Coming Soon...

I've begun thinking about the next installment in the Spiritual Warfare series. I think that it is going to be about grace. The trick is going to be figuring out how to unravel this very difficult concept. It is more abstract than the concepts that I have tackled so far and is something that I have been pondering for almost 20 years.

Yesterday I managed to write my first query letter and submit my first article for publication. I hope that I'll get a positive response to it. I should know something by the end of June.

I hope to head over to the garden for a little while this afternoon. I have some plants to set out and I will probably also tie up the tomatoes again. I don't think that I'll do any heavy work today because I am playing guitar tomorrow. I'm visiting a friend's church in the Charlotte area.

Now I am going to take a little time and practice guitar and figure out what I will be singing for tomorrow. I hope that you are all enjoying this beautiful Saturday!

Sultans Of Swing...

Today I uncovered a CD my nephew had made for me that included the Dire Straits tune "Sultans of Swing." I have been wanting to figure out how to play the song for ages, but just haven't had the patience to get it worked out. I knew it must be fairly simple, but it goes so fast that it had been difficult to figure.

Well, I finally went to YouTube and found a couple tutorial videos on how to play it. I was right. It is pretty simple. What I discovered though was just how many different ways there are to play the same thing. This has given me a lot to play around with tonight.

I also discovered a great series of videos with Mark Knophler (Dire Straits' lead man and lead guitar player) working with a few English guitarists in a small session. It was really neat.

I have come to the conclusion that I am just not as internet savvy as many folks. It has only just begun to dawn on me that you can find literally ANYTHING on the web. It kind of takes away excuses!

Anyway, I learned a lot just watching him play and listening to the comments and suggestions that he was making to the other guitarists. I think that it would help me a lot to make it a regular practice to check out some of these guys and watch how they play.

I have been having a lot of fun playing guitar lately. I have been learning a lot. This is the most excited I have been about playing in years. I really feel like I am gaining ground for the first time in probably 15 years. Hopefully I can keep going with it and get to the place where I feel like I can hold my own with some of the better guitar players I know. It is going to take some work, but for the first time I am starting to get an inkling of how to proceed.

Sorry I've Been Away

Sorry I haven't posted in a couple of days. I'm sure that you are all glad to know that they didn't keep me in the jail on Friday. Things have been a little nutty around here. Alot has been going on since Friday.

I guess I'll start with my trip to the Alexander County Correctional Facility. The prison is new. I think that they just opened it within the past couple of years. It was my first time to go into a prison. It was a pretty strange experience at first. Fortunately we didn't have to go too far to get to the prison's furniture plant.

It was an amazing operation. There within the prison was a fully operational furniture plant. It had new high quality equipment and everyone was busily working at their assigned tasks. We got a full tour of the facility. I was very impressed with the quality of the workmanship and the materials that they were using. The vast majority of the pieces that they were making were solid wood. They even use dovetail joints in the construction of the drawers. The spray booths were awesome. It was a very well appointed facility. Next door was an upholstery plant. The inmates working there were assembling and upholstering office chairs.

In my discussions with the administrators there I learned that the prisoners that work in the unit are extremely conscientious - many working harder and with a better attitude than people on the outside working in the same jobs. I asked Randy (one of the administrators) what he attributed that to and after some thought he told me that for most of the guys working in the plant this was the first job that they had ever held and the first thing that they could point to with any pride at all. I also learned that the inmates have to go through a hiring process to get into the program. They have to apply and be interviewed just like they would for a "real" job.

At this stage in the inmates' incarceration most of them aren't given the job hunting training that they will need later, but as they get closer to their release dates this training will be given. I learned a couple of other things about the program that I wish could be addressed. One involves the procurement practices. At present NC is a low bid state which means that the materials that they are purchasing could come from anywhere. I wish they had it set up to be more favorable to NC businesses. I also wish that the operations could expand so that the products made by the inmates could be sold to a wider market. At present these goods can only be sold to the government and not-for-profit organizations like churches, etc. I realize that with the loss of manufacturing jobs in the state this could be some unwelcome competition, but with a little thought I believe that it is a problem that could be overcome.

When you realize that North Carolina's entire Correction Enterprises is totally self-sufficient due to the revenue generated by these products, and when you realize that the recidivism of the inmates involved in the program is 35% lower than the state average, it is hard to understand why anyone would not want to expand the scope of this operation and its market to gainfully employ every inmate whose behavior would allow them to participate. I can envision a scenario that would be profitable to domestic industry and provide enough revenue to make the prisons themselves self-sufficient. It would also generate enough revenue to fund restitution for the inmates and generate a nest-egg that would allow them to get off to a good start when they re-enter society. I'm guessing recidivism numbers would plummet.

