Last night, our youth group’s high school minister, Chadd, gave a fantastic talk. It was a little bit about selfishness, a little bit about materialism, and a lot about being busy. He used a fantastic illustration by Rob Bell, which I paraphrase here.

Rob was at the beach with his kids. The kids were collecting fistfulls of small shells and shell fragments, visually stimulating, but completely worthless. Then, they saw, floating on the waves, a large star fish, a real prize. He son ran out into the waves to collect it, but came back without it. When Rob asked his son why he had not retrieved the treasure, he replied, “I couldn’t. My hands were full of shells.”

How many times do we miss out on opportunites to do amazing things, to serve God, to change the world, because we are clinging so tightly to the mundane “stuff” in our lives.

Let that one sink in.

Who needs all those freaky telekinetic weirdos. I prefer a more hands on approach… er… spoon-on approach.

I can bend minds with my spoon.

Due to weather related delays (and the fact that I started after business hours), Friday’s video is being posted on Saturday.

It seems my silly little video from last Friday was a huge success. It was just something I threw together on a whim. I even worried that it was too weird. But now I’m getting comments and emails from folks I don’t know or folks I haven’t had contact with in years. They all love it. Tammy’s probably watched it five or six times now. Just last night I heard her laughing in the office and found her watching it again. This is weird.

So now it’s Thursday and I’m wondering, is there any way I could follow up that success with another Friday vlog or will I just fall on my face.

See, now I understand why some people fear success more than they fear failure.

As Katie kindly pointed out:

Twitter: “God IS good. Check my blog on Monday to find out why.”
Trinity, today is Tuesday, and I still don’t know why.

And, yes, it’s now Wednesday. Sorry. (And thanks for calling me by the name only my mother uses, Katerz. Sheesh.)

Anyway. I made that tweet from my cell phone during church. Yes, yes, I know. You children are not allowed to text during church, so do as I say not as I do.

Here’s the story.  Think back to Sunday, August 31st. Hurricane Gustav was bearing down on New Orleans, where our church has gone twice over the last two years to help rebuild. Our church supports a missionary and church planter in India and the previous week militant Hindus had killed one of their pastors, destroyed a church and burned down dozens of homes belonging to Christian church members. Also a high schooler who’s family had formerly attended our church was hit by a drunk driver the preceding Friday and was in a coma with a brain injury. (That one hit much closer to home.)

Our pastor asked all the men of the church to come down to the alter and join in prayer. We prayed for God’s protection over New Orleans, restoration in India, and healing for the boy. It was pretty moving.

At the end of that same church service, someone burst into the church and ran down to the alter to tell Pastor Dennis that the boy had come out of the coma and was asking to go home.

Last Sunday, (September 7th) we got further updates:

Obviously, Gustav landed with a whimper and all our friends in New Orleans were spared.

Not only had the boy come out of the coma, but he was able to go home a few days later. He still has some work to do to recover his short term memory, but he’s way ahead of the game. (Tammy and I can testify to that!) On that same day, within a few hours of our prayer, three other patients on the same floor awoke from their comas, one of which had been in a coma for months and was expected to be a vegetable.

In India, the local and national governments had officially condemned the persecution of the Christians and sent in aid to rebuild the destroyed homes. The Indian Supreme Court went on record saying that all measures would be taken to track down the murderers and hold them to justice. This is completely unprecedented in Hindu majority India.

Wow! You just try and convince me that God doesn’t hear our prayers! I dare ya!

And now, for your surfing pleasure, is this week’s white board quip.

The voices in my head may not be real, but they have some good ideas!

I think the difference between me and a normal person is that, once in a while, I actually implement those ideas.

Threw this together this morning. It’s too dark (North facing windows, too early in the morning, yadda yadda.) and the sound’s not that great, but what do you expect? I’m no Ze Frank.

According to some, rich people should pay more taxes, because they’re rich. Poor people should pay less taxes because they’re poor. And if some stinky old Republican, like GeeDub Bush, cuts taxes, then rich people must be paying less and that’s somehow a bad thing.

Raise taxes! Punish the rich! Rah rah rah!

Ok. Now that the emotional part of the post is over, let’s look at some hard facts.

In 2000, the top 10% of Americans, with regard to income, paid about 67% of all taxes collected by the IRS. That means that 90% of America only contributed 23% of the tax revenue. Wow. So, I guess the rich already are paying more taxes, huh? A lot more.

Oh.

Well, when Bush cut taxes, he only cut taxes for rich people and now poor people are paying more!

