A Pastor's Thoughts

The Crossroads church in Cincinnati, OH is an entrepreneurial church for entrepreneurs.    They actually run a "shark Tank” type event where the church will invest in small businesses.  Actually, investors invest in small businesses through the church, the article “ What would Jesus Disrupt ” explains.  This church is hailed as the fasted growing church in America.  It maybe a fast growing thing but it is not a church . Church and money have always had a difficult relationship. Many people have told me that all a church wants is there money.  That is a perception that is widespread, although not true for Bible believing churches.  In the New Testament, churches collected money to help Christians under persecution in other cities.  The money would be collected and taken by trusted men to buy food and clothing and shelter. Today, churches meet in buildings.  Whether renting or owning, buildings cost money.  If people want to meet somewhere, they must pay for that location.  Bui

After Jesus surrendered his Spirit and breathed his last, the Gospel of John continues to tell us what happened next.  The chief priests went to Pilate and basically demanded that the three malefactors be removed from the crosses.  This is the scene: For the last three hours, it has been dark.  It was dark for as far as the eye could see.  No sun, no moon, no stars.  The only light was the fire-light from torches and lamps.  There was, therefore, no way to know what time it was.  Sundials do not work in the dark.  Therefore the chief priests were concerned that the people would remain on the cross past sundown. This is a problem.  Deuteronomy 21:22-23 gives the Law concerning hanging someone on a tree.  Capital offenders will hang on a tree until sundown.  Hanging on a tree was a sign of being cursed by God.  If the person hung on the tree past sundown, the whole land would be defiled. In our passage, the day is Friday.  Saturday started at sundown.  Saturday was a double holy

Banks are supposed to be friendly places where people put their money and, perhaps, earn a little interest.  Back in the day, before Obama, there was such a thing as a neighborhood or family bank.  When I lived in Colorado, there was a town bank called First Street Bank .  It was started by a family that made a fortune in Colorado oil.  Only two branches existed in the whole world.  One was on the north end of town and one was on the south.  The people at both branches knew me and were friendly and cordial.  They would stop and talk when we saw each other at the grocery store, for example.  Bush’s and Obama’s banking regulations closed 22,000 local, neighborhood banks, including First Street. Now banks act like they are doing people a favor by taking your money and it usually costs more to keep it in there than the interest pays.  I am moving my money out of Bank of America because they went from a free checking account, as long as I had direct deposit, to a $25 a month checking acco

George Washington, America’s first president bled to death.  He had the flu or a cold, and the doctors wanted to rid him of his evil spirits, so the doctors drained his blood.  He did not get better so they drained more until he died. Today I donated blood.  People know that draining too much blood will kill a person, so blood letting for the purpose of improving health, is no longer practiced.  Yet people can still donate blood.  Actually I donated platelets today in a process known as aphaeresis.  The Red Cross takes whole blood out of one arm, puts it in a centrifuge removes the platelets and some plasma, adds saline and puts it back in the other arm, while platelets and palm go into some bags.  For three units of platelets it takes between 2 and 2 1/2 hours.  The modern machines are much faster than the old machines.  I donates platelets back in 1986 and it took close to 5 hours for one unit.  Platelets are primarily used for cancer patients.  Chemotherapy destroys platelets and

Pain has been around since the dawn of man.  When Adam and Eve sinned, God cursed the labor of both of them.  Adam’s physical labor to grow food would now be tedious and tiresome and painful.  Eve’s labor in childbirth would now be painful.  So a reminder of the first sin was given to the world:  daily pain. Every society that has ever existed has had a view on pain.  Some saw it as a punishment from the gods, while others saw it as a guide for better living.  Philosophers have called pain a tutor, a mentor, an illusion, all in your head and normal.  There is no one who has lived who has not experienced pain.  Every religious leader from Buddha to Muhammad and even Jesus experienced pain.  Every religious writing speaks to pain. When it comes to the medical systems, there are more pain relievers than any other remedy.  Most drug abuse has the goal of  ameliorating pain.  Pain that is emotional, mental and physical can all be helped with various drugs in various amounts.  As of toda

