I also had another interesting “coming” personally this week. I got a helper! Dr. Sam Horn, who is one of the speakers for CIT brought his son with him. Last week he was normal teen camper, but this past week he helped us out at JBC with various details like opening and closing the game room, setting up chairs for sponsors, etc. Some of you may remember that he had helped with this for one week last year as well. So it was neat to see him again, as well as to see the growth that had taken place in his life.

Of course campers are always coming, and I had another great prayer cabin this week. Three of the campers in it received the Expert Marksman award for saying all of Psalm 139. Another camper trusted Christ as his Savior this week. The counselor told me he prayed one of the neatest “sinner’s prayers” that he had ever heard. Mr. Ed taught through the 10 commandments in his morning chapel messages and gave the campers a neat way to remember them using their fingers. So in his prayer, he prayed through each of the 10 commandments, “I’ve broken this one, this one,” etc. (For numbers 6 and 7, he said “I don’t want to break that one”).

As usual the campers enjoyed Mr. Ed and his ventriloquist dummy, his gospel magic tricks, his powerpoint review games, his other gadgets, and of course, his preaching. I remember hearing Mr. Ed when I was a junior camper, and he hasn’t lost his ability to speak to kids.

Speaking of campers coming, I’m looking forward to those who will be coming down from PA for camp this week. You guys are in for a great week! We’ve got John Goetsch at teen camp, and Mr. Ed again for JBC. We also have Dr. Berg, Mr. Ken, and Scott Ashmore speaking for the CITeers this next two weeks. Can’t wait!

As far as the going is concerned, I got to go and do a new activity yesterday (new for me, anyway) — skeet shooting and handgun shooting. I’ve shot shotguns and rifles at targets before, but never at a moving one. It was quite a lot of fun to blast the clay targets out of the sky. It was even more fun to fire off a full clip of a .40 caliber Walther P99 handgun at a target from 25 yards. One of the full time staff members has a farm not far from the camp with a skeet shooting setup, and my boss is quite into guns and brought his own small arsenal along to “play” with after all the skeet shooters left.

And speaking of going, I’d better go and start getting things setup for our required service on the campsite this evening, followed by some extra good food and a good ole-fashioned fireworks show once it gets dark. Thanks again for your prayers!

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Thanks again for your prayers this week. We had a great week of camp and the Lord was really at work. This week we had some of the larger church groups that come regularly, so we had a lot of what we call, “professional campers,” or in other words campers who sometimes know the routine better than their counselors! Sometimes that professional camper attitude is accompanied by an insensitivity to God’s working as well, as they’ve “been there, done that, got the team shirt,” but thankfully that was not the case this week.

Perhaps because of all the returning campers, there were a lot of things this week that reminded me how long I’ve worked here. For starters, the theme this year, “Days of Knights” is the same theme as my first year working here, back in 2005. More related to the campers, one of the campers in my prayer cabin has an older sister who was one of my students this semester. Another JBC camper this week has two older brothers, both of whom were in my cabin on different years when I was a counselor. Another camper told me my sister had taught her violin at school this semester. And then to top it all off, in the middle of his message Friday, Big Bob called to me up in the sound booth regarding a detail of one his illustrations that he wasn’t sure about – while giving the illustration! Ok, maybe I have been here a long time. But I love the opportunities the Lord has given me here, and I’d be thrilled to keep serving here as long as He wills.

Kinda related, and I’m not sure if this is on purpose or not, but my assigned prayer partner each week so far has been a first-year counselor without a whole lot of experience. As a result, I’ve been able to share some of the things the Lord has taught me from my experiences which has been a great encouragement to them (and me). That’s just another reason to be thankful for what the Lord has allowed me do. This week, one of the campers in my prayer cabin was very homesick. Understandably, homesickness is not uncommon at JBC, but usually after the first night and the next morning’s activities, the campers are having so much fun they forget about being homesick. However this camper was still a little teary at lunch on Wednesday. However, I was able to help his counselor talk to him about the exciting things they were going to do that day (tubing, water wars, superslide, and of course the amazing, crazy, and hilarious Zing Zang Zap game show ) and I continued praying for that camper. On Thursday when I saw him, he was no longer homesick and was having lots of fun!

