for those of you whom I haven’t kept up with. I’ve been here about a week and will be here for four more. I just got back from a crazy weekend in Lancaster and am trying to get my head above water–anabaptist theology is proving to be a killer. Tata
Sorry about the overall shabby appearance of my site and the fact that it was down for three days. I’m sure lots of my faithful readers were seriously let down by my site’s non-existence these past few days. I’m working hard on getting things improved.
Ran across this at mcpmag.com
Well over 70 percent of all support calls that come to Microsoft support services that start out as Active Directory or Exchange calls end up being DNS calls. Yet, as you’ll see in this article, most of these issues don’t require extensive diagnostic work or sophisticated tools to isolate and resolve. I liken it to the days when automobiles had carburetors; a mechanic could fix most engine performance problems by fiddling with the choke—spritz a little WD-40 into the throttle body, charge $50 and retire in the suburbs after a few years. Nowadays, the same is true for DNS. Check the TCP/IP settings, run a few utilities to verify the zone records, charge $350 (correcting for inflation) and retire to Arizona.
Sounds entirely too simple. No, I definitely haven’t arrived here yet.
There is really nothing I want more than to live a beautiful life. But it seems that life’s cruel intent is to dash that desire and turn it into something more practical, more doable, something to do more with survival or success than true Life. I guess I’ve often despaired of ever living a beautiful life, especially recently.
But just yesterday I was given this picture of a person who could live a beautiful life. I’m sure you’ll know what I mean. This person knows how to live life and live in complete happiness. This person knows how to deal with daily stress. This person knows how to deal with heart-crushing tragedy. This person knows how to deal with difficult people. This person knows how to live. This person delights in most everything.
To describe this person is not all that easy. This person has a real relationship with God, but it’s more than just a relationship. This person has an incredible faith, but it’s so much different than hardened belief. This person has a positive outlook, but it’s not the kind that regularly irritates realists.
This person possesses a beautiful spirit.
I’m seeing it now, and for me it’s an awesome discovery. I’m sure lots of you have known this for ages, so you’ll have to pardon my naive joy. In the last year I have seen and experienced very sharply the pain and heartache that permeates our planet. I have hated it. I have wondered how anyone can live a sane life in the face of all this. My faith has been small, weak at times. It still is. Every now and then I would see people living lives obviously full of joy and I was glad, very glad that there was at least a little happiness in the world. It amazed me that they could do it and I thought they must have their heads in the sand, at least partially. But now I am seeing that the beauty and the happiness in these people’s lives comes not so much from the actual circumstances of their lives as from they way they respond to them. There may be little or no beauty in the events of these people’s lives but these normal, dull, and ordinarily ordinary events are turned into things of great beauty and joy by the way these people experience them. Is this making any sense? Like I said already, this idea has probably been perfectly obvious to most of you for years. However, I think if I could truly live this out, and it could only be with lots of help from Jesus, it would revolutionize my life!
has been a very real struggle. Why all the pain, all the hardship? And not only for me, but the whole world is afflicted. But it seems that when I experience deep hardship myself, I look around and see the rest of the world experiencing similiar or worse things, and then I wander if there is any hope for things ever getting better.
Life is just as much unmitigated suffering as exuberant joy. A genuine feeling for life will show a person the deepest contrast between extreme happiness and extreme pain. It is only when we taste the lot of all, when we become involved deeply in world suffering, one in heart with the need of man, that we can win through to that vocation which is the calling of man, and which, therefore, can alone be joy.
That’s by Eberhard Arnold from the bruderhof website. OK, so we need to taste the lot of all and become “deeply involved in world suffering” to enter our vocation which is the “calling of man.” OK. Done. Now, just what is that vocation he is talking about? Let me go back and read more. Ah, this is good.
No one has felt men’s suffering as Jesus did, and He it is who has penetrated to the root and disclosed the source of suffering.
Now that is a serious consolation!
Only a complete change of our nature—only the return of life to God—can free us from misery, suffering and ruin. The wrong of our life is both a personal wrong and a universal one. To recognize it as our own guilt and at the same time as the need of the whole world
But can a “complete change of our nature” really and truly “free us from misery?” Maybe complete and total misery, but it certainly does not seem to rule out periodic bouts of sharp pain. But when there is hope even in that pain, I guess that’s not real misery, even though it sure feels like it sometimes.
John Bomberger, uncle of my friends Sheri & Karen Keller in Lancaster, was killed this morning in a hunting accident.
Jesus, this hurts.
When I get big I’m going to have an ideal life like Jeremy, and be smart and write really far out posts. But for now I’m just little old me.
I’m having a nice day. This morning after getting up way too early and setting up tables for lunch at the schoolhouse, I breazed over to Starbucks and got a Grande Peppermint Mocha. Lovely. I sat down in a big old chair and watched the people for a while, then slipped over to my cabin in the woods, lit a comfy fire, and sat with my back to it reading James Herriot, then studying enchanting things from Microsoft like DNS, namespaces, zone transfers, dhcp, and various other aspects windows active directory domains. I really do enjoy that stuff, as hard as that is to imagine. Had an awesome dinner with the Hershbergers. Lots of H’s were there whom I hadn’t seen for ages, years, some of them. We had a nice time gorging on the fat of the land, and aftewards waddling around on the vball court. That was OK, but I killed myself playing basketball, and then sprained my ankle to top it off. Lovely. Now I’m hear anticipating another satisfying meal in a few minutes with more of my gregarious cousins.
Ah yes, tomorrow is the big day. Black Friday, when I can join myself with millions of other deal desperate Americans in the most frenzied shopping day of the year. These two days, Thanksgiving and Black Friday, are a little too symbolic of America’s two favorite activities, eating and buying things. But what can I say? Not much, I’m afraid.
from This article by J. Hess:
“As early as the latter 1800s, according to Rodney Clapp, national leaders recognized that production-oriented capitalism was too successful—ordinary citizens simply didn’t need all the products being produced. In order to sustain a strong economy, each person should become a ready spender, one who frequently bought unneeded things. Thus a shift from production- to consumer-oriented capitalism began. Following World War II, greatly expanded production capacity and a larger work force—since many women chose not to exit the work force after the war—combined to require more consumption than ever before. The rise of modern marketing and its catalyst, the television, which became readily available to the public about 1948, attempted to work North Americans into a permanent buying frenzy.”
A permanent buying frenzy, huh? But how true. No, Americans haven’t always been this way. But this is what drives the all-important economy.