Category: Of Random Interest

God's Grandeur: One Of My Favorite Poems

While prepar­ing for this week’s ser­mon I was remind­ed of one of my all-time favorite poems. I won’t be able to use it in the mes­sage, so I thought I’d share it here as a bonus.

It’s God’s Grandeur by Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins

. You can find more of his poems at Bartle­by

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THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.  
  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;  
  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil  
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?  
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;  
  And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil  
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.  
  
And for all this, nature is never spent;  
  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went  
  Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—  
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent  
  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Do you have a favorite poem?

My Redeemer Lives Considered From The Standpoint Of Grammar

WARNING: gram­mar geek­i­ness ahead.

I hate songs with non­sen­si­cal lyrics, espe­cial­ly those that pur­port to be wor­ship songs. The lyrics of a song mat­ter far more to me than their accom­pa­ny­ing music: I would for­bid a song from being played in my min­istry for hav­ing bad lyrics but nev­er for hav­ing chords which I did not like.

And so I was espe­cial­ly pleased to make sense of some puz­zling lyrics in My Redeemer Lives

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in church this morn­ing.

The prob­lem­at­ic stan­za is

You lift my bur­dens
I’ll rise with You
I’m danc­ing on this moun­tain top
to see Your king­dom come

I was hung up on the word “to”, which I took to mean “I am danc­ing on this moun­tain top in order to bring about Your King­dom’s arrival.” In anoth­er lan­guage this would be called a dative of pur­pose. This trou­bled me, because as Lind­sey down­load the tragedy of mac­beth online down­load drag me to hell dvd down­load the name­sake online

said this morn­ing, “There are few things less like­ly to bring about the king­dom than danc­ing on a moun­tain. How about feed­ing some home­less peo­ple or talk­ing to some­one about Jesus?”

But then I real­ized there were at least two oth­er inter­pre­ta­tions of the word “to”. It could be like a dative of instru­ment (“I am danc­ing on this moun­tain top because I get a good view from up here which enables me to behold Your king­dom as it spreads on earth”) or like an abla­tive of atten­dant cir­cum­stances (“To see your King­dom come caus­es me to dance on this moun­tain top”).

I sus­pect it’s the lat­ter.

So now I can sing that song.

For the 1% of you who have been sim­i­lar­ly puz­zled, you’re wel­come.

For the 80% of you won­der­ing if I made up the words dative and abla­tive, check out Wikipedi­a’s list of gram­mat­i­cal cas­es.

Create a Facebook Friend List for Chi Alpha

I just sent this email to the stu­dents in my min­istry. If you find it help­ful, feel free to adapt it for your own church/ministry.

Hope you’re doing well in the after­math of finals.

Quick sug­ges­tion: take a bit of your free time over spring break to do a very sim­ple task that will help strength­en our com­mu­ni­ty.

If you use Face­book, make a friend list for Chi Alpha.

  1. Go to http://www.facebook.com/friends/?ref=tn
  2. Click the blue “Make A New List” but­ton on the left side of the screen and call the new list “Chi Alpha”.
  3. On the next screen, add every­one in Chi Alpha. Use the phone list as a guide (I’ve enclosed the list of names below — just cut and paste them one at a time into the “add to list” box).
  4. Now every time you log in, you’ve got a sim­ple way to quick­ly check in with our com­mu­ni­ty. There will be a “Chi Alpha” link on the left side­bar of the main Face­book page that will show you the most recent sta­tus updates/shared links/whatever from the peo­ple in our group.
  5. Now add two or three peo­ple you are shar­ing your faith with to the list. When­ev­er you see their sta­tus updates pop up on the XA list you just made, remem­ber to pray for them and invite them to join us the next time you see them.

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It’s hard­ly going to rev­o­lu­tion­ize your life, but if all or even a lot of us do it then it will make our com­mu­ni­ty that much tighter. Face­book is a great tool for enhanc­ing real life friend­ships — max­i­mize it for the King­dom!

