Author: Jonathan Blundell

I'm a husband, father of three, blogger, podcaster, author and media geek who is hoping to live a simple life and follow The Way.

Working it out through prayer

I’ve really appreciated this insight today from Brian Zahnd …

On the night of his betrayal, Jesus spent a lot of time in prayer, centering himself on the will of His Father. However, nearby his friends slept.

When the soldiers arrived, his friends sprung into action, drawing a sword and cutting off a man’s ear.

The one who slept reacted out of fear and aggression.

Jesus, who had spent the time laying his fears and issues out in prayer calmly healed the man.

He was then quiet for most of his 3 trials that followed and then prayed “Father forgive them, they know not what they do” as he hung on a cross waiting to die.

The one who slept, quickly denied knowing Jesus and the rushed away out of shame.

—

Such an interesting contrast.

We don’t know everything Jesus prayed that night but we do know he taught us to pray like this:

“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.”
??Matthew? ?6:9-10, 12-13? ?NIV??

A prayer that re-centers us and re-focuses us – not on ourselves but on heavenly things.

Imagine if we were so centered through prayer – that when the bank account was empty we simply trusted for our daily bread.

Imagine if we were so centered through prayer – that when our enemies attack, we stepped in to offer healing, rather than a fist or sword.

Just imagine if we were so centered through prayer – that when faced with the troubles of this world we could truly hush, be still and know …

Imagine …

Making static

Over the last week I’ve been banging my head over and over again as I’ve tried to clean malware off of a number of websites.
A couple lessons learned:

  1. Malware sucks!
  2. Keep ALL your backend software up to date. 
  3. That template/theme you loved 3 years ago may not flag you that it needs updating because the developer stopped working on it. Don’t trust it to be safe 3 years later.
  4. Keep security monitoring software on EVERY site. Even the smallest sites can be hit and be a huge headache to clean up.
  5. Backup EVERYTHING. The extra time will be worth it when things go wrong.
  6. Pingbacks/trackbacks (and maybe even comments) aren’t worth the hassle. From what I’ve managed to figure out – it appears someone exploited a hole in an outdated theme via ping backs on the most affected sites. Knowing someone is linking to your post within WordPress isn’t that big of an ROI (return on investment or risk on investment) to make it worthwhile.
  7. Managed hosting for the win. If you can afford it – use it. Let someone else deal with the backend if it’s not your passion or area of expertise.
  8. Static sites for the win. Several of the sites that were hit were small sites that didn’t need a CMS, I just used it because I’m lazy and didn’t want to mess with FTP and HTML every time I made an update. But … those sites that are still just HTML and CSS – don’t have to worry about them at all.

As a result of all this, I moved two smaller sites from WordPress to static HTML last night pretty easily.

Lost one or two features – like a carousel – but they could be added back of if really needed.

But they’re way snappier than they were before and it’ll cut down on needing to update software and such.

Of course this gets rid of my online editor – really the only reason I put them in WordPress to begin with.

I just built a template in Dreamweaver and went to work.

I’m not sure how scalable that will be though.

I’ve been playing with Jekyll as a static web generator with Git Pages as of late and I like the way it works. But doing a full stack setup with Ruby (something I know nothing about) and Jekyll seemed overkill at this point for these sites.

I’m also intrigued by https://codeanywhere.com it could be a really nice tool to use in the future if I start doing more of these.

I don’t think static sites will be my solution for everything – but it feels nice to get back to the basics every now and then.