This is an open letter to Accordance Bible Software and Logos/Faithlife Bible software. In the late 1998 I had a palm device .  Probably the V or Vx.  Someone told me about a new Bible reader program for the Palm so I found it and installed it.  It was a basic reader with 2 panes where I could load 2 books.  I was able to get an early version of the NET Bible and study notes and install it on my device.  The Bible reader eventually became Olive Tree Bible software and as more books were added to the library, the reader remained a 2 pane window. Fast forward to today.  I have an iPad Pro 10.5”. There are now three top companies in the Bible software business.  I can load Olive Tree’s latest offering, Accordance ’s mobile app and any one of the numerous mobile apps from Logos/Faithlife .  If I launch them, they look exactly like things did on my palm device back in 1998.  I get a window with 2 panes and I can load any two books I want and sometimes they sync when I scroll.  A curs

According to the book “ Spam Nation ,” 85 billion spam emails are sent every day and have been for more than a decade.  That means that 70% of all email messages are spam.  If anyone thinks spam is harmless, consider the load on computers and networks and your ISP to push that much data through for no purpose.  As for me, I get this exact email three times a day You thought escalating your brain activity is nothing more than a pipe dream? These pills will change your life. Don’t miss out on those mind-blowing special offers; find out more about them out here  http://jujhsp.brainbrainbtr.xyz/zcuwsbtwffnp It is always from a different email sender and always has multiple people in the “to” line with my email address is the middle.  This makes if very difficult for spam blockers to parse it and stop it. From my research, there are two primary spam machines.  They are both Russian.  The Russians use their own spam machines to sell knock-off pharmaceuticals.  However, these two spam

Back in the day I could buy a print book.  I could buy it from thousands of places.  Barnes & Noble, Crown books and countless little corner bookstores.  I could take the book anywhere, read it almost anywhere, quote it and copy it, with reference in school papers.  When I was done with the book, I could give it away, sell it, burn it or throw it away, or I could put it on my self for posterity.  Everyone would agree that I owned the book.  I may not own the ideas or the words on the page, but I owned that instantiation.  No one would call me wrong if I said, “This is my book.” With eBooks, companies like Amazon and Apple treat these books like software.  Bill Gates changed the way software was bought or sold.  Prior to Bill Gates, software was owned.  Bill Gates licensed his software which allowed him to distribute billions of copies of the same software package, literally getting the sale price over and over.  The terms and services state that you do not own Windows or Office

There is one reason and one reason only that people read eBooks:  convenience.  I can have dozens, even hundreds of books on my iPhone and iPad.  I can read downloaded books even when there is no service and no internet.  I have a veritable library at my fingertips 24 hours a day 7 days a weeks and that is convenient. There are two top survivors of the eBook wars.  They would be Kindle (Amazon) and iBooks (Apple).  Amazon was one of the first.  Barnes & Noble tried it with their Nook device for a while, but that has gone the way of the Dodo.  Amazon has dedicated devices, called Kindles that store books and allow people to read, even in the brightest sunlight.  Their eInk technology is supposed to mimic paper.  Amazon also has Kindle apps for every device and all these devices sync.  So if I am on page 153 on my iPad, and I open my kindle it will zoom forward to page 153. Apple started putting iBooks (the app) with IOS 4.  It debuted with the release of the first iPad.  iBo

There is a commercial on TV where there is a flying lizard and a larger flying lizard comes along side.  This is advertising some dinosaur exhibit at some learning center of museum in Northern California.  When we see animations like this, some may think that this is actually what ancient reptile beasts looked like.  When we think of dinosaurs, we need to understand a few things. We have no idea what dinosaurs looked like.  We have no idea what any of them sounded like.  We don’t know what color they were or what texture their skin was (mostly). We have no idea what they ate.   We have no idea if they were friendly and docile or violent and full of rage. We have no idea how they walked, how fast they walked or if any of them flew. We have no idea why we don’t have any dinosaurs on earth anymore. This is because we have never found a dinosaur.  In fact we have only found the spaces where their bones were.  When a dinosaur died, it may have gotten buried.  All the skin and mus

Back in the day when computers were first being used to communicate, an email message was actually a file you placed on someone else’s computer.  They would then open the file, read it and place there response in a text file on your computer.  Today we have email programs which allow us to send very fancy or very plain emails.   Email has evolved quite a bit over the decades. My first email account was michael61@prodigy.net .   I did not know anyone who had a computer so I never emailed anyone.  When I got a job at Seagate, they had an internal email system.  They had a Token Ring network and that allowed people to send email messages to each other.  The way our department was setup, no one could send a private message, so when an email was sent, it went to 298 people.  This meant that I received many hundreds of email a day.  It was a very bad way to communicate, but it was 1987.  One of my bosses did not understand the purpose of email, so every morning he would print out all of h

