I don’t think I’ve ever addressed this issue on my blog before. Let me fix that now.

Abortion is abhorrent. Especially late-term and partial-birth abortion. At that stage of pregnancy you can’t mistake it: This is a baby. It moves on its own. It has a brain, a heart, nerves, blood, and all the stuff of life.

Early term abortion is a bit different, depending on how early you’re talking. You can say that sperm plus egg equals human with a soul, but of course you can’t really build a convincing scriptural case from that. The only passages that really speak to the issue are poetic passages that approach it tangentially while speaking to something else. Again, not convincing.

Ironically for modern Christians, I think their case is built more on science than on scripture. I say this because — and this is a whole other post — modern Christians are become increasingly science-phobic as science attacks the creation poem found in Genesis 1.

We can see inside a womb like never before. We can view the stages of pregnancy with at least a certain amount of clarity.

In any case, we can say definitively that the life of the body is in the blood. One of the central narratives of the Jewish law is that blood is sacred. So we can say that a human child in the womb is alive (and thus has a soul) when it has blood in its veins. This is a crude rule of thumb, but it seems pretty solid.

Still, abortion is abhorrent and just plain wrong. But it’s also mind-boggling. In a world chock-full of devices and methods and medications to prevent pregnancy, how does someone still get pregnant by accident? You have to either be wilfully ignorant or be the victim of a cruel confluence of extremely unlikely events. (Watch Laura and I be the victims of a cruel confluence of events because I said that!) There should be no need for abortion these days. Women may have the right to choose a contraceptive, but they should not have the right to choose to kill a person. Women do not simply arbitrarily get to pick when they feel their baby is a human.

If you get pregnant and you don’t want to be pregnant, at least live with the consequences and give the child up for adoption or something like that.

• How do you motivate people to do something they don’t want to do? Say you’re moving someone from an executive to a more sales-oriented role. And they don’t want to do it. Let’s say they use every possible excuse to avoid their new job, keep finding ways to do their old job despite access restrictions, and in the meantime generally get in the way. Oh, and let’s say it’s in a company with only one level of management and that level of management is afraid of conflict. One more thing… it’s all family. How do you do that?
• Hiring family is generally a mistake. Nepotism has no place in business, not simply because it’s unfair, but because it’s destructive. Hiring family makes you weak: You have to choose, sometimes, between your family and your business. And of course you choose family. Hiring family makes hard choices much, much harder.
• I feel like playing Monopoly sometime soon. I don’t know why. I just developed a hankering for the game.
• Do you find that in-line spell checking makes you spell better? I don’t mean, does it help you make fewer mistakes. That’s pretty obvious. I mean, does it make you more likely to spell things right the first time? Do you dread that little wavy red line?
• I’ve finished drinking some coffee that John at church gave me. I’m not sure if it’s Panamanian or Columbian or what, but it’s pretty good stuff. My favourite by far is still the coffee I bought in Cuba, of all places. Who ever heard of good Cuban coffee?
• Speaking of good Cuban coffee, the cappuccinos Laura and I had in Cuba… wow. I don’t think I’ve ever had better coffee anywhere. I’m not kidding. We got up in the morning and stumbled bleary-eyed into the heat just to enjoy one of those bad boys. And it was worth it. No matter how swelteringly hot it was outside.
• I have been married for a year and one month. That’s… crazy. But awesome at the same time.
• God’s plans are so much better than my plans are. Even when he works through hard means. I can attest to this personally. He turns things to good.
• Mom just showed up at the office and is now fetching me a coffee — I hope. Either that or she forgot totally and I shall remain with no coffee left.
• How do you make a really good pulled pork dish anyways? I’ve made a few educated guesses, but I don’t really know.

