Healer

Today, the Christian and Worship blogosphere is abuzz with discussion about the song "Healer" that is on Hillsongs' latest CD, "This is Our God." There was a website about the song at http://healer.integritymusic.com (now gone) that contained a couple of YouTube videos (also now gone). One video was a powerful performance of the song, and the other was a video with the song's author descibing his battle with cancer and his trial of faith which was the basis for the song.

The news today, however, is that the cancer story is untrue. Mr Guglielmucci has never had cancer, and apparently deceived even his wife and children with this story.

Here's a few links if you want to read up on this:

http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,24212817-5006301,00.html
http://mikeymo1741.blogspot.com/2008/08/this-just-in-and-i-cant-believe-it.html
http://www.fredmckinnon.com/myblog/2008/08/20/healer-mike-guglielmucci-exposed/

I had suggested to our team that we do this song as our Song of the Month for September because I was so moved by the song and the testimony behind it. After this morning's news, however, I sent a message to the two guys I work closest with on our team that I felt the song was now tainted, and questioned whether we should do it.

This afternoon, I got emails back from both. Our Worship Leader said the song contains a powerful message, and thought we should still do it. Our bass player, who also is our Discipleship Pastor and former Worship Leader, said this:

Do I think we should use the song? Not if the story behind it is why we
would do it in the first place. Yes. If the song stands on it's own
merits; lyrically, musically, theologically.

Of course the song meets those criteria, and of course we should still do it.



I think the song stands on its own.

I think Mr Guglielmucci and his family need our prayers.

I then think about the songs we do from a murderous adulterer named David.



I realize that my heart can be vile, and at my core I'm capable of
something like that. And then I'm ashamed because I'm a fallen man, too
- this man's sin is just more public than my own.



We should do the song - and now it means more to me than before.

Salem Trip day 2

Quick post as we gotta go:
- van's doing fine, whew.
- made it to Salem at 2:00am PDT
- slept at a Travelodge near the hospital
- heading out now

Thanks for the prayers and support!

Salem Road Trip - Day 1

We had an adventurous day for the first day on this trip. We spent the morning finishing laundry, loading the car, running a couple of last minute errands, and getting our house sitter familiar with everything. We got on the road just fine, and were making pretty decent time. We got to within ten miles of Cheyenne, Wyoming when this
appeared on the road. That's a forged steel driveshaft yoke from a semi truck. My wife estimates it's about 6 inches in diameter and weighs about 30 pounds. She took that picture after making sure it was clear of the roadway and not a danger to other motorists

Unfortunately, I was unable to avoid hitting it and this
is what the left rear tire and wheel on our van looks like now. What you can't see is the dent on the quarter panel. We got the "convenience" spare on the van and made it into Cheyenne without further incident.

By the time we got here, though, it was about 5:45 PM. Everything except WalMart, the bars, and stop lights stop working at 5:30 here - especially the parts counters at the local car dealerships. So, $86 later we're holed up in a Super8 motel with horrid wifi and will be dealing with getting the tire, wheel and hubcap replaced in the morning.

I'm thankful, though, as things could've been much worse. We'd planned to drive until 10:30-11:00pm today and an incident like that could've happened in the middle of the Wyoming high desert, dozens of miles from a place to get it dealt with.

There but for the grace of God go I.

Total distance travelled, about 100 miles. Gonna be a long day tomorrow!

Road Trip

packed? check
van gassed? check
maps? check
credit card? check
housesitter? check

Yep, we're on the road today. My wife's grandfather was removed from life support yesterday and is barely hanging on today. We're heading to Salem, Oregon to be with her family.