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College Ministry and Global Transformation

One of my favorite sub­jects to talk about is the strate­gic nature of cam­pus min­istry. As I was read­ing the most recent issue of Books & Cul­ture scar divx

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, one pas­sage from a book review popped out at me:

I saw a strik­ing pat­tern in these books [Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty and Democ­ra­cy in the Glob­al South: Africa chil­dren shouldn t play with dead things down­load /Latin Amer­i­ca/Asia] that the edi­tors and authors did not men­tion: a dis­tinct source for much of the more prin­ci­pled evan­gel­i­cal social and polit­i­cal engage­ment across the regions. Repeat­ed­ly, the lead­ers of para­church min­istries and reform-mind­ed NGOs that worked on behalf of the poor and the vul­ner­a­ble, who spoke up for human rights and elec­toral reform and against cor­rup­tion and auto­crat­ic rule came from two sources: stu­dent Chris­t­ian move­ments and the world­wide net­work of evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers affil­i­at­ed with the Lau­sanne Com­mit­tee for World Evan­ge­liza­tion. Inter-Var­si­ty Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship joined the Peo­ple Pow­er move­ment in the Philip­pines, while Cam­pus Cru­sade played a cen­tral role in the for­ma­tion of the Cit­i­zens Com­mit­tee for Eco­nom­ic Jus­tice in South Korea. Like­wise in South Africa, it was the mem­bers of Youth Alive, the evan­gel­i­cal stu­dent fel­low­ship start­ed in Sowe­to by Cae­sar Mole­bat­si, who drove the Con­cerned Evan­gel­i­cals move­ment to resist apartheid in the 1980s. The Latin Amer­i­can The­o­log­i­cal Fra­ter­ni­ty, an evan­gel­i­cal net­work with strong ties to both the Lau­sanne Com­mit­tee and the Inter­na­tion­al Fel­low­ship of Evan­gel­i­cal Stu­dents, fig­ures promi­nent­ly in pro-demo­c­ra­t­ic evan­gel­i­cal work across Latin Amer­i­ca.

INFEMIT [the Inter­na­tion­al Fel­low­ship of Evan­gel­i­cal Mis­sion The­olo­gians] itself is a prod­uct of this net­work, which might help explain these authors’ inter­est in high­light­ing this strain of evan­gel­i­cal social thought and action. But it is indeed sig­nif­i­cant. Lit­tle could the Anglo-Amer­i­can founders of the Lau­sanne and cam­pus min­istry move­ments have imag­ined that their empha­sis on thought­ful Bible study and a “whole gospel for the whole world” would help ani­mate demo­c­ra­t­ic move­ments around the globe.

source: “Now What? Revival­ist Chris­tian­i­ty and Glob­al South Pol­i­tics” by Joel Car­pen­ter. Books & Cul­ture March/April 2009, page 36.

If you want to change a cul­ture, change its cam­pus­es. They are the steer­ing wheels of soci­ety.

How To Listen To A Bad Sermon

Lis­ten­ing to a bad ser­mon is like eat­ing crab legs. It’s a lot more trou­ble than it should be, but you can still get a lot of meat if you are dili­gent.

So how do you do it?

Here are some tips that I some­times find help­ful, in order of pref­er­ence. I don’t want to make you too excit­ed: noth­ing is going to make a bad ser­mon good. But these might help mit­i­gate your suf­fer­ing.

  1. Be mer­ci­ful. Preach­ing con­sis­tent­ly good ser­mons is a lot hard­er than it seems. Think about your worst day on the job and how you would like your cowork­ers and cus­tomers to respond with com­pas­sion and under­stand­ing. Now extend that same com­pas­sion to the preach­er.
  2. Over­look the stu­pid stuff. Every once in a while even sol­id and reli­able preach­ers will say some­thing that’s com­plete­ly ridicu­lous — usu­al­ly when they ven­ture out­side their area of exper­tise. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly true when preach­ers begin using sto­ries to illus­trate a point they are try­ing to make. It can real­ly throw you for a loop. Tune it out the same way you tune out that one cousin at fam­i­ly reunions. Even your favorite book has some bor­ing pas­sages, but you judge the book on its high­lights. Judge ser­mons like­wise.
  3. Be ran­dom­ly inspired. I learned this from Dary Northrop in a sem­i­nar: you should bring a note­book to ser­mons not because of how insight­ful and mag­nif­i­cent the preach­er is going to be, but because the Holy Spir­it will spark new and amaz­ing insights in you which are only tan­gen­tial­ly relat­ed to what is in the speak­er’s notes. Few ser­mons are so bad that there is no good­ness in them — even a three-year-old will say some­thing pro­found and/or hilar­i­ous if you lis­ten to them long enough. So wait for a clever turn of phrase, an obscure or unex­pect­ed Bible ref­er­ence, or a fact that you were hith­er­to unaware of and begin writ­ing furi­ous­ly. Doo­dle as well. Repeat as nec­es­sary.
  4. Pre­tend it’s oppo­sites day. don t look now free down­load

