Bible Software

(after a long absence)... helloooo

C_lates. Remember that crazy idea we had for Bible software a few years ago? And remember how we discovered that other people were already doing it? Yeah.. about that...

While reading this morning, I had the same desire for the same software. So I went looking. It's still not there. Nobody is making the software that I want to use. After working with online software and usability for the last few years, I'm pretty dissatisfied with my options. Here's a couple thoughts I had. Let me know what you think?

Sure, there is very powerful Bible software now. Here are the main issues I have.

1. They simply are not usable. They are built around features, and not usability. Sure, I can do "anything", but the reality is, I can do nothing. There are tons of capabilities, but the software is designed in a way that makes it hard to use (and therefore, I don't use it).
   
2. Platform. The whole idea that I have to buy your software, and then I can only use it in one place (and probably only on windows) is so antiquated. I want to be able to use this wherever and whenever. I currently have 3 computers. I want all my stuff to be accessible from any of them. Plus, what about when I go on vacation? or out of town?
   
3. Price. I'm still REALLY bugged by this one. My idea is to build software that really allows people to experience the Bible in a way they never have before. If that is the case, then this is a life transforming tool. Charging someone $60 (or in some cases $4,600) to be able to access this information is a HUGE barrier to the gospel message. Plus, they are asking me to commit to something before I even get a chance to really use it. That time investment is another barrier.
   
4. Flow. This is how I work. I sit down to read a passage. About 10 minutes later I realize that the passage I read just raised about 25 questions. Where is Caesarea? How far is it from Galilee? Where is that in modern day Israel? Is it IN modern day Israel? How long did it take to walk between the two? Wait, is that the same place that King David...? Thing is, I ignored all those questions because I couldn't easily get the answers. Current software has so many features, that it makes it impossible to actually explore the questions I have, and maintain a normal reading flow.
   

So there are a few issues I have. Here is my one possible solution. It's crazy... maybe? I would like to raise money to cover the cost of developing and designing a FREE online software that is incredibly intuitive to use, and yet very powerful. It would probably take about a year. Maybe more. At the end though, we are able to provide a similar product (but better) as what is being offered now, and it will be available online, to anyone in the world, for free.

I know there are a lot of Bible software type things out there. Do you guys know of any that would meet these requirements? I haven't seen them, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

Thoughts?

Christmas preparations

I know what you're thinking. It's not even Thanksgiving yet and you're already talking about Christmas! But the title is Christmas preparations. Which means we're just preparing. To be more specific, this is a post about Advent. So there ya go. Be mad at hundreds of years of church tradition, or just get over it.

To be honest, nothing has been posted here in a long long time, and I've been thinking lately that something needs to be said:

Check out this idea for an Advent calendar.

That's all. Just wanted to share a little happiness.

Of Easter

But I can tell you this: that what I believe happened and what in faith and with great joy I proclaim to you here is that he somehow got up, with life in him again, and the glory upon him. And I speak very plainly here, very unfancifully, even though I do not understand well my own language. I was not there to see it any more than I was awake to see the sun rise this morning, but I affirm it as surely as I do that by God's grace the sun did rise this morning because that is why the world is flooded with light.

He got up. He said, "Don't be afraid." Rich man, poor man, child; sick man, dying man; man who cannot believe, scared sick man, lost one. Young man with your life ahead of you. "Don't be afraid."

He said, "Feed my sheep," which is why, like the chief priests and the Pharisees, we try to make that tomb as secure as we can. Because this is what he always says: "Feed my sheep . . . my lambs." And this is what we would make ourselves secure from, knowing the terrible needs of the lambs and our abundance, knowing our own terrible needs.

He said, "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world."

Anxiety and fear are what we know best in the fantastic century of ours. Wars and rumors of wars. From civilization itself to what seemed the most unalterable values of the past, everything is threatened or already in ruins. We have heard so much tragic news that when the news is good we cannot hear it.

But the proclamation of Easter Day is that all is well. And as a Christian, I say this not with the easy optimism of one who has never known a time when all was not well but as one who has faced the Cross in all its obscenity as well as in all its glory, who has known one way or another what it is like to live separated from God. In the end, his will, not ours is done. Love is the victor. Death is not the end. The end is life. His life and our lives through him, in him. Existence has greater depths of beauty, mystery, and benediction than the wildest visionary has ever dared to dream. Christ our Lord has risen.

- Buechner | "The End is Life" | The Magnificent Defeat

My waiting list

My list of what I'm waiting for is really boiled down into one thing. I am waiting for my life to begin. I have always been curious--even a little anxious--to see what God has planned for my life. I am so thankful to know that my purpose is to minister to youth. But I just wish it would begin already! I know that seminary is a part of this process, I know that I am right where God wants me to be, but I feel like I am in a holding cell. Most of the time I hate school. I love the education I am getting, and I even love the majority of my professors. But I am eager to get out and do what I am being prepared to do. And now that we have friends who are graduating and going off to their places of ministry I want to be doing that too. I want to know where God is going to send us, what the church (or other ministry) will look like, and begin leading a ministry. Gentry and I hope to move back to Florida to be with family and friends, but we know that this may not happen. We are doing our best to be content with wherever it may be that God sends us. But this waiting and not knowing makes me very anxious at times. It is so hard to just wait.

But maybe waiting is a good thing. Maybe contentment is a discipline I need to learn. Waiting on the Lord and resting in his good purposes might not be such a bad thing.

