Got Fruit ?

No groupies, err, beloved readers,I’ve not fallen completely off of the blog radar just yet.

The past week has just been a bit busier than normal with taking part in a Midnight Oil Productions Multimedia Seminar sponsored by the church, Wednesday evening classes, along with prepping for the seminar on Thursday and Sunday morning classes.

In addition I’ve just taken a little time off to reconnect with a few friends from high school via Facebook as well as some friends from church that moved away during the summer.  Just trying to keep a balance to things and not let this blog or anything else for that matter cause me to forget that at the heart of it all, there are relationships to be nurtured and appreciated with God, family and friends.   And let’s not forget the occasional pain in the rear co-worker or the resident church grouch either. ;)   On that note:

Your friend has a friend, and your friend’s friend has a friend; be discreet.
Source: “An Apple a Day: Treasured Selections from Apples of Gold” by Jo Petty

Stay tuned in the coming days, as I plan to give my review of the 1st year of the Got-Fruit(?) blog.  Until then…

Grace and peace be with you.

Blogging

From Slice of Laodicea, hosted by Ingrid Schlueter: an interview with Pastor Dustin Segers of Shepherd’s Fellowship concerning Christian bloggers maintaining balance,focus and righteousness in their lives with regards to blogging in general and as a ministry, specifically anyone called into discernment.  I do hope readers take the time to listen to this interview in full, Pastor Segers has in my opinion some solid advice for us all to consider and take to heart.

File under: Avoiding Distractions

Christian doctrine etc;

The Marshian Chronicles  and Lindsay Brooks of Apologetics.com have posts from earlier in the week that personally speak to and challenge me to step up even more in proclaiming my faith in Christ.  Part 1 of the post from The Marshain Chronicles is here and Part 2 is here.  I mentioned a few days ago about working on a friend of a friend’s PC.  Well the back story to this "friend of a friend" is that they are Mormon, and during our interaction,I felt a need to witness to this young man about the true Jesus of the Bible (sans John Smith), I didn’t though because of not "feeling" that the timing was right.  I don’t know, maybe there’s truth to it, maybe me just dragging my feet in this particular instance since I didn’t have an established relationship with the young man.  As I’m making this entry though, it does occur to me that somehow, some way, I do need to talk to this young man about his involvement with the Mormon church and His relationship with Christ.   

Lindsay Brooks offers his 2 cents worth regarding proclaiming the Gospel, and The Marshian Chronicles also gives some practical advise and words to ponder to go along with what the believer is told in 1st Thessalonians 5:

1st Thessalonians 5:19-22
19 Do not put out the Spirit’s fire; 20 do not treat prophecies with contempt.

Technology

As much as I enjoy technology, be it computers or AV equipment, I am a slow adopter.  For example, I’s only been in the past 3-4 years that I’ve fully embraced Windows XP as my preferred Windows OS (a long time Windows 2000 holdout).    Likewise, I was a diehard fan of the Musicmatch Media Player.  Even after Yahoo acquired the software and "reinvented" it, I held out on the legacy version as my default media player, forsaking Windows Media Player.  Over the past six months or so Musicmatch has become less and less appealing to use, as Yahoo has made efforts to migrate users to it’s home branded media player.

After a day of frustrations with installing Musicmatch about a month ago, I finally gave in and abandoned the app for Winamp.  For the old Musicmatch fanboys that are looking for a comparable replacement, I highly suggest giving  Winamp a try.

Need a tool to convert your media files or graphics to different formats? Check out the freeware media converter know as Format Factory.  The interface is a little buggy/quirky, but the utility itself has performed wonderfully.

Grace and peace be with you.

It’s been yet another busy week at  work, church and all the extra things that keep a fella busy until the wee hours of the morning.  Pheww!!

Tech stuff:

I spent the past two or three evenings upgrading yet another WordPress install.  This time for my church’s blog, which was still on the old WP2.3 install  And yet again not quite the 5 minute painless install that "they" say it is. No database corruption this time, just a problem with Permalinks not working. and we lost our PodPress functionality in the upgrade process.

