Don't Worry - wisdom from Bobby McFerrin and God

Don't Worry, Be Happy : Lyrics by Bobby McFerrin

Here's a little song I wrote
You might want to sing it note for note
Don't Worry — Be Happy
In every life we have some trouble
But when you worry you make it Double
Don't Worry — Be Happy
Ain't got no place to lay your head,
somebody came and took your bed
Don't Worry, Be Happy
The landlord say your rent is late,
he may have to litigate
Don't Worry — Be Happy
Ain't got not cash, ain't got no style,
ain't got no gal to make you smile
Don't Worry — Be Happy
Cause when you worry your face will frown
and that will bring everybody down
Don't Worry — Be Happy

© ProbNoblem Music (BMI)

Matthew 6:25-34 CEV
(25) I tell you not to worry about your life. Don't worry about having something to eat, drink, or wear. Isn't life more than food or clothing?
(26) Look at the birds in the sky! They don't plant or harvest. They don't even store grain in barns. Yet your Father in heaven takes care of them. Aren't you worth more than birds?
(27) Can worry make you live longer?
(28) Why worry about clothes? Look how the wild flowers grow. They don't work hard to make their clothes.
(29) But I tell you that Solomon with all his wealth wasn't as well clothed as one of them.
(30) God gives such beauty to everything that grows in the fields, even though it is here today and thrown into a fire tomorrow. He will surely do even more for you! Why do you have such little faith?
(31) Don't worry and ask yourselves, "Will we have anything to eat? Will we have anything to drink? Will we have any clothes to wear?"
(32) Only people who don't know God are always worrying about such things. Your Father in heaven knows that you need all of these.
(33) But more than anything else, put God's work first and do what he wants. Then the other things will be yours as well.
(34) Don't worry about tomorrow. It will take care of itself. You have enough to worry about today.

You have to appreciate the idea Bobby is hanging out there anyway. Too often we get caught up in the trap of worrying about (insert your worry topic here) and miss out on the sheer joy of life. I have found that worrying rarely is helpful and almost always is a distraction from more important things. While you're pondering that idea, check out what Matthew 6 has to say on the topic - pretty much the same as Bobby McFerrin, who knew?

People need to be needed

Reading an article sent to me today, I was struck again by the simple idea that people need to be needed. The article talks about missions and relating to each other across economic divides but this applies across social, religious and really any other boundaries that we create.

excerpt from the article

Poor people are people. Those who live and die in want of basic needs are just as smart, beautiful, creative, motivated, holy, and wise as you and I. They are also just as dumb, ugly, dull, lazy, sinful, and foolish as you and I.

This serves as a lead in to the story that talks about transforming the way short term missions works in one specific area. The gist of it is that the local population drives the activity and serves in a leadership role, rather than being simply recipients of charity. The fundamental shift comes when we recognize that you do not have to come from a wealthy country, have a Harvard MBA, be the right skin color or come with any other credentials to be an effective leader, teacher or mentor. It is arrogant at best to try and swoop in, determining the needs and providing a solution without the guidance of those being helped.

To be in a recipient only role dis-empowers the recipients and robs those providing the aid of the opportunity to really know those they are working with.

While living in Africa as a child, I saw both sides of this approach. I saw missionaries who were so full of their goodness that they would not deign to eat off of a plate that a Chadian had used. I saw the opposite side of that in my home, with my fathers best friend being a Chadian whom I called my uncle. The people we worked with were my family, the relationships we had were relationships of equals in my experience. What a contrast and what a gift from my parents to me - I never have been able to fully reconcile the two sides of the coin but I am now beginning to understand it more, though I am saddened by the lost opportunity on both sides all those years ago and continuing all over the world even today.

Work it...

This video is more than a little weird, but after the slow start, it gets more impressive. I wonder how much practice this took?

The truth can sometimes hurt

What else needs said?

Conformity - not always the best choice...

Rom 12:2 And be not conformed to this world: but be reformed in the newness of your mind, that you may prove what is the good and the acceptable and the perfect will of God.

Are you the model or are you the conforming one? Who or what are you conforming to?

Drivers and Manuals

• NetGear WG-111 V2

Beat the stress with bubble wrap

How can you deny that satisfaction that comes from patiently working your way through a piece of bubble wrap? Ok, maybe you can, but it's still fun. Here for your popping pleasure is a virtual piece I lifted off the net.

