Sapphire Sky

Robots robots robots …

My youngest brother just graduated from high school, and like his brothers, he plans on serving his country in the US Army, which awarded him a scholarship to study engineering in college while training to be an officer.

I admire and support his decision to commit to officer’s training; I don’t though envy him though. It’s not because the US is in a land war in Asia; it’s because the future looks so uncertain for purposes of planning a career … we may hardly comprehend or even imagine today what our economy and technologies will look like in 40 years.

The rate of change only continues to increase. The world in 2000 AD looked nothing like the world of 1900. I’m afraid 2100 will be even more dramatically removed from what life in 2000 was like. The founder of www.howstuffworks.com, Marshall Brain, hasa thoughtful essay on this topic titled Robotic Nation here.

National Review comments in their May 3 edition:

We have been hearing for some time — about a century — that we shall soon have robots to take over low-level manual tasks, leaving the human population free to write sonnets, compose symphonies, or paint in oils. Perhaps there is something to it: Researchers at the University of California – Berkeley, have just demonstrated a robot that can fold towels. There’s some way to go yet, though, before all drudgery is purged from our lives: The mechanical marvel takes an average of 25 minutes to fold one towel.

culture

More bad news for our kids …

Post author By Christ Ranger
Post date May 19, 2010
No Comments on More bad news for our kids …

Not only are we piling up lots of debt — trillions and trillions — for our children to pay off, apparently, we’re birthing fewer and fewer children to pay it in the future. Fittingly, during the year where we’ve cast off constitutional constraints and moved deliberately to the European social welfare state model, we are now also adopting for the first time their birthing practices, ie our birthing rate has fallen below the replacement level. See here. The social welfare state with a declining population base is economically unsustainable absent massive immigration, which creates its own set of problems and instabilities.

culture

Sexless Humans …

I’m not at all against technology; it makes life more predictable and safe and often more interesting. It can, however, also detract from the pleasures of life. For example, the PDA is great technology, but it can take away from family time and family communications. Technology can also take away from what it means to be human. Here’s an instance where technology may do both. The UK’s Daily Mail reports that “scientists” opine: Sex will not be used to have babies in just 10 years, as couples turn to IVF

Maybe the Luddites were on to something?

Poem

Visiting home …

Grand River

 

Old grey mists fleeting past               

We were summer’s children               

With warm grandparents in winter                

We were together only yesterday          

 

Forests and playfields gone               

28 empty theatres                               

Quiet houses, lonely streets               

They were real only yesterday           

 

New faces and buildings

My children now laughing                 

Grandparents hugging smiles 

Time flowing on like yesterday.

Atheism, agnostic, evolution, etc. entertainment video

Where did we come from?

Is there any more exciting and important question?

praise

Thanks and Praise III

Nos. 1- 10, 11-20,

21. God whispers

22. Fresh pineapples from Hawaii

23. Cheeseburgers fresh off the grill and hot, buttery, salty corn on the cob, and seconds on those cheeseburgers

24. God’s incredible creativity

25. We live in a land where we are free to worship and praise God

26. God hears our worship, praise and prayers

27. How incredibly made is the human body

28. Faith in eternity

29. A loving, faithful wife

30. the Gettys

politics, economy, etc.

Your federal tax dollars at work: renting from Hamas

Post author By Christ Ranger
Post date May 13, 2010
No Comments on Your federal tax dollars at work: renting from Hamas

From the Investigative Project on Terrorism: Government Pays Mosque it Considers Radical

My political outrage meter is so worn from the past year that this hardly registers … but it should.

sports

Canucks are Golfing

For those who are following the NHL playoffs:

entertainment video

Undergarment Struggles

Remembering those halcyon days, when t-shirts used to simply be fun. Could this lead to the next arms race?

encouragement marriage and family

True Beauty

The apostle Paul encourages us to focus on those things that are good and pure. Mother’s day is a day devoted to just that – celebrating and rejoicing in one of the purest and best aspects of humanity. The bond of mother and child is one of our strongest and most intimate forces. Praise God for the love of and for our mothers.

I thank God for the woman who gave me birth and raised me and for the woman who has given selflessly of herself to birth and raise our children. My wife’s love for our children is as certain and steady and warming as the sunrise. I thank God also for my grandmothers who loved my parents into existence, and then me, my siblings, and my cousins.

We really shouldn’t need a particular day to celebrate mothers. The birthday of each child should be a celebration of the birth, i.e. a celebration of what God has accomplished through the mother’s labor. The child should bring gifts to the mother. That is not, however, the nature of parenting, particularly of motherhood.