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    had a tra­di­tion in his Chi Alpha min­istry. Once a year he would preach oppo­site: “Why You Should Not Pray”, “Why God Is Untrust­wor­thy”, etc. He did it dead­pan (well — as dead­pan as Har­low ever gets). The first time he did it he was wor­ried his stu­dents would­n’t catch on that he was mere­ly exag­ger­at­ing and then repeat­ing their own doubts back to them in order to demon­strate how ridicu­lous their doubts were, but it was a huge suc­cess. Even the guests got it. It became an insti­tu­tion. Ever since he told me that sto­ry, I game­ly pre­tend that a real­ly bad ser­mon is mere­ly the results of “oppo­sites day”.

  5. Improve the ser­mon.

    This is risky because it can lead to pride and also can be dis­rup­tive if peo­ple around you notice what you’re doing, but there are times when it’s your only pos­si­ble psy­cho­log­i­cal defense. There are two fun­da­men­tal kinds of bad­ness. There’s bad deliv­ery. That’s the best kind. The preach­er has good things to say, but the inabil­i­ty to say them well. The whole ser­mon can be spent fruit­ful­ly para­phras­ing and improv­ing the sol­id con­tent of the ser­mon. For exam­ple, you might reorder and reword the out­line for greater impact or log­i­cal flow. There’s bad con­tent. The preach­er is dis­tort­ing the text or not think­ing things through. That’s hard­er, but can be even more divert­ing. You can com­pose your own out­line from scratch on the same pas­sage or top­ic that the preach­er is endeav­or­ing to address. One or two of my best ser­mons has come about this way.

Final­ly, my apolo­gies to those who have had to endure a stinker from me. I know it has hap­pened before and have no doubt it will hap­pen again. It’s my job to be the best speak­er I can be and it is your job to be the best lis­ten­er that you can be. I’ll do my job whether or not you do yours, but if we work togeth­er this whole thing will go much more smooth­ly.

And a note to my pas­tor — relax, this was not inspired by your ser­mon this week. You did­n’t even preach. We watched a movie, remem­ber? 🙂

We're Number 10

Just noticed that the Nation­al Coun­cil of Church’s 2009 Year­book was recent­ly pub­lished (found via MMI). Here are the stats on the 10 largest reli­gious groups in Amer­i­ca.

  1. The Roman Catholic Church, 67,117,06 mem­bers, down 0.59 per­cent.
  2. The South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion, 16,266,920 mem­bers, down 0.24 per­cent.
  3. The Unit­ed Methodist Church, 7,931,733 mem­bers, down 0.80 per­cent.
  4. The Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints, 5,873,408 mem­bers, up 1.63 per­cent.
  5. The Church of God in Christ, 5,499,875 mem­bers, no change report­ed.
  6. Nation­al Bap­tist Con­ven­tion, U.S.A., Inc., 5,000,000 mem­bers, no change report­ed.
  7. Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church in Amer­i­ca, 4,709,956 mem­bers, down 1.35 per­cent.
  8. Nation­al Bap­tist Con­ven­tion of Amer­i­ca, Inc., 3,500,000 mem­bers, no change report­ed.
  9. Pres­by­ter­ian Church (USA), 2,941,412 mem­bers, down 2.79 per­cent
  10. Assem­blies of God, 2,863,265 mem­bers, up 0.96 per­cent. dan­ger­ous beau­ty divx online blue­toes the christ­mas elf movie down­load down­load home­ward bound ii lost in san fran­cis­co online

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So.… yeah. We’re num­ber 10, we’re num­ber 10, we’re num­ber 10! Maybe we can chant that at Gen­er­al Coun­cil.

Sad­ly, we’re the only Chris­t­ian group (in the top 10) that is grow­ing. And even sad­der, when you get into our inter­nal num­bers you real­ize that a few parts of our move­ment are grow­ing rapid­ly but that there are huge swaths under­go­ing slow decline. For now, the explo­sive growth is off­set­ting the decay.

I’m grate­ful that I’m on a win­ning team and that our move­ment is grow­ing when so many are stag­nat­ing, but I must con­fess that a 0.96% growth rate is not exact­ly the sort of thing that stirs the pulse.

