My son started his Marching Band practice this week. The Marching Band instructor laid down his law to instil strict discipline into his young proteges. One instruction my son brought home with him was on-time arrival at practice each day.

“If you are early, you are on time,” the instructor pointed out, “If you are on time you are late and if you are late you might as well not bother showing up.”

We had fifteen minutes to go until the practice started that morning. The school is not more than five minutes from our house (or just a tic or so over two minutes if the traffic lights lined up for us). After my son told me that those were the new rules the instructor had given him, I thought about it for a second and turned the car around.

“What are you doing, Dad?” My son looked worried.

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I was talking to this new friend who is an E.R. (Emergency Room) physician. He was describing how ER doctors work twelve hour shifts. I asked him why that is the case. He told me that the reason is that doctors do not want to work shorter, but more frequent, shifts because of the high level of stress in the job. It turns out that if they worked three 12 hour shifts a week, therefore putting in 36-hour weeks, it’s less stressful than to do five 8-hour shifts.

“But are you effective?” I blurted out before I could think further about it.

After a slight, almost uncomfortable, pause, he said, “Well, it’s quite hard. Especially during some shifts when it gets really busy. That is why we always have another “backup” doctor around the last four hours of the shift just to ensure that the pressure doesn’t get to us.”

Which makes me think. But because this guy was a new friend whom I just met, I decided not to continue that line of questioning with him, in case he gets more uncomfortable. Plus, although I like ruffling feathers, I wasn’t in the mood to do so at that point in time. I did ask a little more about him and his work so as to try to understand him and his profession a little more.

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…that I have not recently posted anything, it is because this past weekend, my wife and I went away for a Couples’ Retreat with my church group. About eighty-odd couples went to the Desert Springs Resort & Spa, Palm Desert, CA.

In case observant readers suspect that my wife and I are couples’ retreat junkies, it just so happens that my church’s inaugural family and couples’ ministry retreat was scheduled barely two weeks after another couples’ weekend, one that we had planned and yearned to attend for a long time. When the opportunity presented itself for us to go to both of these events, we struggled with it for a little while before deciding that it would be great to be able to go to both. So, in a short space of two weeks, we were able to get renewed, refreshed and recommitted to our marriage, intimacy, love and couple-hood.

And, we absolute loved it! It was great! We had three fabulous days. Although most of the things that the speaker talked about during the sessions were familiar stuff to both of us, having attended numerous marriage enrichment weekends and relationship seminars over the years, we found the time set aside to talk to one another, and to listen to one another to be invaluable.

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Many of you probably have already come across this trilogy of posts by Brian McLaren on Becoming Convergent, where he recounts his story and explains where he has been, where he is now and where he is going. If you haven’t already done so, I recommend that you read the posts or download the pdf to read, as you will have a better idea of this Emergent movement. At the least, you will have a better idea of who McLaren really is, contrary to the diatribe that you sometimes read about him around the web, especially the blogosphere. As I said a couple of times before, it looks increasingly to me that this guy just does not deserve the kind of vitriol that has been directed against him from those who like to stand in judgment of others.

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Ron Ferguson, writing in his column in the Herald, on the Intelligent Design/Evolution kerfuffle:

One such myth is the theory of evolution. I happen to believe that as an explanation of the origin of species it is currently the best show in town. It has gaps, but it’s pretty fruitful. It doesn’t of itself invalidate the notion of a creator God; nor does it provide answers to questions about why there is evolution at all.

A Christianity which talks about a loving creator hits huge problems which cannot be glibly answered. Or even answered at all. But evolution fundamentalists have a wee difficulty as well: like Shakespeare, Mozart, beauty and disinterested goodness. Anyone who chooses to believe that these things are simply historical accidents is entitled to their view. Forgive me if I don’t join the queue.

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Most people hitting this site are bloggers themselves. Why do we blog? Probably just because we can! Apparently some people are making serious money blogging and some are even doing this full-time. I just found out that a couple of dudes who know how this is done are offering to teach you Six Figure Blogging.

They are setting up a course for you to learn the ins and outs of making money with your blogs. One of these guys, Darren Rowse made so much money blogging that he recently put a deposit on a house, calling it the house that blogging bought.Cool! So, if you are interested in learning about six-figure blogging, and you would like to sign up for the course, you absolutely must check this out.