Ya think? Well, I hate to tell you, that since the 2001 tax cuts, the ratio has gone the opposite direction. In 2006, the same top 10% of income earners paid over 70% of the tax revenue. Yes, after Bush’s tax cut, the rich are now paying more. Whereas, during the Clinton years, in the mid-90’s, the ratio was around 60/40. So, when Slick Willy was in office, the poor and middle class had twice the tax burden that they have now under Bush’s tax cuts.

Oh.

Please don’t take my word for it. Read it for yourself here.

I’ve never liked labels. I think every person is unique with infinite nuances that make them who they are. But there are times when people can be grouped based on a few of their multitude of attributes.

I am a (Big-C) Conservative. Yeah, I know. Stop the presses. But why? What makes me lean that way? I am a Christian first, true, but there are many Christian liberals. (I work with two.) My parents are conservatives, but poll after poll shows that heritage has little to do with political stance.

I like to think that it’s because I think. I evaluate. I make my stand only after researching the truth. I never make a decision based on emotion or the media or a political speech. You’d think that would be common sense, but the longer I live the more I find out it is extremely rare. I hope and pray that all of my readers are amoung the rare thinkers and not the herds of sheep.

Smart folks like us are offended at the notion that Sarah Palin was chosen as a ploy to lure Hillary voters to the Republican ticket. Seriously, who’s dumb enough to think that Palin and Clinton have anything in common other than the “F” on their driver’s licenses. However, as it turns out, there are millions of people who are that dumb.

There is a blog in my feed list, a Christian blog, written by someone you might normally assume was an intelligent thinker. However, here are some quotes from today’s post.

A month ago I was committed to vote for Obama. Why? For reasons of his biography. For wanting to participate in history. And for the simple fact that I had no compelling reason to vote for McCain.

Exhibit A: Your vote was entirely based on the fact that Obama is black? That’s racisim, people!

When Obama chose the worst of all possible running mates, the “I bet my IQ is higher than your IQ” blowhard who has done nothing except be a lifelong politician, my soft support for Obama weakened to the point where I had just about decided not to vote at all.

Exhibit B: Joe Biden’s hard-core, pro-abortion, pro-gay, pro-tax, anti-gun, uber-liberal policies have no impact on your vote. Instead, the fact that he’s a “lifelong politician” (regardless of what he has or has not accomplished during that life) was almost (but not quite) enough to change your vote. So, if Biden was completely inexperienced (*cough* Obama *cough*) you’d have no problem voting for him, even if he is a pinko-marxist-libral?

When McCain [chose] Palin … I was instantly hooked … She had me when she walked on stage after a simple introduction and gave that endearing one-flapping-arm wave rather than the two arms over the head politician’s gesture.

Exhibit C: So, you’re telling me you your vote for the the most important public office in the world is going to be based on the fact that she waved one hand instead of two?

I’m starting to think that Thomas Hobbes was right. The populous is not smart enough to be trusted with decisions as grave and world-changing as this. God help us all.

Well, that’s pretty cool, but it’s not the chrome I was talking about.

By now, even non-geeks who pay any attention to the news should know that Google has taken another giant step towards ruling the world (or at least the world wide web) by introducing their own web browser, Chrome. They even released a very googlesque comic-book to educate you on why you need it.

There’s all kinds of talk about how this is the next generation of browser. How all other browsers will now have to play catch-up with Google’s Chrome (whereas that role was previously held by Mozilla’s Firefox). How this browser is designed for the internet of the 21st century (while all those old, crusty browsers you had before were so 20th century. Gaww).

As proud as I am of my geekness, I’m usually over-cautious on new stuff. I wanted a PDA so bad in 1999, but I waited. In 2007, I bought a Treo and now I get both the PDA and phone in one. I waited to start using Windows XP until my work PC was retired and I had no choice, thus sparing me from the trials of the pre-SP1 bugs. I still have not move to Vista. Instead, I’ll probably wait for Win08 which should have all the major headaches of Vista fixed.

The way I see it, the people who insist on living on the cutting edge of technology are consistently getting burned by it. Everyone I know who stands in line to get the latest gizmo the instant it’s available ends up frustrated by all the bugs and quirks that eventually get worked out in later versions or patches or service packs. I let the fools rush in to battle and get skewered, then I step over their corpses and fully enjoy the spoils of their pain.

But not this time. Because I make my living on the web (and arguably spend most of my life there) I figured I’d better jump on this early. As I type, the Chrome installer is ticking away, loading up the google-goodness. I’ll let you know if I run into any major hick-ups.

I already like how the installer offers to import all my bookmarks, settings, and even saved passwords from Firefox.