Author: Glen

Using Your Doubts To Stimulate Your Faith

Relevant Magazine has a great essay on how your doubts can build your faith. Here’s an excerpt:

Doubt in our faith can lead to the gateway of spiritual growth. Doubt calls us into deeper examination. It draws us onto the path of undying curiosity for real Truth. As Frederich Buechner said, my doubts keep me moving.

…

Brian McLaren, in his soon-to-be-released book Adventures in Missing the Point, written with Tony Campolo, addresses the question of allowing doubt to take hold. Someone asked Brian, Well, wont an openness to doubt lead to spiritual instability and insecurity? Yes, he responded, but couldnt an unwillingness to question lead to false security that could be even more dangerous? Being courageous enough to ask why (or even why not) can lead to a deepening of faith. Jesus never said to us, I will never leave you or forsake you well, I take that back: Ill only leave you when you start to doubt and question. And when you doubt, Im outta here. I believe Jesus, when He said He would never leave us or forsake us, He meant He would stick by us at all times, even in the tough times, the times when we wonder if he is even listening at all. Doubt can be painful, but it has the potential for an incredible spiritual breakthrough.

How To Link To The NET Bible

Finally–how to link to a verse in the NET Bible using their perl script!

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been going crazy trying to figure out how to link directly to a verse in the NET Bible.

Their webmaster finally sent me an email explaining how to do it!

Here’s what you wanted:
The link goes to John 3:16

http://www.bible.org/cgi-bin/netbible.pl?book=joh&chapter=3&verse=16

You’ll note that the way our perl script is formatted, no one can take a verse out of context. That is, when you want a specific verse from the NET Bible, you’ll get the paragraph in which that verse occurs. (Paragraph breaks are sort of arbitrary, but at least it’s a help to the context.) The only other thing you need is a list of our abbreviations. Format: they are all first three letters (gen, deu, 1ch, 2sa, mat)

With following exceptions:
  Judges: jdg
  Philemon: phm
  Philippians: phi.

Cool! This will be useful whenever I have a little time to reply to some of Nota Bene and Integrity Blog’s thoughts.

I Knew The Air Was Bad, But…

In the Bay Area a 2.5 week old baby has inhaled more pollutants than the governmental standard for a lifetime.

OK, I knew that the air in California was supposed to be bad, but this is ridiculous! By the time a Bay Area babies are two and a half weeks old, they have inhaled more pollution than the government recommends over a lifetime!

At least now I have something to tell people who imply that I moved to California just because of the magnificence of the scenerey and not due to the call of God… I’ll try to explain it between hacking coughs evidencing the onset of emphysema.

This Reminds Me of A Proverb…

On the ain’t it pathetic front: A Yemeni man divorced his first wife because she was loud and argumentative and picked a deaf and mute woman as his new bride, a local newspaper said on Monday. Read the whole sad story.

Reading that triggered thoughts of Proverbs 27.15–16: A nagging wife is as annoying as the constant dripping on a rainy day. Trying to stop her complaints is like trying to stop the wind or hold something with greased hands. (New Living Translation, link)

For the interpretationally challenged, let me make it clear the the Bible is in no way endorsing the man’s actions. This is a descriptive passage of Scripture (making an observation about life as it is) and not a prescriptive passage (giving advice and commands to create life as it should be).

Pray for the new students!

Some specific prayers you can offer on behalf of students.

This Thursday the new students will begin arriving at Stanford for orientation week.

As the website says, 1,752 freshmen and transfer students will take part in NSO 2002 from Thursday, Sept. 19 to Tuesday, Sept. 24.

Wow.

These students needs prayer, and lots of it.

1) That those far from Christ would encounter Him.
2) That those who serve Him would remain pure in the midst of temptation.
3) That those who serve Him would be bold in their witness to God’s overwhelming grace.
4) That all students would select their friends wisely.

Great Weekend With Brian and Courtney Jacobson

Some old friends visit, and we get to visit a Stanford football game.

bj_courtney.jpg We just had a great visit from Brian and Courtney Jacobson, alumni from our last ministry.

It’s interesting: we’ve literally had guests in our house every other week since we’ve arrived. Our rate of visitation was much lower in Springfield, MO. Hmmmm.…

Also, one of the highlights of their visit was the Stanford-San Jose State football game. We won 63–26! Woohoo!

I enjoyed the game (especially since we stomped the other team), but I was pretty disappointed about two things:

1) There were no students there. Class doesn’t start until September 23rd. It just seems lame that at quarter system schools the team has to play their first home game without student support.

2) The stadium was pretty ratty. I was shocked. I was expecting sharp, clean markings on the field. I thought the screen would be high-tech and sharp. Wrong on both counts. It’s not like Stanford’s hurting for money–so why the underimpressive stadium?download few good men a dvd

Mormons Have Their Own Bikes?

In which I announce my discovery that there are special Mormon-only bicycles!

A church recently volunteered to purchase bicycles for Paula and I. That’s a super-practical way to support our ministry since the campus is so vast!

