Taking Worship Seriously

OK, so it’s entirely possible that at the ripe age of 32 I’ve just become an old curmudgeon, but in the past few weeks I’ve had a couple of experiences at church that cause me to wonder just how seriously we take this thing we call Sunday morning worship.

Now, I’ll put some caveats at the front. Yes, I’m going to be talking about Stonebridge. Yes, I expect that there are people from Stonebridge who will read this. Yes, I’m going to ask some questions that will sound critical. So up front let me say this isn’t about any one person, or any one service, or any one topic, but rather it’s about the things I’ve seen, and about the mindset I think it reveals.

Experience #1: two weeks ago we ended the service with a great sermon from James, and started it with a good set of worship songs that were full of the Gospel - solid stuff. But the worship team had barely time to get off the stage, and the music had barely faded, before we were treated to one of the church staff dressed up in a superhero costume - complete with mask and cape and theme music! - to give us an announcement about an upcoming event. Hope you didn’t want time to reflect on what you’d just sung about. You weren’t going to get it.

Experience #2: this morning at church was “Family Sunday”, which means that there was no Sunday School for the kids - the whole family got to sit in church together. Then, after three worship songs, the children’s pastor was tasked with giving the message. First came a pseudo-introduction with a scripted “interruption” to give an announcement about a women’s event. Then came the actual sermon from James, and it felt more like a gimmick than a sermon. There was a very distracting, ever-louder ticking clock in the background (for effect!) and at the end of three short points, during what seemed like a conclusion, the ticking finally stopped, and the pastor cut off the sermon mid-sentence and walked off the stage. And just like that, we were done.

Now yes, I know this morning was an attempt to be dramatic and illustrate the sermon point. But I’m afraid that what people are left remembering this afternoon isn’t the point from James 4, but rather the awkward way everyone sat and looked at each other as the pastor walked off, as my daughter asked “is church over?”. She was confused, too. And yes, Laura, church was over. We ended up spending more time driving to and from church than we did actually in the service this morning.

I fear that experiences like these reveal that we don’t value enough the experience of Sunday worship. Yes, we show value to the Gospel in the songs we sing - but we don’t value them enough to give folks time to meditate on the great riches of God’s grace after singing. Instead, we distract them with superheroes in tights. Yes, we value and encourage the Sunday morning gathering, but then we allow gimmickry to replace Gospel proclamation, and send people home early, wondering “what was that?”.

I remarked to my wife on the way home that, on a spectrum with stodgy and boring but solid on one end, and flashy, cool, and vapid on the other, our current church home is one or two ticks further toward the flashy end than I’m quite comfortable with. Don’t get me wrong - I have great respect for a lot of people there, and have regularly heard the Gospel from the pulpit. But times like these past few weeks leave me wondering if our lip service to the Gospel isn’t quite being backed up with the sort of Sunday morning gravity that it deserves.

Adventures in Home Ownership, Part 17

As my Twitter stream revealed over the weekend, it turned out to be a busy weekend, but not quite in the ways we had anticipated.

Becky has been wishing for a new refrigerator for a while now - something newer, bigger, and, well, if it had ice and water in the door, that’d be awesome. So Friday afternoon someone at work posted a fridge for sale that seemed to fit the bill. Lightly used, newer, 40% bigger than our current one, and yeah, ice and water in the door. At a good price.

So Saturday morning we drove down to take a look at it. The fridge was in great shape, a good deal, but there was one minor issue: the thing was one inch too tall to fit underneath the cabinet in the kitchen. We thought on it for a while, looked at some other refrigerators at Lowe’s and Sears, and realized that anything we ended up getting that was much bigger than our existing fridge would be too tall. So, after looking a bit at the small cabinet over the fridge, we decided to rip it out.

For not being the carpenter/handyman in the family, it came out pretty quickly and easily. I did manage to poke one small hole in the plaster, but it can be patched. I saved all the trim for reuse, and in the end we don’t lose much usable storage space. That was step one.

