In the future, I will lay more of my cards on the table as to what I think of this passage. For now, let me draw your attention to this:

That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. (1 Cor 11:30)

Paul saw a connection between the Corinthians’ relationship to the Lord’s Supper and the report of many Corinthians being weak, sick, and some dying prematurely.

For the sake of cooking your noodle, regardless of what they were doing with the Lord’s Supper, doesn’t it follow that if the Corinthians were properly relating to the Lord’s Supper (whatever that means) that the opposite would be true, that there would not be so much weakness, sickness, and premature death?

To put it another way, wouldn’t they experience strength (the opposite of weakness), health (the opposite of sickness), and long life (the opposite of a premature death)?

So, thanks for indulging me with your own time and brainpower.

Some people say that the more sources you pull from, the more well-rounded you are. I agree to a point (particularly when it comes to modern news media), but there’s also a serious problem of not giving enough time to let a single author’s message soak into your thinking. When you stop short of that point, you never achieve significant change in your thought processes. Martin Luther had something wise to say about this in John Piper’s Martin Luther: Lessons From His Life and Labor.

A student who does not want his labor wasted must so read and reread some good writer that the author is changed, as it were, into his flesh and blood. For a great variety of reading confuses and does not teach. It makes the student like a man who dwells everywhere and, therefore, nowhere in particular. Just as we do not daily enjoy the society of every one of our friends but only that of a chosen few, so it should also be in our studying.

Is a person “well-read” when he reads from a variety of authors, or when he reads really good authors with a really high comprehension? Luther argues that we are best served when we take the time to dwell on a person’s work enough so that we absorb that person’s thinking into our own. Reading from multiple sources without spending enough time with that author is more harmful than good because of its tendency to confuse us.

He continues…

The number of theological books should be reduced, and a selection should be made of the best of them; for many books do not make men learned, nor does much reading. But reading something good, and reading it frequently, however little it may be, is the practice that makes men learned in the Scripture and makes them pious besides.

The key is reading something good and reading it frequently, even in small amounts.

For anyone who knows me, my twenties were dominated by my attempt to understand the writings of John Piper. I dabbled in Jonathan Edwards and John Owen, but Piper was the main source I read and re-read. You could rarely find me without one of his books in my backpack.

Interestingly, seminary brought me back to the bad habit of reading from a multiplicity of authors, and I consider my seminary years — honestly — as a general step backwards in my ability to comprehend and grow in my thinking. Not trying to play a blame game, but I know that I don’t do well when taking multiple topics in a semester (especially the amounts we had to at the graduate level); I never really have. Maybe Luther has something to say about the format we use for pastoral education?

In my thirties, there have been two authors that I am spending much of my time trying to understand. The first is Joseph Prince. I have not bought fully into his vision, but I am trying to understand his perspective. He has truly been a surprise out of nowhere in my life, mainly because he taps into a revelation of grace I received back in 2001 that I’ve never felt like I could quite explain.

The other has been inspired by my fascination with Prince, and he is the apostle Paul. I’ve realized that I have never really taken the time to understand Paul and his epistles in the same way that I tried to understand Piper and his books/sermons. Perhaps that’s because I have subconsciously treated any part of the Bible as reading from the same author? Each author had an angle and a perspective, and Paul was given the gospel for the sake of the Gentiles. Since that’s me, I think it’s best for me to saturate myself with his perspective.

This has made me want to understand Paul by reading Romans through Hebrews, repeatedly. Whether Hebrews was written by Paul or not, it sounds an awful lot like him. I’ll write another post about how I’m choosing to do this.

What about you? Is there any author that you’ve unintentionally or intentionally “taken into yourself”?

• 4/4 time
• 64 tempo
• One set of Am, Em, G, D
• One set of Am, Cmaj7, G, D

Instructions

Play both sets of chords. Repeat as desired. Improv as needed.

You’re welcome.

• Christianity
• Giving
• Parenting
• Apple, Inc.
• Music
• Low-carb eating
• Libertarian/Conservative politics
• Video games (particular emphasis on Nintendo)

There’s a LOT I could put under the umbrella of “Christianity”, and it will probably dominate my blog.

But I’ll also be linking to stories that interest me, adding a teaser paragraph or two. I think it’s best to re-link and give credit to the original authors and get you to visit their website instead of posting a lot of their work on my own blog. It seems like cheating otherwise.

Why buy the GameCube version if I already had the Wii one?

The main reason is the Wii version got “flipped”. What’s to the left on the GameCube version is on the right on the Wii version. Why? According to IGN’s Miyamoto Talks Righty Link, the lead designers thought that most people who will swing their Wiimote with their right hand would feel funny seeing Link, a southpaw, swinging his sword with his left hand.

Instead of just fixing the Link model, they just flipped the whole freakin’ world.

I prefer the GameCube layout because the map follows The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Lake Hylia is in the WEST, the Desert Colossus is to the WEST, Kakariko village is to the EAST. In the Wii version, that’s all reversed and it’s very confusing.

