Category Archives: blogging

Loose Ends

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I need to tie up a few loose ends before they are left hanging another week. Let’s start with a news story that should have been included in the Deja Vu. I added it later as a comment but not everybody reads those, and email subscribers may not know about comments that are added later.

Lawrence County in Tennessee will no longer excuse absences even with a doctor’s note. Each student will be marked either present or absent and there will be no more “excused” absences. School intervention will begin after three absences and juvenile authorities will be contacted after eight absences. The school system says they are stressing attendance and responsibility because in the real world young adults will be expected to come to work even if they are sick.

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Read the Bible

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There’s more than one way to read the Bible, what matters is that you are reading it. I have read the Bible through in a single year but I don’t push that on people. If there are books in the Old Testament you have never read then you need to sooner or later; even though I would agree that the New Testament speaks more directly to Christians. “All scripture is good” but all scripture is not equally useful to our daily walk.

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Yes We Are

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I re-entered the blogosphere yesterday with a rather weak statement by asking the question Are we back? I wanted to emphasize the soft launch aspect and point out that we are not trying to restart all the spinning plates that were going before. I have updated the Our Daily Bread and Bible Gateway features in the left-hand sidebar. That only takes a couple of minutes and it’s a good routine for me to start the day with; I have been updating the verse of the day on the Unity Baptist Facebook page this whole time. Our Daily Bread now has a daily video devotional you can subscribe to, so check that out.

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Are We Back?

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Easter Sunday

So when The Master’s Table went on hiatus last fall I was hoping that would last a few weeks and we would resume business as usual. After a week or two of not having the stress of Happy Monday and Satur-deja Vu bearing on me, I had a little bit of guilt because of how good it felt. I would often stay up late on Sunday or more likely get up early on Monday morning to meet a self-imposed deadline. Discussing theology, responding to headlines and reviewing books is easy when you can pop out a post every now and then when there are things to write about i.e. stuff I need to get off my chest. Cranking out those e-zines twice a week became a grind and like I say, I felt a little guilty about how good it felt to not be under the pressure to produce those on a regular on-going basis.

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The Widget is Broken

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At the top of the left-hand sidebar is a list of recent posts at the Unity Baptist church website. I don’t know when it happened but I noticed this morning this list is longer than usual. That wasn’t a change I was aware of making but when I went into the control panel nothing had actually changed. I changed the number of items to display to 4 and clicked update. I changed the number to 3 and clicked update. It has been set to 3 since 2015 when the church website launched but nothing I do changes what is displayed in the sidebar. Funny that.

Happy Monday No. 500

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The Happy Monday truck doesn’t look like it’s aged a day. You wouldn’t age either if your image was digitally manipulated and then just reposted on occasion for the next several years. Fail Blog used to “send in the Fail boat” so I thought maybe Happy Monday could be delivered by box truck.

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The Jesus-shaped Project

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In iMonk Radio Podcast #96 Michael talks about shutting down the Internet Monk website and starting a new project, Jesus Shaped Spirituality. So let’s address the Internet Monk website first. He was warning people at the time that if where was anything they wanted to keep forever they needed to download it and save it. His plan was to heavily redact much of the material he had written and posted between the end of 2000 and the spring of 2008. He did delete some older posts but never to the extent he discussed early on. Internet Monk continued for another decade after Michael passed and there are 20 years worth of posts archived today at iMonk.blog

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Steve Brown

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For the past several months we’ve been going through the Internet Monk Radio archives and re-sharing those episodes. Each time Michael Spencer mentions another blog or podcast I try to find that and see if it still exists. Many times they do not. I often find websites that have not been updated in years. When he shares a resource that is still operating I try to point those out and include a link in my post.

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iMonk Radio Update

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iMonk Radio Podcast #128 is up and running. Here is a link.

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Just a Few Reminders

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The Happy Monday posts began during the summer of 2012. The original format was based on the idea that after a weekend of going out for family and social gatherings, sporting events and church activities people might need a little encouragement and to catch up on news or happenings. The first two or three weekly posts featured a metal count from the summer Olympic games. While the goal was to help readers start their week off right, sometimes the posts leaned a little heavy on the news. One friend in real life told me that when he read the post he didn’t see much to be happy about. Over a few months the format morphed into the a regular template we follow pretty closely: an opening bit, a welcome line or sometimes just the post number, an Old Testament verse, New Testament verse, two inspiring quotations usually featuring at least one Christian author or personality, usually a Coffee with Jesus comic strip to transition from the serious into the silly stuff, then up to four memes, cartoons or cute aminals to put smiles on faces. Mondays are tough, we do what we can.

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