What’s new?
When your first blog post of the new year takes place at the midpoint of March April it is fair to wonder whether you should be paying for hosting at all.
Nevertheless, I continue to do so. Sort of like that YMCA membership my wife keeps telling me I should terminate, only much less expensive!
So, I figure I’ll just take a few moments weeks to ruminate on where I am.
First, kudos to the WordPress team for continuing to improve their product. I’m running version 2.7.1 as I write this and I find the interface just pleasin’ as punch. What a difference from when I started using WordPress back in April of 2004!
Aside from the visual improvements, there is now a automatic upgrade feature for version 2.7 and up which I used to move from 2.7 to 2.7.1. It appeared to hang in the middle of the process, but after clicking to another area of the admin interface it showed that I was using the new version. Clicking back to the upgrade page then showed confirmation. Upgrading WP was never terribly difficult, but this is still a definite improvement to the process of manually downloading zipped files and copying them up to the server via ftp.
So much for the tech update. What else is new? Well, we have a new administration in the White House working feverishly with the Democrat-controlled Congress to take advantage of a largely government-created crisis to expand to a horrific degree the amount of government intrusion into our lives and wallets.
In an earlier draft I had a few paragraphs of examples of the moves by this White House that leave me subdued, but unsurprised. I decided to drop them. If you care, you’ve already heard all about it elsewhere, plus half of the things I cited are out of date at this point because I’m taking too long to write this stupid post!
Honestly, I have been overwhelmed at the headlong rush toward statism, if not out-and-out socialism, by this administration and its congressional allies. I am forced to continually remind myself that God is sovereign and they are His purposes that will ultimately be served in whatever comes out of this time. It may be that we are about to see our nation absorbed into a global hegemony within just a matter of a few years. But though we have been richly blessed from the time our forebears first touched ground, and though the world would be a vastly different (and far worse in my estimation) place without the influence of the Land of the Free over these roughly 232 years, God’s plan has never been dependent on the United States of America.
After all, if the Lord was pleased to divide His people into two warring kingdoms (see 1 Kings 11:9-13; 11:26-12:20 for the details) and ultimately drive them both into exile under foreign powers… we certainly shouldn’t presume that we’re exempt from judgment. After all, the vilest of Israel’s kings never spilled anything remotely approaching the blood on our hands from the abortion mills alone.
Still, for all this gloomy talk, life in a declining U.S.A. in this twenty-first century remains preferable to that in the vast majority of the rest of the world, at least by my reckoning, and meaning no offense to readers outside of this nation. Granted, aside from very brief visits to Puerto Rico, Panama, and Germany, military training exercises all, I’ve never been outside the U.S. and so have no experience to support that claim, but I’ll stand by it. Lord willing, that will still be true by the time my seven-year-old is raising my grandkids.
On a happier note, and speaking of family, this year, my lovely wife and I will celebrate our tenth anniversary! I’m not sure how we’ll mark that occasion yet, but I really want it to involve a trip somewhere for just the two of us. She’s a gifted teacher, a great mom, and an amazing partner who has put up with a lot of selfishness from me. I’m blessed to have her and I pray we have many more years to grow closer to God and to each other.
Speaking of which, I’m also looking to start up a practice of family devotions and worship once the summer break affords more time and flexibility to play around with format and scheduling. I’ve been inspired in that regard by modern-day prophet Voddie Baucham, Jr. in his book Family Driven Faith, in which he makes a powerful case for taking a direct hand in discipling our families and raising our children in the “nurture and admonition of the Lord.” (Ephesians 6:4 KJV)
This is not going to be an easy task; in fact, the thought is kind of intimidating, but the potential for spiritual growth in my family is huge. I particularly want my son to see that worship and Bible study aren’t just something we do at church. I have been reading the Bible to him for years, however, so at least I’m not starting from absolute ground-zero. Plus, while none of us are musicians per se, both my wife and I are inclined to sing spiritual songs at random moments throughout the day; she sings primarily what she hears on Christian radio, or praise songs, and I sing the songs rehearsed in choir and the men’s ensemble in which I sing tenor.
So, while I would like to be more deliberate in making Christ the focal point of our household, there is at least a culture of faith to build on.
On a final note, for now, I’m once again making some progress on my reading backlog as indicated by some transition in my sidebar. Suffice to say that I gave the better part of my free time (which never really is free at all) to an obsessive online gaming habit that ate up roughly a year. Now that I’ve dumped it (aided not inconsiderably by its technical requirements advancing beyond the capabilities of my computer so that, in effect, it dumped me, or was about to), I have nearly finished a third book and have been making good progress through my Bible reading plan that sat long neglected.
The one I’m about to finish, P.J. O’Rourke’s On the Wealth of Nations, essentially his attempt to nutshell Adam Smith’s massive work, serves both as an introduction and a critique, though O’Rourke is mostly sympathetic to Smith’s broader economic principles. My parents gave me this book alongside the Wealth of Nations under the entirely reasonable premise that I might never get around to reading the latter’s 1208 pages! I do hope to take that on at some point, however, because the quotes I’ve read in O’Rourke, who is only scratching the surface, after all, lead me to believe I would enjoy the book. Plus, at times P.J.’s affection for his own wit, as it seems to me, obscures the thrust of Adam Smith’s argument and I find myself wanting to read the statements in their proper context.
Then again, if I’m having trouble keeping up at times in the summary, I may be in well over my head in the original! Time may tell.
I will close this post with one Smith quote provided by O’Rourke, this from the Theory of Moral Sentiments, which I think sums up man’s uneasy relationship with any sort of government:
What institution of government could tend so much to promote the happiness of mankind as the general prevalence of wisdom and virtue? All government is but the imperfect remedy for the deficiency of these.[emphasis mine]
This is why some of America’s founders made certain to warn that the system of government set forth was adequate only for rule of a people governed by internalized virtue. The less virtuous the society, the more power must be appropriated by the state. In other words, one thing I ponder in these days is whether the encroachment of our federal government is merely the natural tendency of men to tyranny or a necessity given the moral decay of our civilization. I suspect a combination of the two.
