Pray for the peace of Jerusalem

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vents are transpiring so rapidly it’s easy to allow them to fly past without recognizing the warning signs—but we do so at our own peril.

Just a few decades ago the concept of the Jews gathering together in their homeland in the last days simply made no sense. The Jews were dispersed in 70 AD and had not had a homeland for almost 2,000 years. But then in 1948 the state of Israel was re-established. [Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel] Now “the gathering” at least seemed a possibility, however unlikely because the Jews had been scattered all over the globe. Why would someone uproot his family and move them back to their ancestral homeland? Perhaps unemployment or death could prompt such a move, but it just did not seem likely that large percentages of Jews would be willing to uproot their families after having lived in other lands for generations.

But I believe we are rapidly heading toward what theologians call the End Times. Current events seem to be spiraling rapidly toward the final events we read about in the bible. And today’s issue of The Times of Israel printed a story that is a clear indication of this trend: After attack, MK calls on Jews to leave France.

Here’s an excerpt:

“There is no Jewish future in France,” Katz, of the National Union party, said, adding that the state of Israel is the future of the Jewish people, and that Jews should not trust their fate to “Sarkozy, Obama or other world leaders.”

The Israeli Foreign Ministry, by contrast, expressing shock over the attack, said Israel was confident the French authorities would do “everything possible” to bring the perpetrator to justice.

Time to get ready. It’s getting hard to ignore.

Baruch ha Shem ha Mashiach, Yeshua! Baruch ho Shem Adonai!

Happy St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick’s Day is a Celtic holiday, and as my family lays claim to Celtic ancestry through Scotland I present the Scottish Declaration of Independence on this holiday.

The Declaration of Arbroath 1320

To the most Holy Father and Lord in Christ, the Lord John, by divine providence Supreme Pontiff... we know and from the chronicles and books of the ancients we find that among other famous nations our own, the Scots, has been graced with widespread renown.... Thence they came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west where they still live today. The Britons they first drove out, the Picts they utterly destroyed, and, even though very often assailed by the Norwegians, the Danes and the English, they took possession of that home with many victories and untold efforts; and, as the historians of old time bear witness, they have held it free of all bondage ever since.... The high qualities and deserts of these people, were they not otherwise manifest, gain glory enough from this: that the King of kings and Lord of lords, our Lord Jesus Christ, after His Passion and Resurrection, called them, even though settled in the uttermost parts of the earth, almost the first to His most holy faith. Nor would He have them confirmed in that faith by merely anyone but by the first of His Apostles—by calling, though second or third in rank—the most gentle Saint Andrew, the Blessed Peter's brother, and desired him to keep them under his protection as their patron forever.

The Most Holy Fathers your predecessors gave careful heed to these things and bestowed many favours and numerous privileges on this same kingdom and people, as being the special charge of the Blessed Peter’s brother. Thus our nation under their protection did indeed live in freedom and peace up to the time when that mighty prince the King of the English, Edward, the father of the one who reigns today, when our kingdom had no head and our people harboured no malice or treachery and were then unused to wars or invasions, came in the guise of a friend and ally to harass them as an enemy. The deeds of cruelty, massacre, violence, pillage, arson, imprisoning prelates, burning down monasteries, robbing and killing monks and nuns, and yet other outrages without number which he committed against our people, sparing neither age nor sex, religion nor rank, no one could describe nor fully imagine unless he had seen them with his own eyes.

But from these countless evils we have been set free, by the help of Him Who though He afflicts yet heals and restores, by our most tireless Prince, King and Lord, the Lord Robert. He, that his people and his heritage might be delivered out of the hands of our enemies, met toil and fatigue, hunger and peril, like another Macabaeus or Joshua and bore them cheerfully. Him, too, divine providence, his right of succession according to or laws and customs which we shall maintain to the death, and the due consent and assent of us all have made our Prince and King. To him, as to the man by whom salvation has been wrought unto our people, we are bound both by law and by his merits that our freedom may be still maintained, and by him, come what may, we mean to stand. Yet if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom—for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

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Given at the monastery of Arbroath in Scotland on the sixth day of the month of April in the year of grace thirteen hundred and twenty and the fifteenth year of the reign of our King aforesaid.