The Transformative Nature

While thinking on the topic of Christianity, and what it means, I have been pondering the slipping of the emphasis on the transformative aspect of Christianity.

Romans 12:1-21 MKJV
(1) I beseech you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing to God, which is your reasonable service.
(2) And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, in order to prove by you what is that good and pleasing and perfect will of God.
(3) For I say, through the grace given to me, to every one who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think. But set your mind to be right-minded, even as God has dealt to every man the measure of faith.
(4) For even as we have many members in one body, and all members do not have the same function,
(5) so we the many are one body in Christ, and each one members of one another.
(6) Then having gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, if prophecy, according to the proportion of faith;
(7) or ministry, in the ministry; or he who teaches, in the teaching;
(8) or he who exhorts, in the encouragement; or he who shares, in simplicity; or he who takes the lead, in diligence; or he who shows mercy, in cheerfulness.
(9) Let love be without hypocrisy, shrinking from evil, cleaving to good;
(10) in brotherly love to one another, loving fervently, having led one another in honor.
(11) As to diligence, not slothful, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord;
(12) rejoicing in hope, patient in affliction, steadfastly continuing in prayer,
(13) distributing to the needs of the saints, pursuing hospitality.
(14) Bless those who persecute you; bless, and do not curse.
(15) Rejoice with rejoicing ones, and weep with weeping ones;
(16) minding the same thing toward one another, not minding high things, but yielding to the lowly. Do not be wise within yourselves.
(17) Repay no one evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men.
(18) If it is possible, as far as is in you, being in peace with all men.
(19) not avenging yourselves, beloved, but giving place to wrath; for it is written, "Vengeance is Mine, I will repay, says the Lord."
(20) Therefore if your enemy hungers, feed him. If he thirsts, give him drink. For in so doing you shall heap coals of fire on his head.
(21) Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

While I do not advocate in any way the legalistic approach and the dogmatic views that ruled much of the church for so long, I also think that we need to keep in mind that we are talking about a faith that should and must change a life. It is a thing that requires transformation to be fully realized.

Reading Romans 12:1 emphasizes this to me in a few ways. On our own, the actions listed in this passage are not always natural, they require a transformation of our mind and our will. These are not listed as a series of commands, rather as an example of ways in which the change brought about by our faith will be evident in our lives.

And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, in order to prove by you what is that good and pleasing and perfect will of God.

As you may be able to guess from my earlier writings, I am looking at all of these listed actions and attributes and seeing one common theme. Love drives all of them. Without love, will you feed and cloth your enemy? What kind of love drives one to do that? It is not natural by any means. What kind of love makes a person willing to bless those that persecute them? The answer is vs. 9 and 10, it is a fervent love that is without hypocrisy. There is no free pass here - we are talking about a life altering love for our God that is the foundation of the Christian faith and if it is real, it will produce change in your life. In fact, it must produce change and that must not be overlooked. Here we teeter on the slippery slope of legalism if we look for an easy way out. It is far easier to legislate a list of rules and behaviors and then simply try to stick to those actions then it is to freely commit oneself to loving God wholly and completely and through that love seeking continuously to be transformed and renewed.

A relationship, well cared for, is no small endeavor and in our world, we seem to find it easier to look for the 10 step quick fix rather than acknowledge the journey that is our faith.

The Wyzo experience...

lifted from the Wyzo website

Wyzo is an awesome new browser that focuses on optimizing your online media experience. Wyzo gives you easy access to all your favourite media sites, downloading media content and inform your friends about your discoveries.
BitTorrent™ Made Easy

We've integrated your torrent downloads inside our download manager, so downloading torrents has never been so easy! Now you can manage your web and torrent downloads from the same window. Start downloads with just one click.
Secure Web Browsing

Wyzo allows you to browse the web securely using the latest protection and safety technologies. Built from the ground up on the Firefox core, Wyzo will make sure your experience is smart, safe, and hassle-free.

I downloaded it and it seems ok, not all that it could be. I will play around with the torrent client more to see if that's really worth it. I also am trying out the FireFox plugin with higher hopes. Check it out for yourself at: http://www.wyzo.com/.

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

The title is shamelessly stolen from Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google. This guy is the consumate hacker, IMHO. Check out this paper he put out on the topic. http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html

Programmer, Developer or Hacker

What's the difference between a programmer and a developer, or even a hacker? A question no real hacker or even a developer would ask, but one I still hear from co-workers or friends in one form or another.

