Dr. Frank Garlock

This announcement appears on the front page of Majesty Music’s site:

****Dr. Frank Garlock went to Jacmel, Haiti last week to preach for the Missions for Haiti school and church. We have not had any communication from him or the missionaries since the earthquake occurred. Please pray with us that he is unharmed and that he can be a tremendous help and testimony to the Hatian people at this time. God is good and we trust Him.****

Follow the link to the Majesty site for updates.

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fun techno stuff

I thought I might mention a couple of things I have found online recently. The first is something called Readability, which is a button you can add to your browser toolbar. On web-pages that are very busy with all kinds of adds, pics, etc, it will find the relevant story and eliminate all the clutter for you, making it easier to read.

I found out about Readability at a NY Times site, Pogue’s Posts, a blog by one of the NYT technical writers, David Pogue. Mr. Pogue is an interesting writer and covers a wide variety of gizmos and gadgets if that is something you are interested in. The Readability column is here.

Last, this one is kind of … different. I suppose several web-news sites have these kinds of aggregators, but I stumbled across MSNBCs “Weird News” feed a couple of weeks ago. They often come up with hilarious and interesting stories, some of which would make great sermon illustrations, if only one could find the text they go with. Of course, some of what they post is drivel, but I am finding that I am clipping columns for later use fairly regularly. With Readability of course!

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a reminder of God’s blessing

An interview in the New York Times reminds me of a great blessing from God our family received a little over six years ago.

I have written about this before, but I just want to again give praise to the Lord for the gifts he gives to men.

Six and a half years ago, my wife began to lose weight rapidly and was bruising easily. She was becoming more and more exhausted each day. (She was enjoying the weight loss part!) We called our doctor who immediately got the ball rolling in our health care system, no small feat. The diagnosis was Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML). Our hematologist was very upbeat, however. The new therapy for this disease was a drug called Gleevec, just approved for CML treatment two years previously. We haven’t looked back. Gleevec has very minimal side-effects (we haven’t really noticed any). My wife is living a normal life.

The interview with Bryan Druker, the doctor in charge of developing Gleevec reminded me of how close my dear wife was to death’s door:

The problem [with a CML diagnosis] was that the death rate in the first year was 25 to 50 percent.

The life expectancy after diagnosis before Gleevec was about 5 years. And the previous treatments would make those years pretty miserable.

This interview gives you a bit of insight into the persistence and dedication of Dr. Druker in bringing Gleevec into production. It is now approved for ten different forms of cancer, but is most successful with CML, I believe.

My wife takes a couple of little orange pills every morning and God has given her six and a half years of normal life. If there is a drawback, as I was commenting to a friend, is that she would have been in heaven these last five years or so … instead, she gets to live with me.

Maybe there is a purgatory?

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just an observation…

If a conference is billed as a conference on preaching, why is it that so many of its speakers are obviously reading a prepared manuscript? Jonathan Edwards notwithstanding, it does seem that preaching should at least sound extemporaneous, don’t you think?

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Vandalism Photos

I thought some of our friends outside Victoria might like to see some pictures of the damage done by vandalism to our church property last Friday evening, Oct 2.

This photo is the worst of the damage – our  completely destroyed storage shed:

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More photos are posted here, at our church site.

The damage could have been much worse. We thank the Lord for His protection in this incident. No one was hurt and really, the damage was very minor.

And in the meantime, we had great services this weekend with significant spiritual victories happening in lives. That is the main thing in all of these distresses. And Thanksgiving is next Monday! So Praise the Lord!

c’est finis!

I woke up this morning to the realization I didn’t have to get up and spend all day at the church building painting! Praise the Lord!

Here is the finished product:

Church8

What a blessing to be done!

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monkey music

This link will only be active for a few weeks, I think. But here’s the headline:

Monkeys prefer metal to Mozart

The article says a recent study shows that monkey’s somehow found heavy metal music relaxing. The researchers wrote music specifically for monkeys, imitating the sounds they make in their calls and cries. The conclusion?

The results suggests music is species-specific. It may be used to communicate an emotional state and try to induce that same emotional state in the listener, Snowdon said.

I’m just wanting to know if they played ‘Hey, Hey, it’s the Monkees’ for them?

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woik, woik, woik…

We’ve been a little busy lately. Our church building is badly in need of paint and new gutters. So…

We have decided to attempt the work ourselves. It will save cash. The wear and tear on our inexpert bodies is free!

Here’s a look from the front of our building:

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And me running my saw:

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Our men installing the gutter brackets:

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The beginnings of a new colour scheme:

Church2 We’ve been putting in many hours each day. Not my normal sort of activity so I am pretty weary. No energy for arguing on blogs!

That’s probably a good thing!

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you so wise

I don’t know if you are aware that blogs get spam too. I have a plug-in on ours that catches almost all of it. Moderation of course gets the rest. Some of them are obscene, but this one caught my eye:

You know so many interesting infomation. You might be very wise. I like such people. Don’t top writing.

A very discerning spammer! My sentiments exactly! I don’t think I can top that one! (I probably could spell it better, though…)

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is tetreau ghosting for dave?

Note this line taken from a new rating system explained here:

FINO—fundamenalist in name only

This can only mean one thing…

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