You really wouldn't believe all of the products made through Correction enterprises. They make everything from stainless steel serving lines to full color outdoor banners. And if their rules were a little different they could make even more products. So that was my trip to jail.

Saturday I spent the day going through my blog archives and trying to get the labels updated on the posts that I made before such things existed. I got about halfway through the old blogs. I'll wait for another rainy day before I do the last 83.

I also had to do some cooking for two community-based Christmas parties thrown by families in my church. You can check out Conspiracy of Kindness to find out more about this. I made date balls and sausage balls for he parties. They turned out pretty good, if I do say so myself!

Saturday night was band practice for church. That is always a 2 or 2 and 1/2 hour deal. We usually go ahead and set up for the service on Saturday night, which takes 30-45 minutes depending on how many people we have to help. I had thought Saturday night would be a good time to have the practice because we could set up and actually practice with the instruments that we use on Sunday, but it really hasn't turned out that way. By the time that the week is over and we have set up all the equipment, everyone is tired and no one feels like practicing! Oh well, I was trying to save us a night. OK. I say save US a night, but it just ends up saving ME a night. I still end up going over to set up on Saturday night anyway.

Oh yes, I almost forgot, I also wrote an Advent post for the church blog over at Conspiracy of Kindness on Saturday. I can see that trying to keep up with writing an in depth devotion every day between now and Christmas isn't going to be an easy task. If you find that I'm not posting enough over here to keep you satisfied this month, go and check out the other blog. It should have new material every day.

Sunday was church, of course. We had a really good worship time I thought. I really sensed the Lord's presence on the song Consuming Fire. I believe He answered the prayer contained in that song for us Sunday morning.

There must be more than this -
O breath of God come breathe within.
There must be more than this -
Spirit of God, we wait for You.
Fill us anew we pray.
Fill us anew we pray.

Consuming Fire, fan into flame
A passion for Your name!
Spirit of God, fall in this place.
Lord, have Your way,
Lord, have Your way with us.

Come like a rushing wind;
Clothe us with power from on high.
Now set the captives free -
Leave us abandoned to Your praise.
Lord let Your glory fall!
Lord let Your glory fall!

Consuming Fire, fan into flame
A passion for Your name!
Spirit of God, fall in this place.
Lord, have Your way,
Lord, have Your way with us.

Tim Hughes © 2002 Thankyou Music CCLI # 3818569
License # 2647180

Anyway, it was a great service.

Then, just a couple of hours later, the party began. As guitar player for the StillWaters Jazz Band, I had my first gig. It was pretty fun. We were set up on the balcony of my pastor's house playing for the party goers in the living room below. We play a Dixieland New Orleans old school jazz style. It is a lot of fun and my first experience with the style. I have already begun to learn alot and I think that my playing has kicked up a notch or two since we started practicing. I'm still not BB King (a long way from it), but my horizons have definitely broadened. I actually soloed in front of people. What was funny was the solos that I felt the best about when I was practicing were the ones that I totally messed up live, and then I nailed several attempts that I made soloing on songs that I hadn't worked anything up for. Go figure. We have another gig next week.

So, that was my weekend.

Today I got back to work on the old Joomla tutorials. I finished them up and then went looking about to see what else I could find. I did find another tutorial site, but just wasn't in the mood to deal with it right now. So instead I went and looked at template sites. Well, actually site. I found a site that has some professionally designed templates that already look very similar to what I am trying to create. Why re-invent the wheel using my head as the hammer? $50 sounds pretty reasonable right about now to get something that I won't have to fiddle with very much to make it work. Of course, I am not such a great fool as to believe that this will solve all of my problems, but I do hope that it will shorten my development cycle by at least 2 weeks (more likely 2 months.) I would really like to have something marketable by the new year. More and more I realize that is probably an ambitious goal, but you have to have a target or nothing gets done. There is also a 2 hour Joomla seminar going on at the local community college on Thursday that I might check out. Based on what I've seen I can't imagine someone being able to teach me much in 2 hours, but if it is free (or at least cheap) it may be worth the time investment. Every day I'm learning something new!

So that is what's happening in my neck of the woods. Hope everything is going great in yours!

The Least Of These

The past week has been a little disappointing. I had such high hopes for a spiritual feast on Thanksgiving. My heart was so full last Sunday night at the joint Thanksgiving service done by the three local PCA churches that I was eagerly anticipating Thanksgiving Day and some great connection with God. I had even been meditating on some scriptures that the Lord seemed to be bringing to my attention. Yet each day closer to Thanksgiving my soul felt drier and drier - like a turkey baked too long without being basted. In fact, even this morning on my way to church my attitude was so far from where I had hoped that it would be. When the time to worship started I was distracted and mildly frustrated. (Not a good place for the worship leader to be!)