This weekend, I got to have some fun too. Camp opened up the brand new paintball field for the operational staff, since we aren’t able to play during the week with campers like the counselors are. And even better, they opened it up for FREE! So I spent about an hour and a half Saturday afternoon shooting and being shot. I have a couple of small welts to show for it, but it was a lot of fun, nonetheless.

Speaking of fun (or more accurately, work, on the sound crew’s part ), our annual Summer Prayer Partner banquet is coming up in just a few weeks on July 16. I hope to see some of you there. You’ll probably have to look for me behind a sound mixer, but I’ll be there .

This week, Tom Farrell is back for round 2 at teen camp, and at JBC we have another favorite speaker, Mr. Ed Dunlop (and of course, his dummy, Andy) Looking forward to seeing what God has planned for us. Thanks for your prayers.

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Campers come in all sizes, and I had one of the XL size in my prayer cabin this week. He had never been to camp before and he had a blast. He was also a lot of fun to watch during the games such as tube tug He responded during the services and made several good decisions. Overall the kids this week were very responsive to Brother Ron DeGarde’s messages. Several were saved, and on Friday night among other decisions, both a camper and his counselor were called to full-time Christian ministry.

I had two interesting counseling experiences this week that were a little out of the norm. First, on Thursday when all the guy junior campers are out in the woods playing capture the flag, I noticed from my perch in the sound booth, that a lone camper playing carpetball by himself in the JBC gameroom. I was about to go down and talk to him when the cleanup crew came in to straighten chairs and such and one of them started talking to him. I watched them talk for a while, and then they stopped playing carpetball and the cleanup crew guy got out a Bible and sat down with the camper. I wasn’t able to hear them from where I was in the booth, but I started praying. I found out later in the week that the cleanup crew guy had been able to lead that camper to the Lord. So it was neat to kind of be a part of / witness that.

The other interesting counseling experience took place with another staff member. He had responded angrily to a situation that developed and the Lord enabled me to confront him about it and remind him of some Scripture and biblical principles. He responded very well, and sought forgiveness from those he offended. It was a good reminder to both of us that it’s not just the campers who need counseling, but we all need it from time to time.

Well, tonight is the first of four required Sunday evening services on the campsite. A staff member (whose identity is usually kept a secret) will speak to us and then we’ll have some really good food. If this year is like previous years, I believe it will be BLT’s and some really good cookies. Tonight’s service will also be special because it will be the first time anyone (that I’m aware of) will use the new Wilds Songbooks. They just came in this week, from what I understand, and they’re not even being sold in the bookstore yet. I had the opportunity to peruse one Friday afternoon and it looks like a great update.

Next week the speaker at JBC will be Bob Roberts again, and the teen camp speaker will be Will Galkin. I’m looking forward to hopefully hearing both of them this week. This week is also the first week of CIT (Camper in Training), which is our camper leadership program. We have what’s often called “the Northland Crew” of Sam Horn, Les Ollila, and Marty Von speaking to them. (Yes, I realize they’re not all Northland people anymore, but they all have been, if they’re aren’t currently.)

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Here are a few quotes to whet your appetite…

I want to take my last breath having guarded the gospel, proclaimed the gospel, suffered for the gospel, and having passed it on unchanged, unmodified, and untweaked to the next generation. ~ J. D. Crowley

Evangelism is making God famous by telling His story. ~ J. D. Crowley

The good news of salvation through Jesus Christ makes sense in the context of this story-line and in no other. ~ D. A. Carson as quoted by J.D. Crowley

Feeling somewhat inspired by the first quote in particular, i came up with this wallpaper image. I’m sure someone else could do a much better job, and I’d love to see it when you do.

