Born 2005, Died 2006.

It was a good blog, and it served me well. But it has moved to greener pastures at mattwiebe.com.

If you are reading this in a feed reader, you will no longer see it updated, although to ease the transition this old feed was being updated from my new site. Be sure to update to the new feed. This is probably the last thing that will ever be posted on this particular space.

Labels: blog, blog death, mattwiebe.com

Here's some questions I'm mulling over for the mentorship group that Jac and I are a part of here. What does everyone think?

Personal Vision:

1. What do you understand "vision" to be? How does it differ from the mission of Christ given to us in the New Testament (i.e. the Great Commission and the Great Commandment)?
2. Why do you think having a clear sense of vision would be important? Is it not simply enough to know what the above stated mission is and simply walk that out in obedience?
3. Why could it be said that vision is a two-edged sword?
4. What would you die for? What will you die for?
   

Shared Community Vision:

1. What should be found in some form within any Christian community's shared vision?
2. How is it discovered?
   

A Lifetime Of Vision:

1. How do you keep vision (individual or community) fully alive?
2. What about Vision Statements? Are they helpful for this or should we have one because they are expected today?

Last Sunday, Pete Fitch preached a sermon based on C.S. Lewis' famous sermon entitled "The Weight of Glory." The themes of that are still ringing through this week, and the following quote is ringing particularly true:

If there lurks in the most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with [temporal things] when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

This is what pisses me off about all of us: we're so half-hearted in anything we do. We run around saying we're Christians but then we try to get away with as much as we can. If all we're after is pleasure, why don't we come right out and say that we don't really want to follow Jesus, but that we simply want to follow fun. Fine, do it, and do it whole-heartedly, but stop mucking about with all of this half-hearted crap. Stop pretending that the mud is the holiday at the sea, and just play in it. Or don't.

Today marks my one year anniversary in blogging. A year ago, I started this blog by saying, "I'm not quite sure if I really need to have a blog or not, but here I go anyways." A year later, I could hardly imagine not having a blog, so this might qualify as need. More thoughts on blogging and what it means to me to come...

So, here's an announcement for everyone to celebrate my one year blogiversary: I'm closing up shop here and moving over to my own domain. That's right folks, you will soon be able to find me at mattwiebe.com.

There's some stuff to sort out over there before I really get going, but you can help me out by voting on the poll as to what the new name of my blog should be. I think that I might be tired of "Rest and Restlessness," but I'd like to hear what people think. If you vote "other," put an idea down in the comments here or there.

Now this is quite hilarious. Thanks to Jac's brother Trav on this one.

I use LibraryThing to keep track of the books I'm recently reading, as you can see in my sidebar. But it's also a terrific, rapidly growing community of book-lovers that is starting to reach the kind of critical mass whereby some fun data manipulation can take place.

They've been getting better at suggesting books to you based on the ones in your library, but their newest bit is a piece of pure, devious genius. It's called UnSuggester, and it takes a book that you input and find out the books that you're least likely to want based upon the millions of book lovers in its database. Here's some interesting results...


And then I did an Unsuggest search for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, and the results were interesting to see the results... 3 out of the top 4 books were by John Piper, and out of the top 30 Unsuggestions, only about 3 of them weren't Christian books. Strange, but I suppose not surprising given the track record of Christian cultural engagement.