Digital Cud

Put this in the “you just can’t eat anything anymore without getting sick” file…

Tim Challies is giving away DVDs this month. Click below to enter:

A video is worth a thousand words…

We were able to catch Mike Huckabee stumping in Maryland today. I am really excited about Huckabee as a candidate, and I can’t remember a time where I have had an opportunity to vote for a candidate that so fully reflects my political sensibilities. Funny thing is this year, Maryland actually makes a difference in presidential politics. Marylanders get out and vote. Give Mike Huckabee all 37 delegates!

I am a creationist. I am teaching my children to understand creationism. I am a potential threat to human rights and an enemy of European democracy.

Or at least that is what the Council of Europe seems to believe according to their latest resolution.

The Parliamentary Assembly is worried about the possible ill-effects of the spread of creationist ideas within our education systems and about the consequences for our democracies. If we are not careful, creationism could become a threat to human rights which are a key concern of the Council of Europe.

Um, yeah.

At least I’ve got the Europeans shaking in their boots!

Al Mohler has a bit of commentary on the issue here.

This year we have implemented a systematic approach to memorizing scripture. We have an index card box (that we call the “Treasure Box”) that holds forty or so index card dividers. The dividers are labeled as follows:

• Daily
• Odd day
• Even day
• One for each day of the week
• One for each day of the month (31 in all)

The daily, odd, even, and week slots have one scripture card each. The monthly is our long term review and will eventually have multiples in each slot. When we add a new scripture to memorize it goes in the daily slot. When we know it, it is promoted to odd, and we add a new verse to daily. Eventually it will be bumped to even, Sunday, Monday, etc, until it lands in a day of the month for long term review.

Each morning and evening we go through our scriptures for the day. We will recite the daily verse, the odd or even (depending on the date), the verse corresponding to the day of the week, and any that have landed in the day of month slot for the current date, making four or five verses read aloud.

The new verse is simply read by myself or my wife until the kids can join in and recite it as well. We don’t get in any hurry, and as soon as we know the verse, we promote it.

Little by little, we are hiding God’s word in our hearts as a family.

UPDATE: I don’t have an original thought, and this is no exception! The memory system is a light tweaking of the Charlotte Mason Scripture Memory system

Our whole family went to the local Apple Store for the release of Mac OS X Leopard. Mindy and I, and our four oldest kids all got snazzy OS X t-shirts, and we got to play with the new operating system. We forgot our camera, so we took pictures of each other with the demo iPhones, and e-mailed the pictures home…and here they are!

Nate loved playing with the iPhones and demonstrated a real knack for the Mac, too. He started using the new remote screen control feature on the Mac to control one of the other computers that was being used for a demo. That’s my boy!

Contrary to the calendars I have on my wall (and possibly contrary to your computer clock, if you are still using Windows. Get a Mac!) it is still Daylight Savings Time. Us Americans still have to wait until November 4th to “fall back.”

What a tangled web we weave.

Bella is an excellent independent film that was released this weekend. My wife and I got an opportunity to see it today, and it was well worth our while.

It is not often that a high quality script with excellent production (and Sundance Festival kudos as well!) expresses such clearly redemptive themes, as well as a strong-but-not-preachy pro-life message. This film is quirky and moving, and just doesn’t follow typical American feel-good romance storylines. I thoroughly enjoyed this film. Get out and support it this opening weekend if you can!

Review here.

A couple of quotes from a John Piper sermon I am reading:

Take care, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we share in Christ, if only we hold our first confidence firm to the end. Hebrews 3:12-14

Three observations from this tremendously important text:

• Sin wages a constant battle to deceive and harden the hearts of professing Christians. If it succeeds, a person slips into unbelief and falls away from the living God.
• The evidence and confirmation of whether we have any share in Christ is whether we hold our first confidence firm to the end. Hebrews sees two possibilities for professing Christians: either they hold fast their first confidence to the end and show that they have really become sharers in the life of Christ, or they become hardened by the deceitfulness of sin and fall away from God with a heart of unbelief and show that they did not have a share in Christ.
• The means appointed by God to enable the saints to persevere to the end is daily exhortation from other saints. “Exhort one another every day as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”

…and…

If we knew that the Gestapo was closing in on us, if we knew that at any time some could disappear from our number never to be heard from again, we would gather often in our homes and in secret rendezvous to strengthen our hands in God. And love would cover a multitude of sins, and our handshakes and embraces and the meetings of our eyes would be like gifts of roses and lilies from the bottom of the heart. Well, we are in war time. We are in enemy territory. Thousands of lives hang in the balance. The danger of hard hearts and unbelief and cool love and American luxury lurks everywhere. O, how we need to exhort one another every day to have strong confidence of victory in Christ, and to dream of new strategies of love to sabotage the enemy’s concentration camps of unbelief!

As I was reading this sermon, I was drawn to think about “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “Schindler’s List.” I love both of these movies, but I have never thought of them quite the way I am thinking of them this morning. I remember the first time I experienced these films, having a tension and tightness in my chest. I can still recall the mixture of suspense and fear and joy and survival that these two films brought me. A real wartime mentality in the Christian life is not to far from these two films. A real spiritual war is at hand, and a Christian has two choices…play along with the enemy and eventually be swept away, or buckle down, build camp, and resist with all my might, in view of the kingdom I am looking forward to, and the power amply supplied in the grace of Jesus Christ.

There is no place in a wartime fellowship for light pleasantries and chit-chat, but rather laying hold of the means of grace supplied to us…Spirit and word. As if our lives and the lives of future generations depended on it.

The new parental controls feature in Mac OS X Leopard are definitely worth the upgrade price. The parental controls will:

• Establish accounts with independent settings (so you can be more restrictive with kiddo accounts).
• Give you a dynamic content filter that blocks objectionable material (like Covenant Eyes or Safe Eyes services)
• Allow you to log and monitor all internet access and chat activity
• Allow you to log and monitor the use of applications (i.e. how long have you been playing SketchFighter?)
• Allow you to block access to applications
• Allow you to shut off access to the internet and applications on a time schedule, or a maximum usage length (i.e. No internet after 9 p.m. and limit use of video games to weekends for 1 hour a day)
• Remote access to the controls from other Macs, password protected of course.

Up to now, you would have to buy at least a couple of applications and a subscription service to get this level of functionality. Now it is available on every Mac. Go Apple!

Today is a red-letter day for Mac folks…the day that Leopard is released. (Leopard is the new release of Apple’s Mac OS operating system)

Since I am among the Mac zealots, there is only one way to celebrate such a venerable day…the whole family eating dinner at the mall food court, standing in line outside the Apple store, and getting cool Mac t-shirts when the release kicks off at 6pm tonight.

And I get geek cred for being in the first time zone that gets to play with leopard.

Uncanny, huh?

In honor of another 6 month blog fade at Digital Cud…

Available at despair.com.

I’m in the throes of a house refinance, and I need some humor.