A Pastor's Thoughts

A couple of weeks ago my life was thrown into complete disarray as my wife and I discovered that we are expecting our first child.  As far as disarray goes, this is the good kind.  Nevertheless time has moved at a different speed than before and my weeks have run together.  It doesn’t help that we’re experiencing a miserable heat wave or the fact that we have had guests most of last week and will again this week.  And none of them are baby related – they were planning on coming before we learned about the baby.

Aside from being excited I’ve had a few other thoughts on the pregnancy so far.  My first is that I have no clue how other women do it.  My wife has the luxury of staying home and she has been tired and miserable off and on.  She’s coped alright but I can’t even imagine her getting up and being at a regular job at 8 and coming home at 5.

Another thing that has struck me is how many doctor’s appointments there have been.  We’ve had three appointments in the first two weeks and have to go back this week because because the baby isn’t quite as old as they thought and they want to be able to hear the heartbeat this week.  Not too long ago there weren’t any of these appointments.  While I’ll do anything to make sure that I have a healthy baby, it’s not like these appointments have done anything to improve its health and none have been checks because something seems wrong.  They are just routine and if something should happen to be wrong, there’s nothing they can do about it at this stage anyway.  I have health insurance and maternity coverage and I already feel like I’m being nickeled and dimed to death.  My first appointment cost $25 out of pocket, I’ll probably pay at least that much for the second appointment and the third I already paid a $40 copay for two minutes of the doctor’s time to tell us that the baby isn’t as old as they expected and we’ll have to come back next week.  And that doesn’t include the cost of what the insurance won’t pay for the ultrasound – or the second one we’ll get this week.  I knew having a baby was an expensive process but I thought that most of that would begin at the delivery and the costs going forward, not right now. 

Most importantly though, I touched by the wonder of God’s creation.  When we discovered we were pregnant I immediately thought of Psalm 139:13 – “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”  I plan on putting this on the wall of our nusery.  Last week I saw a tiny little speck on the ultrasound, no bigger than a grain of rice.  By this week that tiny little speck is supposed to have a discernable heartbeat.  I can’t tell you how amazed I am by this.  I can’t fathom something so small having a heartbeat and I can’t fathom the fact that one moment its heart will just begin to beat.  Even though it is what happens in every living creature there doesn’t seem to be anything natural about this to me.  There is no way that anyone can convince me that this is the result of a random process and it all just fell together.  Only God can do something like this and only He can give life and start a heartbeat in a being so tiny that only recently have we even been able to detect its presence.  I find myself amazed and in awe of God the further we go into this process.

Even though I’ve been working on some other web projects, I’m proud to say that I’ve kept up my work on the devotions site.  All of June’s devotions are up and I hope to make good headway on July early next week.  I find it hard to believe that the devotions site has been running for two years already and I’m proud of the site’s performance.  Originally I expected to to get all of the devotions up within a year – one week at a time – but that proved to be too much.  Getting married last year proved to be a big distraction.  Who would have thought?  When I’m finished with July’s devotions I’ll have an entire year of devotions online.

After July I won’t be finished with devotions however.  I plan on taking some time to work on a few other web projects, like the 140 more articles/commentaries I need to write for my gospel site.  That alone is the equivalent of four to five months of devotions.  But when I come back to writing devotions I have some more themed ideas.  They won’t necessarily follow a month’s timeline but will still be set up to read one a day.

Also I have already reserved the domain name for another devotions site.  It won’t contain any new information but rather it will be a reposting of existing devotions.  I plan on using a blog format that will post a new devotion each day so that if you like you can make the site your homepage so you read a new devotion every day when you visit.  I’m tempted to launch the site now since I have the material for it but January feels like a much better time to be launching a devotional site.  That way the new material won’t abuptly stop in the middle of the year either.  By the end of next year I hope to have at least six more months worth of devotions ready to post for the following year as well.  At least that’s the plan.  That’s kind of a way down the road and there’s no telling what may happen in the meantime.

As mentioned last week I’ve been working on some other web projects that aren’t Christian related.  After a flurry of activity I’m ready to go live with a number of sites.  My goal is to get ahead of the technology curve and have sites running and indexed in search engines before the search terms become popular because by then it will probably be too late to get good search engine rankings and traffic.

So I have ventured into the field of 3D technology.  I love new technology so this was a pretty natural direction to go.  In the process I’ve learned a ton about what is coming out in the future.  3D TV’s are on sale right now and there are actually a few 3D tv stations airing already.  A bunch more are slated to be added before the end of the year.  For now 3D TV is likely only to be a hit with technology junkies and early adopters but I believe it is the way of the future.  I’m willing to bet that by this time next year if you go to buy a tv, you will have just as many 3D choices as any other tv.  Even better, the prices will likely be comparable to regular tv’s and there will be a lot of 3D content in the making.