There’s an old Hebrew proverb, God could not be everywhere, so he made mothers. While I disagree with that theology, I agree with its sentiment. Motherly love is perhaps the closest our fallen race gets to godliness. Self-sacrificing love is the essence of motherhood. Thank you Moms!

culture

Sexy little thang …

I remember the first time I visited Craigslist. We had posted some children’s items for sale. I was surprised and initially impressed by the range of products and services offered on the site and started surfing around. It wasn’t too long before I noticed the “friendship” or “relationship” ads. The explicit statements stunned me. The Red Light District in Amsterdam had nothing on those postings. Turns out that at least some of those girls advertised on Craigslist were/are still little girls. While we were selling kids stuff, other folks were selling their kids …

The open letter below to Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster is a good reminder that the sex-porn industry is based on abuse, either harvesting the fruit of sexually abused children or too often, directly exploiting and abusing children.

An Open Letter to Jim Buckmasterby Rachel Lloyd

Dear Jim,

We met about 18 months ago via video-conference and at that time I shared with you a story of an 11 year old girl that I was working with. I’m not sure if you remember her, but I’d like to share this story with you again.

“Bethany” had been in foster care since she was 2 years old and had bounced from foster home to foster home, until at 11 she was introduced to a friend of her 14 year old sister. This friend was a 32 year old man who lured her in with promises of a stable home and love, everything she’d been craving her whole short life. He took Bethany from New York down to a hotel in DC, bought her some ‘sexy’ clothes, and took pictures of her and then posted those pictures on your site, Craigslist. Bethany didn’t really think there was anything unusual about this, after all her 14 and 16 year old sisters were both being sold on Craigslist too.

For nine months, almost till she turned 12 years old, Bethany’s pictures were posted on Craigslist. Sometimes she was “NEW IN TOWN” when her pimp/trafficker would bring her to cities up and down the East Coast, posting her pictures in different regions. Sometimes she was “HOT N SEXXY FOR U” with her price listed as 150 roses. Night after night, adult men clicked on her ads, dialed a number and ordered her as easily as they would’ve ordered a pizza. Night after night, adult men came to the hotel room she was being kept in and had sex with her, or rather raped her, as at 11 years old she was too young to consent. Night after night, her pimp collected the money that he made from her and if it wasn’t enough he beat or whipped her, badly enough that she has permanent scars.

No-one who saw Bethany’s pictures ever clicked on the link on your site and reported “suspected exploitation of minors and/or human trafficking to the appropriate authorities”. No law enforcement ever found the ads that her trafficker posted in the midst of the hundreds and hundreds of other ads of girls for sale.

Bethany, and her two sisters, were sold on your site, just like hundreds of other girls I’ve worked with have been. Just like thousands of other girls and young women across America are sold every night. It’s hard to imagine that as a businessman with a sense of social responsibility that this wouldn’t sicken and horrify you. The thought that you could profit even one dollar, let alone millions of dollars, in any way from the sale of children has to deeply sadden and make you outraged to the point where you would want to ensure that this can’t happen – at least not on your site. I would’ve hoped that would be your automatic response anyway.

Unfortunately that hasn’t been the case. Your responses to the criticism though raise some interesting points. Yes, while there may be a few people who are concerned about “casual sex” on your site, the vast majority of people who are signing petitions and raising their voices about this issue are doing so on behalf of girls like Bethany who don’t have a voice. Yes, while there are of course other sites, magazines and Yellow Page ads where girls and women can be bought, very few of them have the brand-name recognition that Craigslist does, and besides, the “other people are doing it too” argument seems to be one that our mothers taught us when we were in kindergarten didn’t hold much water. (Kudos, by the way, to New York Magazine for dropping all their sex for sale ads last year). And yes, while Craigslist has been cooperative with law enforcement on this issue, the sheer volume of postings of girls for sale on each night, in each city makes truly targeting traffickers and pimps a Sisphyean task.

This campaign isn’t about a “cynical misuse of a cause as important as human trafficking as a pretense for imposing one’s own flavor of religious morality”. In fact, for those of us on the ground who work with girls like Bethany every day, it’s saddening to have our work and our advocacy efforts framed as such. While we recognize that Craigslist taking a stand on this issue won’t end commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking in our country, it will send a powerful message to the adult male buyers that Craigslist will have no part in, nor take any profit from, the sale of 11 (or 14, or 16) year old girls.

Rachel Lloyd is the founder of Girls Educational & Mentoring Services.

culture

Man without God …

Remember those horrific stories about Nazi doctors performing medical experiments on Jews? Don’t think that our secular socialists are so terribly different than were the German Nationalist Socialists, particularly at American public universities. WorldNetDaily reports that after a significant public relations campaign against the project, a major Big Ten university has cancelled plans to conduct late term abortions that would be used to harvest baby organs for research:

The University of Wisconsin Hospitals have dropped plans to establish a late-term abortion facility at the publicly funded Madison Surgery Center that would be used to provide “fresh fetal body parts” to researchers at the institution, according to reports today from American Life League and the Alliance Defense Fund.

encouragement video

Why are we here

I always struggle with finalizing a blog. Someone else always seems to say it better than how I would say things.

