New Church Plant in my home town

Here is a link to a new church plant in Lawrence Kansas:

http://www.renaissancelawrence.com/

Apostle Paul’s Rejection Letter

A humorous essay by a missionary agency rejecting the Apostle Paul as a missionary on the basis of his ideas on tent making, arguing with Peter, going to an unaccredited school in Arabia, being an unskilled public speaker, handling snakes, speaking in tongues a great deal, been in jail, hurting business for business men, making travel decisions based on dreams, preaching long sermons which result in people falling asleep and falling from windows, and claiming to be an apostle.

http://jimost.wordpress.com/2007/06/25/apostle-paul-rejection-letter/

Bob Dylan at Hershey, June 24, 2007

I thought you’d like the following, from a midnight interview of Dylan, at a Fort Lauderdale hotel a few years ago:Question: When you look ahead now, do you still see a Slow Train Coming?Dylan: When I look ahead now, it’s picked up quite a bit of speed. In fact, it’s going like a freight train now.  

link

I was going to write a review of this concert – but Gretchen already did and she said almost exactly what I was thinking – it was an awesome outdoor concert on a perfect summer night.  He is a poet and a musician for the ages. But he doesn’t have the greatest singing voice (although its getting better with age!).

Here is my wife’s review

Gretchen and I went to see a Bob Dylan concert last night at Hershey Park

Here is a link about Bob Dylan’s faith:

http://web.utk.edu/~wparr/KennGulliksen04251999.html

and here is my favorite Bob Dylan site, with lots of concert information:

http://my.execpc.com/~billp61/dates.html
 

Space Shuttle Atlantis Lands Safely in California

Atlantis  landed at Edwards Air Force Base at 3:49 EDT

• The mission (STS 117) left on June 8th
• It arrived at the International Space Station on June 10
• They added a new set of solar array truss structures to increase the station’s power capabilities, and did repairs during 4 space walks
• It is the 118th Space Shuttle Mission
• It is the 21rst mission to visit the international space station
• Suni Williams came back with this flight – she went to the space station on STS-116
• Suni Williams broke the space endurance record for women on June 16 at 194 days, 18 hours, 58 minutes
• 5.8 million miles were added to Atlantis’ Speedometer during this mission
• The next mission STS-118 is scheduled to launch in August

Doug Lamborn comments on the International Space Station

Doug Lamborn is a friend of mine who is now a US Congressman representing the state of Colorado in United States House of Representatives. Twenty plus years ago he was an Elder in a church I went to in Lawrence Kansas – New Life Christian Fellowship.

Here is the press release: NASA Launches Colorado Astronaut into Space

NASA Launches Colorado Astronaut Into Space

Washington, Jun 8 –  

Washington, D.C. – Congressman Doug Lamborn (Colorado Springs) today issued the following statement on Coloradan Steven R. Swanson, who be on the Space Shuttle Atlantis mission, STS-117, scheduled to launch tonight at 7:38pm from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

“Since the dawn of time humans have looked up at the stars and wondered what was out there. In the 20^th century, space travel became a reality and sparked the American imagination. I am excited to see a Coloradan participating in a mission that enables further space exploration.

Like another great Coloradan, Jack Swigert, Mr. Swanson is an inspiration to the people of the great state of Colorado. We look forward to his pushing forward the frontiers of science and the human imagination.”

Swanson, the Mission Specialist, graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1983, joined NASA in 1987 and was selected as an Astronaut Candidate in 1998. Currently, the astronaut corps has four Coloradans, Jeffrey Ashby, Scott Parazynski, and Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, a native of the Congressman’s hometown of Colorado Springs. Led by Commander Frederick Sturckow, STS-117 will aid in the ongoing construction of the International Space Station.

A Geek is climbing Mt. Everest

A computer geek, Mark Kahrl, who says he rarely gets outside much, is in the process of climbing Mount Everest. So far he is at advanced base camp, and it has taken him 30 days 4 hours 1 minute and 22 seconds to get there. He’s making a lot of flash movies , blogging, reporting status, and taking photos, which are all instantly online at his website. He is describing it as a tale of “high latency, low bandwidth, blown hard drives, and frozen fingers.” He plans to peak on June 14.

Other computer geeks are calling him crazy, and doesn’t he know that people die up there, and hasn’t he read Into Thin Air by  Jon Krakauer. I found this at slashdot.

BHAG defined

BHAG is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. It takes 100% effort of an organization and about ten years to complete. Our pastor (Bob Miller)  is talking about it for our church, so I thought I would do some research on it.