If you are interested in 3D technology that is coming out, I’d encourage to check out the sites just to gain information as to what the future holds.  And of course if you want to be one of the first to own 3D technology, you can find the latest products on the sites as well.  I’ll be releasing a second wave of sites in another week or so.  My thinking is that if I’m going to stake an interest in the technology, I should go all in so I’ve invested in a total of 11 websites.

Here’s the sites that are live right now:

• www.3dbuyingguides.com
• www.3dgamingtoday.com
• www.3dlaptopsstore.com
• www.3dsamsungstore.com
• www.3dsonystore.com
• www.get3dblurays.com

For those who are wondering why I am venturing in this direction, obviously I hope to make a profit off of this from advertising and affiliate marketing.  But there is an added benefit from any time I work on another project.  I learn how to better market websites and hopefully I will be able to create a broader reach with my ministry websites as well.  This week I’ve finally delved into the world of Facebook.  I personally don’t care for it but I know that it can be a great marketing tool and I hope to use it for the ministry sites in the future as well.  That’s my hope at least.  I haven’t learned all of the ins and outs yet but with some experimenting I’m sure I’ll learn what I need.

What on earth is maction?  It is a new term for “massive action.”  I was recently talking to a friend and he said that he had set aside the month of June for maction.  He has a second child coming in August so pretty much whatever he hopes to accomplish in the next few months needs to be done now.

I’ve been absolutely wore out lately with church stuff.  Hospital visits always take a toll on me and I’ve had someone in the hospital for the last three weeks.  It all started with three people in the hospital which wouldn’t be out of the ordinary expect my church isn’t that big.  But I’ve also noticed before that hospital visits come in bunches.  I can go months without anyone in the hospital and suddenly I’ll have a group of them. 

All of this has left me worn out and feeling like I haven’t gotten much done lately.  It’s also a foolish time to take on any more projects.  Yesterday I decided to take on a new project on a whim however.  My whims have been some of the greatest ideas I’ve ever had and have been the cause of some of my greatest online successes.  Despite the fact that I had decided to focus all of my online work on Christian websites from now on, I took on an entertainment project.  Hoping to be ahead of the curve, I’m setting up a network of sites devoted to 3D technology.  If it doesn’t catch on I’m not too concerned because I don’t have too much invested in it.

Just having a change of pace has felt really good though.  I love the work I do as a pastor and I love what I do online.  If I had the option of doing them for free I would.  But it is nice to take on a new project that has no religious significance.  That way there is no real pressure to even complete the project if I don’t feel like it.  If the project fails, I won’t lose any sleep over it either because there is no significance to it other than an opportunity to supplement my income online.

While I’m energized I hope to get the bulk of the work done for the new sites.  Unlike the other projects that I’ve taken on recently, this one is meant to be short term.  This means that right now is time for maction.  Even though there’s not religious significance I’ll post the links here when the sites are completed just in case anyone is curious.  (And it helps my search engine ranking when there are more links too. )

Just about everyone that I’ve talked to has been under a great deal of stress this week.  I don’t know if it is the start of summer that has done it or if it is the end of school for most students or what it is.  It has been a very odd week.

I usually handle stress very well.  I am not wired like most pastors who have a very ordered type A personality.  I’m much more laid back and take things as they come.  But even I have been feeling a lot of stress for the last few weeks.  Ironically, I was even on vacation last week but couldn’t escape a lot of the problems that I was supposed to vacate.  This week I saw the effects of my built up stress when I went to the doctor – my blood pressure was much higher than normal.  Usually my blood pressure is the only good thing I have going for me.

When we’re feeling stressed – and I have to preach to myself right now as well – we need to remember that God is in control no matter what.  He has promised to provide for our needs.  Beyond that, we’ll survive and He will give us the strength to handle whatever comes our way.  We are promised to never have more than we can handle.  This is an easy promise to believe in because when God is with us, we can handle anything.

CNN has an interesting article http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/personal/06/03/spiritual.but.not.religious/index.html?hpt=C2  I’ve been mentioning this in my sermons for probably at least five years.  More and more people are defining themselves as spiritual but not religious.  They believe in god but it is a god of their own making and he is born out of a frustration with organized religion.

Organized religion has its faults whether Catholic or Protestant or any of non Christian faith.  There are plenty of hypocrits and corruption at every level of religion.  The truth is that Christians are sinful like everyone else and while Christianity offers a better way to live life and true Christians have the Holy Spirit to guide them, Christians are still far from perfect.

The biggest problem with the spiritual but not religious idea is that it is a new age idolatry.  The god you believe in is one of your own making.  Don’t like the idea of sinners going to hell?  Then you simply choose not to believe in it.  You accept the things about god that you like and dismiss what you don’t.  It has a new name but it has really been going on since the beginning of time.