Widescreen (16:10)

Standard (4:3)

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Worldliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World

(171 pages + appendices) (Amazon Link)
Edited by C. J. Mahaney, with chapters written by Craig Cabaniss, Bob Kauflin, Dave Harvey, and Jeff Purswell

I enjoyed this little book. Mahaney and the other contributors use the illustration of the Jefferson Bible to make the point that Christians are often guilty of mentally if not literally clipping out parts of the Bible that deal with the sin of worldliness.  Worldliness is viewed as non-conformity to an outside set of a rules and restrictions, rather than a heart issue of putting the things we love above Jesus Christ.  Thus, as long we match up with our “checklist,” we ignore passages that deal with worldliness, mentally clipping them out of our Bible. Throughout the book, the authors present hard questions to practical issues of worldliness (media, music, stuff, clothes) that force one to re-evaluate his decisions in light of his love for Christ. Mahaney correctly makes the point that this self-centered heart attitude can not be defeated by self-effort, but only by the power of Christ, which was demonstrated on the cross.  The book includes a short study guide in the back which makes it helpful for a small group or discipleship study.

Ivanhoe

(Project Gutenberg Link)
Sir Walter Scott

This is a classic work of fiction loosely based on historical events following the King’s Crusade.  One of my favorite books. This was a re-read, but enjoyable nonetheless, as there are always things in a book of this length that you don’t pick up on the first time.  If you’ve only seen a movie or read an abridged version (i.e. the Wishbone version does not count ), I highly recommend you spend the time to read the full, unabridged version.  Another note about this book: I read this using the Stanza app for my iPod touch. Highly impressed with this free app.  As the parent company is now owned by Amazon, hopefully both this app and the Kindle app will only get better.

The Shack

(256 pages) (Amazon Link)
Wm. Paul Young

This book has been ably reviewed by others (Dan Olinger, Tim Challies, etc.) and I won’t be saying anything they haven’t. I was initially skeptical whether or not it would be worth my time to read this book, but I found the reading more profitable than I anticipated. Obviously the book is well-written. Obviously there are theological errors with the book.  Primary being the rather one-sided presentation of the “goodness” of God (love, forgiveness, patience, etc.) almost the exclusion of his “greatness” (holiness, justice, glory, etc.).  The author would argue that it was not his point to present a full picture of God and the character in the book (Mack) needed the emphasis on God’s goodness rather than his greatness. Perhaps. However, this is the inherent problem with creating a picture of God. Any picture we create will fall short because He is incomprehensible.  This might be excusable, except for that fact that by creating a false image of God, we violate the 2nd commandment. C.S. Lewis says something helpful in regard to this issue, but I’m too lazy to go look it up in The Screwtape Letters (Letter 4) in relation to prayer. Screwtape (head demon) tells his nephew (lesser demon) that when humans pray they pray to a composite object they call God composed of “ridiculous ingredients.”  Screwtape is ok with this type of prayer as long as human prayers are never directed “not to what I think Thou art but to what Thou knowest Thyself to be.” In other words, we need to be aware that any picture we create of God, even in our minds is most likely, if not certainly, inaccurate.  Overall, the book is helpful in making you think about your own preconceptions of God which quite probably are also false and thus also violations of the 2nd commandment.  This book may also be helpful on two other fronts. 1) Point of contact with many unbelievers who have read it and have questions (My mom had such an opportunity for a conversation the other week.) 2) Helpful to you in ministering to the “Mack’s” in your life by getting an idea of their false conception of God and how it needs to be biblically corrected