The first time it was ever mentioned was in the context of JFKs “To The Moon” Speech:

Earliest Citation:

There are two basic parts of an effective vision: First is a “Guiding Philosophy” — a set of core values and principles like the Declaration of Independence. Second is a bold mission, or what I like to call a BHAG — a big, hairy, audacious goal — like our national goal in the ’60s to go to the moon by the end of the decade. [If a company says] “Our BHAG is to revolutionize telecommunications technology on the earth,” then that company has some way to determine up and down the line whether people are doing things consistent with that vision. Is everyone aligning with it by setting goals in accord with the BHAG? Are they committing their resources to it? Are they putting most of their efforts in that direction?
—Jim Collins, interview with Tom Brown, “On the edge with Jim Collins,” Industry Week, October 5, 1992

 Here are some other examples of BHAGS:

Boeing – “Bet the pot on the B-17, 707 and 747.”

Ford – “Democratize the automobile.”

Phillip Morris – “Slay Goliath and become the front-runner in the tobacco industry, despite the social forces against smoking.”

Disney – “Build Disneyland – and build it to our image, not industry standards. To be the best company in the world for all fields of entertainment.”

Sony – “Change the worldwide image of Japanese products as poor quality; create a pocket portable transistor radio.”

Guns and Anarchy in Greensburg, KS

Here is an interesting blog entry about how Lawrence Kansas young adults are being turned away by the Greensburg  police when they arrived in their vegetable oil-burning jalopies to see if they could help out this tornado devastated town. Apparently these long-hairs wanted to access the situation and return with the appropriate gear and people to help.  They also wanted to know how the people in the Greensburg prison were being treated. Here are their accounts:

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=2007kma_greensburg1

Here is an account of what happened next:

After touring the town and talking with people, the four anarchists helped a family completely clear out their basement of belongings and debris. Once the basement was empty, the anarchists say that the family thanked them profusely and asked them to bring back “fifty more” people from Lawrence to help clear debris in Greensburg.

The anarchists said they would.The next weekend, Saturday, May 15, the anarchists returned to Greensburg, this time with five members. Though the anarchists are notoriously wary of “the man,” they knew that in order to be the most effective and helpful, they’d have to follow protocol to get back into the town, which was effectively under martial law. They checked in with the Kiowa County Emergency Response Command Post to receive official permission to set up their relief efforts.  They were given a day pass that allowed them to drive in and out of the city—the town was only open to people between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.―and then the group sought out Mennonite Disaster Relief Services, figuring that the local church would have a better handle on what aid the native population needed than would one of the many federal organizations operating in the city.

“Their church was destroyed,” said KMA member Jordan Ferrand-Sapsis, “but they treated us very warmly and seemed glad to see us. They seemed happy to have the hands. They showed us a place where we could store our supplies and tools.”

The group then trekked over to a Red Cross tent to pick up water and sandwiches that were being offered to relief workers.

That’s when the anarchists say they were approached by police officer Ty Moeder of the Olathe Police force and told to leave the city and not return. While the anarchists attempted to negotiate with officer Moeder, they say that an Officer McNemee of the Lawrence Police Department began taking photos of the inside and outside of their car.

At first, says Ferrand-Sapsis, she thought the officers were simply irked that the anarchists were taking food from the Red Cross. But as they talked with the officers, she says it became clear that the police knew exactly who they were and viewed the group as a security threat. According to Strano, Officer Moeder stated that the group was to have been turned back at the road block before even reaching Greensburg and couldn’t figure out how they’d gotten as far as they had.

Then, says Ferrand-Sapsis, the officers convinced the group that they’d better leave because if they were to be arrested, it might not be so easy to get out of jail. “They made comments like ‘they’re not giving people bail right now,’ like it might be a long, sticky arrest and you might get lost in the system kind of thing. They definitely made it sound as if it wouldn’t be a run-of-the-mill arrest. And it did sound like a threat.”

Here is the anarchist’s account continued:

http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/1240

 As far as the people in the Greensburg jail are concerned:

 I told Stejskal about the story I was working on, explaining who the anarchists were and how they’d been thrown out of Greensburg. I mentioned that one of their concerns was the Greensburg prisoners. Stejskal laughed a little, saying that there’s usually only one person in the Greensburg jail and the nighttime jail keeper is a single mom.

Most people in Lawrence see the Anarchists as a group of harmless idealistic hippies who need to get a real job.

The Jatropha Plant

The Jatropha Plant is an oily weed, much oilier than corn, that will grow almost anywhere, and is a great source for biofuel. Here is a good article about it:

Green Gold in a Shrub, Scientific American, June 2007

John Mathews, a professor of strategic management at Macquarie University in Australia, notes that many tropical developing countries have huge swaths of degraded and semiarid land that can be utilized for fuel crops. The cost of labor there is cheap, too. Biofuels made from plants such as jatropha, he argues, “represent the best bet for a last-ditch effort to industrialize the poor south and end poverty.” He advocates large-scale plantings to aid energy independence in expanding economies such as China and India and to boost exports in the less developed countries of Africa.

Burning in my soul

I love this blog:

http://deneenwhite.wordpress.com/2007/05/24/burning-in-my-soul/

May God remove any hindrances for Deneen to achieve her goals to advance His Kingdom!