If you take this idea a bit further than these spiritualists are willing to take it, then you’ll see the absurdity of the notion.  “I believe that when I die, god will turn me into my favorite animal and heaven will be spent frolicing in the woods/field/stream.”  Of course this sounds absurd because there is no basis for believing this.  But that is the problem with the spiritual but not religious concept.  There is no basis for the belief.  You can’t pick and choose ideas from Christianity, Buddhism, and Judaism and decide that this is what you believe.  The religions are incompatible.  I really don’t know how to put it in any other way than that. 

The other problem with spiritual but not religious is that every person believe that they are going to their version of heaven.  It seems pretty obvious that a person is not going to choose to believe that they are hellbound if they decide what the standards for heaven are.  If there are no absolute rules, then a person will always set the bar below where they currently are.  They will point to people who are far worse than them – thieves, murderers, child molesters – and claim that those are the people who are hellbound.  But people like themselves who are relatively good and who try to live a good life will certainly go to heaven.  Without absolute standards for right and wrong, how does anyone know what is wrong?  It comes down to conscience which is a poor indicator because it can be ignored and twisted.

Organized religion is far from perfect because it doesn’t always operate the way that God intended for it.  But it is better than the alternative.  Spirituality that is chosen based on what feels right will only lead to trouble.  Without standards of right and wrong, we’ll choose the lowest common denominator and stop aspiring to be better people.

I amd very please to announce that I am officially launching a long time project, Four Gospels Together.  www.fourgospelstogether.com  This is actually only partial launch as I only have about half of the commentaries finished.  Nevertheless, I have the largest section, the life of Christ, complete and I wanted to get the site going live and start to attract traffic.

If you’ve followed the blog, I’ve been talking about this project for a number of months.  It has been very time consuming and I’ve faced my share of distractions in completing it.  I now have commentary on over 100 gospel stories, covering the entire life of Christ.  I still have miracles, parables, and teachings of Jesus to complete.  I plan on saving the teachings for last because they will be the most in depth theologically.  In retrospect the life of Christ is probably the hardest section to do however, not only because it is the largest but because of the details that need to be looked at.

My goal in this site is to compare and contrast the stories in the gospel.  Because each gospel gives a slightly different account of what happened, I often find myself looking for a story, only to discover that it doesn’t contain the particular detail that I was looking for so I am forced to look for the story again in another gospel.  The site provides all of the gospel accounts of one story on one page so that anyone can read all versions at one time. 

In the commentary section I point out key differences between the accounts and try to put things in chronological order when there are a lot of things happening in one story.

I found myself using the research that I already did for this site as I completed my sermon series on the gospel of John.  I believe that this site will be equally valuable for anyone who is studying or teaching anything from the gospels.  I encourage everyone to check out the site and recommend it to friends if you like it.  I’ll continue to provide updates as I get more of the site up.

In April, a blogger for CBS wrote that Supreme Court nominee might be a lesbian.  After pressure from the White House, the post was taken down two days later.  The truth is that this is an issue which the mainstream media can’t discuss without causing itself a lot of trouble.  Regardless of the truth, the discussion of the topic appears to be taboo.

Quietly, conservative Republicans have been upset about the prospect of a potentially gay Supreme Court judge.  However, they have little recourse concerning this for a number of reasons.  First of all, there is no way to know if the rumors are true short of Kagan coming right out and saying that she is gay.  This would appear very unlikely because this would hurt her chance of approval whether fair or not.

Even if Kagan would come right out and declare that she is gay, officially there would be nothing that anyone could do about it.  The Senate is to confirm her based on her qualifications.  If thye would reject her solely on the basis of being gay (or even they would be perceived to reject her for it) there will be serious accusations of discrimination. 

If in fact Kagan were gay, this would be a win-win situation for the gay community and a power move by Obama.  If she is confirmed, she would be the first homosexual on the Supreme Court.  If she is rejected, it will bring up all sorts of gay rights issues and spark public outcry about blatant discrimination.  Legislation will likely be enacted along with lawsuits by every liberal and civil rights organization.

Personally, not that my opinion is really worth anything, I don’t believe that she is gay.  For the position she has been nominated for, it would almost be impossible to hide this from everyone.  A leak would spring from somewhere.  Frankly I don’t believe that Obama would make such a bold move as he seeks to take the middle of the road.

This does not mean that homosexuality is a non-issue with the nominee.  When dean of Harvard Law School, she protested having military recruiters on campus because she disagreed with it’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.  This is cause for concern, more than for just the issue of gay rights.  Whether she agreed with the policy or not, it was and still is for the moment the law of the land.  Ironically, this rule was instituted by a Democrat, Bill Clinton, and not a Republican.  If she will not support the law of the land, it is scaryto think what she may do once she has the power to reinterpret it.

