jonathan stegall

Some time ago, I purchased The Practice of the Presence of God, and haven’t yet gotten around to reading it.

Understand that I have a massive list of books that are sitting around waiting for me to read them, but lately there hasn’t been much time to do so between the freelance work and other things.

Anyway. Recently, I received a free audiobook of The Practice of the Presence of God, and thought to myself, “I should listen to this in my car. I can’t be working while I drive.” So, today I decided to begin listening. The audiobook is slightly less than two hours in length, so it could be finished in a couple of days with my commute. Today, though, I listened to the preface.

I know a little bit about Brother Lawrence, from college and from the linked Wikipedia article, so I was already very excited about listening to this. The preface, though, blew me away. Brother Lawrence, in a summary, was a man who could commune as closely with God while working in the kitchen as he could praying at an altar.

I yearn for this. I yearn to be able to feel closeness with God as I design, or code, or drive, or walk through Wal-Mart. So I look forward to this book, and will post some things on it in the near future.

In light of the project mentioned here, I have been spending a lot of time in the past few weeks thinking about MVC and MVC frameworks. This post indicates that Microsoft will be releasing a new ASP.NET MVC Framework later this year.

I find this exciting. I have not been a fan of ASP.NET, due to the horrible HTML that it generates, and my lack of knowledge about how to separate the various parts of an application to have more control over the HTML. Evidently, this new system will give me that kind of control. I’m totally impressed by that.

As annoying as some of Microsoft’s projects can be with regard to standards and such things, I don’t envy the variety of developers that they have to try to please. They have to try to please the hardcore programmers that don’t care about the front end at all, and they have to try to please the designers who are really picky about the front end. Hopefully, this will help.

From Fake Steve:

Now it is time. You must run. Not because you want to run, but precisely because you don’t want to run. That, Al, is your strongest point. You don’t want it. You don’t need it. You dare now to be yourself. No artificiality, no stiffness, no falseness. You are who you are. And we need you

I started writing this the day our friend’s Nobel Prize was announced, and just hadn’t finished it.

When Al Gore ran for president in 2000, I was a 17 year old senior in high school. I knew enough about politics to know that I didn’t trust them. I knew enough about theology to know that Christianity wasn’t synonymous with the Republican Party, and that secular moral destruction wasn’t synonymous with the Democratic Party either.

That being said, at the time I wasn’t impressed with Al Gore. I thought he lacked passion, or anything to make him remotely interesting. Honestly I didn’t pay enough attention to his actual views on anything to see what they might be. At the time, I lacked the interest to look beyond the abortion issue to see what else was there and worthy of consideration. And, to an extent this was irrelevant since I was 17 and couldn’t vote anyway.

Now, though, he has passion. He has a message and a conviction that he is doing the best he can to get to everyone, and he’s doing it without running for president. Without wanting to run for president. I’ve heard recent interviews with him discussing the issue, and he has such a relaxation. But such a passion when he talks about the issues that he’s concerned about. I respect that. If he ran for president, I’d put him on my short list. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a president who isn’t interested in all the junk that comes along with the political process? Who actually doesn’t want to run for president, but honestly wants to change the world?

As an aside, when I look at politics and sources of news there are a variety of different viewpoints that I like to listen to and consider, and many of them disagree with each other and with me on various issues like global warming, or immigration, or other things. And that’s ok. I’m not looking for people I agree with on everything. I’m looking for people I can trust and respect, and who have passions for things that are important to me. Who agree on the things that are core issues for me.

I’ve been doing a good amount of ranting about false dichotomies and wanting a third choice, and so on, lately. I want to draw attention to this post by Mark Van Steenwyk that reminds us Emergent types that we have our own tendencies that it is wise to keep in our minds.

We should be careful not to draw lines in the sand - even if “they” drew it first. We should always be VERY careful when we use us versus them language - especially within the Body of Christ.

I’m guilty of this.

The emerging church as a whole can be guilty of this and the other points, just like the underground church was guilty before it, and continues to be guilty. I’m sure every other significant change in theology has struggled with this, and humanity is not any better at it than it has been in the past.

The other points in this post all fit various people at various times. I don’t think any of them fit all of us at all times, and don’t think they were intended be seen as such. But in looking for a third way, or a higher way, or a both/and way, or even a neither way, it’s essential to do it with the best possible heart.

We as the church humanity are not good at being told that whatever we were doing or thinking or believing isn’t what we should be doing or thinking or believing anymore. We who want to do the telling have to remember that when someone else tells us, we may not be good at it either. I believe that God is always changing the ways he interacts with humanity. His character is always consistent, but the ways he does things is always changing. There are people who grasp that, and have a passion for being wherever he is. I want to be one of those people.

I wish I could vote in both primaries. In politics, I’m a both/and person. Really, I’m a neither person, but we do have two parties. I don’t care what a person’s affiliation is. I don’t buy into the conservative/liberal divide, because most of the issues that divide the two sides are smokescreens that allow politicians to look like they stand for something.

“At least I didn’t vote for ___. You can trust me.” Or, “At least I tried to stop them passing _____. You can trust me.” And of course, the whole time this is occurring they are passing increased surveillance, and moving toward invading another country that hasn’t done anything, and so on.

