From the monthly archives:
May 2009
A quote from Henri Nouwen about moving on…
You have an idea of what the new country looks like. Still, you are very much at home, although not truly at peace, in the old country. You know the ways of the old country, its joys and pains, its happy and sad moments. You have spent most of your days there. Even though you know that you have not found there what your heart most desires, you remain quite attached to it. It has become part of your very bones.
Now you have come to realize that you must leave it and enter the new country, where your Beloved dwells. You know that what helped and guided you in the old country no longer works, but what else do you have to go by? You are being asked to trust that you will find what you need in the new country. That requires death of what has become so precious to you: influence, success, yes, even affection and praise.
Trust is so hard, since you have nothing to fall back on . Still, trust is what is essential. The new country is where you are called to go, and the only way to go there is naked and vulnerable.
It seems that you keep crossing and recrossing the border. For a while, you experience a real joy in the new country. But then you feel afraid and start longing again for all you left behind, so you go back to the old country. To your dismay, you discover that the old country has lost its charm. Risk a few more steps into the new country, trusting that each time you enter it, you will feel more comfortable and be able to stay longer.
–Henri Nouwen
You can read Acts 12 online here
v3 King Herod – after killing James – ‘after he saw it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter’ – we clearly influence our leaders.
v5 Who do I “pray fervently to God for” ?
v8 – Peter slept with his belt unbuckled
v9 – he thought he was seeing a vision – even apostles can’t tell sometimes
v19 – Guards that were with Peter were put to death – who was responsible for this? Peter? God? The ’system’, the soldiers?
v22 – How many of us would still be kicking around today if we failed to give Glory to God as Herod did – I wonder if the worms ate the ‘royal robes’ too.
Some of you know, I’m speaking on lust at another church this coming Sunday, if anyone’s got things you think I should be specifically addressing to 12-18 year olds, you can contribute to the discussion on my personal blog here.
Breaking pre-conceptions. The big idea here is obviously that v18 – “God has granted even the Gentiles repentance unto life.” – That everyone is invited, even if they were at one point ‘on the outside’
a couple other interesting pre-onceptions that might be challenged from here.
v5 Peter was in a trance – What does the ‘strictly the word of God’ fundamentalist think of that?
v7 The Lord sayd “get up, Peter. Kill and eat” – What does the vegan pacifist think of that?
The most fascinating section of this chapter to me is v26 “The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.”
They were not self-identified as Christians – others saw Christ in them and described them as such. Forget the labels you’ve given yourself. What labels would people put onto you and why?
You can add YouTube videos to either WordPress posts or WordPress pages. Go to the editing section of WordPress by either writing a new entry or managing an existing one (Figure 1).
Figure 1: A WordPress entry
Without closing out the WordPress page, open up a new tab or window of your web browser and go to the YouTube.com website. Navigate to the YouTube page that has the video you want. Find the long string of HTML tags in the field labeled “Embed” and copy the entire string to your clipboard (Figure 2). You can do this quickly by clicking into the field and pressing ctrl-a to select all and then ctrl-c to copy (on a Mac, hold down the command key instead of control).
Figure 2: A YouTube page. Notice the Embed text field on the lower right of this screenshot
Now, go back to the WordPress text editor.
In most circumstances, when you first begin to edit a post, you use the “Visual” editor. This allows you to see your formatting changes as you type (for example, bolded text in the editor window is bold in the published entry). When adding a YouTube video, however, you need to temporarily switch over to the “HTML” editor to paste in the YouTube instructions. The button for the HTML editor is on top of the textbox (Figure 3). Click it, and if you had any formatted content in your text box to begin with, you now see it with HTML tags surround by angle brackets (“<” and “>”) (Figure 4).
Find an empty line in your text where you want your video to appear and click there to place your text cursor. Now, paste the text string from YouTube that was on the clipboard. Usually control-v (or command-v on a Mac) is the quickest way to do this. You’ll see a long string of HTML text inserted at that point, starting and ending with an <object> tag (Figure 5).
Click on the Visual tab to return to your normal way of editing. Though you will not see your YouTube video immediately, a colored box appears where your video will be inserted. If the position of your video isn’t right, you can return to the HTML editor, cut out the entire <object> string you inserted, and paste it somewhere else.
Once you are ready, you can save your WordPress entry in the normal way and then navigate to the page to see how it turned out (Figure 6). You’re done!
