Burdened
In honor of 121’s first Maundy Thursday event in our new building, my portion of the Journey to the Cross we did eleven years ago tonight, in the first year of our old building.
Year: 2017
Sojourner
From this morning’s reading.
For YHWH your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the sojourners, providing them food and clothing.
You shall also love the sojourner1, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.
You shall fear YHWH your God;
Him alone you shall worship;
to Him you shall hold fast,
and by His name you shall swear.He is your praise;
He is your God,
who has done for you these great and awesome things that your own eyes have seen.
Next to Tinseltown
When I was five or six, we lived in a rent house. I can recall two things about the house: one of the windows had a very long hose coming out of it from the washing maching down to the lawn, and our next-door-neighbor liked to work on his cars and I liked to sit on the engine and “help” him. (This is the closest I’ve ever been to working on a car.)
When I was thirteen, we lived in a different rent house, in a different state. I remember two things about the house: my bedroom was in the basement (which I loved) and the big open room next to my bedroom seemed big enough to play racquetball in.
Comings and Goings
The ball is going to bounce around a bit today, so buckle your seatbelts and return your tray to its upright, locked position.1
A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were watching a lightweight heist TV show when suddenly the lead character starts talking about chicken sexing. (Don’t leave off the suffix, that would have been an entirely different show.) We were rather dubious about what he was spouting, but in the wonderful age in which we live, we can Duck2 that kind of nonsense while the character is still talking. It turns out chicken sexing really is a thing3, and reading a bit further led me to a book.
The New Guy
A new hire at Apple was announced today.
Given that Apple has over a hundred thousand employees, a new hire there usually doesn’t qualify as news. However, this one did. It wasn’t, of course, Apple who did the announcing, but the various media outlets who make a living from following Apple. Unlike most Apple “news,” which is typically a wild rumor in a very thin “it might be true!” wrapper, this news came straight from the horses mouth, i.e. from the new hire himself.
His name is Jonathan Zdziarski, and, although you can be forgiven for not recognizing (or being able to pronounce) his name, he is justifiably famous in the Apple universe, as he is perhaps the best and most well-known expert in iOS digital forensics and security.
Kiss This Guy
Long ago1 but still in this galaxy and not very far away at all, I read a humorous article in the Reader’s Digest.2 As our brains are sometimes wont to do, it stuck this article in the “permanent, never forget” section, along with the theme from Gilligan’s Island and the lyrics to all the Beatles songs. In the article, the author had occasional hearing issues which caused him to sometimes interject odd things (“And there’s no ketchup in Australia!”) into a conversation about John Donne’s poetry.
Many of us have a completely different kind of hearing problem. For example, we had a speaker at our church a few month ago.