My Church is Taking Over WordPress!

Bwa-ha-ha!

I just wanted to let everyone know that in the near future, WordPress will be conquered by members of Durham Evangelical Church in Durham, NH!

At least four blogs here belong to us, and I want to promote the other three, since they are friends of mine.

First of all, I’d love for you to take a look at RRamblings. I won’t tell you what the other “R” means at this point, though I do know. (He told me.)

Eaglescoutjonathan is a great guy, currently a college student and member of my church’s worship team. I also blame him for my weight problems. The guy eats half a dozen doughnuts in a Sunday morning, yet he’s thin as a rail. I suspect that there’s a wormhole transferring all of that fat and sugar from him to me.

Anyway … yeah, his blog. It’s there, and he’s got some good stuff there, and more coming. I know this because he asked me to preview one of his posts.

Chris, over at Sing Louder Musings, is my church’s worship pastor. He’s had the blog for a while, but took some time off to do things like focus on his family, write songs, organize the worship team and help coordinate the various teams around our church, etc.. Not sure what’s up with his priorities.

Anyway, Chris is very interested in using his blog to explore some of his own passions — how to use modern developments in the Church’s real mission and how to use them for God’s glory.

That brings me to Jesusfreek (yes, with two “e”‘s). He’s a good guy, too. In fact, he started his blog well before I started mine, and he inspired me to do it, suggested WordPress, and everything. You’ll note that he hasn’t posted in a while.

A long while.

Maybe this will help prompt him to get back in the game. After all, if DEC is going to take over, we might need his help.

Anyway, I just wanted to send some love out to my friends and suggest that some of you reading this blog might be interested in theirs, as well. (And trying to jolt Jesusfreek back onto the blogosphere!)

By the way, don’t forget Blogapalooza over at Middle Zone Musings. I’m scheduled to be posted today at 3pm. Since I think Robert is in Texas, that means it should be up shortly as of this writing (3:30 Eastern).

There is some good stuff out there.

Enjoy.

Regarding Israel

For the record … if your thoughts on Middle East policy don’t go farther than “Israel is good,” then please stop reading this post, now.

I’m going to open with an 18-year-old story. In January of 1991, while the opening attacks from Operation: Desert Storm were being shown, there was talk about anti-aircraft fire coming from the rooftops of many buildings in Baghdad, including hospitals. I turned to my father to ask him a question. His credentials, by the way, are pretty solid to answer my question. He was about to retire from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel. He had flown B-52′s over Vietnam, and later the FB-111′s. He had worked at the Intelligence desk for the Strategic Air Command’s 45th Air Division. Yes, I was raised by someone genuinely qualified as an expert in military ethics.

I asked him, “If Hussein is putting AA guns on top of a hospital, does that make it into a legitimate target?”

I still remember the look on Dad’s face as he began to answer. At that time, I was a pretty faithful right-winger, and had the world very much divided into “us” and “them.” I think he knew that I was just about ready to blame Saddam Hussein if a hospital was bombed. However, he answered very levelly, “No. It is a war crime to use a hospital as a gun site, but it doesn’t justify bombing a hospital. It’s a hospital.”

I’m in Blogapalooza

More than once in my life, I’ve wondered if the alt. rock people who created Lollapalooza appreciate the absorption of “palooza” into everything else. Ah, well. They’ll get over it, or write a depressingly-whiny song with incomprehensible lyrics about it or something.

What was I saying?

Oh, yeah … Through the High Calling Blogs network, I encountered Middle Zone Musings, whose author (Robert Hruzek) apparently likes to keep other bloggers busy. Group writing projects come out of there quite a bit.

For the month of January, he’s asked for bloggers to submit our best, favorite, or otherwise-noteworthy posts from each month of the past year. I am participating in what he’s calling Blogapalooza (thus my opening bit … get it?).

I’m actually late in posting this, as Robert has already begun putting up posts, but last I knew he still had plenty of room for more submissions. If you’re interested, check it out and go ahead. I found it to be a lot of fun looking over the past year and choosing my posts. My post, by the way, is scheduled to go up at 3pm on Saturday.

Yes, he scheduled times. This tells me that Robert is a more-organized person than I have the potential to be.

Anyway … check it out, enjoy, and I’ll let you know when my post goes up there. (Or, more likely, when I get around to remembering that I have this blog on Saturday afternoon.)

Panetta? Really?

I repeat my principle for how to handle Pres-elect Obama during the transition period: I’m not going to imagine what I think he might do right or wrong, but I’m going to hold off on commenting until he’s done something.

I really haven’t had much to say about his nominations to date for a simple reason: Most of them have been reasonable, given who he is. While I might have liked people well to the right of the ones he’s choosing, we all knew that Obama isn’t in that direction. Given that, most of his appointments have been decent-enough people. I didn’t say anything here about Hillary Clinton because it was already being said … I had sort of hoped to see Colin Powell reprise his role (though I know that the hard Left would have been in hysterics).

However, the choice to make Leon Panetta as CIA director leads me to break that silence — he must not be put into this office.