Step two was to figure out how to move the new-to-use fridge up from Swisher to our place in Hiawatha. I put a plea out on Twitter and Facebook and got a response from a friend who could borrow a truck (thanks, Bridget!). It took checking three places before I found a utility dolly to rent, but finally it all came together and Sunday afternoon we moved in our new refrigerator.

Steps three and four can be given a little more time. Step three is to get the water line hooked up. Hopefully I can get that done today. Step four means we need to get the plaster patched, get the trim put back up, and get things painted. I’ll post a few pictures when I get a chance.

So it wasn’t the way I expected to spend my weekend, but I was able to put some tasks off and it worked out well. Now I just have to get the lawn mowed before we start losing small children in that jungle.

Bullet Points for a Friday #2

  • Slow-ish week turns into busy weekend. Lots of family in town, softball tournament, leading worship. Fun, but busy.
  • Oh, the occasion for all the family visiting: Laura turns 5 on Monday. Hard to believe I’ve been a parent for five years now.
  • No matter how cool the gong is on “The Great Gate of Kiev”, the solo piano version of Pictures at an Exhibition is far and away superior to the orchestrated version.
  • Just when I think my homebrew DVR is all working and I’m ready to blog about it, something else isn’t working quite right. I’ll be installing the Windows 7 Release Candidate tonight.
  • I’ve been flexing my web design muscles again a bit this week and it’s kinda fun.
  • I’m down 7 or so pounds in the #20lbchallenge this month. This weekend’s meal plans will be a challenge to that accomplishment. (Two months to go!)
  • Looks like I’ll have a quick trip to Ottawa, Ontario for business in a few weeks. Wish it were Toronto instead so I could meet up with Dan & Laura.
  • I haven’t had the heart or inspiration to blog about politics lately.
  • All the things that are on my mind re: God and church are things that need to be worked through first in our lives before they’re worked out on this blog.
  • I reactivated the IntenseDebate commenting plugin - they’ve improved it a lot since last time I tried it. Now with Facebook and Twitter authentication! Leave a comment below and let me know what you’d like to have me blog about.

A Rant on Amazon's Super Saver Shipping

Mostly to save my Tweeps from a half-dozen tweets venting my frustration.

I ordered a HDHomeRun networked tuner and a chunk of ethernet cable from Amazon on Friday morning, June 12. The tuner was ordered from Amazon proper; the cable from whichever of their providers had it the cheapest. I opted for Amazon’s super-saver free shipping, both to save the $6 and because I didn’t have enough $$$ on the gift card I was using to pay for shipping.

Additionally, I ordered a RAM upgrade for my Mac Mini from newegg.com on Tuesday evening, June 16. It came with free shipping.

Now, as to arrival times.

The network cable shipped the same day I ordered it, and arrived in the mail on the 16th. Snappy response, well done to the Amazon retailer.

The RAM shipped from Newegg on Wednesday June 17th, and arrived this morning via USPS. 5 days, including the weekend. Not bad.

Amazon finally got around to announcing that my tuner had shipped on the evening of Tuesday the 16th. So it took them three full business days to even get around to shipping it. And the USPS tracking number they gave me says that yes, they entered the tracking number into the system on the evening of the 16th. However, the arrival scan for the package doesn’t show up until the afternoon of June 19th. So between the time they boxed it up and the time they actually got it to USPS was another three business days.

Now they’re telling me that the anticipated delivery date to my home in Iowa (from, per the tracking info, someplace in Kentucky) is not until Thursday, June 25th - a full two weeks after I ordered it, and a full nine days after they told me it shipped. I know the USPS isn’t the fastest carrier, but hey, that’s just awful.

I have had better shipping service from Amazon in the past - maybe this is just a fluke. Or maybe it’s part of a strategy to dissuade customers from actually choosing their free shipping option. Either way, it’s pretty awful.

End rant. Carry on.

Fever° Version 1.01

This morning Shaun Inman pushed out (with notice via Twitter) version 1.01 of the Fever° feed reader. First of all, major kudos to Shaun for the auto-updater built in to Fever°. (Yes, I’ll go ahead and conform to the official naming of this tool, adding the little degree symbol to the end.) Once Shaun pushes the update out, Fever° will auto-update within 24 hours. Or, you can do an instant update from the menu. Very cool, very very simple. (Here’s the changelog for V1.01.)