Throw yourself into the wave

"He gave me no assurance. No Fixed Lands. Always one must throw oneself into the wave." -King Tor of Perelandra

C.S. Lewis, in Perelandra, sets forth the notion that Venus (called Perelandra) has human life on it, a new proverbial Eden, pre-fall. The two (green-skinned) humans are given the same opportunity of Adam and Eve, but with a new challenge. You see, Perelandra is a watery planet, with islands that float on top of the waves. A still photograph of the islands would reveal landscapes similar to our own, however this landscape is constantly in flux, in motion, such that any point of land could at one moment be the top of a hill and the next the pit of a valley. Their "forbidden fruit", as it were, was an island that had roots beneath the water, a fixed land. Stability, a place to make a home in and return to, to own and control and find consistency. They were not allowed to sleep overnight on the fixed land.

The story is fascinating, and as this is no book report, I will leave it to you to enjoy the story of your own decision, but I was enamored with the outlook of King Tor, of always throwing yourself into whatever position you happen to find yourself. Whatever God sends your way, to take it on full force.

In "Surprised by Joy", Lewis (I am currently reading a lot of Lewis in hopes of finishing my goal of completing his collected bibliography) says, "Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears. Take in what is there and give no thought to what might have been there or what is somewhere else."

Later he tells how a friend had shown him how to appreciate equally beauty and sorrow, to, in effect, take fully whatever came. "I learned from him that we should attempt a total surrender to whatever atmosphere was offering itself at the moment; in a squalid town to seek out those very places where its squalor rose to grimness and almost grandeur, on a dismal day to find the most dismal and dripping wood, on a windy day to seek the windiest ridge. There was no Betjemmanic irony about it; only a serious, yet gleeful, determination to rub one's nose in the very quiddity of each thing, to rejoice in its being (so magnificently) what it was."

How often do I get dissatisfied with how things are (and even consider that noble!) and not simply ignore the present joys but refuse them. The inhabitants of Perelandra considered (whether by habit or because they knew nothing else) each piece of fruit the best piece of fruit simply becuase it was the only one being eaten at the present. It could not be compared to fruit from yesterday nor to what fruit that might have been.

I think this is, for me, one of the ways that I would like to 'start living'. To live in such communion that I have no need of assurance or a fixed land, but need only the present and eternal Joy.

To throw myself into each wave.

so unlike Fear...

One of the conferences we do every year is called Big Break. For four weeks during Spring Break campuses from all over the eastern half of the US come to Panama City Beach to share their faith with other Spring Breakers. Today I had an interesting conversation with our tech director, Ben Warren.

He would say, of the act of sharing or proselytizing, that he (and virtually the collective student body amassed here as well) is "scared shitless" to go out on the beach. That term is far from inaccurate in my own experience as well.

What is it about evangelism (especially of the type we call 'approach evangelism') that generates so much fear in the heart of a man? Yet it is so unlike Fear, so much greater than Fear. Would I (or anyone else in my shoes) be so afraid of selling vacuum cleaners or even peddling something so practically useful as sunblock?

Is it Doubt at the heart of our timidity? Are we (and I switch between the first person singular and plural flippantly because i find that my experience is not isolated) so Insecure about our own Faith that we shrink back and hide from sharing it with others? What conflicing intention drives us away from the beach? We live and die on our hills of "green" and "social justice" and fear not rejection in these battles, perhaps from a sense of intellectual superiority over our antagonists, perhaps merely conviction over what we feel to be true or right. We can share our Politik or Policy sure enough, but Heaven forbid we offend someone (or ourselves) by speaking of Love Himself, of Redemption, of the Greatest Injustice.

Instead, we concoct the grandest of exceptions of why we shouldn't share the Faith, or why we don't need to, or simply for why we don't. What could possibly be at the root of such evasion? Where else in life does fear exist to this exent? Can it be overcome? Should it?

[Incidentally, I would love to write a tale someday that features a character who is so arrested by fear that he recognizes it not as fear but something larger. No good ideas about that yet.]

nevermind our planmaking

embarrassingly its march 2nd and i just read two posts from january that i had never seen before on this blog. that means i am a bad contributor. scratch that, it means i am not contributing. my bad. reading that most recent post was good for my heart though. i long for a lot of things in life, but i think mostly i long to start living. i live as one who is afraid i think. just earlier today i was thinking about myself (naturally) and remembering when i was just a boy. i can remember the first rollercoaster that i ever was really able to enjoy that was worth anything as a rollercoaster. see i was terrified. the thought of flying off that coaster was so controlling my mind that enjoyment was not a possibility, i only waited until the ride was over to breathe a sigh of relief that i had not in fact died. what happened was i had this sort of epiphany, i cognitively realized that if people flew off these rollercoasters, they would not be allowed to use them, if they were unsafe they couldnt make any money, so they had to make them safe. now of course i couldnt truly know that they were safe until i experienced them, but i did have to believe that they were. so i decided that day that i would not be afraid anymore, that i would go on the rides and trust that i would not die. that day i started to like rollercoasters. it was freeing and awesome.

i think im the same way with God, intellectually i kinda know that things will be best if i really just completely give myself to him and his mission, but there is just still so much of me that is afraid of things. i mean what will people think? will i still be able to have lots of friends and be cool? will i still be able to hang out with people that arent christians? will i still ever be able to have fun? will i get to do so many of the things that i want to do? i cant know the answers to these questions, i just cant, but i think i at least intellectually have to make that jump. to decide that jesus gets all of me. not just the easy parts to give. and trust what i say i already believe, trust that the plans that God has for me are really the best plans for my life.

see im sick of being halfway, its just no way to live. i mean sure i gave jesus my heart, and ultimately God is my boss, but a lot of me wants to be able to control what people think of me. not to have to trust Jesus that it will be ok even if they think im weird. im so sick of this, im so sick of dreaming about what God is gonna do in the world but not doing anything myself. i think i wanna be done with that... so i propose that we nevermind our plan making and lets start living...