At 1:00 AM today I was cleaning up files and folders on my hard drive. At that hour my mind wasn’t operating at full capacity and I made a big blunder. I accidentally deleted my Outlook data file (email, contacts, tasks, calendar, etc).

I realized what had happened when I opened up Outlook this morning after arriving at work. Thankfully I had recently read an article at Lifehacker on a file recovery program called Restoration.

Restoration recovers files deleted from your system. The software searches your hard drive for sectors containing files marked for deletion and provide a mechanism for recovering the files. After performing a search of an entire hard drive the software shows a list of files available for recovery, sortable by type, size or filename. You can choose to recover one or more files or have Restoration completely erase all traces of the file from the PC.

I downloaded the program, ran it, and was quite happy when I was able to restore the Outlook data file. Your results will vary depending on how soon you’ve realized a file has been deleted (the more data that has been written to disk since deleting a file the more likely the file marked for deletion will be overwritten). However, it is very handy to have a tool like Restoration on hand.

[tags]file recovery, software, tools[/tags]

Calvary Chapel has released a statement detailing their concerns about various aspects of the Emergent Church. As someone who used to be on the pastoral staff at two different Calvary Chapels I’m always interested in CC news. Mark Driscoll has included the statement on his blog along with introductory comments. Read it here.

[tags]Calvary Chapel, Emergent Church, ministry, theology[/tags]

If you haven’t thought about the idea of government’s limited role lately the following story will be sure to get the mental juices going. Via Tim Challies I heard about “Abraham Cherrix, a young man with Hodgkin’s Disease who wants to attempt natrual treatment but is being forced by the courts to undergo chemotherapy.” The actions of social services in this case are quite disturbing.

Make sure to read about it here.

[tags]government, social services[/tags]

Over the last few months I’ve been challenged in my thinking about loving others. In particular I’ve been rethinking my understanding of loving those who are outside the church. I’m still working through this so my thoughts are not well developed and I still seem to mostly be asking questions of myself and my church background.

I think that in the past I’ve made a distinction between loving those inside the church and those outside the church that amounts to the following:

1. It’s good and right to love those inside the church for no other reasons than the fact that I’ve been transformed by God’s grace and love is a natural outflow of that change of heart plus God commands me to love those in the family of faith.
2. I should love those outside the church because I will be able to share the Gospel with them if I do so.

Now at first glance there may not seem to be anything wrong with those statements. On further thought though I’m questioning my motivation for loving those outside the church. Of course wanting to share the Gospel with someone is a very loving desire. I’m not saying that is wrong. But I wonder if I (and many other Christians) would see much value in loving someone if I knew there was no chance of ever sharing the Gospel with that person and that the individual would never visit my church. I suppose my question is this: “Is doing good to someone valuable, good, and glorifying to God in itself?” The answer, I’m sure you would agree, is an emphatic “YES”. However, I think the way we approach those on the outside indicates that we don’t really believe it (as in this way of thinking and belief changes the way I live). It seems to me that the question often lurking in the back of our minds when considering our interaction with those outside our group is “Will this give me an audience for sharing the Gospel?”. Yet, wouldn’t an attitude produced by the Gospel say that loving others (meeting needs, offering help, doing good, etc) is itself the right thing to do whether you get an audience or the people think any differently about you? Isn’t love a witness not just a means to being a witness to the Gospel?

Shouldn’t we love others because love naturally flows out of a heart transformed by God’s grace not merely because of the results that love may produce. Maybe you already think like this and you’re wondering how I’ve been so lost all this time. I suspect though that you may recognize the pragmatic motivation for loving unbelievers in your own heart too. It seems as though that type of thinking about love is the norm within many of our churches. I pray that my own heart and thinking would be radically changed so that I may love those on the outside as God loved me when I was outside of His family.

[tags]love, mission, church, Christian living, loving others[/tags]

Around 5:00 pm yesterday we had a power outage. It lasted less than two hours, but showed me how dependent we are on electricity. Our plans for the evening revolved around items that require electricity. When it looked as though we needed to change plans I realized that we need to work on developing fun things to do that don’t necessarily require DVD players, TVs, computers, etc. I think that it’s about time we break out the boardgames.

[tags]family, family fun[/tags]