Wordless Wednesday: 100th Post!

I know it’s supposed to be wordless but I couldn’t help myself: I also passed 1000 views today too! (at this server) Here’s to the next 100 posts!

Top Three Tuesday: Marketing

Over the next four weeks you are going to see some of the most spectacular marketing you will ever lay eyes on.  In a season where economic uncertainty is so prevalent, an easy sell is going to be as hard to find as a three legged ballerina.  Our family is looking for a digital camera this Christmas and we are going to be white knuckled penny pinching cheap about it thank-you very much.  I won’t buy it unless it is a spectacularly good deal.  Let’s just say that if the sales person isn’t crying, I won’t be happy.  So…

Top Three Examples of Over Achieving Marketing
(or selling a marginal product extremely well)

3. Lime Flavoured Anything
When did everything start coming in lime flavour? How did this happen? There must be some incredibly hard-working lime sales guy out there. He’s got people putting lime in everything! You can hardly buy nacho chips anymore without lime.

Lime Beer Whatever.

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Check The Wounds Yo

From the Greek home -work this week: John 20: 19-23. The Sunday after Jesus was crucified John says the disciples got together after the first ‘weekday’ after this horrible weekend.  The doors are ‘already locked’  (strong emphasis).  They didn’t lock after everyone got there.  They were locked at the start; people were cautiously added one by one and the door was immediately locked after each one.  While they were all just sitting there Jesus ’stood in their midst’ (past tense) and then says (present tense) “Peace”.  The most common Hebrew greeting, said in coming and going was, ‘Shalom’ which means ‘Peace’.

It’s subtle, but the change in tenses here implies a stunned silence.  He stood right in the middle of  the group ….  and then he says, “Hi guys.”

In Greek there is a figure of speech that goes (literally)  “show your hand” and what it means is, show your influence or show your power.  If I have four little boys who aren’t listening to me, I may need to ’show my hand’ and demonstrate ‘everyone needs to listen to Dad!’

Here in John 20: 20 John uses a pun when he says, “… he showed them his hands and his side”.  Jesus literally showed them the marks on his hands (yes it was me on that cross) and his side (yes, the fact that I am alive is a miracle) but he also, in a figurative sense was showing them His power.  I have power over death.  I have power over life.  I can raise dead people like Lazarus and I can do it to myself too.

I love studing Greek.

Your God is Too Small

Have you ever noticed that the most outwardly ‘religious’ people in the world have the most anemic gods?  In the news last week I saw an ultrasound photo taken of a woman’s womb.  “Is Jesus in the picture”, a reporter asks?

Of course he’s in the picture! How do you think its even possible for a new life to begin like this? Jesus is indelibly in every ultrasound photo that has ever been taken. The idea that a baby can begin life in his/her mother’s womb and be born safely is impossible but for the grace of God. A human life is beginning before your eyes and you are marveling at the incomprehensible noise coming from the wall of this woman’s uterus. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.

The second image that caught my eye this week was one that was so blasphemous it was almost funny. Read more »

Wordless Wednesday: 4th Picture Challenge

Click here to find out what “4th Picture Tag” is. Here is mine. This is from my picture directory, the fourth directory (2000), the fourth subdirectory (June (06) - 2000), the fourth picture (Grandma and Jacob).

I know it’s supposed to be wordless but I have to say I love this picture.  My Mom holding my 11 pounder.  We called him ‘Thumper’ back then.  He used to take dumps that weighed the same as kids his age.

Top Thr33 Tuesday

photo by Martin Cann

Lots of homework lately.  I don’t have time to do anything but write papers.  I had a great weekend a couple of weeks ago (Oct. 31 - Nov. 2) at the Williams’ estate on Lake Joseph with 12 friends.  We enjoyed a great deal of fellowship and played a game of cards or two.

photo by Martin Cann

photo by Brent Williams

photo by Brent Williams

Here they are…the Top Three Nicknames from the Weekend. (Don’t make me explain ‘em)

photo by Martin Cann

3.  The Preach

2.  Jim, ‘the closer’ Whitfield (just ask Tim about that one)

and the number one new nickname after the weekend…….

photo by Brent Williams

1.  Brokeback Burrows

photo by Martin Cann

Right-Brain Bible Study

At my church we have been doing a midweek Bible study called ‘Total Immersion Bible Study’.  Our focus is the book of Philippians and rather than zoom in and obsess over one word or perhaps two we are backing out and looking at the whole book all at once.

It came as a surprise to me that you can read the entire book in about 11 minutes, at a reasonable pace.  Some amazing insights come when you hear the whole thing all at once.  Paul has some basic themes that he keeps coming back to in this letter but you miss them when you only read one sentence or two at a time.  You miss the forest for the trees.  This was after all, a letter from Paul thanking this group of Christians for their support.  When was the last time you read a thank-you card sentence by sentence and then referred to study guides or dictionaries?