Darren by the way also run a site for his “emergent church,” The Living Room, “a life giving space where people connect with the teachings of Jesus in natural and culturally relevant ways”. I resonate with a lot of things this Aussie bloke says.

Last week, I hosted Christian Carnival #82. This week it is David Knowles’ turn at all kinds of time blog. You can find it here. David classified the blogs by topics and interspersed it with quotes culled from various sources. There are quite a few of posts and I haven’t had the time to go through them all, but I submitted the third post in my series of “On Looking Lustfully at a Woman” to the Carnival. I may still have a couple more posts in the series, but haven’t been able to sit down long enough to get it out of me. We shall see. In the meantime, you can go to the Carnival and check out the entries for this week.

Step 1. Write about sex.

Step 2. Get noticed by Messy Christian and be linked.

However, I don’t know what the secret is to get feedback.

This blog is still relatively comments-challenged. What’s up with the readers who stop by here? Either they are shy, or I have frightened them away by my forthrightness. Or, perhaps they like a different style of writing. Do you know why my readers don’t normally leave me comments?

Why don’t you?

I just realized that it is almost a year ago that I was inspired to start my own blog. I was then a regular reader of DJ Chuang’s blog, having started with being a regular reader of his website, checking out his latest article about diversity and multiculturalism. I was also checking out some other blogs and photoblogs, when one day, while checking out a church, I stumbled upon Messy Christian’s blog. Reading her blog led me to read other blogs (through her blogrolls, and then blog-hopping through those others’ blogrolls) and finally led me to discover that it is actually quite easy to start your own blog!

A few days later, that was exactly what I did and put up a tentative post. At the time I was in therapy and dealing with a few difficult life issues. So I opted to blog anonymously because I thought things might get quite nasty in these pages, and I did not want to hurt anyone in my life. As it turned out, I haven’t really gone down that path too much except for one or two rare occasions, so every now and then, I do toy with the idea of coming out as some others have done.

But then, I like being the bloke…in the outer… so I might just remain behind the screen for a little while longer yet. In the meantime, how should I spend my blog-anniversary? Should I have a huge party? Should I have a blog party and do some interactive blogging? Should I revisit some of my old posts? Any suggestions?

In two previous posts on this issue, I outlined what I think Matthew 5: 17 - 48 is about. I suggested that this passage teaches the principle that the Law was given not to condemn us but to expose our utter helplessness in order to emphasize the centrality of grace and mercy in our relationship with God. (To read some of my views about the place of the Law or the Ten Commandments in our lives, read the series that I began a while back - this just reminds me that I need to complete this series! Hah! Such is the blogging life!)

So far, if you have come to these posts via Messy Christian’s discussion about masturbation and whether or not it is sin, you might be thinking that I have been dancing around the question. In a way I have been doing that, but that is only to establish some important biblical background.

So far the two most critical biblical support to outlaw masturbation, and the sexual fantasies tied to it, are the infamous “sin of Onan” passage and the alleged injunction against sexual fantasies in Matthew 5: 27-28.

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Logged into my blog this evening after a Sunday night of entertaining with friends. My wife cooked up a storm and invited several friends from our old church who have been in touch with our family. These are especially close friends who provided us with moral, spiritual, social, and even financial support during our most difficult times. We had way too much food, a lot of laughter, a lot of good fellowship and they all got the opportunity to say goodbye and wish my daughter well as she prepares to set off to the Big Apple in a couple of weeks.

Anyway, I was saying that I logged in to do some blogging when I was distracted by this message about the security upgrade to WP 1.5.2, so adventurous soul that I am, I took a deep breathe and said, “Let’s go for it!”

Unlike my previous upgrades, I decided to follow the instructions verbatim and not do any more than was instructed (previously I made a couple of backups, stopped all plugins and so on). This time it went quite smoothly, except for the fact that right after the upgrade, I lost my nice permalinks to my post. I had to restore the .htacess file in order to get the permalinks structure to work again. I don’t know why the documentation does not address that. I will post a question up at the very well supported and very friendly WP Support site and see what the gurus have to say about that. Other than that, I think the upgrade went quite smoothly. The most time was taken by the backup process itself. The actual upgrade took less than 10 minutes.

Please let me know if you find anything that is broken here!

Reading this. I commend it to you. Well worth the read. (ht: Fidler on the roof)