Wayback

(320 pages) (Amazon Link)
Sam Batterman

This was an excellent example of Christian historical science-fiction, for lack of a better term. Quick summary: A well-funded U.S. thinktank finds out about a Nazi secret-weapons program that attempted to create a method to travel back in time. The group succeeds where the Nazis failed. However, after failed attempts to reach 100,000 B.C., a team of specialists in various fields decides to make a trip to 2,300 B.C., just before the biblical Noah’s flood. What they find and document, if revealed to the public, would radically change widely accepted theories about world history.  However, a terrorist organization has also discovered the existence of this time machine and plan to use it for their own nefarious purposes. Batterman has done an excellent job of making a believable rendition of young-earth, world-wide flood, biblical history.  This is due in part to help from the scientists at Answers in Genesis.  I have a few small quibbles (mostly due to my own geeky views of time-travel and the ability to change history), but overall this is an excellent book. One of the characters in the book (an intially skeptical atheist) does raise an interesting question about time-travel from a biblical perspective, in relation to what time-travel and the ability to document important biblical events does to faith.  In other words, say for example it were truly possible for a individual to travel back to say, A.D. 30 and take photographs and video of the resurrection of Christ or even bring back a piece of the real burial shroud, thus establishing it as a historical fact beyond doubt by anyone, what would that do to faith?  Obviously there is more to salvation that faith in a historical event, but I look forward to seeing how this and other issues are dealt with in any future books. (Aside: Finally something put out by a Microsoft employee that’s enjoyable! jk )

Christ-Centered Worship: Letting the Gospel Shape our Practice

(307 pages including appendix) (Amazon Link)
Bryan Chapell

Having greatly enjoyed and profited from Christ-Centered Preaching, also by Bryan Chapell, I’ve been looking forward to reading this book.  Chapell did not disappoint. His goal in this book is to help ministry leaders re-align their worship services around the themes of gospel.  He begins by a historical survey of orders of worship or liturgies from Medieval times, through the Reformation, up to the present day.  He demonstrates how all of these, as well as several biblical examples of worship are ordered in respect to the gospel.  He traces the themes of Adoration, Confession, Assurance, Thanksgiving, Petition and Intercession, Instruction, Communion/Fellowship, and Charge and Blessing through each of these examples of worship and shows how they relate. For example, Adoration – recognition of the greatness of God – leads to an accurate view of our own sinfulness which in results in Confession; because God is always ready to forgive those who have contritely confessed their sin we have Assurance of his grace and pardon which should cause us to respond with Thanksgiving, and so on… He discusses the importance and relation of each of these themes to the gospel.  He also includes various examples of different ways each of these themes could be communicated through a service (choir, congregational singing, prayer, preaching, offering, etc.).  In the back some resources are listed to help with locating suitable means to express these themes.  I think this book is a great complement to Gary Reimer’s book, The Glory Due His Name: What God says about worship.  While Reimers focuses on the elements of worship God requires (Preparation, Praise, Prayer, Presentation, and Preaching), Chapell shows how each of these elements can be used to communicate the gospel God desires. Another one of Chapell’s goal is to show how a biblical, gospel centered approach to worship avoids many of “worship wars” prevalent in churches today, often caused by a desire to hold to traditional practices or implement modern ones.  Although I would not agree with all of the applications Chapell draws, and I doubt he would expect me to, there is much in this book that is very helpful.

Anyone else read anything interesting or helpful recently you’d care to comment on?  You know where to do it.

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Snow Leopard in my opinion has lived up to its claims of faster boot/shut down time, increased disk space, more eye candy, etc. Btw, speaking of increased disk space, the increase is not as large as it initially appears. Before I installed Snow Leopard, Finder reported 32.28 GB of free space on my hard drive. When I finished, it reported 49.14 GB. Sweet, I gained 16.86 GB’s! Not quite… Although Snow Leopard does remove a lot of legacy code used by the older PPC architecture, they also changed how GB (and KB and MB) are calculated. The easiest way to explain this is what consumers see as the discrepancy between what hard drive vendors report the size of a disk as and the size it appears to your computer. For example, I recently bought what was advertised as a 1 TB (1000 GB) external drive. However, Finder on my mac only reported it to be about 909 GB. Hey! Aren’t I getting gypped 91 GB? Not really. Computers and hard drive vendors measure KBs, etc differently. To a hard drive vendor (and most consumers) a kilobyte is 1000 bytes, a megabyte is a 1000 kb, etc. But to a computer, which use a binary (base 2) system of calculating, a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, a megabyte is 1024 kb, etc. (The technical term for these units of measurement is a mebi-, gibibyte abbreviated MiB, GiB, but hardly anyone calls them that.)

