We introduced this FANTASTIC song this past Sunday:

Glad to have Rob aboard. In case you missed it this past Sunday, here’s his first sermon in the Ministry Center:

Our family shut down all of our Google related services with the announcement of their new privacy (non-privacy) polices.  Looks like Bing will be our search engine and Hotmail migrated all of our gmail accounts and calendars across, seemingly, seamlessly.  I will remain at swood [at] wearestandrews [dot] com.

The Washington Post had this article on the new policy:

Google’s announcement that it is sharing more user data across its services has already raised the hackles of privacy advocates, technology writers and caught the attention of at least one national data-protection agency.

On Tuesday, the search giant announced that it was placing 60 of its Web services under a unified privacy policy that would allow the company to share data between any of those services. (Google Books, Google Wallet and Google Chrome are excluded due to different regulatory and technical issues.) Any user with a Google account — used to sign in to services such as Gmail, YouTube and personalized search — must agree to the policy. Users who don’t want to have their data shared have the option to close their accounts with Google.

What kind of information are they collecting and integrating?:

Google collects and can integrate almost anything that’s already in the Google ecosystem: calendar appointments, location data, search preferences, contacts, personal habits based on Gmail chatter, device information and search queries, to name a few.

A little later in the article it says by collecting such information Google will be able to send you a reminder, based on having identified your location, as to whether you might be running late for an upcoming meeting – or, it will auto correct the mis-spelling of a name in a document based on its spelling in your contact file.

Creepily invasive.

Read the rest.

Meet the Marriage Killer
From the WSJ: Ken Mac Dougall bit into the sandwich his wife had packed him for lunch and noticed something odd—a Post-it note tucked between the ham and the cheese. He pulled it out of his mouth, smoothed the crinkles and read what his wife had written: “Be in aisle 10 of Home Depot tonight at 6 p.m.”

When Good isn’t Good Enough
Our unbelieving neighbors regard themselves as more tolerant. They suppose themselves to be morally superior to judgmental Christians with our exacting, unrealistic standards of holiness. But the reality of the situation reveals itself in a case like Paterno. No good is good enough to wipe away his sins from the record of history as judged by his peers. He could never recover. The first paragraph of his obituary tells the story.

Adele as Allegory
From James Smith: Because of her commercial success, some indie music snobs might miss the fact that Adele is one of the great female crooners of a generation. We bought my daughter a copy of her live performance at Royal Albert Hall for Christmas, but I think it’s been in the CD player in my car since December 25. It is a masterful, captivating performance (despite the fact that she was suffering from a throat condition and would undergo surgery shortly after).

The Iron Lady: A Truly Meaningful Film
From Carl Trueman: Watching The Iron Lady was a strangely emotional experience.   As for anyone who came of age in eighties Britain, the formative years of my life were dominated by the presence of Mrs Thatcher.  The riots of 81, the Maze hunger strikes, the IRA bombings, the Falklands, the miners’ strike, the poll tax: these were the events which shaped public life; and they shaped how I thought of England, of Britain and of the rest of the world.  I joined her party in 1982, voted for her in 1987 and was saddened but not surprised when she fell from power in 1990.   It is a tired and hackneyed phrase, but, for good or ill, we shall not probably not see her like again.

Work on Your Character and a Good Life will Come to You
The blogosphere is abuzz with advice for the new year. We’re being given tricks and tips on getting ahead, becoming more efficient and so forth. But as a guy who helps people live better stories, I have to tell you the best advice I’ve ever heard is simple: Work on your character and a good life will come to you.

In April 1938 war was looming in Europe. Germany had just invaded Austria. C. S. Lewis wrote to his friend Dom Bede Griffiths:

I have been in considerable trouble over the present danger of war. Twice in one life – and then to find how little I have grown in fortitude despite my conversion. It has done me a lot of good by making me realise how much of my happiness secretly depended on the tacit assumption of at least tolerable conditions for the body: and I see more clearly, I think, the necessity (if one may so put it) which God is under of allowing us to be afflicted – so few of us will really rest all on Him if He leaves us any other support.

Later that year Lewis returned to this theme in writing Owen Barfield:

I had so often told myself that my friends and books and even brains were not given me to keep: that I must teach myself at bottom to care for something else more (and also of course to care for them more but in a different way) and I was horrified to find how cold the idea of really losing them struck. An awful symptom is that part of oneself still regards troubles as ‘interruptions’ as if (ludicrous idea) the happy bustle of one’s personal interests was our real work, instead of the opposite.

I did in the end see (I dare not say ‘feel’) that since nothing but these forcible shakings will cure us of our worldliness, we have at bottom reason to be thankful for them. We force God to surgical treatment: we won’t (mentally) diet.

–The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 225-26, 231-32

A very interesting account of a conversation between Steve Jobs and President Obama in which Jobs tells Obama that manufacturing jobs are not returning and why this must be so.

Here’s a clip:

A really nice article by Rick Reilly:

A man is more than his failings.

I learned a lot about Paterno when I wrote a story about him in 1986 for Sports Illustrated. I’ve learned a lot about him since. He was a humble, funny and giving man who was unlike any other coach I ever met in college football. He rolled up his pants to save on dry cleaning bills. He lived in the same simple ranch house for the last 45 years. Same glasses, same wife, same job, for most of his adult life.

He was a man who had two national championships, five undefeated seasons, and yet for years he drove a white Ford Tempo. In 46 years as a head coach, he never had a single major NCAA violation.

Read the rest.

Good article from Christian songwriter Matt Pappa on the state of Christian radio programming:

Mainstream Christian radio is altogether banal and shallow in both a musical sense and a spiritual sense.  The songs are man-centered and the DJ’s and radio programmers are man-pleasers . . . they play the songs that will attract the most listeners to their station, period.  Christian radio is like Joel Osteen in musical form . . . safe, happy, and untruthful.  It is the TBN of music . . . a large-scale, embarrassing presentation of Christianity to the world.

Read the rest.

Here’s part two of the series.

Yesterday marked the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.  Russell Moore offered this pre-anniversary commentary.   Worth the read.

In your congregation this Sunday, and in the neighborhoods around you right now, there are women vulnerable to abortionist propaganda, not because they reject the church but because they’re afraid they ‘ll lose the church. Pregnant young women are scared they will scandalize church people when they start to show, so they keep it secret. Parents are fearful their pregnant daughter, or their son’s pregnant girlfriend, will prompt the rest of the congregation to see them as bad families.

As they keep all of this secret from the Body of Christ, many of them fall prey to the false gospel of the abortion clinic. “We can take care of this for you,” these people say. “And it will all go away.”

Every time pastors and church leaders speak, they are speaking, at least potentially, to these men and women, the aborting and the abortionists. Many of these people don’t argue that the “fetus” is a “person.” Their consciences testify to that, and they’re either tortured by this or violently trying to sear over that persistent internal message.

Read the rest.