Worship Setlist Carnival - August 10, 2008

To continue my participation in Fred McKinnon's Setlist Carnival, where you post your song service setlist for the week and link back to his site with the goal is to see what others are doing in order to help with our own planning and whatnot, here's our setlist for August 10, 2008:

Christian Church of Broomfield, Sunday August 10, 2008
8:00 (Traditional) Service
Only Trust Him (197)
Trust and Obey (327)
Make Me a Blessing (177)
His Eye is on the Sparrow (151)
My Faith Looks Up to Thee (188 -communion)
I Surrender All (252 -invitation)
Doxology (Trad -closing)

10:45 (Contemporary) Service
Victory Chant (Bob Fitts)
Today is the Day (Lincoln Brewster)
I Will Sing of the Mercies (John Sellers)
Ancient of Days (Ron Kenoly)
I Shall Not be Moved (Trad)
My Savior, My God (Aaron Shust -communion)
I Surrender All (Hymn -invitation)
Today is the Day (reprise -closing)

A Wordle from me

The image below is called a Wordle. It's a mashup of the text in this blog. Kinda neat, if you asked me. Thanks to Fernando and Toni for posting these on their blogs. Go getcha one for your blog and post back here - would love to see it :)

Mac Withdrawal and Linux Laments

If you hadn't guessed by reading previous posts, I'm a pretty big fan and user of Apple computers and the Mac OS X platform. My main machine is first generation MacBook Pro that I purchased a little over two years ago. It's become my almost constant partner as I take it nearly everywhere with me. Not only is it the ideal work computer, it's an excellent personal computer, too. In two years, I'd had very little to complain about with this machine.

It. Just. Works.

I plug in a camera, it opens up iPhoto and asks me where to put the pictures. I plug in a camcorder, it opens up iMovie and starts importing the video. I plug in my Verizon eV-DO card, it asks me if I'm ready to connect. I plug in an external monitor and it asks if i want to mirror or extend my desktop. There's very little in the way of getting things done.

Last Wednesday, however, my beloved machine wouldn't start up. The night before, I'd worked on music for church until the wee hours of the morning. When I finished what I was doing, I clicked on Time Machine and told it to backup immediately then went to bed. Time Machine does automated hourly backups - I just got in the habit of doing a backup every night before bed long before Time Machine came into being, and haven't stopped. The next morning, I came into my office, sat down at my desk and grabbed my mouse to wake up my Mac- like I do every morning.

Nothing happened.

"Oh dear," says I, "wonder what that's all about." I tried to reboot, nothing but a gray screen and startup sound. I unplugged it and removed its battery for a few minutes, then tried again. Same results. My "oh dear" got a little stronger. Next step, I decided, was to bring the thing to Genius Bar at a local Apple store. I'm fortunate in that there are two stores within 20 minutes of my house, and two more within an hour. Anyhow, I got on Apple's website with my spare laptop, found that the Boulder Apple store still had Genius Bar appointments available, so I made one.

I made my way to Boulder and was greeted by a friendly guy at the Genius Bar. He fiddled with my machine for about 20 minutes trying various key combinations, attempted to boot it from their network, and then with an external hard drive. He decided that since the machine would respond with the gray screen and sounds, that it was probably just a bad hard drive, so he ordered one and said it would take a few days to get the drive and get it installed. Inconvenient - but tolerable, especially since I purchased Apple Care when I bought the machine and this work isn't costing me anything more. I then beat a hasty retreat from Boulder back to civilization.

Meanwhile, I still have to work. I work for a technology company from my home office, so a well-connected computer is absolutely essential - which is why I keep a spare laptop around. My spare is an IBM (Lenovo) ThinkPad T43. It's a few years old now, but still serviceable. I got it really cheap because it had, ironically, a bad hard disk. I replaced its hard disk and installed Ubuntu Linux on it some time ago. I keep the machine updated, and regularly use it as it spends most of its time in the living room for those times when you just have to look up what other movies that actor you're watching on TV was in on imdb.com.

Now since this is a backup work machine, I already had lots of things configured for what I need to work like Pidgin IM client, ssh configs, vmware console, softphone for our VoIP system, and so on. That and everything on the machine hardware-wise seems to work fine - including wired and wireless networking. But that's where the fun stops.

I mentioned above that I have a Verizon eV-DO card - what a great invention. I plug it in and bascially anywhere there's cell coverage, I'm able to get online. I've already mentioned how easy this device was to get working with my Mac: plug it in, click connect. That's it. Using it under Windows (on my wife's work laptop) was a little more difficult - had to install a driver and some goofy program to use it - but once that's done it's a matter of starting that program, sticking in the card, and clicking connect. Now to the Linux machine. I searched the internet for someone who's done this and found a blog with instructions on how to make it work. It invovles using the command line to probe the usb subsystem for the device, watching what happens when inserting the card by watching a logfile, writing a script, and editing a couple of config files. When you're done, there's a menu item on the network monitor applet that allows you to connect or disconnect from the network. However, there's absolutely no indication that you're connected nor any indication of the signal strength, so when when you click connect, you just get to hope it works by starting your browser (or email client, or terminal program, or...) and hope you have a network connection. It's worked well since I've had it configured - but man, what a pain to get setup and working. I can't imagine my mom, wife, son, going through this to get a peripheral device working.