• Chris asks a good question via Twitter: Is there a way to do church without burning leaders out? I think the answer comes back to something Joel Main and I talked about the other week. There are different ways to do church. We assume that church always revolves around a couple guys, but is that really how it has to work? What if the church is more of a collaborative environment where more people get involved? And what if instead of creating programs and activities with the implicit goal of getting people involved in peripheral matters, why not embed them at the heart of the whole thing? Of course the quality will go down as people with varying talent levels get involved, but church isn’t a stage show or some kind of theatre. Maybe sacrificing some polish would be a good thing. If it spared people’s marriages and drew people in and made authentic community.
• I’m beginning to hate the word “authentic”. It’s so over-used — and by me, too, yes — that the word itself seems inauthentic. Which makes me wonder if what we mean when we say “authentic” is actually just “cool”. That thing that as soon as it become mainstream becomes uncool. Or unauthentic.
• There are people I usually like a great deal who turn into raging idiots around politics. They become incensed that “their party” is being “attacked” and so they go on the offensive and “defend” them. This is true of both Republicans and Democrats, both Liberals and Conservatives, but it seems to be worse with those who mix religion and politics. More to the point, people who genuinely believe that the Republican party is another arm for the body of Christ seem to get more upset when their precious idol is under attack. I don’t know why this is. I know and respect many Republicans and Democrats who don’t do this. I know many who are measured and rational. But there’s always a few who seem to think they’re helping. But they’re not. They’re making arses of themselves.
• Today I’m going to have some sort of burger for lunch. But because I took public transit — which really isn’t public, as I still had to pay for it: Why do I have to pay for public transit but not public healthcare? — I’ll have to walk there. I need an hour lunch break for exactly that reason.
• I went to Nick’s profession of faith yesterday. It strikes me that before any of us go after the Catholic church for whatever doctrinal failings that branch of Christendom may espouse, we should clean up our own houses first. Especially when we’re still perpetuating a bunch of baroque rituals whose purposes are exemplary but whose roots are not in scripture. Even when you know the rituals aren’t grounded in scripture, and you can say as much. You can know what you like and say what you like but what you do is what matters. If you tacitly or implicitly put something on the level of scripture, you have absolutely no right to speak up against those who do so vocally and in the open.
• I am hungry!
• Laura and I went into Toronto for a while on Saturday and just walked around for a long time. It was fun: We don’t go to Toronto enough, it seems, even though we live on the border of Mississauga and Toronto. All this to say that one day I would very much like to live in downtown Toronto. Maybe not something as posh as Queen’s Quay, but something close to everything. It’s a grand city. Or, as Torontonians seem to blather on about, it’s a world-class city.
• And that’s it folks! Also, I hope Obama wins. He’s the lesser of two evils, and I’m a great fan of rhetoric. Ever since I watched the West Wing, it seems, and developed a peripatetic crush on Aaron Sorkin.

It’s easy to look at those people — no matter who those people are — and mark up their personal failings. It’s easy because personal failings are always more pronounced and obvious in those people. Especially after the fact.

You can look at those people in light of their most recent transgressions and say, Ah, I see the failing that led up to this calamitous fall. Or, Ah, I always suspected. Or, Ah, I told you so.

There is some value to this, of course, if you examine yourself through and through, if you comb through your own life to find if that same root might one day flower into a full-grown plant, to find if you’re hiding the same sort of bodies in a closet somewhere.

As a leader of a church you can ask yourself how you can prevent your charges from falling into grievous sin. But from a human perspective there isn’t anything you can do. People are good at façades, good at erecting walls and appearing perfect when they are in fact anything but.

Quite a few churches seem oblivious to this fact. It’s non-obvious to them, and probably for good reason. After all, if the intensive study of scripture, if participation in an ancient tradition, if having the right doctrine and presumably the right relationship with God, if the right kind of exegetical preaching with enough emphasis on sin, if these things don’t produce a church full of the proper kind of people, what can? Everyone feels like they should be better; they should be sinning less, they should be doing more, they should be… something. And everyone else looks just like this portrait of the perfect Christian, so we all just pretend.

This happens in every kind of church. Post-modern, modern, ancient, whatever. Because it’s human nature, and human nature is a hard thing to get over.

It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way. The recognition of sin shouldn’t drive people ever more into a world of spackle and paste and paint and fabric, but deep into the arms of God’s grace. The recognition of imperfection should drive men and women to break down the walls between then, no matter what these walls are made of. Whether they’re middle-class suburban perfection, or theological precision, or a pious but empty care for the disenfranchised.

What else do we share? Rich, middle-class, poor: We’re all deeply and entirely flawed. Flawed to the point that each of us, apart from Christ, is liable to fall horribly. Even in Christ we still have that old man nipping on our heels.

I speak from deep within this myself. I am imperfect. I am part of a community of believers who are imperfect. Our leadership is imperfect. Our feeble attempts to draw close to God are imperfect.

But the most important thing, I think, is the realisation, and then the action. A kind of humility that gives grace to those who have fallen, who have done terrible things, whether they are living in rebellion against God or not, and whether they are seeking forgiveness and reconciliation or not.

I would like a few things.

• Move the “Create a New Filter” link to toward the top of the page. I end up with a lot of filters and I don’t really want to scroll down all the way to the bottom just to make a new one. Or put a link at the top and the bottom. There’s no reason it can’t be in both places at once.
• Under the “Reply” pull-down box, place a link to make a filter from that sender. This is a lot easer than, say, copying the email address, going to filters, making a new filter, pasting the email address, etc.
• For Google Apps, could we perhaps get a “Global Filter” type page or something to mass-manage email? There are quite a few message types I would prefer no-one receive, and I don’t have time to modify each account.

Thanks!

I want to plug a DVD player directly into a monitor. Anyone have any experience with this sort of thing, any product recommendations?

Bryan asks an interesting set of questions.