We are experimenting with some on-line class options and are posting recordings of the classes on the Tintern church website so that people at home (or at a distiance) can pull up a chair and join us each week.  Click hereto download a class recording or check out the handouts.  I hope to get the podcasting going by the end of the month.

Last night we looked at word clouds using a great website called http://www.wordle.net/  On this you can enter some text and then the computer creates a composite image of the words you have entered.  More frequent words appear larger and less frequent words appear smaller.  After you take out the common English words (and, if, of, and so on) you get an interesting insight into the book as a whole.  When you enter the entire book of Philippians here are some examples of what you get:

On a related note, I finished reading A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink this week; it is a book about how important right brain (holistic) thinking is.  Left-brain thinking is logical, linear, analytical, organized.  Right-brain thinking is intuitive, all at once, creative, thinking.  You follow directions with your Left-brain, you recognize your mother with your Right-brain.  Bible study (at least in my fellowship) has long been a Left-brain practice.  Bible verses were pulled apart, dissected, and analysed in Bible class but not much time was ever spent looking at the whole picture.  Just like reading the whole book gives your Left-brain a look at the whole book, looking at these word clouds above lets your Right-brain see the whole book in one shot.  If you clear your mind (and still your Left-brain) you can get insight into some of the main points of the whole book.

One thing that is immediately obvious is how often the word Christ appears.  We had an interesting discussion of how key that word is.  Paul, reflecting the joy that was his, made it clear that joy is a product of being ‘in Christ’, hope comes from knowing Christ and so on.  It was an interesting discussion and we will be referring to these clouds again.  You are welcome to join us each week.  Download the class and follow along.

Wordless Wednesday: What If Starbucks Marketed Like The Church?

Top Three Tuesday: Mrs. Zila Stories

Tracey, Linde, and Julie in December of 1988

Julie and I are remembering Linde Zila this week.  She died last Thursday and her Funeral was yesterday.  She became the Girl’s Dorm Supervisor in September 1987, at the same time that Julie came to Great Lakes for the first time.  She was a lady that was so wonderful she had to be experienced to be believed.  You always say about people at their funerals that they were “nice to everyone.  never complained, always thought the best of people, always gave them the benefit of a doubt”  but that is so true of Linde.  She was courage and grace and class, dignity, and love, all rolled into one.

I read recently that Love is “ascribing worth to someone else at your own expense”.  Linde was always loving people.  This week, Top Three Memories of Linde Zila (and these were just what Julie and I came up with in about 10 minutes).

1. Just after midnight, during the winter of 1988, two guys from town climbed onto the roof of the Girl’s dorm and cut through a screen and entered through a second floor window.  They snuck downstairs and came into Julie’s room.  Julie’s roommate Bev woke up and carried on a partially conscious conversation with one of the intruders.  His name was Bob, and he was visiting. The moment he left the room Bev, jumped down of the top bunk and through a throttled shout, called Julie until she woke up.

“Julie! Julie!  There was a man in the room, right there!”, she hissed.

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Reading Very, Very Old Books

I am currently a student at McMaster Divinity College studying for a Master’s Degree of Divinity.  I sometimes get people asking me how school is going and I say, “Good, its going good; lots of reading, but I enjoy it.”  Sometimes though, I can’t help myself…  I just snap and dump all this obscure stuff on them that I am learning. Seriously though, I do get asked stuff about NT Greek so I thought I would write a little bit about the world I am in every Tuesday afternoon.  Let me tell you about a book I am currently reading.  It is the oldest book I have ever read.

Constantine's giant stone head

In A.D. 325 Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity and in A.D. 331 he asked a historian named Eusebius to have 50 copies made of the collection of writings that all the Christians were reading at that time (the New Testament). These books had been commonly circulated amongst churches for over 100 years (unlike what Dan Brown would have you believe).  Nobody knows what happened to these 50 books ….

In 1761, an Italian traveller named Vitaliano Donati visited the Monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai peninsula in Egypt.  He wrote in his diary about seeing a beautiful, ancient copy of the Bible written in Greek with four columns and rounded letters written on thin sheets.  More than 80 years later a famous Bible Scholar named Constantin von Tischendorf from Germany visited the Monastery and noticed some sheets in the garbage.  He immediately recognized them as ancient copies of the Old Testament translated into Greek.

He saved 43 pages out of the garbage and after repeated attempts, finally acquired a collection of pages (in 1861) that make up the entire New Testament and most of the Old Testament.  This collection is called the Codex Sinaiticus (Codex is Latin for book).  It is likely the oldest complete New Testament in the world.  It is breathtakingly well maintained in spite of being over 1 600 years old!

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