We need divine­ly-sparked revival to which we must respond with orga­ni­za­tion­al renew­al, or else we’ll soon be cel­e­brat­ing the fact that we shrunk least.

But hey — for now I’ve got a handy fact I can share with peo­ple who say, “The Assem­blies of God? Nev­er heard of it.” I can now shoot back, “Hey — we’re almost as large as the Pres­by­te­ri­ans. Near­ly. We’re only off by like 80,000 peo­ple. That’s the size of a good South Amer­i­can church. We haven’t quite fig­ured out how to do that in North Amer­i­ca, but it can’t be that hard. So we’re basi­cal­ly one mis­si­o­log­i­cal insight and then one good church plant away from being num­ber 9. So there.”

Digital Discipleship

In one of the first con­ver­sa­tions I remem­ber hav­ing with Scott Aught­mon, he tried to sell me on the advan­tages of using sequen­tial autore­spon­ders down­load evil under the sun

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in min­istry. I had no idea what he was talk­ing about, so I smiled and nod­ded.

Turns out they’re awe­some. I wish I had lis­tened to him soon­er.

Con­sid­er the case of Dick Schroed­er. He speaks at retreats and fre­quent­ly prays with peo­ple to be bap­tized in the Holy Spir­it. Over the years, he has put togeth­er a series of emails that he sends to peo­ple after­wards to coach them from a dis­tance.

One day he asked me if there was a way to auto­mate the process. My mind flashed back to Scot­t’s enthu­si­asm for these autore­spon­der things, so I down­loaded a free PHP script called Infi­nite Respon­der

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and set up http://chialpha.com/resources/holyspirit.

Now if some­one signs up, they begin receiv­ing coach­ing emails from Dick once a week. Since the mes­sages appear to come from his email address, stu­dents can just hit “reply” and ask Dick about any­thing they found con­fus­ing or that they need spe­cial advice about. It’s very low-main­te­nance for him, and Chi Alpha stu­dents nation­wide get a year’s worth of Dick­’s exper­tise.

Since rolling this out at the World Mis­sions Sum­mit (Jan 1st), we’ve had just over 200 peo­ple sub­scribe to these updates. That works out to about 7 signups a day. I have no idea where the total will cap out, but momen­tum is build­ing and I don’t even feel that the resource has been thor­ough­ly pub­li­cized yet.

Things I like about the tool:

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    It’s just email. No one has to install a spe­cial plu­g­in, put head­phones in their com­put­er, or have some insane­ly fast con­nec­tion.

  • Per­son­al. The emails come from an actu­al human being to whom you can respond.
  • Low-main­te­nance. Once the email is in the data­base, it’s just there. Nei­ther Dick nor I need to do any­thing spe­cial to send them out. And Dick only gets replies from peo­ple who have spe­cif­ic ques­tions, which is only a frac­tion of the peo­ple who receive any giv­en email.

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Pret­ty cool, eh?

Late­ly I’ve been won­der­ing what oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties are out there. Some ideas that I’ve had:

  • Emails for new believ­ers
  • A “40 days” type cam­paign for Chi Alpha with dai­ly emails where each cam­pus that choos­es to par­tic­i­pate picks its own start and stop times and the script takes care of all those details.
  • A first two weeks of school devo­tion­al to get stu­dents fired up when they return from sum­mer break
  • Coach­ing emails for peo­ple who are called to min­istry
  • Month­ly emails for Chi Alpha grads to help them make the tran­si­tion out of col­lege grace­ful­ly
  • A ter­m’s worth of week­ly emails for peo­ple pio­neer­ing new Chi Alpha min­istries
  • etc,etc

It’s just a mat­ter of find­ing a per­son with the right exper­tise and hook­ing them up. So if you’ve got an idea, I’d love to hear about it. I’d espe­cial­ly love to hear if you’re a Chi Alpha leader who has con­tent ready to go. I can just run it past Den­nis and get that stuff online faster than you can imag­ine. 😉

How Can There Be Only One Way?

I was recent­ly think­ing about 1st Tim­o­thy 2:5–6: “For there is one God and one inter­me­di­ary between God and human­i­ty, Christ Jesus, him­self human, who gave him­self as a ran­som for all, reveal­ing God’s pur­pose at his appoint­ed time.” (New Eng­lish Trans­la­tion)

These vers­es high­light the aspect of Chris­tian­i­ty that both­ers West­ern­ers most: its exclu­siv­i­ty. The notion that Jesus is the only way to God vex­es many peo­ple.