Ok, if i lost you somewhere in there among all those bytes, let me explain why that is significant. The reason is because Snow Leopard changes that. Instead of using the binary system where a kilobyte = 1024 bytes, it uses the base 10 system where a kilobyte = 1000 bytes. So although it looks like i saved 16.86 GB, in actuality I only gained 14.48 GB going by the new system or 13.49 GiB going by the old system. Still a significant savings. Clear as mud? Ok, moving on.

I’ll finish up this post write an additional post later with some of the things I really like about Snow Leopard, but first I’m going to deal with some of the quirks i ran into due to software that had not been updated to work with Apple’s new big cat, etc.

Upon first reboot, I was greeted with a couple boxes asking me to find System Events.app. This is obviously a system app, and was changed in Snow Leopard. I quickly googled and found it was located at /System/Library/CoreServices/ and selected it. I believe the culprit apps that were asking for it were Caffeine and Isolator. These are free apps that run in the menu bar. Caffeine keeps your mac from going to sleep, and Isolator puts a background behind the current window, preventing any other windows or items on the desktop from being distracting.

As I attempted to find the location of System Events.app, I was met numerous times with a box from PlugSuit.app that needed me to authenticate. PlugSuit.app is used by an app called Afloat, which allows you to set transparency of Cocoa windows and force a certain window to always be on top. It appears this app is not compatible with Snow Leopard, and they provide instructions on their website of how to disable Afloat to stop the requests for authentication.

Next up were a couple Apple Mail plugins that notify me when I receive new mail, Growl Mail and MailUnread Menu.  I wasn’t terribly surprised to find them incompatible as Mail is known for breaking these plugin bundles whenever it updates.  I was able to find a script that could communicate with Growl through use of a rule, so I am still notified about new mail.   That script can be found here

The biggie that didn’t work that I was concerned about was Quicksilver.  Thankfully all that was involved was installing the new version and trashing the preferences folder (located at ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksiver).  Some of the plugins still do not work with the latest version (such as the Services Menu plugin) but hopefully they will be updated soon.  Let me just put in a plug for Quicksilver while i’m at it.  Quicksilver is much more than a application launcher or file finder.  If that were all it were, I would pass because Spotlight does that very well.  Quicksilver’s strength is being able to do anything you can think of on the computer, with the keyboard.  Say i have a file on my desktop and it needs to be put on a folder some where in Documents, with Quicksilver, all i need to do is click on the file , invoke QS (or invoke QS and type the name of the file), tab, type “m” (for move), tab, and type the name of the folder I want to move it to.  And it can do a lot more than this like, control itunes, append the selected text to a file, etc. For more information see here and here.

Another app that didn’t work completely was Logos, the most extensive Bible software available for Mac.  However, a quick check for updates, and we were on our way.

A third app was Reader Notifier, another menubar app.  This one checks updates on Google Reader.  Again, a check for updates, solved this as well.

Although this wasn’t a serious problem, I was annoyed by the fact that Snow Leopard breaks all 3rd party screensavers, of which i have several.  Thankfully, my favorite one, Skyrocket a fireworks screensaver, has been updated for Snow Leopard (and probably many of the others will be soon).  What’s cool about Skyrocket that I haven’t see with other screensavers is that you can control it from the keyboard to create your own fireworks show.  You can also control the camera the views the show as well.  Pretty neat. (It is also available for Windows and Linux, as it’s OpenGL)

This next error was brought to my attention by a friend as I don’t use this particular feature, but it appears that afp network shares do not seem to work correctly.  I was using smb shares, so it didn’t really affect me, but a quirk, nonetheless.

Two final things.  I like tweaking how my mac looks, so I installed Docker, to change the default appearance of the dock and Drawers for stacks (see TUAW writeup here)  Since Snow Leopard restored the default appearance of the Dock, all I needed to do was open Docker, change the preferences to what i preferred and apply them.  For drawers, I needed to add the .app suffix to my drawer file, change Display as to Folder, then back to Stack, and I was good to go.

