hAS ANYONE SEEN MY cAPSLOCK KEY?

Uhm, hi back. Can you please take my picture with that cool camera?

I like interesting days, the days with lots of mental stimulation. I wish today had included some physical exercise, too, but I'm prohibited from that for the next week. And it's too stinkin' hot to work out in the garage. My plan was to tackle little tasks on the VW first thing, but even at 7 a.m. it was at or very near the 90 degree mark, and in that confined space it just wasn't gonna happen. So I managed to fill the day with mental activity and enough menial tasks to keep me from the sense of a day wasted.

Got the sermon finished, though I want to spend lots of time with it before Sunday morning. It's the second in this trilogy of "Things God Wants You (the Christian) to Know." Gut preaching more than head preaching, so another that's not up my preferred alley. But necessary, nonetheless.

Worked on a writing project I've been chipping away at for several months. It's in the final stages - written but in need of proofing and revision. I wish I understood the rules about comma usage. I know there are rules, but that some of it is also personal style. The problem: I don't know where the line between them is.

In the process of sermon prep I recalled a quote from Robert Murray McCheyne that fits my second point. But since I didn't really know who he was - just that he said this potent truism - I did some reading about him. Turns out he said or wrote a lot of good stuff before his death at the age of 29 (typhus plague in the early 1840's). And, he was Scottish!

I also read three brief articles that arrived as links in email conversations. Each struck me as both enlightening and worth noting. So, if you're interested:

My friend Jim sent me this short blog article from the Seattle Times by columnist Jon Talton. It includes jobless stats I was completely unaware of.
He also sent this, from the Wall Street Journal.
I despair of understanding international, never mind U.S. economics, but it seems worthwhile to have some grasp of the depth of the crisis so I can be an enlightened voter and a careful steward of personal financial resources.

My brother Scott sent me this article on the difference between childhood now and 40-50 years ago. I don't think this is an area where we're going to turn back the clock, but at the individual level it's worth noting.

I've done some looking and can't find a grid format showing Olympic TV coverage. Huh? Shouldn't someone, especially the NBC group of channels, have put that together and made it readily available.

This new HP printer is a lot faster than the troublesome Kodak AiO now occupying space in a landfill (ooops; is that a no-no?). It also has noticeably better print quality. I like it!

Work with me on this, OK? I'm going someplace, and it's not going to get there in this post. So before you jump to conclusions wait until I've reached mine in subsequent posts. In other words, keep your finger off that flame thrower, at least for now.

I have every right to express my convictions at the ballot box. You may or may not agree with them, but that's the whole point of a democracy - we reach a civil consensus by each expressing our individual convictions on who should lead us and/or what laws should be enacted/discarded.

This dynamic takes on added significance for the Christian in light of Romans 13:1ff where Paul says that govt. is one of God's ordained means to do good in the world and to restrain evil. Agreed, govt. doesn't always (often?) fulfill that mandate, but that's a result of sin's corruption of God's plan and it doesn't nullify the value of govt., at least in theoretical terms. "[The govt.] is God's servant for good, not evil" (Rom. 13:4). Worth noting, Paul wrote that, and the command to be subject to the governmental authorities (v. 5), when Nero, a despot who was particularly cruel toward Christians, was the head of the Roman Empire.

Put those two things together - that in a democracy I can & should express my views at the ballot box, and that govt. is designed by God to preserve good and punish evil - and the outcome is a special burden on me as a Christian to participate fully in the democratic process and to do so enlightened by the biblical teachings of what's good and/or evil. That is, the monastic movement had it all wrong. Withdrawal from the process is not only counterproductive, it's biblically wrong, and amounts to shirking my duty to influence govt. as it seeks to fulfill its divinely assigned role.

So how am I different from the extreme Muslim who seeks to impose Sharia Law on a society that includes non-Muslims?