Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.
Job 1:21 - English Standard Version (ESV)

Oh that my life would echo constant praise regardless of circumstances.

The hymn goes like this…

You have longed for sweet peace,
And for faith to increase,
And have earnestly, fervently prayed;
But you cannot have rest,
Or be perfectly blest,
Until all on the altar is laid.

Is your all on the altar of sacrifice laid?
Your heart does the Spirit control?
You can only be blest,
And have peace and sweet rest,
As you yield Him your body and soul.
Eli­sha A. Hoff­man, 1905

This is only the first of 4 stanzas but the point is very poignantly made right here. So many times this has been the story of my faith. I want my cake and to eat it too.

I can attest through hard experience that this is ever so true, again and again. Personally, in the last 24 hours I have seen the truth in this hymn played out in my life. God’ promises are abundant and blessed. He is waiting to shower down upon me, even more than I can dream or hope for. I just need to prepare myself to receive. What am I receiving? “Sweet peace” and “faith to increase.” He has granted these in abundance, plus other blessings besides.

Maybe I’m a little simplistic here, maybe not. You tell me. But the law is the law. A law may be dumb; it may not have considered the ’small time’ offender; it may be completely unreasonable. But if I am in a position to enforce the law it is not for me to look the other way. If I am in a position of enforcement (whether a peace officer, store security guard or local movie theater) I need to respect the law, regardless of how I personally feel about it.

Recently a teen (19 is pretty much an adult in my book - but that’s our sensational media once again) was charged and sentenced with the ‘crime’ of recording 20 seconds of a major motion picture.

World’s Largest Theater Chain Pressured Prosecutor to Charge Teen for Filming 20 Seconds of Transformers by David Kravets - August 22, 2007 @4:57pm

You can read the blog and gather the details. My interest lies in the comments to this blog article. The vast majority of the comments advocated boycotting the theater or expounded the pettiness of the theater and on and on. I have to say that I agree with the sentiment that the ‘crime’ is not worthy of making it into our legal system. BUT the beef is not with the enforcer, which in this case is the theater, but with the law itself.

Very few comments faulted the law. It is appalling to me that the cast majority of people feel that enforcement of a law can and should be subjective upon whether they feel it was a crime worthy. Any law can be changed to specify when it is applicable. The outrage should be directed toward the law and pressure put upon lawmakers to alter the law.

Your comments?

I ran across a headline advocating “How to Lucid Dream” on google and it grabbed me.

The most basic definition of lucid dreaming defines it as “being aware you are dreaming while dreaming”. Lucid dreams usually occur while a person is in the middle of a regular dream and suddenly realizes that she or he is asleep and must be dreaming. The person is now said to be “lucid,” and may enter one of many levels of lucidity. At the lowest level, the dreamer may be dimly aware that he or she is dreaming, but not think rationally enough to realize that events/people/actions in the dream are not real/pose no real threat. At the highest level, on the other hand, the dreamer is fully aware that she or he is asleep, and may have complete control over his or her actions in the dream. It is possible to control your dreams by employing the lucid dreaming methods that follow.
wikiHow - The How-to Manual That You Can Edit

This entire article begs the question, “Why do I want to lucid dream?” Isn’t that what work is for? So I can wish I were somewhere else, doing something else, in a world of my creation?

This is eerily interesting to me, enough so that I want to do further study on this topic.

It seems that today is the 16th anniversary of the world wide web. Tim Berners-Lee, not Al Gore, created his first web page on his first web server to be seen with his first web browser. He pretty much had to create all the technology to make his Internet collaboration project possible. Berners-Lee made his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The World Wide Web Consortium decided that their standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone.

This was not the beginning of the Internet, this is the world wide web - which is a subset of the Internet. Today the Internet and the web are often interchangeable terms, so I wanted to clarify which birthday we are observing.

On a personal note, my first exposure to the www was around 1994 after several years of dabbling with BBS’s for about 10 years or so.

Wikipedia says:

Faith has two general implications which can be implied either exclusively or mutually:

• To trust:
  Believing a certain variable will act or has the potential to act a specific way despite the potential influence and probability of known or unknown change.
    - To have faith in ones spouse that he/she will keep a promise of commitment
    - To have faith that the world will someday be peaceful
    - To have faith in a person to pay you back
• To believe without reason:
  Believing impulsively, or believing based upon personal hopes

In either case, Faith is based upon the interpretation of the intangible (feelings, emotions, etc.) instead of the physically tangible and is primarily associated with religion in modern times. Faith - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Why is faith so difficult? It consists of only trusting without tangible reason. I have faith that sitting on a chair will support my weight. I can see the chair. I can analyze its state of repair and general workmanship. I have past experience that supports my reason. I sit fully expecting the chair will support my weight.

Spiritual faith that God will do as He says also shares the fact that my past experience gives reason to place my complete trust. But, unlike something I can check out with other senses, I am generally lacking any other “tangible” way to validate that my faith in God is well placed. It seems like using the other senses to confirm what my mind believes is the key releasing true faith. If I can somehow let go that need for tangible validation and take God at his word what a glorious live I would live.