So now I have my T43 that can connect virtually anywhere, and all my software working, I'm ready to use this as my main machine, right? Well, almost. On my desk, I have a laptop stand and a Samsung 19" monitor. Nothing fancy, in fact I bought it at Sam's Club. Anyway, plugging this monitor into my Mac and using it as an extension of its screen was super easy, just a couple of clicks after plugging it in the first time, and now every time it just works. In windows, it's just as easy. Plug it in, go to the display properties, and fiddle with things until it's how you like it. Linux however... well, I wish I could tell you, because I still haven't gotten it to work. I even spent time installing windows on the stupid thing to see if it was even possible - works fine. This evening I found an article about this laptop's display and how to hack the /etc/X11/Xorg.conf file to make external monitors work right, so I'll be attempting that tomorrow. Looks like I'm about to get an unwanted education in the intricacies of X11 configuration.

Don't get me wrong. I love Linux. We run our business on a farm of ~60 servers, all running Linux. I believe in the product, the philosophy of Open Source Software, and especially in UNIX and UNIX-like platforms. It's fast, flexible, stable, secure, scalable, configurable, interoperable - all the things you want in your infrastructure.

On the desktop, however, it's still an OS for the geeks who don't have a problem with hacking at system internals in order to make stuff work - or for closed hardware environments where things that will trip people up just can't be added to the system. I'll continue to use it, and will work through the problems I come across, thanks mostly to the user community. But, when someone asks me what kind of computer to buy, I'll tell them "Buy a Mac."

Worship setlist, August 3, 2008

UPDATED 5-Aug-08 to add 8:00 service.

To continue my participation in Fred McKinnon's Setlist Carnival, where you post your song service setlist for the week and link back to his site with the goal is to see what others are doing in order to help with our own planning and whatnot, here's our setlist for August 3, 2008:

Christian Church of Broomfield, Sunday August 3, 2008
8:00 (Traditional) Service
Shout to the Lord (Zschech)
His Way With Thee (335)
Send the Light (229)
Give of Your Best to the Master (170)
In the Garden (241 -communion)
I'll Go Where You Want Me to Go (222 -invitation)
In the Service of the King (230 -closing)

I don't have the hymnal nearby so the number references probably mean nothing.

10:45 (Contemporary) Service
Come, Now is the Time to Worship (Brian Doerksen)
Forever (Chris Tomlin)
Let God Arise (Chris Tomlin)
In the Blink of an Eye (Mercy Me)
Nothing Without You (Bebo Norman)
We Enter In(Donny Limbert - Communion)
Draw Me Close (McClurkin - Michael W. Smith version - Invitation)
In the Service of the King (Trad Hymm - Closing)

Third Day - Revelation

The band Third Day released their latest album titled 'Revelation' last Tuesday. Being a fan, I bought a copy through iTunes as soon as I could, listened as I worked that day. I love the album. To me, it marks a return to what Third Day really are: Christ followers sharing the gift God gave them in the most honest, skillful way possible. The lyrics are touching and uplifting, the music is driving and engaging, and the production is very high quality.

As part of promoting this album, the band, its record label, and KLOVE radio sponsored two 'secret' concerts. My wife and I were fortunate enough to catch the Denver concert Friday evening at Crossroads Church Denver in Wheatridge, Colorado. It was a fairly short show, but the environment was intimate and spontaneous. The band played a couple of songs from the new album, took audience questions, interacted with the crowd, and spent a couple of hours meeting people and signing autographs after the show. It was an amazing, spirit-filled night for my wife and I.