I can't say that things got any better during my part of the service. My guitar strings were buzzing and sounded terrible. I couldn't get it positioned correctly and my arm and hand began to fatigue. It was some rough plowing. Thank God I have a great band behind me. Fortunately things picked up with the pastor's sermon. He has been challenging us as a church to reach out to our neighbors and used as his text the first half or so of Matthew 22.

God has truly called us to a great celebration. His party will blow all other parties away. He even provides everything that we need to be acceptable at His bash, and yet there are so many who refuse to come. Weird. And yet, how guilty are we - the invited - of acting like we are going to be scourged instead of going to a celebration? If we truly believed that God and His reward for us were all that, wouldn't we be eager to tell others? Wouldn't our lives be so full of joy and excitement that others would want to come? And then there are others who try to come but refuse His "party clothes." Thinking about this made me think of some of my loved ones who want to "come to the feast" but don't want to dress according to the code. It makes me shudder for them. Do I say that they aren't saved? I can't make that call, but I can't help but believe that they are in very dangerous waters.

Our church is at a place where I believe that God is calling us to reach out like most of us have never done before. I look at my sister's life and how God has strategically placed her in a neighborhood full of lost folk who love her to death. I look at my own neighborhood and realize that although there are some Christians living around me that there are many who don't know God at all living within a close walk of my house. This is what I am dealing with - breaking the inertia that keeps me from being a good neighbor and friend to the people who live close by. Dealing with the fear of sharing the gospel with anyone. I know it is an absurd fear - most fears are - but it is where I am.

I was talking with my good friend Bruce after the service and we were both feeling kind of low and worn out. We've both been taking a little time in the Lord's crucible lately, and I confessed to him how dry I had been feeling this past week - lonely for the Lord's presence. (Isn't it funny how being lonely for the Lord will often disguise itself as loneliness for other company? But I digress.) He suggested that it was perhaps the enemy's attack. We talked for a little bit longer and in the course of that discussion decided that we should do some servant evangelism together soon. (See Steve Sjogren's book Conspiracy Of Kindness.) As we left the church we passed a car broken down in the middle of the road. I stopped to ask if the guy driving needed help, and he could only answer me in Spanish. I went to park the car and looked up and there was Bruce! He was stopping to help too.

Now you need to understand, I am utterly NOT mechanical. I know next to NOTHING about what is going on under the hood of a car - especially if it isn't doing what it is supposed to be doing. However, Bruce is VERY mechanical. We helped the fellow to get his car out of the road and then Bruce went to work on the car. I used the little Spanish I knew to talk to Carlos and before you knew it Bruce had the car running again! We didn't say a word to Carlos about God or Jesus - I probably could have if I had been in practice - but as we went on our way I felt like I had just touched the Lord's fellowship for the first time in the past seven days. Is it possible that we met the Lord broken down on the road? Matthew 25:40 would seem to indicate that we did.

Perhaps God let me get dry and hungry for His presence so that I would sense it so clearly when I encountered it with Carlos this afternoon. If so, may He not let me forget to seek His presence even amongst "the least of these."

And God, please bless Carlos and help him to learn who You are!

New Song This Week

One thing that I don't think that I have ever mentioned here is that I write music for church. So far I have probably written (or contributed to) about 20 songs. Some of the earlier ones aren't too great. They may never see publication. However, over the past few years my songs have been getting better. I hope to have some of them published soon.

I have a number of songs where I have written both words and lyrics, but the last couple have been resetting some outdated hymns to better (in my opinion) tunes. The first one that I did was Rescue The Perishing. I am very happy with the way that this one turned out. Let me tell you, it is a strange feeling to share creative credit with one so well known as Fanny Crosby!

I wrote my second this week. It is a re-write of the song Let Your Heart Be Broken. I am looking forward to seeing how it is received tomorrow.

I guess my method is kind of random. This week I was working with the fellow who will be preaching at our church on Sunday. We were putting music together and I showed him this song. We both liked the lyrics - he said that they would perfectly fit his sermon this week - but we both really hated the tune. I told him that I'd try to reset the song that afternoon if I had time. (We had our worship team rehearsal Thursday night.) The rest of my day was filled with errands. I thought that there was no way I'd have time to come up with something and get it into Finale in time for the rehearsal.

Well, I got home and within 15 minutes had come up with the tune. And within another 30 minutes I had transcribed it into Finale. I even got the rhythms right on the first try! (That NEVER happens - a sure sign of Divine intervention!) Well, I guess I can credit Divine intervention if the song is well received, but I'll take the heat if it tanks!

