CWF on HBO

We filmed footage for this sometime back in 2006 and HBO will be airing a special Thurs. Jan. 25 featuring the CWF. From the description there’s not telling what they’ll say or show.

FRIENDS OF GOD
Journalist and filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi takes viewers on a road trip to chronicle the leaders and followers who comprise the booming evangelical Christian movement. Travelling through the red state heartland of the U.S. that helped elect and re-elect George Bush, Pelosi meets with an array of outspoken evangelicals, from television celebrities like Joel Osteen, Jerry Falwell and Ted Haggard to leaders of groups like the Christian Wrestling Federation and the car club, as well as regular folks committed to carrying out the Creationist messages.

Tune in at 8 p.m. CST on Jan. 25, 2006 to see Friends of God.

Watered down objections

The Baptist Standard has an interesting article on the SBC stance towards drinking.

A growing number of Baptists may have brought in the New Year by raising a glass of something a bit stronger than iced tea, some cultural observers speculate. Baptist attitudes toward alcohol consumption seem to be in transition, they insist.
Consider the spirited debate—and debate about spirits—sparked last summer when messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting approved a resolution opposing the consumption of alcoholic beverages—and an amendment disqualifying imbibers from service as trustees of SBC entities.

Jews don’t recognize Jesus as the Messiah

Protestants don’t recognize the Pope as the head of the Church

Baptists don’t recognize each other in the beer store

Terabyte drives

Cnet reports:

Last year, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies predicted hard-drive companies would announce 1 terabyte drives by the end of 2006. Hitachi was only off by a few days.
The company said on Thursday that it will come out with a 3.5-inch-diameter 1 terabyte drive for desktops in the first quarter, then follow up in the second quarter with 3.5-inch terabyte drives for digital video recorders, bundled with software called Audio-Visual Storage Manager for easier retrieval of data, and corporate storage systems.
Hitachi terabyte drives
The Deskstar 7K1000 will cost $399 when it comes out. That comes to about 40 cents a gigabyte. Hitachi will also come out with a similar 750GB drive. Rival Seagate Technology will come out with a 1 terabyte drive in the first half of 2007.

I’m drooling over the size of this drive.

That’s enough room to hold 250,000 Mp3 files – or as CNet puts it – enough music to play continuously for two years without ever repeating.

The article also reports that the entire Library of Congress could be held on 10 terabytes.

This comes after the 50th birthday of the original hard drive last year.

The original weighed a ton and held 5 MB.

UPDATE: As of August 2011 I now have a two terabyte hard drive sitting on my desk that I purchased earlier this year for less than $125. As of today, you can buy the same drive for less than $90 from Amazon. The times they are a changing.

Treading water

Leonard Fin is having trouble with treading water as a 20-something. Sound familiar? He thinks his current status has to do with the Discovery Channel and a rafting trip he took in high school.

My friends from high school who wanted to be doctors received their white jackets a few days ago. My aspiring-dentist housemates from college are fixing real teeth … and those of us who didn’t want to be doctors and lawyers and such? Since we’re not busy celebrating our budding professional careers, what are we up to, here and now, in our mid-20s?
Well, personally, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. Wondering why I’ve turned out this way, wondering if there’s still enough time to fix it and get a real career. I’ve also been looking back on high school thinking about what started the path to here. And how much a few things mattered. Things I never would have thought about then. Things like The Discovery Channel and raft trips.

What about you? What led you to your current status in life?

Reaching the world

This is shared from Wade Burleson:

I caught my Wednesday Night group off guard. We’ve been going through the BF&M 2000 for the last few weeks and we just did Salvation last week. So I came in and said that we were going to think a little more about salvation, but specifically missions.
I told them that they had just been appointed as missionaries to reach a tribe whose name I made up. I said that they had just been dropped into the valley where their tribe is located (incidentally, I said that the tribe was about 9,000 strong located within a ten mile radius (this happens to be the number of people within a ten mile radius of our church)). I then asked them how, not knowing anything about their tribe, they were going to reach them with the Gospel? I set up a dry-erase board and we began 45 minutes of brain-storming. They came up with some excellent ideas.

The ideas flowed and then suddenly someone spoke up – “hey these are all ideas we could use right here in our town.”

My friend Mike told me once, before another friend went on a mission trip, that he took our friend around town to show him apartments, soccer fields, basketball courts, senior homes, parks etc. All the things he would see on his mission trip. Every economic class was represented and Mike told our friend that while he was heading overseas to do mission work – those same things could be done in his own neighborhood.
I think both are an important reminder.

And this is from Marni on the topic:

Definitely a great read, and as often the case, the comments are almost as good as the blog…Thanks for sending this.
At a church we used to attend, our pastor read a letter. I can’t remember if the letter was addressed to our church or another local one, but it made a loud and clear point. The letter congratulated us (sarcastically) on the mission trip we had made to a foreign country to “win souls for Jesus”. The writer was a 20 year old young woman. A few months earlier, both her parents died in a car accident. A local church reached out to her and some members were sharing the good news of the gospel with her. In her letter, she wrote the church members told her belief in Jesus as the Son of God and asking Him to be Lord of your life is the ONLY way to Heaven. Then she said the chilling part…”If that’s true, then my parents never knew that and now they are in hell. I live 5 minutes from your church. Why did you go all the way to Romania to tell people about Jesus, but my family lived a mile from your congregation and no one ever told us?”
We sat in complete silence for several minutes. It was VERY convicting and God has never let me forget that. I am certainly not knocking foreign missions because God calls us to go far away sometimes and the whole world needs to know and so few take God up on that call. But the pastor in Wade’s blog is right and the letter from the distraught young woman was right. We should be working in our own backyard too. I see that constantly and consistently with encounter am I’m grateful God called us to encounter to be a part of that. I’ll continue to pray for God to keep us free from the junk that tangles us up so much that we forget we’re a church and why we do what we do.

Ouch.