fundamentalism by blunt instrument
By that I mean, marriage is a good idea. I am always mindful of this on those occasions when my wife and I are apart for a significant length of time, like more than a few hours.
Yesterday and today she was off driving our sons to Sea-Tac for their trek back to school. They’ll probably make it back before she gets home, but that is a fact of Island life.
In her absence… well, things haven’t fallen apart, but let’s just say her presence is sorely missed…
We have had our own website for our church for the last year. My purpose in setting it up was to provide an easy way for our people to get audio copies of messages they wanted and to refer their friends and acquaintances to our site as well. As such, our site has been a success and a blessing to our ministry.
An unexpected but welcome additional blessing has been the world-wide attention we have received as well. I don’t mean to imply that we have received attention in great numbers! Our site gets very low traffic. But it is interesting to read sitemeter and see where our traffic comes from and why. Our own people are one thing, but we have gotten interest from many countries around the world.
This last week, we had two visits from China. I was particularly interested to see that one visitor spent almost 13 minutes on the site. Both of these visitors used a similar search to reach us, and it is this type of search that I have noticed increasing our traffic since last fall.
What is our ‘big’ attention getter?
And over it is, now, in our church. We complete our Christmas series a couple of Sunday’s late. It is fitting in a way as it is our last day with our boys as they head back to school tomorrow. We will enter another season of mourning without our lads in our household.
Nevertheless, we had a good day in the Lord’s house today and a great four weeks with the boys home.
Our Christmas season is over as we look to the promise of the one who authenticates the Scriptures as true and reveals himself to be the bright hope of Scripture promise as the light of the bright and morning star.
The next look at the Pilgrim’s Progress finds Mercy and Christiana admitted into the way of salvation at the Wicket Gate. They learn a valuable lesson on prayer as they set out on their journey from that place.
My son Rory, on his last day home for Christmas vacation gives us a good message from James on enduring trials and enduring faith. He closed with a clear call to the lost to join in the walk of faith that wholly depends on Christ alone for salvation.
In Canada today, the biggest news story of the day is the arrest of two Mormons for polygamy. These men are the heads of rival factions among a Mormon sect in Bountiful, BC. There have been numerous stories about these men, their wives, their children, their feud, and on and on over the last few years. With the arrest of two of the principles yesterday, our news media has exploded with stories and opinion articles concerning the matter.
Google.ca news says there are 599 related articles when I clicked on this link, but once you arrive at the link, it says 89 related articles. I am not quite sure how that works, but the story is undeniably a big story here in Canada and is surely of interest around the world, especially in places where there are many Mormons.
One of the men arrested yesterday was on TV today claiming religious persecution. Now… is this religious persecution, or is this a matter of good governance?
Our own Victoria, BC’s ABEBooks.com posts a list of the most expensive sales through their system in 2008. The list is very interesting. The number one sale was for $17,216 for Etudes à l’Eau-Forte by Francis Seymour Haden. Number two was $13,000 for L’Abou Naddara, Journal Arabe Illustre (1878-1884) by James Sanua.
Now, what do you think was number three? Would you believe Harry Potter?
A couple of recent articles of interest to me… on science and a startling admission, on culture, politics, Steynism, and a parallel in church circles, and on an interview with an alleged Anglican ‘conservative’.
We are behind the times in giving you our sermon summaries. This Christmas, we have been totally discombobulated by our weather. We still have close to a foot of snow lying around in our yard, though the roads are now clear… with spots of black ice in the mornings. We just don’t get weather like this here… usually.
I am also trying to install a new sermon publication plugin for our church site. It looks quite exciting, but we have something set wrong so it isn’t working yet. I spent a lot of time last week trying to get it working and didn’t publish last week’s summaries here as a result.
You can find the last two weeks of messages at these links:
12/28/08
1/4/09
We are continuing our Christmas series in the AM messages, inspired by the Moravian star. The 12/28 message has to do with Balaam’s prophecy of the star in Jacob. Today we look at the wise men, very likely knowledgeable of Balaam, his prophecy, and some of the other OT prophecies. Their lives were changed by seeking Christ.
The Moravian mission story was a prequel, leading up to our showing of First Fruits, a docu-drama of the first Moravian mission and the beginning of Protestant missions. It is a remarkable story. Today, we return to our study of Pilgrim’s Progress.
The afternoons were messages from my sons, first on the theme of finding complete satisfaction in Christ by Number One Son, Dunky-boy, and then this week on three truths revealed concerning forgiveness in Mt 18 by Number Two Son, Rory-O.
From CTV:
And as it turns out, the global economy wasn’t the only thing to slow down in 2008, so too did the Earth’s rotation.
Perhaps you’ve heard already, but 2008 is the longest year in more than a decade. We had a leap day in February and a leap second last night. Did you notice?
More to the point… did you use your extra time well?
The latest audio from the GBCvic
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