The Siberian Grinder

When I was a kid here in Florida, an approaching tropical storm would barely cause any concern. It usually meant a couple of gray days and a lot of rain. But, now, after the crazy storms of ‘04, most folks take all the precautions. The school is out, many local events are canceled today, and gas stations are running out of 83 and 89 octane gasoline. We have our supplies and I am working from home today. Hopefully, there won’t be much flooding.

But not everyone is taking this storm seriously. Check out this clip of a guy, a kite, Tropical Storm Fay, and a really bad idea.

(Update: Youtube pulled the video because of a copyright claim. You can click here to view the clip that I had embedded.)

Here begins my daily posting. And today is a fit day to begin. It is the first day of school, i.e., the first day that I heard 50 school buses fire up their engines at 5AM just a few meters from my house.  The plan is that each weekday I will be posting something in this space: a quote, a lame attempt at wit, an original article, a book review, etc.. Every once in a while it might even be worth reading.

The following entry comes from John Piper’s A Godward Life and confirms (or agrees with, at least) an observation that I have made verbally several times: that sign gifts often draw unstable Christians. I found this to be especially true in Siberia. And while I do not share Piper’s openness in terms of Continuation, his thoughts here are excellent. Without further ado, here is Piper:

Read the rest of this entry »

We took the kids to the zoo last week. Right above an entrace to the insect zoo, we spied a sign. It read:

If all of the humans disappeared from the earth, the earth would return to its prehistoric environmental equilibrium. If the insect world disappeared, the ecosystem would completely collapse.

Sans man, the world would return to prehistoric environmental equilibrium? Get a life! It would be a world overrun with cockroaches.

Steve Mooradian said that this five-minute clip by Lizzie Palmer ought be required viewing for the entire nation. After watching it, I completely agree.

I have been working on a two-part sermon on Colossians 1.15-23. The manuscript for the first part, which I preached last week is here, and the second part, which I hope to preach tomorrow is here.

In the last 24 hours we have seen a snake, a deadly spider, a nest of mocking bird chicks, several deer, not to mention a few less desirable creatures.

And, last but not least, an armadillo chewed a hole in my trash can (we have the plastic type).

This is a great analogy of the candidates’ differing views - and Obama’s strange logic - on Iraq from Peter Wehner. I just read it over at Justin Taylor’s blog and had to publish it here too.

Assume that your child was ill and had a fever. You took him to the doctor and the primary physician recommended medication. Another doctor, not the primary physician, said medication wasn’t needed and, in fact, it would be counterproductive. The fever continued; in response, the child’s physician increased the dosage of medication (over the objections of the second doctor). The child’s condition continued to worsen, to the point that you took your child to the hospital. Medication was then combined with other interventions, over the strong objections of the second doctor. In fact, the second doctor not only recommended against medication, he felt at this stage the child was a lost cause and it would be a waste to devote much more effort on the child’s behalf.

Slowly, however, the child, because of the increased medication and other interventions, began to improve. In a few days, in fact, he was released from the hospital, with the fever going down. Finally the child got to the point where he was healthy enough that the primary physician said he now envisioned that the child would soon be able to come off the medication, provided we continued to see conditions-based progress. Now imagine if the second doctor declared that because the child would one day be off medication, he had been right all along. Such a claim would be absurd; the child would have gotten worse, and probably would have died, if the secondary doctor’s recommendation had been followed. The child’s recovery demonstrated why the secondary doctor’s judgment was deeply and dangerous flawed rather than right.

From The Supremacy of God in Preaching by John Piper:

“…The true usefulness of preaching will not be known to us until all the fruit on all the branches on all the trees that have sprung up from all the seeds we’ve ever sown have fully ripened in the sunshine of eternity.”

Some days are just full of surprises. This evening, after an already eventful day, Hannah slipped from a chair and fractured her arm. We had a room full of guests, but none of us were close enough to catch her. Doctors casted her up, but decided that she needs surgery in the morning. So please pray for our little Hannah. The procedure is scheduled for 9AM, under general anesthesia. Here is a picture we took today, before she broke anything.

Update (7/18/08, 1:30PM): In a very pleasant surprise, Hannah’s doctors decided this morning that her arm did not require surgery. So they simply put a full length cast on her arm. She actually enjoyed the morning, especially being able to watch Dora. Our thanks to everyone who prayed!

I got out of bed early to get a jump on the day and to spend some extra time studying Hebrews 3. Before I got into the text, I made some coffee to help clear my brain and enhance concentration. Then I sat down at my desk armed with a steamy cup of java and noticed that some papers on the desktop needed a little organizing, and I did that first so that there would be no distractions. Since most of my study books are in the Logos format - and I intended to do some serious digging - I clicked on the computer. Outlook is right there and, just to get it out of the way, I decided to check my email; found an important one and wrote a quick reply. Then, mostly out of habit, I decided to check the status of the blog and noticed a new version of Wordpress. I decided to quickly upgrade while Logos was loading up. Ran into a glitch during the upgrade, and had to do a few tweaks and then reinstall to get the site up again. Then another email popped up, and I needed to answer it - or I’d be thinking about that instead of devos. Since the email referred to information in a voice mail, I needed to quickly check my v-mail box. I had to listen to four messages to get to the one I needed.

Then I was ready to get down to business with Hebrews. And then the kids began waking up, so I gave up and decided to write this post.