I've met and managed a lot of programmers, I've even worked with a bunch. It is not a bundle of fun. Programmers tend to be people who write code of some type in A language that they are comfortable with, for a paycheck. They are not known for independent thinking and are not known for passion about their work.

Developers on the other hand usually tend to be people who write in several languages, with a passion for whatever language is cool to them for whatever reason they have, rational or otherwise. They tend to look at the world as a problem to be solved and will argue, sometimes passionately, over their brand of right for the solution. They work well independently and sometimes with others. I have worked with a number of these types and I enjoy it a lot more. These are some of the more fun people to hang out with. They usually have a good sense of humor and are fairly well read.

Hackers are another breed. A really good dev may desire to attain true hacker status, but not be willing to make the time required due to a personal life. I have worked with and also managed a couple of real hackers. Of the three types, this is my favorite. Not because of the impressive social skills attained by 20 out of 24 hours at the keyboard, rather because they are generally so incredibly intelligent. I wish I could say I have attained hacker status, but it would be untrue. I have been called one, and while flattered, I have to say that at best I was an aspiring hacker. With the time I spend on dev work at this point in my life, true hacker status is a long way off for me. It has become a term loosely thrown around anymore and misused as bad as the word Diva in pop culture.

Legacy Video Games

I ran across a find today that will make any old gamers wax nostalgic. Check out http://www.everyvideogame.com/play-nes-Contra_(U).htm. Contra and a whole bunch of other NES games are available via an online emulator.

A thought for the fourth

I was thinking last night, while I should have been sleeping, about this country in which I live. How we have been sliding slowly from a culture of strength and sacrifice to a culture of immediate gratification and one that demands quick fix, no cost remedies. This brought to mind some wise words that I will leave with you, spoken by greater men than I.

"From time to time, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them"
-- FDR

Plethora of web links

Another good find: http://www.alvit.de/handbook/

This is a page with links to all sorts of web content and developer tools and widgets. Enjoy

Blog Hacks

I have several blogs and online "properties" that I maintain and I wanted to share styles and content among them. I also wanted to minimize redundancy. To that end I am collecting most of the customizations here, with pointers to more detail in some cases.
First off, I needed to share content among my sites so I needed a file host. GooglePages fit that bill very nicely and can be found over at http://googlepages.google.com.

Shared Lib Includes:

These go at the top of every page / template I use

<link href='http://jking.net.googlepages.com/sharedBlogStyleSheet.css' rel='stylesheet' type="'text/css'/">

<script src='http://jking.net.googlepages.com/sharedBlogJS.js' type='text/javascript'>

These two files hold the shared styles that I can then customize further in individual site files.

Google Pages

I recently gave up my paid hosting account to give a go at using all free web services to create a new virtual site that offered even more functionality. One of the needs for this project was a place to store simple things like shared files, js libs and what not. I spent some time banging around the net until I remembered that google page creator offered just such a thing. Huzzah, problem solved and even better, staying on the base google platform.

Check out google page creator at http://pages.google.com/

Online Office Replacements

As I move to the online line mashup model, I have been looking at replacements for other applications that I use. What can I do using just a web browser? These links are for tools and sites that I have found useful for this purpose. This was originally posted on my main site blog, but here I will dig a little more into the guts I hope.

For now, check out the links below.

Google Docs

This site from Google has a decent word processor and spreadsheet as well as some other gadgets but it is not tops in functionality.

Zoho

This suite has the best setup I have found so far. I like the way the software works and the suite is robust.

CSS Based Slider Menu

Thanks to Stu Nicholls, over at CSSPlay I got a jump on making vertical sliding menus for my site from a standard, compliant data definition list. I was looking for a good way to make a menu that did not fly all over and was simple to use, while being compliant with existing standards. I took what he had as my foundation and modified it slightly for my use. You can check it out on my main site.

Attach an icon to anything

Through the magic of CSS, we can do so much more then ever before with web pages. One of my favorite recent tips is the ability to attach icons to links (or really anything) based on custom attributes. Rather then re-write the whole article, I am linking it here: http://www.hunlock.com/blogs/Attach_icons_to_anything_with_CSS.

Try it out and be amazed. The tip works on all new (2007) browsers but will degrade gracefully for older systems. They will simply not see the icons.