I love the prayer of King David in response to God's word through Nathan that David would not be the one to build a temple (2 Samuel 7:18-29, 1 Chronicles 17:16-27). It tells us much about the nature of bold and proper prayer.

To set the stage, David's kingdom has been largely established, the Ark of the Covenant has been sought out and brought back to prominence in Israelite worship, and David has built his palace. He looks and sees that the Ark is in a tent, and purposes to build a temple for God. Through the prophet Nathan, God tells him, in effect, “You want to build me a house? No, I will build you a house, and your descendant will build my house.” Both texts covering this event then give us David's prayer of praise in response to the message he has received.

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Make what you will of U2, but Bono sometimes has some crystal-clear articulations of the Gospel and what it entails. In Bono in Conversation, he makes one of these, picked up by Gene Edward Veith and Vitamin Z:

Bono: You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics—in physical laws—every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It’s clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the universe. I’m absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that “as you reap, so you will sow” stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff.

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D.A. Carson is preaching at Bethlehem this week and next, and is giving a 14-session seminar over the two weekends (Friday night and Saturday) entitled The God Who Is There: Naming God in a Pluralistic World. Jennifer and I have been going, and so far it is quite good.

Some observations he has pointed us to thus far:

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Last weekend, Jennifer and I both joined Twitter. For my part, a large use case for it is sharing links and random thoughts that aren't substantial enough to warrant a full blog post. Previously, these would likely be shared via my Jabber status, instant messgaes, and/or e-mail. Twitter will provide a platform where I can share interesting things I come across in a broadcast fashion.

What is Twitter?

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This is kinda cool and kinda scary. Why do we want Perl 6, again?

I'd like to start the Sunday Reflections thing again, so I'll throw out a meditation God, in His grace, blessed me with towards the end of last summer. I had been reading Isaiah and was towards the end of the book. I was feeling somewhat dry at this time, having read fairly cursorily, yet I felt that there was something for me to learn or see in the midst of alternating depictions of the wrath and mercy of God.

In this mind I sat one Sunday morning with my Bible open to the 63rd chapter of Isaiah, praying and reading and waiting for God to show me something. My meditations focused on the first few verses (1-4 ESV):

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Charles Stross has a good post today on why he, a science fiction author, uses Linux and its associated software rather than Windows and Office. Mostly centering around accessibility of information, it's a worthwhile read on why vendor lock-in and its problems.

Found this today while reading FreeBSD Planet. While I actually find Java's enums somewhat useful, I do agree that they are a bit wonky...

Why art thou cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God. (Psalm 42:5-6a ESV)

This is the great and glorious theme of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones' book Spiritual Depression, a collection of sermons delivered before Westminster Chapel dealing with depression in the Christian experience. With the pastoral heart of a true and loving shepherd, he unpacks various causes of depression, doubt, and inordinate fear in the life of the Christian and directs his hearers (and readers) continually back to Scripture and to the marvelous grace of their Savior as their sure anchor and the cure to their condition.

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One of my projects this winter break (besides enjoying family and studying for my preliminary exams) has been working on a little program to scratch an itch in my backup setup for our home network. I wanted a way to transmit backup files (in the current case, gzip-compressed file system dumps) from a VM to the host machine without the overhead of opening up a full network file system or shell access.

Thus, I give you rstash version 0.1 (very alpha!). It has a server which provides a set of drop boxes into which other hosts can write files. It allows no read access and no access to anything outside the box directories, so it easily handles this case.

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