Workflow?

There is much on the web regarding creative production workflow whether it be about the written word, images, or applications.

At the end of the day it is always primarily a matter of time and energy and the distance or progress that can be meaningfully achieved. I’ll be continuing to chip away when I can and hopefully, over enough time, cover some distance. I’m still learning to manage this hosted website. It should get better eventually.

My goal with this ongoing creative effort is to glorify God, our Creator, and to look forward to all that He has revealed and will reveal to the best of my energy and ability… and of course, we can all do that as well in the way we live our lives, though it can be extremely difficult at times as we live in a fallen and broken world.

Because creation/nature is still my favorite subject, I often remember these timeless words

of William Wordsworth, which I first read almost 40 years ago…

… and this prayer I make,

Knowing that Nature never did betray

The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,

Through all the years of this our life, to lead

From joy to joy: for she can so inform

The mind that is within us, so impress

With quietness and beauty, and so feed

With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,

Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,

Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

he dreary intercourse of daily life,

Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb

Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold

Is full of blessings.

Excerpt from:

Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,

On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798

God bless

Ed

The Weight of Resentment: Destructively Great Expectations

I found this to be a clear perspective on how we must endeavor to keep our irrationally demanding expectations under careful consideration.  Though so much in the days and nights of our lives is well beyond our control, our behavior and reaction is ours to manipulate and apply advantageously in any situation.  We can confront our self-serving and self-righteous disappointment and disillusionment, shed the crushing weight of passivity, and neutralize resentment. Happiness and Joy are different things.  

We have happiness when expectations are met.  We know we have joy when disappointment holds no power over us.  

Excerpts below:

"Our mind-sets make a huge difference in how we perceive our circumstances.  What we expect shapes how we respond. If we expect peace, we will resent having to fight. If we expect rest, we will resent having to endure. If we expect leisure, we will resent having to work hard."

"Our emotions springing from misplaced expectations of peace, rest, and leisure ask to be coddled. But the Bible doesn’t coddle them; it confronts them. This is kind, not cruel. Because such expectations are weights to be discarded, not desires to be indulged."

—Jon Bloom on the weight of passivity

http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/lay-aside-the-weight-of-passivity

Cheers. God bless.

Times of uncertainty?

There is much talk and prayer about our times of uncertainty, lately.  Only last summer there was not nearly as much of this palpable anxiety in the parlance of the news-gathering and social media mainstream.  No matter.

We can truly take heart that there is no uncertainty and thus release the adversary's anxiety to the wind.  The Lord has already destroyed our death --- and:

All time belongs to God. 

Nothing that belongs to God is uncertain.  We can take great comfort knowing that there are no uncertain times.  Not even the Great Flood nor the Babylonian captivity was a time of uncertainty. 

It is written: All which we now behold will come to an increasingly well-understood and extremely specific end.  

Today -- we also, mercifully, live with the certainty that we have been saved by the blood of Jesus. 

The uncertainty we experience is of our own making -- especially the uncertainty which can follow according to the manner in which we react to events beyond our control.  

The uncertainty we are all subject to experiencing is of our own making: our behavior, perspective, our reactions, and our choices -- and we need to pray for guidance to help us to be quite certain of what we do with each these -- and how they each reflect the will of the Lord.   This is because things will certainly continue to happen in our clear and present fallen state:

To everything there is a season,
A time for every purpose under heaven:

A time to be born,
    And a time to die;
A time to plant,
    And a time to pluck what is planted;

A time to kill,
    And a time to heal;
A time to break down,
    And a time to build up;

A time to weep,
    And a time to laugh;
A time to mourn,
    And a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones,
    And a time to gather stones;
A time to embrace,
    And a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to gain,
    And a time to lose;
A time to keep,
    And a time to throw away;

A time to tear,
    And a time to sew;
A time to keep silence,
    And a time to speak;

A time to love,
    And a time to hate;
A time of war,
    And a time of peace.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 NKJV

Uncertainty did not make the list.  Thank God.

There is no time of uncertainty that is not of our own fabrication.  In the Lord, we know how the story ends.  

Let us strive for the faith of Daniel -- for whom even the greatest fires, wild beasts, and kings of the earth were no match, and of no consequence..

God bless

imagine

More than a year has come and gone since a pianist "rolled up a grand piano and played to a crowd of journalists and onlookers" in Paris after a series of "attacks", reads the subtitle of the Huffington Post article cited by a news aggregator.  The selection performed was reportedly John Lennon's "Imagine".  I looked up the lyrics again to refresh my memory of this old pop anthem and imagined some different words to the same timeless melody in light of the terrorist act and the resulting devastating urban mayhem.  Just imagine... 

Imagine sin resisted 

We're fallen but we try 

We are all convicted 

Above us more than sky

Imagine all the people 

Living under God.

Imagine no humanism 

It's very hard to do 

Only good and evil 

Clear to me and you 

Imagine all the people 

Living in the Lord 

You may say I'm a believer 

But I'm not the only one 

I hope someday now you'll join us

For eternal life that is to come 

Imagine no obsessions 

I wonder if you can 

No heavy tax nor welfare 

A neighborhood of man

Imagine all the people 

Sharing love of God 

I believe He is the Redeemer

But I'm not the only one 

I hope someday now you'll join us 

For the Kingdom is soon to come.

America: Imagine the world without her

Exceptional- like the country it is about.

In other countries your rights come from other people: idiots-queens-kings-dictators-bullies-elites.  In America, your freedom and your rights begin with God- though this is quickly being forgotten. The more idiots there are, the more we give up our rights to other idiots.  Even humanity's greatest victors and manipulators cannot rewrite enough history to hide their descent into imbecility.  

Now we see the end game of almost three-hundred years of enlightenment philosophy taken to it's perverse and foolish self-sufficient extreme in which the role of God is a problem to be solved.  But I digress.  Good movie.  The left, in their very special wisdom, detests it. 

Starting a website can be intuitive?

Plug and play?  This is a learning curve. 

Great fun though, and helps to decompress from the day.  As long as the aging laptop is cooperating, somewhat.

It is important to discern privacy from invisibility, I read somewhere.  After considering many ways to share captured moments and flowing (hopefully) thoughts, social media alone did not seem to be a balanced solution. 

This "square" space web hosting just might work.  First I'll need to stay awake through their probably excellent instructional videos (which, so far, have been hosted by someone who clearly has no personal recollection of local cellular phone calls ever costing ninety cents per minute but sounds quite knowledgeable) and then follow-up with an email to the support team with my carefully crafted cogent questions, should I manage to come up with any.  Random You Tubers may also be helpful with all this...

There are no phones at the space of squares.  Speechless space.  They don't want to hear it.

So if you see some Latin filler text, I did not write it, et cetera.   I'll check in here again after watching some more of the informative squarespace movies. 

So this is what "under construction" is about...