I’m not sure exactly what all kicked loose, because it seemed like some feeds started working even before I pulled down the 1.01 update, but since updating Fever° is kicking butt. The scrolling issues I reported in V1.0 are all fixed, and the feeds appear to all be pulling in nicely. I’m gonna run it side-by-side with Google Reader for the day to make sure they seem like they’re catching the same stuff, and if Fever° passes that test, I’ll be saying adios to GR for the foreseeable future.

Now if I could just get him to set up some sort of referral bonuses…

Shaun Inman's "Fever" a day later

I’ve had a Fever install up and running for 24 hours now, and I’ve gotta compliment Shaun for working through the emailed bug reports - he responded back twice, once to acknowledge my email, and a second to ask if I had any tips on reproducing one of the errors I reported. ( I couldn’t reproduce it either.)

Where I am seeing problems, though, is in the feed updates. I thought it seemed kinda slow today activity-wise, so I just went and opened up Google Reader. Sure enough, GR has nearly 1000 unread items, just from the last 24 hours. I’ve seen maybe 200 or so in Fever today. I spot-checked a couple of feeds, and yeah, they’re missing. For instance, Andrew Sullivan over on theatlantic.com has at least a dozen updates since this morning… but Fever, even though it says it’s refreshing every 15 minutes, doesn’t have anything newer than 16 hours old.

My one fear with host-it-yourself apps like this is that all of the connectivity issues get thrown back upon the user (and webhost) to resolve - i.e. if there’s no other discernible bug, maybe it’s just something with your server. In this case, though, I think there’s something else going on.

Anybody else have any Fever reports, good or bad?

A first look at Shaun Inman's "Fever"

Twitter and the blogs have been abuzz today over Shaun Inman’s newest creation, called Fever. Some of you may be familiar with Shaun’s previous creation, Mint, a really nifty blog stats package that you host yourself. Inman is on familiar ground this time with Fever, creating a spiffy feed reader, full of AJAX-y goodness, suitable for hosting on your own website.

I’ve been a regular Google Reader user for years now, occasionally trying out other readers… there was that fling with Feedlounge, before it went under, and occasional dalliances with NewsGator’s line of readers… but I’ve always gone back to Google Reader. I took a look at Inman’s demo of Fever, though, over on feedafever.com, and knew it was time to give it a try.

Does the world really need another feed reader, anyway?

Creating a new RSS feed reader is no simple task. Taking accepted existing designs and improving on them requires creativity and good ideas about usability. Inman is on the right track here. But aside from the UI design, Inman has created a dual-purpose tool. On one hand, Fever is a traditional feed reader. You subscribe, it updates the feeds, you read. On the other hand, though, Fever is something like your own personal Digg. You can subscribe to all those noisy feeds, those linkdump feeds that occasionally have something interesting in them, and identify them as “Sparks”. Then Fever will aggregate them, pick out the hot topics, and present them to you in a “Hot” category, grouping them around a specific topic or link. This, to me, looks like the really slick part of Fever.

After the jump: my experience with installing Fever, importing my feed list, and some thoughts on usability and performance.

Purchase and Installation

Like Mint before it, Inman’s pricing model is similar to that of off-the-shelf software: pay once, install on your own machine. In this case, your own webhost. $30 buys you a license which is tied to a specific domain name.

Installation is ridiculously easy. You download a little “tester” zip file, unzip it and upload it to your domain, and visit the one page that it creates. The tester does some cursory checks to ensure that adequate versions/settings of PHP and SQL are present, and then does a database check to ensure your database is set up with adequate permissions. A word of warning here: pay attention: the database settings you use to test here will be used to install Fever should you choose to purchase it. This wasn’t clear to me when I did the install. Fortunately it didn’t become an issue.