This morn­ing a thought occurred to me: almost every­one who believes in God believes that there’s only one way. Most peo­ple just don’t real­ize it.

For most peo­ple I know, their “one way” is being nice. Unless you are nice/­good/s­in­cere/al­tru­is­tic/em­pa­thet­ic/en­light­ened/ad­jec­tive-of-choice enough, you fail.

The way of nice­ness is no less lim­it­ing than the way of faith in Christ: it excludes peo­ple just as sure­ly and it is far more arbi­trary.

This is coun­ter­in­tu­itive to some peo­ple, so allow me to explain.

It is exclu­sive in that some peo­ple just aren’t nice enough. More on that lat­er.

It is arbi­trary in that the dev­il is in the details. How do you know if you’ve been nice enough? And what con­sti­tutes the right kind of nice­ness, any­way? After all, there’s no real rea­son to sup­pose that an infi­nite­ly smart Being would mea­sure nice­ness in the way that makes the most sense to you.

The Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ple of exclu­siv­i­ty makes more sense, for it flows from the sim­ple belief that Jesus is God in the flesh.

Think­ing about this for a sec­ond should make the rea­son­ing clear.

If you believe that Jesus is God, then to say you can come to God apart from Jesus is as non­sen­si­cal as say­ing you can go to Los Ange­les with­out going to Cal­i­for­nia.

In oth­er words, all that Chris­tians are insist­ing is that you can’t come to God with­out com­ing to God. This hard­ly seems con­tro­ver­sial. You may reject the premis­es of the argu­ment (that God exists or that Jesus is God), but grant­ed those two the belief can’t be cat­e­go­rized as extreme or bizarre. It’s just con­sis­tent.

The real prob­lem most peo­ple seem to have isn’t that Chris­tian­i­ty is exclu­sive. Their real prob­lem is that Chris­tian­i­ty appears to be unfair­ly exclu­sive. This is most often expressed as fol­lows, “What about those who have nev­er heard of Christ? How can God exclude them sim­ply because they haven’t heard of Jesus?”

There are actu­al­ly some very rea­son­able answers to those ques­tions. Here’s one, here’s anoth­er

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, and here’s yet a third. There are more where those came from — if this ques­tion dis­tress­es you then dig into it. You won’t agree with every­thing you read. I cer­tain­ly don’t agree with every argu­ment in three arti­cles I linked. Fig­ure out what you believe for your­self.

But here’s the impor­tant thing to real­ize: the same prob­lem con­fronts the nice­ness stan­dard. What about those born in the wrong time or the wrong place? Some of your ances­tors owned slaves in accor­dance with the cus­toms of their cul­ture (this is true regard­less of your eth­nic­i­ty) — did they fail a test they did­n’t know they were tak­ing?

Some of them like­ly burned cats to death for fun. Do they fail the nice­ness test mere­ly because they were born in the wrong time or in the wrong place?

For that mat­ter, what of you? Who knows which of our actions our grand­chil­dren will deem immoral? Per­haps you have been born in the wrong time and place to achieve a rea­son­able stan­dard of nice­ness.

You might object that we should judge peo­ple rel­a­tive to the stan­dards of their own cul­ture, so we don’t need to wor­ry about what stan­dards our grand­chil­dren will hold us up against. Per­haps. Believ­ing that would require you to stop judg­ing dic­ta­tor­ships, sweat­shops, mod­ern-day slave traf­fick­ing, and racism in oth­er cul­tures. Also, you will need to let the Church off the hook for things like the Cru­sades and the Inqui­si­tion. This is just one the prob­lems that emerges from the notion that moral stan­dards are com­plete­ly rel­a­tive to cul­ture or per­son­al­i­ty. There are sev­er­al detailed cri­tiques avail­able: here’s one

, here’s anoth­er, and here is a third (that last one is a pdf writ­ten by Car­di­nal Ratzinger before he became Pope).

So if your main beef with Chris­tian­i­ty is that it’s exclu­sive, exam­ine your own beliefs care­ful­ly. You might be sur­prised to dis­cov­er just how exclu­sion­ary they turn out to be.

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I Am Thankful

Today is Thanks­giv­ing, and once again I am remind­ed of all that I have to be grate­ful for.