Endorsed: Letter directed to our Lord the Supreme Pontiff by the community of Scotland.

The Odyssey and a new camera

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ne of my creative passions is event photography. I have enjoyed the challenge of event photography for more than 20 years, but hadn’t learned many useful techniques until about seven years ago when the company I work for asked me to photograph an event after the contracted freelance photographer got sick just a couple days before the event. That was an interesting night as I attempted to photograph about 200 people packed into a dark room lit primarily by a laser light show.

Since then I’ve had many opportunities to take pictures in less-than-desirable lighting conditions and have learned to relish the challenge—not that I always succeed. But I’m learning and enjoying it more and more.

So when our immensely talented friend, Stephanie, played the part of Circe, the Enchantress, in Warren County High School’s production of Homer’s Odyssey, I took my camera along to see what luminous roadblocks I could overcome. The play was great. Stephanie was awesome (as usual). And I got some nice pictures.

This one is of our friend, Stephanie. She’ll be famous one day.

But these were all taken with my old Canon 30D camera—the first digital camera I owned. And then, just a week later, I received my new camera: the Canon 7D. This new camera is a significant step up from the 30D and I can’t wait to give it a good workout. But so far I haven’t had the chance.

Not that I haven’t tried—I took the camera with me to the store two days ago and when I stepped out of the car to go back into the house I put it in the crook of my arm and it began snapping pictures on its own. I ended up with four pictures before I pulled the camera out of my bundle of packages. The picture below was one of them. Kind of cool! I can’t wait to see what this camera can do when it’s actually intentional.

Unintentional – but still kinda cool.

iPhone posting

Perhaps I would post more if I could post directly from my phone. I just downloaded the Blogger iPhone app, so I guess we'll see.

A pastor’s advice to pastors

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ne of my favorite blogs is Reformation 21. I recommend it as one of your daily stopping points online.

As part of the blog author’s preparations for an upcoming conference, he is beginning a series on pastoral character—something the readers of my blog will recognize as an issue of supreme importance to me. Please take a look at Reformation 21 and follow it in the near future so you may benefit from this research. We all need to pursue the character of Christ. And, so much more, our church leader need to pursue this holiness.

As a personal aside, my pastor is one of the good ones—one of the shining stars. I praise God every day for what He has done in my pastor’s life to make him the man of God he is today.

[The pastor]

must have the heart of a preacher; that is, he must stand in awe of the God in whose Name he preaches, and with love seek the welfare of the souls to whom he preaches. He must know himself to be entirely undone in himself and have a lively impression of his own inability, so that he will not trust too much in having studied properly. He ought to pray much beforehand, not so much to get through the sermon, but for a sanctified heart, for a continual sense of the presence of God, for suitable expressions, and for a blessing upon his preaching to the conversion, comfort, and edification of souls. His concern ought not to be whether the congregation will be pleased with him and will praise the sermon, but his motive must rather be a love for the welfare of the congregation.

Wilhelmus à Brakel, The Christian's Reasonable Service, 2:138

Music and the Barbs

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few months ago I posted A tribute to a great lady – Joan Barb. This dear lady had such an incredible impact on the lives of all those who knew her. And I was honored to be involved in her funeral services, which was a celebration of Jesus Christ, the Savior who made Mrs. Barb the woman she was. It was an amazing and wonderful and tearful and joyous goodbye.

When my sister and I were in our early teens and were struggling to make sense of the world and of the things we found in scripture, Mrs. Barb was a continual inspiration. While adults were having foll blown meltdowns about electric instruments and percussion, Mrs. Barb talked seriously with us about what we saw in scripture as it applied to music. Eventually, she even asked my sister and me to present our music philosophy to her AWANA girls. She said that although she disagreed with the styles of music we liked, she thought our music philosophy was scriptural and well-thought out. She was probably one of the people who impacted my musical philosophy/theology the most while I was growing up.

A few weeks after the funeral, her daughter Michelle contacted me about singing at the brunch her church’s singles group was going to have in February. One thing led to another and the date is now upon us. This coming Saturday (February 18, 2012) my church’s worship team Aver Union will be presenting a few songs. After we are done, the worship leader from another local church in Stafford, Va., will be presenting a message from the bible. Brian Burke is a long-time friend and was one of the first people I ever played in a band with. We used to meet at his house, where he had an astounding collection of recording equipment and instruments. We’d jam together and have deep theological discussions. And we’d talk about how great it would be to play for real some day.