Learning about the show is a good story in itself. I happened to notice a guy in my twitter-stream post a message to a user @marklee3d. "hmm," I say to myself, "there's a Mark Lee that plays guitar for Third Day - could he be twittering?" So, I follow him on twitter, and sure enough, it is him! He tweets about their experiences preparing for and performing at a taping of The Tonight Show, then mentions that they're heading to Phoenix for this 'secret' concert and posts a link. I check out the link and discover they're playing in Denver Friday night. "Wow," I say to myself, "an opportunity to see Third Day for free!" Well, I put it in the back of my mind as I was super busy with work and life stuff like taking the kiddo to the orthodontist, guitar lessons, to see his mom in Colorado Springs, getting my laptop fixed, preparing worship team music for rehearsal, and so forth.

Friday comes along, and I again notice Mark tweet about the show in Denver - only now the show is tonight! I fire off an email to some friends at my church, but don't get a response in time. I also IM my wife, and talk her into going. I had to do a work thing on the other side of town, so I told her I'd come to her office as soon as I was done, and we'd head down to the Crossroads Church and see what was up. As we got there, there was a line snaking around their parking lot, it looked like a zillion and a half people were there - but, there was a place to park the car on the street very near where the end of the line was, so we jumped in line and hoped for the best.

Now if you live in Denver, you know that Friday was THE hottest day of the year for the Denver area. The official high for that day was 104F - and we were all standing around on an asphalt parking lot, so I'm sure that added a few degrees. It was HOT. Since we were in a rush to get there, we didn't even think about the heat. We were both wearing, you guessed it, black. In the sun. Standing around on asphalt. On the hottest day of the year. Bleah. At least we sweat-laden fans made the news :)

My wife had just had a horrible day at work and was grumpy, she was having second thoughts about going to the show. I was getting achy, sweaty, headache-y and my own mood was heading down. About then, a guy that was helping keeping the line in order walked by, so I asked him if he thought we would be able to get in. He told us they estimated there were about 1600 people in line, and there were 2000 seats in the church, so things looked up! We were still about 1.5 hours from the start of the show at that point, so we pressed on. My wife went back to our van to put some baby powder on her skin to help keep from breaking out: she gets hives if she's in the sun too long and gets sweaty, making an already grumpy wife just plain miserable.

An hour or so later, the event staff started handing out tickets. We got ours, guaranteeing we'd get in, then shortly afterward, the line started moving quickly and we found ourselves inside looking for seats. We ended up way in the back, stage right - which ended up to be Mark Lee's side of the stage. Our moods were still iffy, the venue was hot and stuffy, and fighting crowds is WAY down on both of our lists of favorite things to do. We don't get out much :)

The show started with words from the KLOVE folks and the introduction of Lisa Williams (afternoon DJ) who would be our Emcee for the evening. She introduced a 'local' band called The Ride from Vail, Colorado, who took the stage and performed a couple of songs. They were excellent! Had a Jars of Clay vibe to them, acoustic guitars and percussion, and a great vocalist. We were glad to have gotten to hear them.

Moods improving, we began to enjoy ourselves. Third Day was announced and took the stage. The crowd went nuts. They started playing, and I leaned over to my wife and said, "Now THAT'S a band!" See, we're both involved with music ministry and are used to...uh...the quality that an all-volunteer band led by a a volunteer worship leader lends itself.

Mark posted the setlist on Third Day's blog, so I'll let you read that for the detail of what they played and what the night was about. You can also check out Third Day's video page for some video clips of the night. The best part of this show was getting to know the band a little. Hearing the stories about some of the songs was touching, especially 'Cry Out to Jesus'. Knowing that the stories in that song are personal and that the song is hard for them to play, really raised the impact of hearing it. I'm listening to it as I type, in fact. If there was a dry eye in the place after that song, I couldn't see it.

After the show, we opted to skip the autograph session. We a) didn't have anything to sign (though I'd have loved to have just gotten to shake Mark's hand and tell him thanks); b) there's that fighting crowds thing again; and c) neither of us had eaten dinner nor had anything to drink since we got there now 3 hours later. So, we went out to the van, prayed together for a minute, and went and got something to eat.

We left refreshed, hopeful, entertained, and impressed.

Oh, BTW, Mac: according to Merriam Webster, 12th is spelled 'twelfth' and pronounced with the 'f' sound. Hope to see you guys October Twelfth :)