But as I was reading through Philippians today and came across 1:23-25, Paul talked about looking forward to Heaven yet realizing there is still more he had to do on earth. He says, “But I am hard pressed from both directions, having the desire to depart and be with Christ, for that is very much better; yet to remain on in the flesh is more necessary for your sake. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy in the faith, so that your proud confidence in me may abound in Christ Jesus through my coming to you again.”

In reading these passages, it made me ask myself, is this the meaning of life? Is this why we are here? We are to appear as lights in the world holding fast the word of life (Phl 2:15-16).

So let us spend our time here on earth focused on Him, worshiping Him, loving Him, and serving Him by being of the same mind as Christ, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose, doing nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind, regard for one another as more important than ourselves by not looking out for our own personal interests, but for the interests of others.

This is may so much easier said than done.

I later came across this video on YouTube called “We Are Here” which I thought was interesting given the state of mind I was in after reading Philipians:

entertainment music praise video

In Christ Alone

I think the Keith and Kristyn Getty are the best songwriters of our generation and that people will be singing the songs they’re writing today until the Lord returns. Here’s a favorite …

In Christ alone my hope is found,
He is my light, my strength, my song;
this Cornerstone, this solid Ground,
firm through the fiercest drought and storm.
What heights of love, what depths of peace,
when fears are stilled, when strivings cease!
My Comforter, my All in All,
here in the love of Christ I stand.

In Christ alone! who took on flesh
Fulness of God in helpless babe!
This gift of love and righteousness
Scorned by the ones he came to save:
Till on that cross as Jesus died,
The wrath of God was satisfied –
For every sin on Him was laid;
Here in the death of Christ I live.

There in the ground His body lay
Light of the world by darkness slain:
Then bursting forth in glorious Day
Up from the grave he rose again!
And as He stands in victory
Sin’s curse has lost its grip on me,
For I am His and He is mine –
Bought with the precious blood of Christ.

No guilt in life, no fear in death,
This is the power of Christ in me;
From life’s first cry to final breath.
Jesus commands my destiny.
No power of hell, no scheme of man,
Can ever pluck me from His hand;
Till He returns or calls me home,
Here in the power of Christ I’ll stand.

encouragement

Our times together …

I enjoyed a father-daughter camp retreat this weekend. We enjoyed fantastic Carolina weather and the Pamlico sound and a host of activities, but more importantly, it was really special having so much time together, just the two of us. There is no substitute for time spent together, particularly when the purpose of the time is to enjoy the time together. The memories were precious and even a little painful as I’m reminded that this “parenting period” is temporary. Older parents always say with nostalgia that it’s over before you know it, and most often it’s said with a tint of regret.

I’ve been really convicted this year on how easy it is to get sidetracked even obsessed with things that ultimately have little or no significance while at the same time neglecting what really matters — each other. Some quotes to further that conviction:

“When you are in the final days of your life, what will you want? Will you hug that college degree in the walnut frame? Will you ask to be carried to the garage so you can sit in your car? Will you find comfort in rereading your financial statement? Of course not. What will matter then will be people. If relationships will matter most then, shouldn’t they matter most now?”
— Max Lucado

“Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happines there is in our lives” C.S. Lewis

“No relationship is perfect, ever. There are always some ways you have to bend, to compromise, to give something up in order to gain something greater…The love we have for each other is bigger than these small differences. And that’s the key. It’s like a big pie chart, and the love in a relationship has to be the biggest piece. Love can make up for a lot.”
— Sarah Dessen (This Lullaby)

“It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.”
— John Ruskin

“The capacity for friendship is God’s way of apologizing for our families.”
— Jay McInerney (The Last of the Savages)

“The willingness to forgive is a sign of spiritual and emotional maturity. It is one of the great virtues to which we all should aspire. Imagine a world filled with individuals willing both to apologize and to accept an apology. Is there any problem that could not be solved among people who possessed the humility and largeness of spirit and soul to do either — or both — when needed?”
— Gordon B. Hinckley (Standing for Something: 10 Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes)

“Never ruin an apology with an excuse.”
— Benjamin Franklin

“How did it get so late so soon?”
— Dr. Seuss

Ministry

Christ in Action …

God is greatly using Samaritan’s Purse to bring relief to Haiti’s impoverished quake victims. The relief provided by Samaritan’s Purse includes the following:

