The Grey Shadow

Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, O you my friends, for the hand of God has touched me! (Job 19:21, ESV [show]Job 19:21 [21]Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, O you my friends, for the hand of God has touched me!
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When you are up to your nose in emotional pain, the only thing that might keep you sane is the support of your friends. And this is a gift from God.

This past weekend I was recovering from some painful days, but God allowed me to meet with Mrs. B., a longtime friend from mine. She listened carefully to me, and offered me comfort and joy. To top it off, herhusband challenged me to a Halo deathmach . I wasn’t in the best of shapes, but I laughed and forgot about my personal issues for a little while. A true display of God’s grace.

Thanks, O Lord, for our friends, for they are a mirror of Your kindness and mercy to us.

“Oil and perfume make the heart glad, and the sweetness of a friend comes from his earnest counsel.” (Proverbs 27:9, ESV [show]Proverbs 27:9 [9]Oil and perfume make the heart glad, and the sweetness of a friend comes from his earnest counsel.(1) Footnotes 1. [27:9] Or 'and so does the sweetness of a friend that comes from his earnest counsel'
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If everything goes well, I might start swimming practices as early as tomorrow. This will be quite a challenge, since I am used to swim in pools of half the Olympic length; i.e., 25 m (27.34 yd) since the Olympic length is 50 m (54.68 yd). However, I look forward to my swim, and I am thankful for the opportunity; otherwise, exercise would mean producing liters and liters of sweat in our summer-like temperatures, with incredible levels of discomfort. Let’s make a splash!

Most of you know what I think of current worship practices in church. My disagreements on that area are mostly philosophical, aesthetic and methodological. However, sometimes it is just plain old incompetence what gets you.

Two Sundays ago, I went to our church service. The worship (or what passed for it) was directed by a certain lady. Everything was truly awful (as usual), but then things sank to a new low. She called for Hymn #370. I searched in my hymnal and thought “wow, that is great. An Old German choral by Gebhart.”

However, the music started and something was awfully wrong. The music was completely different! Searching, I found out that the music was in fact that of Hymn #217, which is the exact same lyrics but with a completely different music. Even worse, the worship group even got the melody wrong and repeatedly made mistakes!

What became evident is that not only the directing lady didn’t know anything of even basic music reading; the whole worship group didn’t know the first thing of score reading as well. Awful, just awful.

I continue experimenting with themes. This is Fluid Blue 1.5, a great theme by Srini. The big merit of this theme, in my opinion, is its resemblance to the old Blue Theme. Maybe this is a keeper

I managed to upgrade to WordPress 2.3. This is a pretty serious upgrade, and for the first time it comes with native tag support!

Because of this I also decided to change theme. After years of using the excellent and sober Blue Theme 1.0 by Alex King, I am tentatively switching to the Unnamed theme by Xu Yiyang. This is a great theme that greatly resembles the old Blue Theme while supporting the latest WordPress features such as widgets and tags.

Meanwhile, all the info you saw on my previous theme will be gradually migrated to the new, improved theme.

So far, I find the new WordPress very good. Upgrading is recommended.