I would have to say, though, that most (if not all) of my songs have come by way of Divine inspiration. I don't know why I was given the gift, but I am sure glad to have it. More later!

A Pretty Good Day

As I am winding down tonight, I can't help but think that it's been a pretty good day. The temperatures in lovely China Grove remained reasonable for early September and my air conditioning was able to keep up. I was given a reprieve on some work that I was doing that made me want to pull my hair out. I enjoyed some pretty good food. I got to spend some time talking and praying with my pastor. I got to blog. And I got to play my guitar.

I haven't played my guitar so much in a long time. I have been trying to learn some new stuff, and that always necessitates a little practice. I haven't had to work this hard at anything (on guitar) in quite a while, though, so it is really rewarding.

I remember all those days back in college when I had my guitar out all the time trying to learn how to play. Somewhere along the way I guess I decided that I played pretty well and there wasn't any point in working at it so hard. Kind of a bummer making that decision. I might have been really good if I had kept pushing forward.

I suppose after a while you get to the point where no one is really teaching you anything any more. If you have ever played guitar with people who can play, you will agree that they rarely do much teaching, but they do a whole lot of playing. This is especially problematic if you are trying to share one guitar during the "lesson."

Anyway, last year (I think) sometime I bought an instructional DVD for worship guitar. I messed with it a little bit, but really didn't take the time to really learn the things that I didn't already know. Well, I did manage to learn the first pentatonic scale form and worked through the others, but never worked at learning the other forms.

For the past few days I have been working on the second form. It is from the devil! It has been really hard to teach my fingers to do that, but I think that they are slowly being driven into submission. It is amazing how out of shape the muscles in my hand and arm have gotten - even with the regular playing I am doing for church. Of course, the truth may be that since I have never really learned scales that I have never worked these muscles this way.

Oh well! Whatever the case is, I have made a concerted effort to take my playing up a notch. I have never ventured out on lead much, but I am hoping that learning these scales will be a path towards learning how to do that more and learning how to play electric guitar. I play acoustic pretty exclusively.

It should also help me when I am playing bass. I have pretty well always done that by ear, but knowing the scales should take me up quite a few notches there too if I can ever get an opportunity to use my bassing.

Playing last night I came up with a possible new song. It uses the same chord progression as the verse of Blessed Be Your Name, but has a much different tune. I think that the lyric will be a fusion of the Doxology and Gloria Patri

I heard a worship leader named Ashlie Rice use Doxology in her worship set. It was really cool. I have wanted to use it myself, but I didn't want to just copy it from her. She is hopefully going to be coming to our church in a couple of weeks and will hopefully be leading worship some in my place. I hope she will do it then so that she will get the credit for coming up with the idea if I do it in the future.

I guess I've never really mentioned it in this forum before, but I do lead worship at my church. I've been doing it now for 2 years... I think. It is either 2 or 3. This is definitely the longest time that I have been responsible for leading worship for a church. In the past it got really weighty, but it hasn't been too bad this time around. I have had a real grace for it. Not to mention that I really enjoy hanging around with all of the characters in my band. We have a couple vocalists and a piano/keyboard player, a bass player, and me on guitar. It would be nice to have some percussion, but that would also add a whole new set of challenges that we don't have to deal with right now.

Another thing that I never mentioned here is that I started seminary last fall. Well, kind of. I took my first class in the fall of last year. Subsequent financial challenges and a season in God's crucible have put that pursuit on hold for the time being, but I am really looking forward to getting back to my studies. I go to Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte. It is an excellent school. I can't wait to get back. I'll have to devote a post to the story of how I ended up bagging the real estate business and going to seminary some time soon.

Anyway, I guess that is enough for now. Suffice it to say that it has been a very good day.

I'm Baaaack!

Hey folks!

Sorry for taking so long to get back to posting. It has been a crazy couple of weeks. Between being sick and trying to get back into my house I haven't felt much like staying at the office until the large hours of the night. Hopefully I will be able to get the cobwebs out of my brain and start to do some good writing again.

I'm basically staying away from the Democratic Convention this week. I have found that the brazen lies and over the top arrogance of the speakers and analysts at the convention a pure catalyst to set my blood pressure at a boil in less than 30 seconds.

I still have some things to do around the house, but I have made some good progress. Hopefully this weekend I will be able to get some outside work done and clean up flower beds and my carport.

I have also picked up my guitar again. It has been a long time and my fingers are telling me all about it. They still remember where to go, but the padding on my fingertips is long gone. I am hoping to get my "chops" back by the end of next month so that I can perform at my parents' church. It feels good getting back into it.

Anyway, that is about all for tonight. Take care, and don't believe the hype.