In light of this, eventually I have to figure out which primary I want to vote in, and register for that party. I have a lot more hope for a couple of the Democrats, since Ron Paul is constantly ignored by mainstream media types. But then, are the ones that have a chance really trustworthy? Will they really change anything important? Or anything at all, for that matter?

This month, I’ll be in Chicago once. I’ll be arriving on the 23rd, and leaving on the 24th. Work meetings will be occurring most of both days, but as always, leave a comment if you want a coffee or something at night.

Chapter two of This Beautiful Mess covers the idea that Jesus cannot be separated from his kingdom.

We have taken His free salvation insurance like those folks on the hillsides who ate His free lunches. Then we go home. We carry with us a nice Jesus with a cool title. But all the same, we go home king-less.

And here we sit telling Jesus he can be our Savior, but he has no relevance to our lives. He’s not smart enough to understand what we deal with on a daily basis. We evangelicals are so good at this. We want everyone to accept Jesus and take on our beliefs, but we don’t think he is capable of or cares about influencing the world around us through our daily lives. He doesn’t care about war, or the environment, or the poor.

And liberals all too often go the opposite direction. Jesus said a lot of great things, and we should go out and feed the poor and help the sick and maybe even have a revolution and overthrow some corruption, but Jesus doesn’t care how screwed up we are, and isn’t capable of or interested in changing us.

Great book. I can rant about this stuff all day, but again, what am I doing about it? How is it changing me, internally or externally? I need this kind of challenge.

Over the last month or so, I’ve been hurriedly attempting to learn Ruby on Rails for a client project. Essentially, this project has involved too many requirements with too little time. So basically, I’ve been a desperate designer seeking a way to program a site with very specific requirements in as little time as possible, with as low a learning curve as possible.

I know PHP fairly well, but I don’t know any of the MVC frameworks that exist for it (Cake, Symfony, etc.) If time ever allows, or a project dictates that I do so, I may try to learn these, but for this one I thought it was wisest to go ahead and dive headfirst into Rails, and learn it as I go. So, I bought a book. This book teaches Rails through designing a social networking site.

Thus, it covers Models, Views, and Controllers in what I would consider to be significant detail. It covers migrations, database access, relationships, and so on. Toward the end, it covers REST and briefly covers scaffolding. I have heard that scaffolding will not be a part of the next full version of Rails, so I have not used it in my client project. For the most part, though, everything else that I learned was essential to the development of this site.

Observations thus far

Essentially, Rails is amazing. At this point, I’m not ready to be posting code examples, but so many things are happening so much faster and easier than they would in PHP, or .NET; which of course is the reason I’m trying it in the first place.

The slogan in the Rails community is “convention over configuration.” In .NET, and more so in Java from what I hear, one has to configure a lot of things in the initial setup of the application. In Rails, there are conventions built in so that one does not have to do this. I love this. Almost everything I have needed to do so far has a convention built into Rails that one can use to do it. My task has been to learn as much Ruby as possible, and learn where these conventions are built so that I can take advantage of them. Brilliant.

The Rails community

In PHP, there is a vibrant community. There are any number of forums where one can find help for almost any issue. Many times, i have received an error for whatever random reason, copied that error exactly, and pasted it into Google only to find out that others have had the same error, and to learn how to resolve it.

Rails isn’t there yet, or my errors aren’t there yet, but the forums have been a lifesaver. Rails Forum and Ruby Forum are full of people that have been so gracious and willing to help.

Moving forward

As this project continues, and after it’s over especially, I hope to continue learning the best practices for Rails, and to continue diving into Ruby as the programming language that powers Rails. There’s something about being on a deadline that forces me to really start learning things…

In another introduction to the forthcoming series, I want to look at the problem that exists in most conservative and liberal versions of biblical interpretation.

This problem is that we are both putting God into a box. We’re saying, “Ok God, this is what you were saying, and those people who think you’re saying this are wrong. They’re reading it wrong, because this is how they should read it.”

This is a vast simplification of a number of different issues and methods and theories, but I believe that the reason we can’t ever come to a consensus on much of anything is something similar to this root issue.

And this is why people like Brian McLaren, N. T. Wright, and a number of other scholars and writers and so on, are attempting to find a third way of looking at things. We in postmodern, emerging culture, are not as big a fan of the either/or dichotomy as people have been for the last few hundred years. We want both/and. We don’t want conservative or liberal. We want both (or maybe neither). We see this in ministry, politics, spirituality, theology, and any number of other things. This is a good thing, and it’s a bad thing.

The question to be asking isn’t, “Should this change happen?” Either/or was a good thing, and it was a bad thing. The question to be asking is, “What does this mean?”

So, when I speak of “a third way,” with regard to the Bible, that’s what I mean. Both sides are putting God into a box, and both sides need to learn something from the other side. I’ll leave you with an example.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. - John 1:1

Liberals love to use this verse to prove that Jesus is the Word of God, and that the Bible isn’t. Fine. Jesus should be viewed as the Word. But come on. They’re using a prooftext to prove their point, ignoring countless other things in scripture that suggest that scripture is also the Word, which is the same thing they accuse conservatives of doing.

Lest we leave conservatives looking better than they deserve:

Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard. Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD. - Leviticus 19:27-28

Conservatives love to quote the second verse in support of their dislike of tattoos. But, you’ll never see a fundamentalist with peyos (the Jewish sideburn-looking curls).

From your friends at CareerBuilder.com:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNrq7GAxRcc