Once your server has passed all the tests, you are given a link that will take you back to feedafever.com, where you can drop your $30 via Paypal for the license. Once you pay up, you are given a license key which you can then copy and paste back into Fever. Normally, at this point, you’d be expecting to have to download a full install, upload it, do some manual configuration, and so on, right? Not with Fever, though. Once you give it the license key, Fever silently installs the full setup (about 900 KB of files) and you’re up and running. Brilliant.

Importing Feeds

Next I went over to Google Reader and dumped my OPML file. I’m a heavy user, probably not quite in the ‘power user’ category yet, but the OPML had 454 feeds, about 100KB worth of XML. It took about two clicks to suck it into fever, and the import went very smoothly. Compared to the import times when I’ve tried using FeedDemon, FeedLounge, or (shudder) Bloglines, Fever screamed through the import.

You have the option of keeping all your categories from the OPML or choosing not to when you import. I did keep my categories, but found a small issue with that choice later on - there is a bug (design choice?) that keeps the category list from scrolling. So, I can only see about half of my lists. Not a fatal issue, but something that needs fixed.

Once the feeds were imported, Fever started kicking off updates of all the feeds. This just takes a little while. If you want to set up a cron job on your server, you can have Fever pull in updates every 15 minutes ‘round the clock. If not, Fever will update every 15 minutes when you have it open in a browser. I have yet to set up the cron job - we’ll see how it goes.

General Usage

Fever is set up with the power user in mind. Keyboard shortcuts are built-in and intuitive; they allow you to do navigation, switch between two-pane and three-pane views (shown below), and the space bar lets you jump one article at a time, or, if it’s a long article, one page at a time. Slick.

Fever looks great, too. The overall layout feels a lot like Google Reader, even more like its Greasemonkey-enhanced alter ego Helvetireader. Group and feed lists are on the side, and you have the choice of showing or hiding unread counts.

When you go to the Hot category, Fever assigns “temperatures” to the topics and presents the links in grouped form. For example, in the shot below, “Sojurn Community Church” is a hot topic among my feeds, and the half-dozen links discussing it are listed below. Clicking on any of them opens the actual blog article in a new tab. The “temperatures” are the one thing I’m actually a little unsure about. While they are a nice way of showing “hot” topics, having the temperature listed there in a BIG font seems a little big cheesy. We’ll have to see how it stands the test of time.

Performance

I have yet to hear from my webhost and friend Geof complaining that the server’s taking a beating, so I’m hoping Fever has a smart backend that won’t tie up the server. Right now the SQL database is taking about 13 MB of space. I’m a bit curious to see at what point Fever starts pruning old feed items and how large my database might grow to be.

Bugs and Quirks

I do have a few gripes with Fever that I hope will get ironed out in short order. (Note: Fever automatically checks the server for updates to itself! Awesome!) The first is the feed editing dialog. (Click on the image to see it full-sized.) Maybe it’s just because I have a lot of groups defined, but when I bring up the feed editing dialog, the bottom of the box is off-screen, with no way to scroll to it. (This is running 1280x800 resolution with Firefox fully maximized.) Fortunately, if I F11 to full screen view, the whole thing just barely fits on the screen. Otherwise, I’d be stuck.

The other general gripe is the mechanism for sorting feeds into groups. As I said earlier, I had a lot (50?) of categories defined in my OPML file, so I decided I’d consolidate things a bit. Creating a new group is easy; picking the feeds for it is less so. Once you decide to edit a group, you are given a scroll box with your entire list of feeds. It’s a multi-select box, which means you better make sure you hold down the Control key while you scroll through and select the ones you want - otherwise you’ll be starting over. Ugh. Suggestion for Mr. Inman: use check boxes. Or even better, figure out a way to drag-and-drop.

As a general note, there is an iPhone/iPod Touch interface built in for Fever. To this point, though, it’s not liking my Fever login… not sure why. Gotta keep trying.

Summary

All in all, Fever is a welcome addition to the world of feed readers. For a tool I’m gonna use every day, I’m willing to spend a few bucks, and I think in this case Fever is $30 well spent. I’m looking forward to having a few days to get things organized, and for a few bugs to get sorted out, and I may well have a new favorite feed reader. Time will tell.

