So especially now that all my siblings, and even some of their significant others, have blogs (including Britt, Gina, Shane, and Ben), it's going to be a pain to check and see when everyone has updated their blog. I found a great tool today for making this easier.

First of all, if you're using Blogger and you haven't turned on the site feed, do so now. It allows readers to use a tool that will alert them when there are new posts. When you see a little graphic somewhere that looks like , this is usually a link to a site feed in either RSS (really simple syndication) or Atom format. To turn it on, check the Blogger help entry titled How do I change my site feed settings?.

You'll notice the little XML image on the sidebar of this site, but underneath it is something new - a link to Bloglines, that looks like this:



Bloglines helps you to create a list of all the blogs you read, and will display which ones have new posts, just like an e-mail program does. So if you create a Bloglines account and subscribe to this site, you can see when there are new posts using Bloglines. But you can also see, at a glance, when any of the Mooneys have posted something new. Cool, huh? Programs that do this are called "RSS reader aggregators". They basically aggregate other content on the web for you.

I've seen other programs that do this, but this is the best one I've seen yet. It's free, and it's online, so you can access it from anywhere. You can add subscriptions to any site that includes a site feed, including two of my favorites -- Neal Boortz' Nealz Nuze and James Taranto's Best of the Web Today. On those, or any other sites that regularly publish content, just look for the little XML graphic. You can even get comics (Bloglines has links to Dilbert and Get Fuzzy), weather, and news via RSS.

The best part is that if you're hosting your blog on blogspot, you don't even have to turn on the site feed for it to work with your site. So it works with my siblings' blogs even though they haven't turned on the site feed yet.

Labels: tech

So I've been a little behind on pictures lately. Isn't it funny that we feel guilty about that, and let people give us guilt trips over that? I mean, did our parents fret over whether they took enough pictures for any particular month? Uh-oh! July only has eight pictures! I'm such an awful parent!

Well, today you have a plethora of new pictures of our kids to enjoy! Go to the albums page to see them all.

And now it's my turn to give a guilt trip -- if you have pictures of MY kids that you've haven't sent to me, SHAME ON YOU. Get off my website, e-mail me those pictures (full-size, please), and then you're allowed to come back and view my pictures.

Labels: life

Today was getting rough before we even left the house. We were headed to have dinner with Amy's uncle Bill. Amy's aunt died a little over a week ago, quite unexpectedly, and it has hit the family hard. We made dinner plans that included Amy's brother and his family, and another of Amy's aunts. Amy worked hard in the kitchen all day, and we left a little late, as usual, but we still managed to get out there pretty close to on time.

Unfortunately, one of the tea pitchers we had in the back turned over and spilled -- pouring about a third of a gallon of concentrated sweet tea all over the back of our three-month-old van. So when we got to Bill's, instead of me watching the kids while Amy got dinner set out, I was outside cleaning the car, hosing off the removable cargo bins, rushing to keep ants out of our stuff.

At one point after dinner, I was sitting at the breakfast bar, holding Jeremiah, trying to keep him from getting into everything. Before I realized it, he had grabbed a candle in a glass candlestick (and a big one at that, too), and it fell to the floor in a big crash, pieces going everywhere.

As we were preparing to leave, I got back outside and found ants all over the cargo bin - which had been left outside to dry, but I suppose hadn't been cleaned off as well as it needed. So I spent a few minutes getting a couple of dozen ants off of it as it began to rain. Eventually I figured I had gotten enough of them, and put it back into the car as Amy put Jeremiah in.

I went back inside to say goodbye, and as I got to the front door with McKenna, the windows of heaven opened up and there was a huge downpour. With the umbrella in the car (with ants likely in there, I figured), I just went on and put McKenna in the car, bucked her seat belt, closed the door, and hopped in, by which time the back of my shirt was soaking wet.

We pulled out of the neighborhood and onto Pleasant Hill, making our way slowly since the rain was pretty extreme and visibility was low. The traffic light at Pleasant Hill and Peachtree Industrial was out -- if you've ever had to honor a 4-way stop with three lanes of traffic each direction, I don't have to try to describe how frustrating that was. Obviously, people have very little courtesy in situations like that.

We turned left onto McClure Bridge Road to head through downtown Duluth, and the rain was just as bad as ever. I was watching the side of the road since the middle line was difficult to see, and keeping my speed pretty low, watching for big puddles and what not.

All of a sudden, I heard Amy scream "watch out!" Followed by one long, deafening, intense scream. I looked ahead to see a car in our lane, headed straight towards us. Either he had been going too fast and hydroplaned or simply couldn't see where he was going. Or possibly both. I was expecting him to swerve back into his lane at any moment -- but he didn't. At the last moment, I served onto the left side of the road and around him completely.

As I moved back into my lane, we could see behind us that the car had gotten back around to the correct side of the road and moved on. After I could hear again, Jeremiah was crying and McKenna was asking what was wrong.