Shelters:
- over 500 completed
- strategy to build 1,200 each month
- 7,500 is the goal – should be completed by the end of October
- Haiti’s president said the shelters have been the best thing to happen since the earthquake
Medical
- Baptist Haiti Mission (medical outreach of Samaritan’s Purse) has had over 9,600 patient contacts
- Their clinic in Cite Soleil has treated over 2,600 patients
- Nearly 30 pallets of medical supplies have been sent
Water/Sanitation
- Installed 20 water filtration systems, each of which can provide enough water for 3,000 people daily
- 149 shower stalls installed
- 211 hand washing stations constructed
- 681 latrines constructed
Rubble Removal
- Over 34,000 metric tons of rubble removed in Grand Goave and Leogane
- 1,292 local Haitians employed by cash for work trash/debris removal (40% women)
Non-Food Items
- 12,672 Jerry Cans
- 29,940 Blankets
- 2,200 Flashlights
- 2,000 Mosquito Nets
- 1,000 Kitchen Kits
Supplies: Samaritan’s Purse has flown supplies into the country on 21 flights, including six planes chartered by Samaritan’s Purse. They have also sent two cargo ships loaded with emergency relief and rebuilding items.
Staffing: Samaritan’s Purse has sent 185 staff members and non-medical volunteers to Haiti. They have also sent 90 medical staff members and volunteers, and 22 chaplains from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s Rapid Response Team have worked with their team on the ground. Over 1,200 national staff have also been employed.

Bibliophile Benefits

I’ve long been a fan of John Ruskin’s quote: “A book worth reading is worth owning.” It’s fairly conventional wisdom that a book-rich home encourages children to read which in turn introduces children to the joys of learning, thinking, and imagining. A recent study now shows benefits of actually owning those books …

“Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics,” reports the study, recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. “Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books. “This is a large effect, both absolutely and in comparison with other influences on education,” adds the research team, led by University of Nevada sociologist M.D.R. Evans. “A child from a family rich in books is 19 percentage points more likely to complete university than a comparable child growing up without a home library.”

More here.

encouragement theology

What should we pray for?

I often think of the common child’s prayer: “bless Mom, bless Dad, bless my friends, bless my teacher, …” Now as adults, we can make a much better sounding prayer, with much more more spiritual words. However, how often do we really think about what we are saying when we pray for others? What do we pray for?

I am encouraged to pause when reading the Bible when it covers a specific prayer or prayer requests. How often do our prayer requests model these precedents in Scripture?

Paul starts the letter to the Philippians with a prayer of encouragement:

And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve the things that are excellent, in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God. (Philippians 1:9-11)

In this prayer of encouragement, these are some of the specific requests made on behalf of the Philippian Christians:

“That your love may abound still more and more” – That their love (agape) would grow in abundance; more than enough
“real knowledge” – That their love would be anchored in understanding and in the Truth of Scripture.
“all discernment” – Also translated as “depth of insight”, that their love would show an understanding of what is good.
“approve the things that are excellent” – That that they would evaluate things for what has real value
“sincere” – lit. “without wax”; illustrating broken pottery that was repainted for a cheap sale. The prayer for them is that their love and discernment would produce in them a pure faith without secret agendas or motives.
“blameless” – that they would give no cause for offense; have no legitimate accusations against them
“having been filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ” – recognizing that the only source of them being able to accomplish this was their salvation in Christ, and his ongoing work in them.
“to the glory and praise of God” – the ultimate goal was for God’s glory in everything.

May we include this in our prayers for others.

“For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 1:6)

Atheism, agnostic, evolution, etc. politics, economy, etc.

National Day of Prayer

The following link is an interesting article by the president of Focus on the Family, entitled “A day of prayer for judicial common sense”

culture entertainment

Piano dedication

We enjoyed a touching and enjoyable piano dedicatory recital Monday evening at the beautiful Butler University Chapel on Campbell University. Randall Atcheson was the pianist. He performed on a new Steinway nine-foot concert grand model “D.” Great performer and wonderful instrument. Mr. Atcheson, a member of the international roster of Steinway Artists, professed a strong faith in Christ and gave a wonderful performance. After playing a set from Chopin, he performed a Gospel, popular, and patriotic selection, each of which he arranged. Mr. Atcheson is a passionate and fun performer who loves God and is excited about everything, particularly music and God and other people. And he wasn’t afraid to express it. His stories about his southern preacher father were touching and humorous. We also share the same favorite song: Amazing Grace. Great performer if Monday night was in any way typical for him.

The litany of dedication was also touching:

Creator God, You have given us minds to know You, hearts to love You, voices to sing Your praise and instruments to resound the majesty of Your name. We are grateful You have gifted Your people with music.

When words fail, music can express our deepest yearnings. In those seasons of our lives, we can find You in the notes of the familiar hymns whose melodies bring soothing calm and sweet serenity.

When we are still in Your presence, we can seek You and find You in the songs of quiet contemplation.

When we gather to worship, music can voice our highest and most exalted praise through the sounds of strength and majesty.