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Author Archive for bcg
So according to this report two weeks ago, all the people who live in the North should move to the South, because regeneration efforts are failing. To avoid become 'trapped' in poverty, people should move to Oxford, or Cambridge, say.
Of course, all the major parties rubbished it, and the councils of various Northern cities did as well. David Cameron said it was 'insane'.
Imagine my delight when I read another story today, this time about 'mapping' Britain's 'happiest places'. It seems Edinburgh comes out bottom - but, in a delicious irony given the story a couple of weeks ago - EIGHT of the top TEN happiest places in Britain are in the North of England or Scotland.
Now, what does that tell you? It tells me that stupid middle-class think-tanks assume that all that matters is financial well-being.
So, my call to the South is: come up here, it's a much happier place to live!
In Jeremiah, there's a lot of judgement, of Israel and the surrounding nations. The final few chapters basically comprise a long series of judgements on the surrounding nations.
So I was surprised when I noticed that God promises to restore some of them. For example, in 49.6 God says, 'But afterwards I will restore the fortunes of the Ammonites.' And in 49.39 he says, 'I will restore the fortunes of Elam.' And so on.
While the language of judgement is common to all nations (not just Israel), normally the language of restoration is reserved only for Israel. They are God's chosen people; the surrounding nations are not. Therefore, although they are judged, they are never completely destroyed.
So what is going on here?
I wonder if we have here a prefiguring of the mission to the Gentiles that comes in the New Testament. The fact that God doesn't simply punish, but also restores the Gentile nations suggests that his salvation is not limited to (although he may primarily be for) Israel.
Of course, the verses only have this significance once the mission to the Gentiles is made explicit. But they are maybe one of the reasons why the early disciples accepted Peter's vision and Paul's mission. For I hope that they used the Scriptures to test the words of prophecy and visions, as Paul tells us to do. If they did, they would have found verses like these (and of course many others, even more explicit) to support the visions.
I have recently taken the plunge and bought myself a Mac. I love it - for a long-term Windows user there have been the inevitable confusions and frustrations (the weirdness of skipping/deleting entire words is STUPID - Ctrl-Arrow and Ctrl-Delete is so much easier and more sensible).
Anyway - one of my biggest frustrations was using VMware Fusion to run Windows. Yes, I still have some applications that need Windows - not least Excel, which is absolutely awful in Mac compared to a PC. And I discovered that the Enter key on the number pad simply will not work as an Enter key.
I spent ages looking for a solution, mapping keyboards in Windows etc etc, and finally I found this. I believe it is in Italian, but the instructions are clear enough. Shut down VMware Fusion and open this file in TextEdit:
~/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/preferences
Then add this line to the bottom of the file:
pref.mapISONumpadEnterToAltGrEnabled = "FALSE"
Open VMware Fusion again, run Windows, and, hey presto, you have an Enter key again! Of course, you won't have an Alt Gr key, because that's what VMware use the Enter key for by default. Why they didn't leave it as the right-hand side Alt key, I'll never know.
Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to
whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the
ill-fated creature is born.
We had an interesting comment by the preacher in church today. He was saying that whenever he preaches, he tries to have something fresh, something new and prophetic to say.
Now I whole-heartedly agree that preaching should be prophetic. It should challenge people, show them what God is saying to them through the Bible, feed them with truth, and encourage them in their day-to-day lives. And above all, it should point to Jesus.
Now, my understanding of 'prophetic' is not that it is all about predicting the future (although it often does include that). Much of the prophecy in the Old Testament consists of the the prophets reminding the people of God's promises, to bless them if they are faithful, and to punish them if they are not. Granted, that included predicting the consequences of their disobedience, but essentially they were calling the people to remember God's word and his promises, and to be obedient.
Now that will sometimes include something 'new'. That is, a fresh way of putting something, or teaching people something they didn't already know. However, my reflections on the Old Testament prophets is that very often the people did know what they were being told, they were simply choosing to ignore it. Or, they needed to be shown or told something they already knew in a different way.
I think that preachers should not be too worried about having something 'new' to say, but having something faithful to say - faithful to God's word. The challenge comes not from what the preacher comes up with that is new or fresh, but from the word of God itself.
All this, the preacher tonight would agree with - his comment simply set me off on a train of thought!
I love WYMeditor, it is by far the best Javascript text editor I have used. As I have written before, I use the Simple WYMeditor plugin so I can have WYMeditor in my WordPress installation.
However, when I upgraded to WordPress 2.6 it stopped working for me. There is no new version of Simple WYMeditor as yet, but this little fix worked for me.
Simply change line 69 from this:
69 if ( strpos($wp_version, '2.5') !== false ) {
to this:
69 if ( $wp_version >= "2.5" ) {
Enjoy!
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