Well, as this post has gotten rather long, I’ll actually post what I like best about Snow Leopard in a later post…

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Anyway this semester begins my 7th year at BJU.  I’ve so far received a B.A. and a M.A. in Bible, and am now pursuing a M.Div (Master of Divinity, also referred to as a master of infinity ).  All of the classes from my M.A. carry over to my M.Div. so I’m not technically just staring the M.Div., however it will take several more years to finish.  So this semester I will be taking the following classes:

• OT 701 – Hebrew Exegesis I  (commonly referred to as 3rd semester Hebrew), taught by Dr. Bell
• NT 616 – Exposition of Paul’s Shorter Epistles (1 & 2 Thessalonians; Prison Epsitles, Pastoral Epistles), taught by Dr. Minnick
• CH 601 – Church History, taught by Dr. Cook

In all, 9 credits, which toward the upper end of my limit as GA.  I’ll still be working as a GA in the “Media Center,” now known as Instructional Technology Services (ITS), which is now a department of the new Academic Success Center (ASC). My coworker thought it would be fun to answer the phone with “ASC, ITS, Andy” (which, of course, sounds like, “Ask, it’s Andy”).  I don’t think we’ll do that though.

I’ll also continue to serve in the ESL (English as a Second Language) ministry at Cornerstone Baptist Church, where I attend.

Ok, enough personal stuff for now.  The rest of that can be relegated to facebook.

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First, xhtmlpro.com, where I previously hosted my blog was my the home of my web development/design company.  Our company did some realignment this summer, and now exists at http://waldenwebdev.com.  Xhtmlpro was too unwieldy of a name for those not familiar with web design and coding and such, and since we primarily market ourselves to churches and other Christian ministries, most of which aren’t familiar with terms like xhtml, we (my brother and I) decided we needed to charge our name and branding.  It also gave us an opportunity to redesign our site which needed a facelift.  (Btw, xhtmlpro.com is for sale, if anyone is interested. It would be a great domain for, say, those that convert Photoshop layouts to web templates.) So all that is to explain why I’m not still at andy.xhtmlpro.com.

But why not at say, andy.waldenwebdev.com? Well, the main reason is i thought it would be good to go ahead and get my own exclusive domain.  Not that i’m really concerned someone else will snatch up andyanglea.com (afaik, i am the only one in the world), but I can do other geeky things with it too, like setting up Google Apps for your domain, email server, backup/storage, roll your own URL cruncher, etc.

Now if you’re wordpress savvy and read my previous post, you might be wondering why i had to get my old posts from google cache, as wordpress has an export function in the control panel.  Well, I would have loved to do that, but due to some shenanigans by our web hosting company, that was not an option.  (Short version, they took down xhtmlpro.com before they said they would.)  As you might guess, this site is not hosted by that company.  Depending on how the service goes, I’ll reveal who that is sometime down the road. If you’re really curious, you can look at my whois record. So far so good, and I technically have more than I did with my previous host (storage, bandwidth, etc) for about half the cost.  Next up, the semesterly (or yearly) life update…

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There were several things I wasn’t sure I was going to like about it, but either the aroma exuding from the package caused me to forget all of that or they weren’t as bad as i thought they would be.  For example, I was previously a ThinkPad user, and was in love with the little red eraser trackpoint and had never had much success with the trackpad. So I was afraid i would have difficulty adjusting to the MacBook Pro’s trackpad.  But i’ve been using it without a hitch pretty much from day one.  It’s much more “intelligent” than trackpad’s i’ve used in the past with only moving or clicking when i want it to.  I love the 2-finger scrolling, in fact it annoys me when it doesn’t work on the Dells in the Media Center

I obviously still use Windows at work, and I actually dual-boot Vista via BootCamp and VMWare Fusion (once Logos for Mac gets completed that may change…)  I’m still pretty much of an Apple n00b but i’m planning on delving into AppleScript and Objective-C this summer as time allows (XCode is sweet!).  I may also add a triple-boot option of Ubuntu Hardy Heron, we’ll see how it goes…

If anyone else out this is thinking about switching and you have any questions, fire away in the comments.

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