I was called to be a pastor in 1984.  At that time, there were early computers that could run Bible software.  This software, like the computers, were text based; no graphics user interface yet.    Parson’s software offering was QuickVerse .   A couple other companies supplied the text of Bibles on 5 1/4” floppies.  So I bought books, many, many books.  I bought hundreds of study books, commentaries, Bible versions and other such tomes to allow me to study and grow as a future pastor.   When I separated from the Air Force in 1985, dozens of boxes of books were shipped home. Logos Bible Software came into being in 1992 on Windows computers.  I found out about it and began to purchase electronic books that were shipped on 3.5” floppies.  Their software was really nothing more than the text of Bible and commentaries that could be searched.  Logos expanded their offerings when in 2001 they merged with Libronix.  This added speed and expandability and allowed Logos to grow their library

There is a movement today lead by Bernie Sanders and Debbi Shultz who want every doctor to be an employee of the government and every clinic and hospital to be the property of the government.  That would be the federal government.  There would be no private insurance, no private care except in the black market, which is guaranteed to exist. I have healthcare provided fully by the federal government.  My only healthcare comes from the VA (Veterans Administration).  They do not provide dental so I buy that separately.  However, every doctor I see is a VA employee.  Every prescription I get is sent by the VA.  All I can say is that I hate it.  The care is basic, and acceptable, I guess.  I really have nothing to compare it to.  I had Kaiser for a while many years ago and compared to that, the VA is acting like they want to kill me. I am notified for appointments with the VA through postcards.  They have an email system, but it requires 4 different logins and 12 links to get to it and

Everybody has habits.  There are good habits, like brushing your teeth and bad habits like gambling or smoking.  Most people with bad habits may spend years trying to break those habits.  A habit is anything that your body does on autopilot.  So if you just automatically brush your teeth and have no or little memory of it after the fact, then it is a habit.  People who have studied habits say that if we do something the same time every day for 46 days, we will form a habit.  Some people need reminders to do things or form a habit.  In the old days people would tie a string around their finger.  Today there are smart phones with all manner of reminders and apps to help you form good habits and break bad ones. One such app is Coach.me .   It is a service, an app and a website.  Their goal is to have you sign up for a task and set your goals.  For example, I started writing 500 words a day when someone turned me on to Coach.me.  They make their money by having you hire coaches to inspir

Life is full of tedious tasks and mundane routines. That is a fact of life. From the earliest recorded history people had to clean things, mend clothes, sharpen swords and maintain stuff. It seems like most of our time these days are filled with tedium. So it must be asked: is that a bad thing? If your life is routine an tedious someone can understand why boredom would set in. After all if the tasks are the same, day after day, week after week and so on, where is the excitement in that?  People want new and novel and exciting. Perhaps this is why people used to line up for the latest phone, only to be bored with it three week later. But is this a bad thing or just the state of humanity? I propose that boredom is a sin.  Some may say that it is a fleeting feeling and feelings are not evil.  In that case, boredom is a temptation. If a person grabs a hold of it and focuses on the boredom then it becomes a sin. Boredom is a sin because of who God is and what he has done for people. For

In my work as a pastor I have found people who never hear the voice of God and others who claim that God is a chatterbox who is never quiet.  The one question many people want answers to is this:  Is God silent?  We would have to modify that to say: Is God’s normal behavior to be silent?” The classic Baptist seminary answer is that God spoke, the valuable stuff he said was written down in the Bible and we do not need any other words from God.  Certainly, there is not any additional revelation than what is revealed in the Bible.  God can reveal anything he wants in eternity, but right now, while humans have the Bible, there is nothing extra biblical that we need to know.  Therefore, if God speaks, or a prophet speaks for God, whatever they say must be consistent with the written text of the Bible. I have read books by authors who claim that God, in the person of the Holy Spirit helps them find their car keys or warns them of an accident on the road.  These seem harmless, but also

Many years ago there was an Outer Limits or Twilight zone episode where a cowboy from the 1800s was transported to Los Angeles in the 1950s.  The first thing he did was put his hands over his ears and exclaim how loud it was.  Compared to the prairie of old, the freeways and traffic of Los Angeles in the 1950s must have been deafening.  Compare today to the 1950s and we have more noise making devices than ever.  Our phones and computers beep and pop and ding and make all manner of electronic noise.  We live in a very noisy age. There is a teaching, that promises release from the stress of life, and that teaching is silence.  Sitting in silence, walking in silence, just being alone with your thoughts, in silence.  Some have even said that it is a spiritual pursuit to experience silence.  Some Christian teachers have said that it is impossible, or at least very difficult, to hear God unless we are in silence. When God was using Elijah to bring judgement upon the kingdom of king Ahab,

