Some Blog Site

Here is a guest post I wrote for SCL back in the day (2011 in case you’re wondering). It wasn’t run because I didn’t actually write a full blog post for Jon, I just sent him an outline of ideas. But I decided to fill it out and present it to you today.

What role should luck have in Christianity? We do see people casting lots, which would seem to us to be a game of chance, but it also a way for God to communicate. Christian broadcasters should announce Stanford’s quarterback as “Andrew Providence” or “Andrew Blessing” rather than “Andrew Luck”.

Similarly, gatherings with food should be called “pot blessings”.

That’s how long ago I wrote that – Andrew Luck was a college player. Since then he has gone into the NFL as a player, retired as a player, and then joined the executive ranks.

For a recent blog post, I knew I had written about “raising awareness” a while back and wanted to reference that. Not having all my blog post dates memorized, I turned to a search engine for help.

Many years ago, when I setup Some Blog Site, I added a search feature that uses Google to provide results. So I started with that. I looked up “awareness” on the site and did not get the page I knew existed.

Then I switched to Duck Duck Go and it gave me the page I wanted as the first result. Just for fun, I tried Bing, and Bing was also helpful.

I rarely use Google anymore, because my recent experiences with it are not good. If it won’t find things I know exist and am looking specifically for, how can I trust that it will give me the right results for something I don’t know as much about?

Note that I didn’t grab the Google screenshot before the latest post, so originally it didn’t have the first four results, which are the one I just made and not the one I was looking for.

Here are Duck Duck Go and Bing:

It seems Google prioritizes recent results and just kind of forgets about older results, not even bothering to mention they exist.

For fun, I thought I’d try one more check, with the keyword “helmet”.

Here are Duck Duck Go and Bing:

Anyway, I normally use DuckDuckGo now, because it gives better results and because I can turn off any AI responses.

Here is a guest post I wrote for SCL back in the day (2011 in case you’re wondering). It wasn’t run because I didn’t actually write a full blog post for Jon, I just sent him an outline of ideas. But I decided to fill it out and present it to you today.

What is the Entryway called?

Depending where you grew up, you call the church entryway different things. Please vote on what you think the church entryway should be called:

A. Entryway
B. Foyer
C. Vestibule
D. Narthex
E. Lobby
F. Airlock

I don’t have personal experience with this, but I was thinking about the old topic of raising awareness and for some reason I made the connection with drunkenness.

Normally to have fun you go to an event and it’s a higher level than your normal activity, so you end up having fun.

Being drunk fools you into thinking you’re having fun. Instead of going to something that’s a higher level than your normal activity, what it does is bring your mental ability lower so whatever you’re doing seems fun. But if fun, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose that accomplishes its purpose.

This is somewhat related to the concept of raising awareness in that raising awareness becomes pointless when everything is raised. But it’s the opposite in that your current experience becomes better if you keep it the same but lower your brain functionality. I.e. you’re more easily impressed or amused.

Which might not seem to be a bad deal to some people, but you can’t sustain that. It’s like so many people these days – instead of aspiring to be someone better, they look to bring down the other people.

Here is a guest post I wrote for SCL back in the day (2011 in case you’re wondering). It wasn’t run because I didn’t actually write a full blog post for Jon, I just sent him an outline of ideas. But I decided to fill it out and present it to you today.

If you want to get out of some job or activity in the church, you have to bring a spiritual aspect to your reasoning. The easiest one in this case is to play the “body of Christ” card when someone asks you to do something.

“I know you need someone to teach Sunday school, but that’s like the role of the mouth or the hand or something. In the body of Christ, I’m the shoulder. Or maybe the collarbone.”

There are legitimate reasons to play that card though. Maybe you have tried to work in the nursery and you know that’s not where you belong.

Just don’t claim to be the tonsils.

Now that no one is talking about the Thorndyke font anymore, it’s time to announce that Font Grill has released a new font.

Introducing: Isabeau Font

AKA: Ladyhawke

Go download Isabeau.

I was inspired by the opening credits of the Ladyhawke movie. I was going to call this the Ladyhawke font but then another font in the movie caught my eye. I couldn’t make two different fonts both called Ladyhawke, so I decided neither one would be called Ladyhawke. I’m naming the fonts after characters in the movie.

Our pastor had a topic with the kids in youth group – since some of them don’t have much church background – on Jesus’ name.

One of the things he made sure to tell them is that “Christ” is not Jesus’ last name. Christ is His title – Jesus the Christ, which means the Mesiah or The Promised One.

So far none of the kids have asked what Jesus’ last name actually was. Pastor did bring it up in a separate discussion and I joked that Jesus’ last name was Carpenter, because that was the family business.

Here in America, and I assume we brought the habit over from Europe and didn’t just make it up ourselves, people got their last names from what they did. Back in the old days at least, before machines came along. Now it seems that no one gets assigned last names anymore – we just keep inheriting them.

Anyway, it used to work like this:

You needed some horseshoes or a plow, you went to see John the Smith.
You needed some grain turned into flour, you went to see John the Miller.
You needed some barrels to hold the grain, you went to see John the Cooper.
And so on.

People’s trades became their last names because everyone kept referring to them by that. That’s why Americans would think of Jesus’ last name as Carpenter.

But it wouldn’t have been that.

In the Middle East they did (and still do) things differently. You are not known by what you do, rather you are known by your family.
Your last name is who your father is, such as John son of John (or John Johnson, which is a thing Americans are also familiar with from some other parts of Europe, and also Wisconsin).
And, as I learned from someone who spent time in Iraq just over a decade ago, once you as a male have a son, your last name changes from whose son you are to whose father you are. First-born son only.

Since Jesus was from the Middle East, I expect the custom would have been for Him to be called by His father’s name. Earthly father, since that’s how the people who would be talking to Him would know Him.
And that is what we see in the Bible, although we non-Middle-Easterners don’t recognize it as a last name. Let’s look at John 6:42a:

And they were saying, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?”

Right there, you see the people give Jesus’ first and last name. First name: Jesus. Last name: Son of Joseph, or Barjoseph as they would have said.

Not sure how useful that bit of information was, but it may come in handy if you have a discussion about what Jesus’ last name was.

Also I find in interesting that Barabbas, whom you may recognize from Jesus’ trial, was known as Barabbas. “Bar” meaning “son of” and would have been the equivalent of his last name. I’m guessing he was an only (male) child so he could have been known as the “son of Abbas” and it would have been unique enough to identify him. Or maybe there were some complications in his family life and all he knew was his dads’ name but not his own, and that propelled him into a life of crime. It’s also interesting to consider his kids’ last name: would it be Barbarabbas?