Oh well, on the bright side, I came across two sweet themes that anyone looking for an update may want to check out.  The themes offer a ton of customizations without having to dig into code:

Check out the theme titled Mandigo if your looking for “an elegant widget-ready one/two/three-column WordPress theme, available in two widths, SEVEN color schemes and 38 languages!”

If your looking for "Fluid width, 2 or 3 column theme for WP 2.2 - WP 2.6, with rotating header images, customizable logo and options page. Plug & Play for various plug-ins" then check out this 2 or 3 columned theme titled Atahualpa.

Need a media player for all of the multiple media formats out there in Internet land?  Try VLC, it’ll play .mp4, m4v etc.  A nice feature is VLC’s playback support of RealMedia (arrgghh!) streams, something I found out while visiting the following site  listed under…

Christian PodCast/Broadcasts:

From their tagline, Pirate Christian Radio claims: "This station proclaims "Christ crucified for our sins" and exalts and defends THE historic Christian faith."

Apologetics.com is one of my more favored sites to visit for informative broadcasts on a variety of Christian topics.  Apologetics.com, has a fairly laid back forum… must be all of that that California sunshine.

Another site that I only recently visited (known about it for a while, just busy,lazy, forgetful…), Slice of Laodecia, also has an interesting forum that’s caught my attention.  For the Podcasts check out the top center portion of the page.

Memorable Readings:

I recommend reading Mark Carlton’s post on The God of The Old Testament (Part20): Genocide or Justice, a nice refresher for our perspective of God and His divine justice system.

Lashawn Barber’s 2 cents worth on Why did God make Different race?

By it’s fruit you will know it:

For those that have followed the Lakeland Florida Outpouring closer than I have,there now appears to be more to Todd Bentley’s recent problems.  Link found via Apostasy Watch.

Matthew 12:33
33 "Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit.

Grace and peace be with you.

Things took a bit of a turn from the norm this week.  I was asked to give Communion Meditation this Sunday, so I’ve spent the past few days in thought, prayer and preparation vs spending the normal evenings of reading\studying the Bible from a semi-scheduled pseudo systematic approach.  Being a bit nervous about this, I asked for a "critique"  Friday .  The feedback was positive and I believe sincere, so I’ll probably share the thought in a Sunday evening post.

Kinda, sorta related…

Louie of the Marshian Chronicles has a post that carries some ideas similar to the train of thought I had when prepping the communion meditation, of course you won’t be able to see that till I post it.  

In other news..

It looks like another one of my favorite bloggers has returned from a blogging hiatus.  Check out "L" at her new site: http://holidaylonging.wordpress.com.

Also, I caught this post late in the week by "Frankly Speaking".

Skirting politics…

Wickle has a deep post on politicians, infedlity (adultery) and trustworthiness.  It’s a long post that after going back to read again, I may drop my 2 cents worth on or write my own perspective about here, just not tonight this morning. (YAWN!!!)

“[For the director of music. Of the Sons of Korah. According to Alamoth. A song.] God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.”- Psalm 46:1

Until then..

Grace and peace be with you.

A co-worker sent this link a few days ago.  When I visited the site I was dumbfounded!

Maybe it’s the $38 per case that’s got me floored, maybe it’s the 850-1000%  markup compared to what a case of water costs at Wal-Mart… then again it is "spiritual" water.

A blurb from the web site:

Changing the world’s spirit one bottle at the time!

The mission of Spiritual Water is to help people think positive, lift up their spirit, give them a chance to believe in themselves (Christopher says: Are you for real!?!) and let them know that God is with them!

Hmmm?  Doesn’t prayer, the Holy Spirit, God and His Word do the same?  Ok , to be fair, 10% of each sale is donated to the Spiritual Foundation to feed hungry children.  Still, something a little "off" about this.

Grace and peace be with you.