Republicans have the right to fear that Kagan will support a liberal agenda and will attempt to undermine marriage between a man and a woman.  On the other hand, this will be the case of every person that Obama could possibly nominate for the position as he’s going to place a liberal on the court.  On the bright side, Kagan, if confirmed, will be replacing someone who is considered the most liberal judge on the court today, so ultimately we’ll be trading one liberal for another.

In the end, the issue of whether Kagan is gay is a concern but also a non-starter of an issue.  Republicans have no option in pursuing the question because of the legal and political fallout.  In the end, it likely won’t stop the confirmation from going forward.  This is a fight that Republicans would like sitting out but it is in their best interests to let it be.

Now comes the hard part, making the unpopular spending cuts.  The hundreds of billions of dollars that was shipped out to states to keep them afloat last year is drying up and as budget makers plan for 2011 they are falling short, way short.  It’s impossible to truly measure the effect of the stimulus package but it appears that in many areas it became nothing more than a stopgap solution.  Instead of stopping the bleeding to allow for recovery to begin it appears that it just prolonged the inevitable.

Without federal stimulus money, states are scrambling to pay for big budget items such as education and medicaid.  This means that many jobs are likely to be lost unless something drastic is done and done quickly.  It is estimated that the stimulus package saved 300,000 jobs in the field of education.  Once the federal government is no longer picking up the tab almost all of those jobs, 275,000 of them could be cut.

I’m of two minds on this issue.  I don’t think that cuts in education are a good thing but if states believe that they can achieve the same results by trimming fat, then these are jobs that should have been shed previously to save money.  While the last thing we needed last year was for more people to lose their jobs, this year isn’t exactly any better.  Without stimulus money, states would have been forced to make unpopular decisions and work on balancing their budgets last year. 

I’m not about to suggest what should be cut and what should be saved – that’s why we pay our lawmakers big salaries, we expect them to make the hard decisions.  Every American has had to learn the hard way that we can’t spend more money than we make.  That’s why so many people have had houses foreclosed and bill collectors calling.  The government needs to make the same decision that we can’t borrow our way out of trouble until the next economic boom. 

Of course we haven’t learned our lesson.  There is already talk about sending more money to states so that they don’t have to make the necessary cuts.  This will only teach states that they don’t need to make unpopular decisions and that the federal government will bail them out. 

I’ll be interested to see how this plays out in the coming months.  State budgets have different deadlines but Congress is not going to want to touch this issue until after the November elections.  Any kind of second stimulus is going to give Republicans ammunition to use against what they will categorize as wasteful spending by democrats.

I recently made a post about fixing health care.  Part of that included the radical idea that employers don’t pay insurance companies directly any longer but instead insurance is paid for by the government.  It appears that just may happen, not on a universal scale but it occur on a wide scale basis if employers drop employees’ health insurance. 

http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/05/news/companies/dropping_benefits.fortune/index.htm?cnn=yes&hpt=C2  There’s a ton of interesting information in this article including an amusing anecdote about democrats accidentally running across this information and immediately trying to bury it because it shows that the health care bill has the potential to cost massively more than was just estimated. 

Essentially, big companies started doing the math after the health care bill passed.  While the bill requires employers to provide insurance or pay a fine, it turns out that paying the fine amounts to a massive savings.  Employees who are not covered by their companies would be allowed to purchase through exchanges.  Families making $88,000 or less will have their health insurance subsidized by the government. 

The uninsured will still likely have to pay some money out of pocket but most people already pay some amount of their insurance.  It is assumed – and we all know the danger of assuming – that employers can’t just drop health insurance without increasing employees pay.  A relatively modest increase will cover the cost of employees paying for their own insurance.  Employees will still save a bundle of money and there’s a chance that employees will come out ahead as well with the insurance subsidies.

Of course we know that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.  Employers save billions of dollars while hopefully employees at least break even if not come out ahead.  The government picks up the tab to the tune of billions of dollars.  There’s no telling how much it could cost but the article above how some pretty interesting numbers.

By Fortune’s reckoning, each person who’s dropped would cost the government an average of around $2,100 after deducting the extra taxes collected on their additional pay. So if 50% of people covered by company plans get dumped, federal health care costs will rise by $160 billion a year in 2016, in addition to the $93 billion in subsidies already forecast by the CBO.

Only time will tell how this all pans out.  It depends quite greatly on if employers decide to actually opt out of paying for insurance.  It could be good for employees but the tax payer will end up paying for it in the end.  We’ll just have to wait and see if the cost of all of this comes in the form of increased taxes or decreased benefits somewhere down the government chain.