Remember when the Internet sucked?

Popular websites, back when the Internet looked awful but we were too in love with the novelty to realize.

They did forget one website though.

HT: JT
File Under: Weird. I didn’t realize Drudge and Craigslist launched last week.

Beauty and the Barak.

HT: Darin

File Under: I can’t believe they did it all in one take.

Here I Raise my Ebenezer

I started school at Talbot School of Theology, officially, last week. Heading toward an M.A. in New Testament.

I’m pretty excited.

Last Monday they had all of the new students for a banquet with the professors. We all sang one of my favorite hymns “Come Thou Fount”. I was thinking a lot about the structure of the song itself, which I hadn’t really ever before. How there is this kind of a natural progression through the whole song. But it arose because of the very strange word which oblongly protrudes from the center of it.

Ebenezer.

I actually had to google it to find out how it’s spelled. Because unless you’re a big fan of Dickens or you’re an Old Testament junkie, there’s really no reason to know why or how its spelled, I think.

An ebenezer, in the improper sense, means a place where God’s people would leave a marker, in the case of Israel, a stone marker, which would serve as a reminder of when God had pulled his people through. Especially, although I suppose not always, supernaturally. (Ex. vv. 1 Sam. 4:1, 5:1.)

And I thought to myself, in many ways, here I do raise my ebenezer. Hither by Thy help I’ve come. That, like with Joshua and Israel, I’m crossing a Jordan of sorts. That deserts are hot. That God often requires someone’s foot hitting the water. That he deserves the praise for the provision. But the road actually in many ways just gets much, much harder.

But that being said, I find myself all the more begging and begging and begging, I find myself a man whose heart is so prone to wander. So prone to leave the God I love. That, like a shackle, a handcuff, a fetter, I pray his goodness would bind my wandering heart to his. I have a vast arsenal of tools for monkeying up this whole thing up. I sat in my Greek class last week, grinning ear-to-ear as we started the alphabet, but faintly in the background and the Ghosts of Glens Past sang the haunting dirge of all the ways I’ve made a mess of great things God has given me before.

So I resolved. Just like Jonathan Edwards (awkward commas, conditional statements, and all), I resolved. That I wouldn’t be a loiterer in the matters of God.

Resolved, to do everything in my power to focus everything that I am on doing the best I can in all that I can in this program for the sake of the glory of God; except wherein studies and work works to the detriment of the person of or personal relationships with my family, friends and neighbors, in the loosest sense of all of those terms, and above all, the Lord God himself.

If you think about it, pray for me. And hold me accountable. Make fun or mock me in lieu. It doesn’t mean I’ll be able to hang out with you every day. Because I’m probably in the library or a coffee shop. But if I don’t call or email for a couple months, its likely God isn’t my God. School is.

Or I am.

Or both.

And that sucks.

File Under: Praise the Mount, I’m fixed upon it, mount of Thy unchanging/redeeming love.