There are no chapter titles

I think it really hit me when I saw the dirt bike. I hadn’t seen that dirt bike in years, but I remembered the story behind it. It had been bought cheap, fixed up in a garage, and when finally complete, was brought to a party at a friends’ house in the country. The owner rode it first, then handed the helmet to my wife. She proceeded to take it on a loop of the property, then lost control and ended up riding the thing directly into the corner of a limestone barn. Becky recovered within a couple of weeks from her spill, but when I saw the dirt bike sitting out waiting to be loaded into a moving trunk on Monday afternoon, I realized it had set for the last seven years with a bent rim waiting to be repaired.

On one hand you could say “come on, a bent rim, that’s an easy fix, why has it taken so long to fix it?”, and you’d be right. But having been friends with the owners of that bike for the past ten years, I know the stories of how life has intervened. Her chronic illness. His serious infection that cost him the vision in one eye. (No small thing for a pilot!) The business start-up. Later, the provision of a flying job. (Can you believe they let a one-eyed pilot fly 747s? I can.) The births of two delightful children. The struggles and joys of families, friends, church. I can very well understand why that dirt bike still has a bent rim. (On a side note: I wonder what projects I have sitting in the garage that still need completed…)

Monday afternoon I helped load the contents of these friends’ house into a long moving van. Assuming all went well yesterday, they drove the eight hours and arrived in Indiana where they are moving to be closer to family. With his gone-17-days-at-a-time work schedule, it makes sense for them, but we still hate to see them go.

Life has chapters, but there are no chapter titles. We can only turn the pages and see where this next chapter takes us. I look forward to an upcoming chapter that sees us visiting those friends in Indiana, and I have only one request for them: once you get the bike fixed, let somebody other than my wife ride it first.

Fox News, knee-jerk reactions, and out-of-context statements

If my previous posts in which I declared my support for Obama and for civilly-recognized gay marriage weren’t enough to convince my church friends that I have become a heathen leftist Commie pinko, I’ll probably do it with this post. Why? Because I’m going to be mildly critical of Fox News and of those who blindly follow it.

Yesterday I linked to a Rod Dreher column entitled “I was wrong about Sotomayor speech”. (Yeah, there’s an article missing somewhere in that sentence, but live with it.) To catch anyone up who hasn’t heard about it, the controversial statement from Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was made in a 2002 speech at Cal Berkeley, where she said this:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

There was (as one might expect) immediately a lot of noise made by conservative groups like the Judicial Confirmation Network and bloggers (I’ll link Michelle Malkin here as just one example), and when I was on the treadmill at the gym for 30 minutes on Tuesday afternoon, Fox News host Glenn Beck had that quote up on the screen seemingly every minute of his show. And let’s face it: as a stand-alone statement, it seems bad. It’s not the sort of thing that a “judges apply the law, they don’t make it” conservative like me likes to hear at all.

So back to that Dreher article I linked. Conservative columnist Rod Dreher candidly notes that after reading the full text of the speech in question, he says he is

…still a bit troubled by the remark, but not in any important way. Taken in context, the speech was about how the context in which we were raised affects how judges see the world, and that it’s unrealistic to pretend otherwise. Yet – and this is a key point – she admits that as a jurist, one is obligated to strive for neutrality.

And then he quotes another passage from Sotomayor’s speech, one that didn’t ever make the screen at Fox News:

While recognizing the potential effect of individual experiences on perception, Judge Cedarbaum nevertheless believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law. Although I agree with and attempt to work toward Judge Cedarbaum’s aspiration, I wonder whether achieving that goal is possible in all or even in most cases.

Now, that puts a whole different spin on things, doesn’t it? All of a sudden Judge Sotomayor sounds a lot less like a radical legislate-from-the-bench sort of judge and more like an idealist who nonetheless understands the role of the judge in the three-branch governmental system.

At this point I have to put a disclaimer in, because just as my support of civilly recognizing gay marriage caused friends to think that I no longer believe homosexual behavior is sin, this post suggesting that Judge Sotomayor isn’t quite as radical as Fox News suggests will cause some friends to think that I’m soft on abortion. So here’s the disclaimer. Judge Sotomayor does not appear to be the type of judge I’d prefer to see picked for the Supreme Court. I much prefer the staunch conservative views of Justices Roberts and Scalia, and the late Chief Justice Rehnquist. And abortion remains a heinous sin. OK? Are we cool? So let’s proceed.