The only problem now is that I got kinda used to the disoriented feeling I had when initially playing the Wii version. When I play the GameCube version, while I can now tell my brain that it’s just like the Ocarina layout, I feel the same way I did when I used to work for Super Target. There was a store across town that had the exact same layout as mine but it was reversed. I worked there a week for training and I have since referred to that Super Target as “Bizarro Target“. In other words, I got fairly used to the disorientation from the Wii version, and now playing the GameCube version is a double-whammy of dizziness.

IGN’s video review didn’t help, either, giving the impression that because of the Wiimote, you can swing your sword while running. But you can do the same thing on GameCube.

Overall, I’m much preferring the GameCube version. If you haven’t played and are thinking about it, I’d recommend the GameCube version because it’s

1. cheaper,
2. the controls are tighter (the Wii version just feels loose), and
3. it follows other Zelda games you may have already played.

Now, I hope that Skyward Sword improves, because I’m still terribly fond of the traditional controller for Zelda.

• the baseball player Albert Pujols getting $254 million dollars over the course of ten years for signing with the Los Angeles Angels, and
• the fact that 25,000 people die every day of starvation.

That’s the reality of the world we live in. It can’t help but make you feel sad.

However, what do you do with that information? What’s the solution? Would Pujols only making $100,000 a year change the other side of the equation?

There’s at least one thing the Bible is clear about: if you’re generous with the poor, you will have more to give.

Whoever despises his neighbor is a sinner, but blessed is he who is generous to the poor. (Prov 14:21)

What does “blessed” mean?

Whoever is generous to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will repay him for his deed. (Prov. 19:17)

The truth of the matter is, if the disparity between the rich and needy bothers you, the solution is to be generous yourself and trust God to multiply what you give back to you so that you can keep being generous.

“Yeah, but I don’t make $25m a year!”

Fine. Start where you are. And trust God to be true to His word.

He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God. (2 Cor 9:10-11)

God will not just pay you back for what you do to make things even. He’ll pay you back WITH INTEREST. In fact, in my own experience, I’ve seen as low as 150% return on my generosity and as high as (I’m not joking) a 10,000% return.

So, a built-in mechanism for wealth creation and generosity is: give that it may be given to you. Not by the person you give to (though the joy is enough payback in itself!), but by your Heavenly Father who sees what you do in secret. He’s not a bad manager; if you put His interests first, it’s amazing how generously He will pay you back in this life, and that’s not even mentioning the life to come.

Who knows? Maybe the more your own generosity is multiplied, the more that 25,000 could be lowered?

There are so many things right with the way he blogs that I’ve always found easy to follow.

So, I’ll be shamelessly borrowing some of the structure of his blog, though my fields of interest will be different.

I will be blogging again. Now that seminary is pretty much done, my brain has been freed to pursue topics of interest I had to put aside for a while.

So look out. Here comes Rob.

I wanted to merge a couple of the calendars on MobileMe together, and I discovered that the simple method of going into iCal, exporting the calendar to the desktop, and re-importing it into the MobileMe calendar of my choosing resulted in some sort of very annoying permissions error that pops up for one of Every. Single. Event. in your entire calendar. Not to mention, the result is that none of your imported events are written to the new calendar.

But I found a workaround!

What you need:

• A Mac running Snow Leopard
• An iOS device running iOS 4.x
• MobileMe calendar upgraded to the new calendar system

Here’s what I did:

1. In iCal, I selected a calendar I wished to be used in the merge and selected File > Export… > Export… and stored it on my desktop (or wherever you prefer). I did the same for all calendars I wished to merge.
2. I then created a local calendar by going to File > New Calendar > On My Mac. I named it “Merge”.
3. Next, I went to File > Import… > Import… and imported each calendar, one by one. I was prompted with a screen that asked me which calendar I wanted to add the events to. I chose the “Merge” one I created in step 2. I now had a local calendar called “Merge” that contained the events from all the calendars I wished to merge. It would be awesome if the next step was simply “Drag calendar into MobileMe calendars,” but alas, no such luck.
4. I plugged in my iOS device, launched iTunes, and went to the “Info” sync section of my iOS device.
5. I turned on “Sync iCal Calendars” and synced only the “Merge” calendar. Because I wanted all of my events, I made sure that “Do not sync events more than X days” was unchecked.
6. After performing a sync, my iOS device now had my MobileMe calendars and a calendar called “Merge” that is “On my [iOS Device Name]“. Almost there!
7. I went into my MobileMe account in Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars and disabled my MobileMe calendar. I was prompted with what I wanted to do with my calendars, and I chose “Delete from my iPad.” After all, the truth is in the cloud, right?
8. I immediately re-enabled calendar sync, and was asked if I wanted to merge my calendars with MobileMe. I said yes, launched the Calendar.app, and happily saw that my “Merge” calendar was alongside all of my other MobileMe calendars.
9. Back in iCal, I deleted the individual calendars that I merged and renamed “Merge” to the name I wanted. Voila?

Basically, iCal does not currently support importing .ics files to MobileMe, but iOS does. So, we get everything imported locally to the iOS device and then get it to perform a merge. This effectively imports your local calendar onto MobileMe.

Only a few days left of this semester….

From Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 4.

How all occasions do inform against me
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event—
A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward—I do not know
Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do,’
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me.
Witness this army, of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d,
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!