God loves me. I have a won­der­ful fam­i­ly (both by birth and by mar­riage). I have a faith­ful team of sup­port­ers who part­ner with me in min­istry. I have the coolest call­ing in the world. I have fab­u­lous stu­dents in my min­istry. I live in Amer­i­ca in the 21st cen­tu­ry — one of the great­est, freest, and most pros­per­ous cul­tures of all time. I live in Cal­i­for­nia, which is as awe­some as the rest of you think it is. And, and, and, and…

Today is Thanks­giv­ing, and so such a list springs eas­i­ly to mind. It reminds me that I am to be thank­ful every day. Many pas­sages com­mand us to be grate­ful. Among them are Eph­esians 5:19–20, Colos­sians 2:7, Colos­sians 3:15–16, and 1 Thes­sa­lo­ni­ans 5:18. They’re won­der­ful pas­sages and worth mem­o­riz­ing.

But my favorite pas­sage on grat­i­tude is from Deuteron­o­my 8:17–18:

You may say to your­self, “My pow­er and the strength of my hands have pro­duced this wealth for me.” But remem­ber the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the abil­i­ty to pro­duce wealth…

It is God who gives us the abil­i­ty. Not just the abil­i­ty to pro­duce wealth, but also the abil­i­ty to make jokes, to find love, to enjoy a sun­set, to get good grades, to run quick­ly, to leap in pud­dles, and to sleep sound­ly at night.

Every day is filled with occa­sions for grat­i­tude, but we almost always let them pass unre­marked.

This Thanks­giv­ing, take to heart the ever-quotable G. K. Chester­ton:

You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the con­cert and the opera, and grace before the play and pan­tomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketch­ing, paint­ing, swim­ming, fenc­ing, box­ing, walk­ing, play­ing, danc­ing, and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

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Expecting An Email From Me? Check Your Spam Folder.

If you haven’t heard from me and you’ve been expect­ing to, I apol­o­gize. For some rea­son a lot of my very nor­mal emails (par­tic­u­lar­ly to stu­dents) have been labeled as spam. Here’s an exam­ple of an email that gets labeled as spam:

Stu­den­t’s email to me: “Glen, can I get a ride to church on Sun­day?”
My reply to the stu­dent: “Sure, I’ll pick you up at 10am. See you then!”

Result — auto­mat­i­cal­ly delet­ed as SPAM! The poor girl thought I was ignor­ing her and almost biked to church before we got it straight­ened out.

I had a stu­dent send me a copy of one of the unfor­tu­nate emails, and dig­ging through the head­ers I found this entry from Stan­ford’s spam fil­ter:

X-Spam: Probability=82%, Report='URI_CLASS_ABS_DOMAIN 8

stir of echoes the home­com­ing down­load free

from with­in movie , BODY_SIZE_6000_6999 0, WEBMAIL_SOURCE 0, __BOUNCE_CHALLENGE_SUBJ 0, __CD 0, __CP_URI_IN_BODY 0, __CT 0, __CTE 0, __CT_TEXT_PLAIN 0, __FRAUD_419_BODY_WEBMAIL 0, __FRAUD_419_WEBMAIL 0, __FRAUD_419_WEBMAIL_FROM 0, __FROM_GMAIL 0, __HAS_MSGID 0, __HELO_GMAIL 0, __MIME_TEXT_ONLY 0, __MIME_VERSION 0, __PHISH_SPEAR_HTTP_RECEIVED 0, __PHISH_SPEAR_STRUCTURE_1 0, __RDNS_GMAIL 0, __SANE_MSGID 0, __URI_CLASS_ANY 0′

I’ve googled for URI_CLASS_ABS_DOMAIN, but I haven’t been able to fig­ure out what it means. I’m send­ing my emails from gmail, so I don’t think there’s any weird­ness there. Some­thing about the con­tent of my email seems fishy to the spam fil­ter. My best guess is that it’s my foot­er (which I intend to dis­able as a test), but any insight is appre­ci­at­ed.

The foot­er, in case you’re curi­ous, is an innocu­ous

Glen Davis: http://glenandpaula.com/
Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship @ Stanford University: http://xastanford.org/

Bot­tom line: if you expect­ed an email from me and you haven’t seen it, check your spam fold­er. A hap­py sur­prise might be wait­ing for you.

the col­or pur­ple movie