Anyway, the pastor asked me to research bicycles and let him know what we needed.

All the bicycle sites online seemed to be focusing on upper-end triathalon-type bikes, which just aren’t what we need. So I started thinking about it, and I realized that Mormon missionaries probably know more about the type of bicycles we’re looking at than anyone else.

So I decided to do some research, and I was amused to find that there is a company that makes specialty Mormon missionary bicycles. In fact, that’s all that they sell–and no one except Mormon missionaries can purchase them.

I love this quote: As for theft, long a problem for missionaries, Spence notes: “If you see a hippie guy with long hair riding a Liahona down the street, and he doesn’t have a shirt and tie on, you know the bike’s not his.”

I knew that the Mormons have special Mormon undergarments (which I understand Senator Orrin Hatch wears), but I had no idea they had special bikes as well!

Another Example of America’s Universities Gone Insane

Schools go nuts trying to convince freshmen that their morals are stupid.

In BMOC: Big Mandate On Campus, World Magazine covers the amazing indoctrination that some schools put incoming freshmen through. I would have written the article differently, but it’s got a lot of good data.

They don’t mention Stanford, but I’m curious to see what sort of experience the incoming freshmen have in the next few weeks.

Here’s an excerpt: Others say outright that such presentations are designed to shake the soil from new students’ small-town roots, dismantle traditional values they might have brought from home… “I really want [freshmen] to understand that they are no longer at home, they’re not in high school anymore, and a lot of the values and morals they may have had from those experiences may change here over the next four years,” said diversity issues coordinator Marcus Newsom of Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa.

Thanks to blogs4God for bringing this link to my attention.

Ministry Wishlist

Want to make a one-time gift? Here’s what we can use it for!

DISCLAIMER: this information is on our website because some people actually come here looking for it. Other people get horribly offended at the mention of money and donations online. If you’re not of the former, chill. Just filter out this message and look at some of the more entertaining stuff on this site.

You’re still here? Good. 🙂

Sometimes people are more interested in making one-time donations than in becoming a monthly partner (and sometimes monthly partners want to make a special gift).

If that’s you, then here are some needs that we have in our ministry.

Expensive Items

$10,000,000 to establish a ministry center near Stanford.

Yeah, it really would cost at least that much. We’d be looking at purchasing an existing religious center or a business propert adjacent to campus and then remodeling it.

Failing that, $1,000,000 to purchase a home near Stanford.

Again, it really would cost that much. We’re currently renting about five minutes from Stanford and there’s a home across the street on the market for $1.1 million. And it’s not a really nice house–housing prices are just ridiculous here. This matters because the nature of our ministry is relational, and so we have students over all the time. If we had a home within 15 minutes of Stanford we’d be better stewards of God’s money (not spending it on rent) and we’d be able to up the quality of our ministry to students radically. We’d have more students over more often and accomplish more in the way of discipleship and modeling. Plus, we’d be able to host other ministers in our house for a week or two at a time and expose the students to them and their ministries, thereby increasing the likelihood that students would “get it.”

Midrange Items

$6,000 to set up a multimedia studio.

This would cover a digital video camera, a dedicated computer for video-editing, and the software necessary to do high-quality videos. With such a studio, we could create high-quality training videos for college ministries across America. We could also do some neat stuff in our large-group meetings at Stanford.

$500 for a smartphone.

This would help Glen be more organized–and he needs all the help he can get!

Inexpensive Items

Anything from Glen’s Amazon Wishlist or Delicious Wishlist.

These are almost all books or other resources useful for ministry. Of course, some are just random.

If you would like to purchase any of the above items, either give online or just send a check for the amount needed to
  Chi Alpha #2650299
  1445 N Boonville Ave
  Springfield, MO 65802

Also be sure to email us and let us know what you’ve done so that we know the purpose the funds are designated for!

9/11 @ Stanford

Some comments on how September 11th, 2001 touched Stanford University.

It’s already been a full year. It’s hard to believe. I was scheduled to preach at an AGTS chapel service that morning. As soon as I saw the planes hit I began changing my message, although I fully expected the phone call that came shortly afterwards: “We’ll reschedule–we just feel like we need to devote the full service to prayer.”

In that year I’ve moved from there to here, and I was surprised to learn how Stanford was affected by the terrorist attacks on our culture.

A few items in no particular order:

I found this brief story about the 40 Iranian nationals who study at Stanford interesting. I also thought this administrator’s perspective on their plight was interesting.

I also was shocked to learn that Stanford received fake anthrax mailings last October. Those incidents spawned an emergency response force. I did find it mildly humorous that the biosafety manager had to get special permission to just analyze everything herself. I’m sure the Stanford research laboratories were much better equipped (and the researchers more highly trained) than at the Santa Clara county facilities.

The community as a whole seems less traumatized and polarized than many other campuses: both Berkeley and San Francisco State have seen some pretty angry encounters over Middle-Eastern issues, but tempers at Stanford have been much cooler.