I’m looking forward to the reunion. And I’m grateful to the members of Aver Union who were willing to set aside a Saturday on relatively short notice to play at my friend’s event. It’s great being a Christian, praising the Awesome God, and having friends who do the same.

The playlist embedded here contains five of the seven songs we will be presenting. The only one on this playlist actually recorded by our team is "All of Your Words." The others are there for your enjoyment and edification.

Portraiture - my passion!

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t’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything. I have become far too busy lately. But even in my busy-ness, which is all work related, I managed to enjoy photography.

I was asked to take portraits of the people in my group at work who were interested in updating their profile pictures on our internal social networking site, D Street. I, of course, immediately accepted this offer and we set up a day to take some “executive portraits.”

Our firm’s branding calls for a somewhat casual look set in natural light and taken in one of our offices. So I took all of these pictures in a small conference room on the 9th floor of our Rosslyn office, just across the Potomac River from the Kennedy Center and downtown Washington, DC. Unfortunately, you can’t see much of the tourist landmarks in these pictures, but you can see the people—which is the point of portraiture anyway.

Sophia is Ethiopian and has wonderful stories to tell. She’s kind and caring and amazingly competent. I am proud to be one of her associates.

Kate is our newest editor. She is vivacious, entertaining, and an extremely good editor.

Rob is a fantastic proposal manager who is a total and complete pleasure to work with. I am blessed to be part of his team.

I don’t work very closely with Jenni, but she is one of the people I would never have met if it were not for my photography. This passion of mine has brought me in contact with more awesome people than you can imagine.

Tyrone is one of our graphic artists, so I sit very close to him. I am a graphic designer with a focus on page layout and Tyrone is a graphic designer with a focus on illustration. Tyrone is a wonderful person who exudes gentleness, kindness, and a love for life and humanity.

The beautiful Kristen is our chief of staff. She is so competent in every way that it boggles the mind. A true pleasure to work with ... always!

Sasha is a recent addition to our team. She is incredibly intelligent—speaking five languages and still acting like a normal person. We are all in awe of her intellect, and yet she is delightfully unassuming.

James is the lead graphic artist on our team. He’s very talented and is also a very good manager. He seems to have an innate understanding of people’s motives and motivations.

Suzanne is another person I don’t get to work with very often. But she is special among this group. After all the other portraits had been taken, she came back and asked me to give it another go. I used my favorite lens, even though it is a difficult lens to use. I’m glad she came back because my first attempts didn’t even come close to this one.

This collage is just a few of the almost 100 portraits I took that day. It was a blast!

Aver Union

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od loves us so much! God brought us to Front Royal, Virginia, and directed us to a church that is unique among churches in a way that cannot be expressed. But we are so grateful to God to have brought us together with such wonderful and dedicated Christian people—people who love God with all their hearts and love each other.

Last November, our worship teams recorded a few of the original songs written by members of the three worship teams at our church. The embedded playlist contains most of the songs we recorded just a few months ago. I am in two of the three teams, so I am singing background vocals or playing bass guitar on quite a few of these songs. Also our pastor sings background vocals on quite a few of the songs. He’s not only a great pastor and a good friend, he’s also quite a good singer.

I hope you enjoy this music. Let me know what you think.

I guess I should explain what "Aver Union" means. Perhaps the best way is to let the album cover explain it. Click on the picture to see a larger version. Here it is:

Blog Header - January 6, 2012

I took this picture the week of Christmas about two years ago in one of my firm’s downtown Washington, DC, offices. It just looked quite festive in the lobby.

Natural or exhibitionist?

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Tim Challies, one of my favorite bloggers, posted an interesting article about breastfeeding in public. I have not had to deal directly with this issue, but found the discussion quite interesting.

I was not breast-fed and we adopted our son, so my wife did not breastfeed him either. So we have not had to even consider the whether-or-not-to-breastfeed-in-public topic, although my libertarian bent would probably put me in the leave-the-decision-in-the-hands-of-the-mother camp.

Read the article. See what you think.