It is generally believed that a basic level of education is needed to function in society.  This is one reason the government provides schools, paid for with your tax dollars.  Some people do not want their children to go to government schools so private schools or homeschooling are utilized.  Whatever the schooling, it is illegal to keep children out of the lower levels of education, except in extraordinary circumstances. As children grow up, additional education may be needed for desired profession.   Mike Rowe is a great proponent of trade schools for some.  If a person wants to be a doctor, more mandatory schooling is necessary.  Lawyers do not need to go to school.  All that is required is to pass the State Bar exam.  However, it may be difficult to get a job without the prerequisite schooling (see Suits ). It has been the practice for millennia to send those who wish to be pastors to school.  Many years ago I met a young lad who believed he was called to the ministry.  He

Anyone who goes to school and gets a job in their field wants to be a success and earn a good living. Lawyers are no exception.  The difficulty is that things have gotten out of hand concerning lawyers and the law.  For example the Federal government has written a law called the ADA to give regulations on how disabled people are to be given access.  California took that law and made it much stricter.  Instead of putting a financial fine on people who break this law, California allows lawyers to sue people who violate the California ADA.  Now the California ADA is a very precise and complicated piece of legislature.  Therefore I could go into any school, church, business or government building and say they are in violation of both the Federal and State ADA and I would be correct.  No one complies with it, it is impossible. So, lawyers like Scott Johnson in the Sacramento area go on Google maps, find businesses and send demand letters.  He randomly picks some part of the ADA and deman

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From the earliest recorded history people have wanted to update and upgrade things.  From a wooden plow to an iron plow to a steel plow.  From riding a horse to riding a wagon pulled by horses.  People are always looking for something better, the next new thing. During my time in the Air Force, the IBM PC was released.  The Air Force bought many of them and I learned to write databases using IBM db2 .  We only had floppies to store our data on.  Things moved very fast from there.  The processor that powered computers were updated and became more and more powerful.  Software to manage those features also became powerful.  Now we have pocket sized computers, we call phones that have more computing power than the entire space program of the 1960s.  Companies like Samsung and Apple and HTC and LG need to come out with new models every year so they can make money to make different models for the next year.  Even though many of these phones will last 3-5 years or longer, if we take care of

When people take an offense or  or are hurt by someone, they have the option of forming a resentment.  The world is a chaotic, interesting and wonderful place.  People will say things and do things that we do not like and it is very easy to take an offense when things and people do not behave the way we expect. Everybody has expectations about life.  When we flip a light switch, we expect the light to come on.  This is because the switch is a mechanical device that has been behaving the same way for a long time.  When we flip the switch and nothing happens, there are specific steps that can be taken to rectify the situation.  People like the fact that their home, technology, cars and other machines operate as expected and that makes life simpler and allows things to flow without much thought.  This type of expectations are a great way to focus on what is important and not on the minutia. However, when we apply the same level of controlling expectation to people, it can cause proble

Regrets, I've had a few But then again, too few to mention I did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption I planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway And more, much more than this, I did it my way Frank Sinatra had a mantra.  He announced it clearly and it became his theme song for decades.  He did everything his way.  And that is fine.  If someone is willing to live with the consequences, then live your life anyway you want.  But today I don’t want to write about Frank Sinatra’s misguided life, I want to write about regrets. Generally, regret happens when people remember something with a sense of disappointment or loss, even sorrow.  Everyone has looked back at something they said or something they did and wished they could have done it or said it differently, even better.  I knew a pastor many years ago who would recount every word and thought after a gathering and actually reverse doing it better next time.  He had regrets. For any o

Today, it seems, that the name of the game is this:  find someone to blame.  Of course this is as old as history itself.  Eve ate of the tree, then she gave it to Adam.  When God confronted them, Adam blamed God for Eve and Eve blamed the serpent.  In my history, I was born into a family with 1 older brother, therefore he could always blame me and I could always blame him. Blaming people is useful to shift the responsibility away from the malefactor.  Recently Hillary Clinton went on TV several times and listed everything in the world that was responsible for her losing the election.  The one item missing from her list was herself.  Everybody that does anything is responsible for their own actions.  If it turns out bad, then we blame others. Blaming other people for my own sins and wrong doings is a great way to ameliorate my own feelings and if I am a public figure I can turn the eyes of the world on someone else.  If I commit a crime, and successfully blame someone else, I might