We take it for granted, but the internet is a wonder. All that information at our fingertips! Here’s a story of medical self-diagnosis by internet that I believe is valid. If I am correct, I have a condition that only 1 in 10,000 ever suffer from.  The hearing in my left ear has steadily diminished over the past few years. The volume is fine, but there’s a lot of interference. Melissa finally convinced me to see a doctor about it. (I agreed because she has really good health insurance for the family now, so it was cheap even by my…

The half flight of steps leading from our front door down to the basement used to have a banister. It disappeared almost two years ago when I renovated our basement. Finishing the steps and replacing the banister should have been done a long time ago. It is the sort of project I referenced in yesterday’s post – one where I procrastinate endlessly because I don’t know up front how to do the job perfectly.  Just over a week ago, on a Monday morning at 6 am, Melissa – still bleary eyed and carrying a mug half full of coffee in…

I am getting a jump on my New Year’s resolutions for 2023. I don’t have a specific habit in mind. Instead, I want to focus on a mindset – one I have learned from my daily writing.  Regular blogging has taught me that if I wait until ideas are perfectly formed in my head before I begin to write them down, I spin my wheels endlessly. And nothing gets accomplished.  But when I embrace imperfection and start with putting a crummy draft down on paper, I make progress. And once I have started, I find that improving the piece of…

I have been reading about ChatGPT recently on Twitter. It is an Artificial Intelligence which generates text in response to human prompts on almost any subject.  I finally checked it out for myself after Caleb told me that he was using it to outline a paper for one of his college classes. So I created a free account and started asking this thing questions. It responded in seconds with fully formed “thoughts” in well-organized and readable paragraphs. Once I was convinced of its competency, I decided to ask it to do some work for me.  (That’s what all this AI…

In his chapter on Judaism in The World’s Religions, author Huston Smith brings up something I had never considered before.  Smith writes, “Certainly, the idea that a universal God decided that the divine nature should be uniquely and incomparably disclosed to a single people is among the most difficult notions to take seriously in the entire study of religion.” (307) Yes! How odd that THE God of the universe would focus on one particular people group to the exclusion of all the rest of His human creation.  It really makes no sense – especially since Israel was not interested in…

One of my classes this semester is exploring the belief systems of various world religions, in particular Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.  The assigned reading includes two helpful overviews: Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions and Stephen Prothero’s God Is Not One – The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World.  To fulfill an assignment, I need to record a video in the next couple of days incorporating some aspect of the readings. The professor gave a list of suggestions but I settled on a topic outside of his list: What Christians can Learn from the Other Major Religions.  My…

A few nights ago I had to make an “emergency” run to Walmart for some milk, cookies, and ice cream. And some googly eyes – for a reindeer craft the next day in Melissa’s kindergarten classroom.  It was the first time I have ever made such a run to Walmart that I did not regret in some way. In fact, I came home in a good mood. And this good mood had swept over me suddenly in the ice cream aisle … where I found a crumpled twenty dollar bill on the floor. Ownerless. And that twenty more than covered…

In Colossians 3:16 the Apostle Paul instructs believers to “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God.“ I found it curious that when I posted a link on Facebook the other day to what I wrote about under the heading “A Bible Study Practice to Recommend”, it garnered all of 15 likes and one share.  But about 50 people clicked on the link to see what I had written. Three or four left…