very strange to me. Talk to me about it.

Image credit: dborman

Here are five of my favorite uses for DropBox:

Web Design

I like to build websites, and I like to do this often. Sometimes I like to do this on my laptop, sometimes my desktop, sometimes somewhere else. With DropBox, all of my work is shared with all of my computers. Furthermore, I use Espresso for all my coding (sidenote: I really like Espresso), and DropBox wonderfully handles my project files, assuring that I see the same screen no matter where I decide to get to work.

Simple File Transfers

This one won’t win any creativity points, but it’s what I use DropBox for most often. Besides syncing back and forth between computers (DropBox’s basic purpose), it’s great for quickly transferring large amounts of data.

For instance, I bought a new laptop some time ago, and I wanted to quickly get my music collection on it. With one simple drag-and-drop (ok two really…one to upload, one to download), it was done. Beautiful.

Sharing

If I’ve got a document or image or something that I need to share with someone else, I would typically upload it to my web server and point the other person to that URL. While that’s pretty basic, it still requires me to open my FTP client, navigate to the right directory, and type out and email the other person the URL. With DropBox, I put the file in question in the Public folder, right-click it, and out pops a public URL.

On-the-Go

When I’m not at one of my computers, I’m still able to access all of my important files. I log in to DropBox’s web interface iPhone client (Update!) and select what I want, and I’ve got it. Forget planning ahead.

Password Synchronization

I use 1Password (which, by the way, you should use, too, and not just because it’s gorgeous). I also use several different computers. I would be a fool to manually add each of those passwords on every computer I use.

Instead, I simply place 1Password’s Keychain file in my DropBox folder, and presto—instant password synchronization.

So there are my favorite DropBox uses. I’d love to hear some other creative ideas, especially since mine weren’t really all that creative.

For the past several weeks my morning routine—after crawling out of bed and draining liquid matter that had amassed overnight—was to jump onto my laptop, read a few blogs of well-known pastors (while simultaneously checking their Twitter updates), seeing what new sermons were available that day, and reading the Bible. Hi, my name is Richard, and I am a church addict.

Usually these pastors share great words of insight regarding leadership and the Christian faith. At times they might even provide steps for dealing with various issues which may arise in one’s life and ministry. Regardless, even though I was able to acquire a great wealth of information, my life remained pretty much the same.

For one of my classes I’m reading through the letter and a commentary about First Corinthians—it’s in the Bible. It was written by a guy named Paul and he, to most Christians, is a superhero: traveling to foreign lands, starting churches in the middle of thriving cities, and debating with some of the most brilliant minds of his day. 

The church in the ancient city of Corinth had more problems than I care to go into. Paul, dealing with these problems from several miles away, comes up with what he thinks to be the best solution: 

I urge you to imitate me.

And so Paul sends one of his most trusted co-workers, Timothy. Paul is confident that the physical presence of Timothy will remind the Corinthians of Paul and will simultaneously help them to navigate their predicaments.

Christianity is something that cannot be learned from a distance, through screens and iPods alone. Sometimes the best way to learn something in life is to have someone close in your life, as in a physically present human being, who models it. What do you think?