Here’s the thing I want to get to in regard to Fox News: if you watch it and for a minute think that you’re really getting a “fair and balanced” view of the news, think again. Is it truly “fair and balanced” to hammer on Sotomayor for the one line that sounds bad, without bringing in the other line from the same speech that balances things out?

So next you’ll say to me “OK, Chris, we’ll admit that Fox News is biased towards the conservative viewpoint. But all the other networks are biased towards the liberal side, so why can’t we have our one network?” And that’s OK, I guess, as long as you recognize the bias. Because, let’s face it: if your only news source is Fox News, you wouldn’t even know they have a bias. (Me personally? I don’t watch TV news at all. But my news sources of choice should really be the topic of a separate blog post.)

So my plea to my friends this morning: read, watch, and listen widely. Think about things and come to your own conclusions. Don’t just assume that if it shows up on Fox News, it’s the gospel truth. (Don’t assume that it isn’t, either.) Be willing to see shades of grey in areas where there isn’t a black-and-white standard. And be gracious and loving to all as you do it.

10 years

Last Sunday we visited Noelridge Park Church for the morning service so Laura could participate in the AWANA recognition Sunday. (She’s been a regular there in Cubbies even though we’ve not been attending Noelridge for the past 18 months.) As we got ready to go Sunday morning, I noted to Becky that it was nearly ten years, to the day, since the first time we visited Noelridge, immediately after we moved to Iowa.

That was then…

Ten years. Nearly a third of our lives to this point. In one sense I look back and say “wow, time flies”; but in another sense I look back and remember all that we have lived through in those ten years, and it does, indeed, seem like a long time.

  • Ten years ago we had been married less than a year, two kids moving across the country to an unfamiliar city and state. Now we’re both into our thirties, have three kids of our own, and Iowa feels a lot like home.
  • In ten years we’ve been from an old rental farmhouse in the country that leaked heat like a sieve in the winter, to unintentionally renting a house in town from the most notorious landlord in Cedar Rapids, to owning our own place, to starting to wonder when/if we’ll outgrow our own place and have to look for something else.
  • In ten years we’ve gone from being young newcomers at a church to being in and out of leadership, to then dreaming up and leading a church plant, and then finally being led away from the church plant to participate in a different church.
  • In ten years we’ve gone from knowing no one here to having made a lot of friends. Then it’s just sad to see them go. We were sad to see the Majerle’s move to Minnesota five years ago, though we were glad we could buy their house. :-) This summer, particularly, feels like the end of an era, with the Garner’s moving to Indiana and the Finley’s moving to Texas. I guess now we have new places to visit on vacations.
  • In ten years Becky’s job description has changed from “CAD drafter at a stone quarry” to “wood shop worker” to “mom of one” to “mom of two” to “mom of three”. I’m pretty sure she likes her current job description best.
  • In ten years my job description has been more consistent, changing only from “software engineer” to “software team lead” to “software certification specialist”. I’m hoping to make the certification thing a long-term gig. Hopefully this fall it’ll all come together.
  • In ten years I’ve gone from being a smooth-cheeked youngster with plastered-down hair to slightly-less-plastered-down hair to a beard and shaved head. I’ve had this look going for three years now, and think I’ll be keeping it for a while. Sooner or later I won’t have to shave the head as much.
  • In ten years Becky is still the beautiful woman who took my arm and came to Iowa sight-unseen. She’s still kicking butt on the softball field every summer, growing yummy stuff in the garden, keeping our household running smoothly, and making our home a place I always want to come home to, and never want to leave.

I can only imagine the changes I’ll have to reflect on if I’m still writing on this blog or something like it ten years from now… teenaged kids, middle age… I can wait. But if the next ten years are as rich and full and wonderful as the past ten have been… I will (continue to) be a man most richly blessed.

This is now…