1. What time do you usually leave for lunch?

Anywhere from 1130 to 1230 depending on what’s happening at work. The odd time I skip the whole dog and pony show altogether, but most days I take it.

2. How long do you usually take for lunch?

I get a half hour as mandated by Ontario law, and that’s it. Most days I’m under that. Rarely, I go over by a few minutes.

3. Ever eat lunch at home?

I suppose I could, as I live 10 minutes from home, but I dislike driving enough already thankyouverymuch.

4. What are your favorite places to eat out for Work Lunch?

Wendy’s or The Country Kitchen (part of Highland Farms). I don’t do that as often these days.

5. How often do you bring food in from home?

Almost every day. We always have something around here, even if it’s just a sandwich with lettuce, ham, provalone, horseradish mayonnaise, mustard, and pepper.

6. Are you a lone ranger or a community eater?

I don’t like eating with people. I’m solitary. Groups of larger than two — especially people I don’t know — make me long for solitude.

7. How often does your company pay for your lunch?

Never in a blue moon would my company pay for lunch. Well, there was that one time with the pizza.

8. What is your favourite lunch meal of all time?

Left-over pasta that I made. Especially angel hair noodles with a really nice sauce. The ground beef, Spanish onions, green onions, green pepper, red pepper, garlic, and diced Roma tomatoes kind. Kills me.

Welcome to the Nodcast: A podcast so boring it doesn’t even have an RSS feed.

Nodcast 1: A Reading From Truman Capote (Ogg Vorbis)
Nodcast 1: A Reading From Truman Capote (MP3)

Who will follow me into the sky?
Will they train their telescopes
to catch my silver sail?

Who will leave this dying world behind?
Will they build a ship to set
their better angels on my tail?

The meek can inherit the earth
we’ll take the stars.
The meek can inherit the earth
when heaven’s ours.

Who will give their daughters to my sons?
Will their generation stretch
as far as they can fly?

They can have the cradle we’re done
growing into giants upon
giants standing high.

The meek can inherit the earth
we’ll take the stars.
The meek can inherit the earth
when heaven’s ours.

• Here we go again!
• One of the great tragedies of the modern church is that we’ve for the most part lost the language of covenant. We still have some of the ideas. But there’s hope. Imagine, if you will, the power of context and the power of covenant wedded to each other; perhaps this is an unholy union of the ancient and the post-modern, but which covenant doesn’t have context? The church and God in the context of his schema of salvation; the covenant of marriage in the context of God and the church’s covenant; these are powerful concepts.
• Share the Well is — and I hate to say this, as much as love Long Line of Leavers — probably the best Caedmon’s Call album ever. So many years and I still love CC. It’s true. I’ve listened to them longer than I’ve been a Christian.
• I’ve heard it said that if God seems distant it’s probably because you’ve drawn away; the implicit assumption is, of course, that God is static and that he always wants to be close. In light of scripture, does this seem true? Are there not many people in scripture who were desperate to draw close to God only to find him still distant? I think when we talk about God we need to remember that he’s also a person, or a Person if you will, who has thoughts higher than ours and a plan greater than we can understand. God’s not static. He moves, we move, it’s the grand danse (as you may have heard said). If God seems distant and you don’t understand why — if you want to draw near and nothing happens — all you can say is that there is a reason. It’s almost blase in its simplicity. But there is a reason. Sometimes you don’t get to understand, sometimes you do, but there’s always a reason.
• It’s hard to synthesise the appalling poverty most of the world labours in and the almost limitless prosperity we enjoy. The question is, of course, at what point does prosperity become a curse? This very blog begs ask that question: I have enough money to buy a computer and enough free time to contribute this ocean of dross that is the internet. How much time do I spend feeding the hungry and how much time do I spend feeding my own various hungers? How much should I?
• Candace is getting baptised on Saturday, which is totally awesome. Baptisms are amazing things, no matter which side of the spectrum you fall on. It’s a powerful symbol no matter how you look on it. I’m a paedobatist by preference, but anyone who fulfils God’s command to baptise is terrific in my books. I have a special bit of confusion for “Reformed Baptist” (decide which side you’re on, you freaks!) who seem to have forgotten that Reformed theology leads inexorably to the baptism of children, but hey, it’s all good.
• It seems to me that a little introspection and self-knowledge is a good thing, but a http://www.aldaily.com/lot leads to confusion. Maybe it’s because people function on a sort of quantum level: You measure yourself enough and you change. Then you have to start over again and it becomes a full-time occupation. And not a fun one.
• Beer is proof that God loves us; dentist are proof he can change his mind.
• I’m less three teeth, by the way.
• You ever have it where you say, “It can’t get any better than this?” and then it does? Yeah. I got that. It’s called marriage. I’m an incurable optimist, it’s true.
• This is probably the best thing I have in my feeds.
• It seems every nation has its legacy to overcome. US, India, China, all the big ones.