Handy tips for a happy life that I just thought up lately…

(1) Couples who feel the need to argue about something should only do so by candlelight.

(2) Don’t waste your money on the solution to any problem you didn’t know you had before the solution presented itself.

Okay, in case those didn’t change your life, it’s on to yonder linkage accumulated in the past week…

1. 10 Useful Secrets the Major Airlines Don’t Want You to Know
2. Mind-blowing foodscapes
3. Dave Paisley lost his wife just a month ago, and he’s been keeping up his blog with descriptions of some of the changes and activity in his life since she died. Last weekend he posted the solution to his dilemma of what to do with season tickets for the ballet. He still wanted to go, wasn’t about to ask another guy, and wasn’t looking for a date. I admit he lost me with his description of the performance, and perhaps rather than “companionship”, there would be more click-throughs if I said “wife-swapping” …but in a good way, not what you’re thinking. In any event, his description of what happened struck me somehow as a warm expression of community.
4. Makeesha wonders about emerging church programs and the establishment of multi-site ministries with special-interest groups for every niche. Me too… I’m the one who said publicly, “If it’s even possible to have an emerging megachurch, the Americans will figure out how to do it.” Maybe I should clarify… that wasn’t a challenge I wanted to see met.
5. Lost in Wonder, an online labyrinth (via). I had trouble with the stations, not sure if it doesn’t work on Linux or if you have to wait a really long time for navigation buttons to appear so you don’t have to use the “back” button on your browser.
6. What are the Essentials for Christianity? A Test of Unity and Diversity
7. More from Steve Mccoy on ESV, The Literary Study Bible (Hardcover, Black Letter), which came up recently around here. (Still on my wish-list.)
8. Jordon Cooper’s Notes from N.T. Wright at Soularize, some good stuff on Acts, it sounds like.
9. Somebody draw me a flowchart! Andrew Jones recaps three streams of “emerging” from Darrin Patrick… but it’s not “five streams” …unless you notice that one of the streams is really two, which means five — so three is kinda the same as five. Looks like a good overview.
10. ASBO Jesus 237 on “following the vision.” Why does “following” always seem to result in so much fallout?
11. Chris Marlow explains why he’s going to Africa through a series of images of families around the globe posing with all of their groceries for a week, with the cost tallied up. Scroll down until you find your own budget (I think ours was actually near Poland) and then… keep… scrolling…
12. Turns out you need to be a high school grad to read here, according to an ultra-scientific blog widget. I thought I lost more people than that, but it turns out Scot McKnight’s blog is at the same level… so I figured, “Hey, I know a guy that knows lots of big words!” But even so, Len Hjalmarson‘s blog only requires a Junior High education. If you want something more reliable, there’s Readability.info, where I score a bit lower, grade 9.5… which is a good thing if you want people to actually read; “ideal” is a grade 7 level. FWIW, I thought the NIV translation read at a grade 9 level, but it came up as 6.3 on some selections from Isaiah, about the same level as the NLT… which I thought would be much more understandable… but that’s what you get with automated widgetry.
13. Top Twenty Theological Pick-up Lines NOT to use: includes “Looking at you makes me reconsider preterism, because you are heaven on earth.” and “While giving her a TULIP say, ‘This Totally depraved person has been Unconditionally drawn to you, Limiting himself to your Irresistible beauty that is Persevering beyond all others.'”
14. I have a theory that you probably don’t really understand something well until you can explain it to a child… which tells me that Mike King knows what a heretic is.
15. How to kill Emergent Conversation: I read both Doc and Brian Oberkirch, which is to say I subscribe to their feeds and — as with all of my feeds, I at least skim. So when Doc quotes Brian’s post, it pops up twice, which helps catch the important stuff. And Doc’s summary of two of Brian’s quotable lines made me think of the “emerging church conversation”. “Here we are now, monetize us. …To recast it: conversations are markets.” Ouch.
16. Andrew Jones was doing a book review storm this week… one that caught my notice was Bob Whitesel’s Inside the Organic Church: Learning from 12 Emerging Congregations, whose contribution as Andrew observes is to illustrate a connection between the church growth movement and the emerging church movement.
17. Roxburgh interviews McLaren:
18. Some interesting results in this survey about various doctrines, which are necessary for salvation or for orthodoxy, or not at all. Which one surprises you most? Me, it was probably the deity of Christ.
19. I’ve been keeping a bit of an eye on David Seah’s emergent task planner, which he’ll be marketing soon (and he knows a good pen when he sees one). It occurred to me that this might be a good tool for some pastors… not because of the “emergent” term and the emerging church, but because of… well, it being an emergent task planner. Some people have a difficult time ordering their days because tasks keep popping up out of the blue that need to be dealt with… and from a wide array of different projects. This actually seems a very simple way to deal with those, or at least make an attempt. There are some older and alpha versions of the tool available for download to try it out.
20. Free Rice… you have to multiple-guess a lot of definitions to fill a bowl, but real rice gets donated and after a while it gets a little addictive, so you want to have some time to devote: (1) lag (2) jog (3) overturn (4) dedicate …they get harder as you go along.
21. A few selections from the 100 Photographs that Changed the World, with a nice introduction.

That wraps it up for another week. Anyone continuing with comment troubles should check my last update for instructions on what to do… I’m still working on it, but the workarounds should resolve almost everyone’s troubles.