BoldUlysses.com

for something I knew that I would get to keep

The utter joy of BT’s “The Emergency” is infectious. The song is propulsive, driving, leaping, bounding forward with energy and far-ranging sight. Here at work, while listening to it on my earmuff headphones, I briefly turned up the volume while pushing the headphones more snugly over my ears. The bassline and harmonics completely filled my ears. I need to listen to it at that volume more often, and in a place where there isn’t the danger of not being able to hear a summons from another part of the office. Yep.

One thing I appreciate about the pastor of our new church is his humility. He preached an excellent sermon yesterday, beginning a new series in which he’ll be drawing parallels between the life of Joseph and that of Jesus, an entirely appropriate and good thing, since

1. The Bible is first and last about Jesus, and He is the foundation of the entire meta-narrative, and
2. Too often the applications from Joseph’s story are reduced to mere narcissistic moralizing (e.g. “How can you be ‘a Joseph’ today?”), when the whole point of his life was to point to Jesus,

two points which the pastor alluded to in his opening remarks about the sermon series. He moved on by highlighting the correlation between Joseph’s brothers’ response to his dreams and the religious leaders’, His society’s, and by extension our own response to Jesus’ person and teaching. The connections were divided into two categories:

1. The ways in which they/we are condemned by our guilt, and
2. the ways in which they/we are condemned by His glory.

Without rehashing the entire sermon, I was struck by (among other things) how the pastor chose to emphasize his experience of being rightly condemned before a holy God, in the midst of the sermon’s application for the congregation. I don’t recall the specific example or examples he used, and they probably wouldn’t bear repeating here even if I did, but I will say that it was refreshing to have the dose of application, not shoehorned into the text, underscored by the pastor’s reflections from his own life. And all of this in a sermon that could be characterized as a teaching sermon, which can often be devoid of application altogether. I appreciated it very much.

I’ve been revamping the company’s website.  I don’t mind this a bit, since I was the original site’s designer a little over a year ago and I like web design in general.  The owners had a number of requests and comments about the current site, many of them focusing on the usability of the portfolio pages.  So I’ve been busy redesigning that interface.  It’s a fun challenge in usability, trying to balance the look and feel of the site with a design that’s intuitive and simple to use and also communicates clearly.  It’ll all be online soon enough, assuming too many tasks don’t jump ahead of it on the priority list, or I don’t have another setback like I had this afternoon, when I accidentally overwrote a beautifully-crafted CSS file.  If the free utility I downloaded isn’t able to retrieve it from the browser’s cache it’s going to take me a few hours to recreate it.  Sigh.

The inevitable, relentless buildup of DCFC’s "Transatlanticism" is going through my head.

We’re inching closer to deciding on a church.  I swore we’d never be "church shoppers," but it sure feels like that’s what this is.  I wonder if the people we judge unfairly as such are just going through the same ordeals we are in looking for one?  Granted, much of it is self-inflicted, but on the other hand, a lot of it is borne out of a good desire to be cautious before committing, out of respect for the gravity of that commitment.  Much of the waffling, it will be said, is my fault.  I actually committed too quickly to the first church, without taking the full measure of my family’s considerations into account, and then was led entirely too much by my emotions in the ensuing months, going back and forth in my mind between a couple of options.  Diane and the kids didn’t know what to expect from me, and that wasn’t fair to them.  But the good news now is that I think we’re getting more involved with one church in particular, one with rock-solid theology, methodology and a thriving community with lots of families.  They’re hosting an ice cream social this Sunday evening, and we’re planning to attend.  Hopefully we’ll make some new friends.