The Maxson Homepage on the WWW
This video illustrates my problem with praise choruses. You can take anything and turn it into a 24/7 or 7/24 (the same 7 words sang 24 times). This is an extreme example, but I hear the same worthless kind of words when I hear most choruses.
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: technology is awesome. Before the internet, we probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to listen to English language radio here in Serbia. But now, we can listen to tons and tons (and not just the 80’s and 70’s music played here on the radio….they love that stuff) of it.
Here are a few good sites I have found, just in case you are in a similar position:
Word of Truth Radio
Pirate Chrstian Radio
SermonAudio
Shoutcast (tons and tons of music from around the world)
Rush Limbaugh (I need news somehow and CNN international just doesn’t hack it)
Your favorite radio station from the US.
[Update 08-18-2008 05:13:48] Added Pirate Christian Radio and Sermon Audio
Think for a minute about the holidays you celebrate: Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Good Friday, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Haloween, etc…. Have you ever wondered how they line up with what you claim to believe? Why is that important? Well, if you aren’t careful, you end up like the Roman Catholic Church and think things like famadihana are ok. For more on it go read this article at the BBC website. Here is a quote from the article:
There have also been clashes with Christianity. Early missionaries to the country tried to stop it and today increasing numbers of evangelical Christians are turning away from famadihana.
Perhaps surprisingly though, the Roman Catholic Church, the largest in the country, no longer opposes it.
For his part Jean Pierre stressed that in any case it is not a religious ceremony, but a tradition.
I don’t know anything more than what I read in the article, butI believe that true Christians would and should seperate from this kind of behavior. Why? Well, once the body (the earth suit) has died, the soul leaves the bod. That “person” isn’t around any more. What use is there is revering the body?
Don’t get me wrong, we have many things in our US culture that are the same way: Christmas and Santa (no, he isn’t real). Easter and the Easter Bunny. Haloween. The list goes on and on. We need to be very careful in what we think, say, and allow. Otherwise, we won’t be able to honestly look at our fellow Brothers and Sisters and explain to them why a practice like famadihana is wrong without being hypocrytical. Go think about it for a bit.
…under water restrictions here in Cacak. Before you think “That’s not so bad” this isn’t your typical we have water restrictions but I’m still going to water the street type of restrictions we see so often in the US. Nope…this is a no water in the spiggot type restriction.
We think it started 2 days ago, but aren’t really sure. We started simply having bad water pressure yesterday…then it came back last night. Today, there were times of no water. We asked two friends and they both said the same thing. When will it end, we asked….no one knows. Probably once it starts raining.
To that end, we bought 20 liters of water today to have to drink. Tonight, we are going to run the tub full so we have a source of water to flush the toilet, etc… tomorrow.
I’m sorry for the lack of posts the past week. This past week was really rough for me. I had my worst day since being here: I didn’t want to go out and spent the whole day looking on the internet. That didn’t help, but I wasn’t up to talk to anyone.
Thanks for your prayers! I’m back, mostly, and feeling better. PTL!
In an update to this post where I talk about ways to contact us, I mention that I’m not using the Gizmo client. Well, after ditching pidgin and skype and gizmo (the client not the service) for Wengo Phone , I decided to switch back. Why? Well, I had forgotten that I was using the pidgin encryption plugin and I started having issues receiving calls with Wengo. So, I’m back to using the Gaim software and Pidgin now.
But, yesterday, I downloaded and tried the new version of Unbutu (the 64 bit edition). I think this winter, I’m going to try to get it on my laptop and working. When that happens, I’ll find a free SIP Phone to use. Any suggestions?
[Update 2012-12-26 06:52:08] Wengo Phone is now QuoteCom. I updated the links.
Remember New Rome It’s in Was in Ohio near Columbu s but the town got disolved because it was leeching money off of people who drove through the little burb (100-200 yards of road if I remember right).
I came across a tool today called Wordle. It will build a word image of a bunch of words, an rss or atom feed, or several other options. I decided to make one of my maxsons.org atom feed. I thought it was interesting.
Lydia is growing so fast, but she had a rough couple of weeks. We were in Greece for a week the end of June and had a great time. But Lydia definitely had a hard time getting back into a good eating/sleeping routine. A couple of weeks after we got home, she started with the up and down cycle of good and bad days (diarrhea, not eating, whiny) that would eventually lead us to the dr. Thankfully, our friend and tutor, Marijana, went with us and everything turned out fine. Lydia just finished 10 days of a probiotic to get her little digestive system back on track and this week she has been so much better…happier, eating like her old self (oink, oink), and no more tummy issues! She’s certainly starting to gain back some of the weight she lost. Thank You, God!! Even though it was a tough time, it is so neat to see how He takes care of us:)
Now for the “ludi” part…which translates to CRAZY! We have 3 friends, college students from the US who came for 2 months to work with a summer English program, who left for Belgrade at 2 AM to catch an early AM flight back to the States. One of their favorite places to eat is this fast food stand in the centar that has chicken sandwiches and french fries and happens to be open 24/7. They were planning to meet some friends at the “chicken stand” at 1 for one last meal in Serbia. So Matt and I thought it would be cool to go see them off. He went to a concert in the park and hung out with friends by the river drinking coffee for hours and I was home with Lydia. Around 12:30, she started fussing so I went ahead and got her out of bed to get ready. I really thought I could slip on long pants, socks, shoes, and her jacket over her PJ’s and she’d go back to sleep as soon as I put her in the stroller and we started walking. Was I ever wrong!! We got down there and she was ready to mingle…especially when she saw the french fries! Jelena (our friend who watches her when we go to language class) was there and held her and fed her french fries the whole time :^) Poor Lydia, at first the french fries were really hot and she scared herself with one, but then she got so mad when we made her wait for them to cool off more. And by the time we walked with our friends back to their apt. (which is only a block from ours), she was positively punchy. She kept squinting her eyes and giggling randomly as we walked down the street!
We had a great time giving our friends a proper send off and Lydia doesn’t seem to be feeling any ill effects today, but I sure am tired. I must be getting old…maybe I’ll join Lydia for naptime today:^)