becoming

Listening to Tim Chester again:

God has placed you together with the people in your congregation. You did not chose them; God chose them. And that diversity of personalities, backgrounds, social class, ethnicities is used by God to make you grow in Christ and to display the unifying power of the cross.

But in cyberspace you are god. You chose who will be in community with you. You create your own communities of convenience that mean you are never challenged. Or if you are challenged or relationships become costly you can just scuttle off to new relationships. As a result we never grow. We are permanently immature.

[link: Tim Chester]

Blanket statements about all evangelicals mix the Democratic Tony Campolos with the far right Jerry Falwells. Given evangelicalism’s diverse history and its undefined future, it is both inaccurate and unhelpful to stereotype all “evangelicals” as the religious right. It was especially this public linking of evangelicals with the political right, by Jerry Falwell and other public figures, that initially consolidated the religious right. Today, stereotyping evangelicalism as a whole only fortifies the influence of the political right on a movement that has a much more varied history. Democrats should therefore applaud President Obama and others working to transcend these traditional political barriers.

Read the whole thing here.

Here is the test of whether you are facing this danger: Is your Facebook self more attractive than your real world self? 

When I am forced to answer “yes” in all honesty, I know it is my time to disable the account.

[link: Tim chester]

No, I haven’t read Bell’s Love Wins and I have no intention to do so in distant future. But with all the debates and conversations going on over the net and with all the heavyweights being pulled to support or refute certain arguments, I think it is time to take everyone back to memory lane and learn where one’s interpretation actually comes from.

Andrew Perriman have done us a huge favor by charting various schools of interpretation with his recent post over at p.ost. Take a good look.

[link: p.ost]

With the Canadian dollar at par with USD, ordering from Amazon.com for us Canadian still lost its appeal if you add back the shipping cost to any Canadian address.

On the other hand, pricing on Amazon.ca has yet to reflect the current exchange rate, despite the fact that shipping is free on order $25 and over.

I have mentioned a few times about www.bookdepository.com. Shipping is free on everything internationally. Their pricing are quite competitive with Amazon (.com or .ca). And sometimes, it is even lower.

An alternative worth considering.

Instead of babbling all sorts of things you have done for yourself during the holiday seasons, can we post and share about:

1. what others had done for you in 2010?
2. what are you going to do for others in the new year?

Time for a change!

As a pastor, I need to write day in, day out. Having emails, notifications, phone calls, and all sorts of other updates throughout the day make it next to impossible to focus on my own work.

A recent article from Lifehacker on Distraction-free writing tools reminds me about my own struggle to get things done. Here is what I do when I need to sit down and write:

1. Go to a dedicated space where distractions will be minimal (For me, that’s my basement study area).
2. Turn on an app like Think, which basically turns your multi-tasking computer into a single-tasking machine (because you need to) while focusing on the app you are using and blocking all alerts and updates from other apps showing up.
3. If the task at hand involves heavy writing, use OmmWriter or similar full-screen writing app. Trust me, the soft music and the key-pressed effects do help!
4. Unlike Anson, I am not as discipline as to adopt the Pomodoro Technique. I basically just keep on writing until I can’t think of anything else, and then take a break (by physically leaving the place I work), and come back within 30 minutes.

More importantly, don’t write until you finally sit down in front of your computer. Keep the thoughts and points in your mind throughout the week. Create a mental outline as to what you want to say. So when you finally do sit down and write, you are really there to write it out, instead of struggling with where to start…

Oh, I also tend to write non-linearly, i.e, I don’t necessary start from the introduction and move on…. Try filling-in your various main points BEFORE spending time figuring out how to connect one thought to another. Sometimes, I also find it helpful to have the final words spelled out and work backwards!

So what’s your writing style? What works and what not?