Everyone in the Mooney clan knows this, but for those that don't, we were less than two miles away from the location of the wreck where I was seriously injured over fourteen years ago. God protected our family then -- and He protected my family tonight as well.

I was speechless for most of the drive home, kind of in a half daze. Except for when we were on Ga 120, nearing Satellite Blvd, and I see a guy in the middle of the road (it had just stopped raining), waving one of those little red batons. I slowed to stop, not knowing what was going on, and it was a cop, trying to stop traffic, to let a single car out of the Korean church. No police lights on or anything, just a guy in a vest waving a little red baton trying to get people to stop who are going 50 miles an hour downhill on wet roads. We were, of course, going much slower since I was still a bit shaken up, but traffic coming the other way (which had not been slammed by this storm yet) was not stopping, and this cop was getting angry. I bit my tongue and waited to be waved on, but after what we had gone through tonight I felt that this was downright silly. If he wanted people to stop, he should have been a little more conspicuous.

We made it the rest of the way home without incident, though we did pass by a wreck at Sugarloaf and Old Norcross that was halfway cleared. Other than that, McKenna wanted us to repeatedly explain to her what had happened when Mommy screamed. Three-year-olds want to know everything about the world around them.

So we got home, brought the kids in, and as I was unloading the car, I found a few more ants, of course. The kids are now in bed, the trash has been taken out, and we can still hear some distant thunder that keeps the adventure of this evening fresh in our minds.

Still wearing a damp t-shirt (from getting soaked nearly two hours ago now), events play out in my mind, as well as big "if's". If I had been going faster, if he had been going faster. If I had panicked. If he had gained control and swerved back into his lane as I was swerving around him. If there had been another car right behind me that might not have known what to do, either. If I had gone through that unexpected 4-way stop sooner, or later. If the light had been working. If I had chosen to take a different route (I almost did choose to avoid that road).

But most of all, what's going through my head is that now, as it was fourteen years ago - God has designs for us, and He is in control. And that no matter whether we escape without injury, survive with major injuries, live with life-long limitations, or die unexpectedly -- what is important is that God is honored above all else, and that we understand that our time here is limited and is to be valued like nothing else.

Labels: life

I want this. Someone buy it for me before I spend money on myself...


More great stuff at jesusisarebel.com.

Labels: life

On his blog, Ben posted some of his thoughts about modern worship in a post titled Community and My Glorious:

I've basically been at the forefront of a movement in our church to move to a modern worship style. There are a hundred reasons why I've argued that this is vital to our church, but over this past week, I've started to question them.

I've been thinking a lot about this kind of stuff lately, as well -- as a worship leader, you tend to do that, especially when you've lost members of your worship team over issues of style. Go read Ben's post first, but even if you don't, the following will still be plenty readable. What follows is the comment I posted on his article, but I thought it might be good to capture my thoughts here as well.

---

Good thoughts. I've always thought that people who want a church to only do hymns are virtually no different from people who want a church to never do hymns. I lead worship the way I do because that's who I am, and that's the way God made me. That includes my background both as a kid raised on hymns, and as a teenager yearning to be famous in a rock band.

That said, I think there is something to be said for staying current and relevant. Most of the great hymn writers were controversial in their day, especially the ones who broke new ground in terms of arrangement, harmonization, accompaniment, terminology, rhythm, or any other number of things. And most of those changes were in response to the church holding onto a style that had lost its relevance to the community because the modern culture had moved on while the church stayed right where it was.

I see it no differently than new translations to the Bible. It used to be that all scripture was read from the Latin Vulgate -- it was a difficult transition for the church to move into using translations that the common person could understand in the form of the King James Version, which dominated outright until a new controversy broke out in the 1970's with the release of new translations. Thankfully, the Christian community, as a whole, is much more accepting of a new translations now than it was 20 or 30 years ago.

In the same way that we need to update the translations of the scriptures every few years, I think we need to update the language of our music. I see it as no different.

The reality is that what some see as "holy" in terms of song selection, music style, or presentation, was considered by many to be blasphemy when it was introduced. In the same way, when rock music was creeping into the Christian culture in the 80's, it was considered blasphemy. It is beginning to be considered "holy" now, and will one day lose its relevance to the wider culture, but will still be held firmly in the grip of the church that won't let it go.

Instead of trying to mimic modern culture, I think the church should instead be leading it. We should be controversial not because we're picking up remnants of the modern culture, but because we're challenging the modern culture, and revealing Christ through our cultural leadership.

But we're not going to do that by demanding only traditional hymns and sticking with styles that were popular years and years ago -- neither will we do that by forsaking our own history and repeating our prior mistakes. We must learn from our past -- both in accepting new musical styles, and in not treating them as anything other than what they are -- simply another "translation", that is used as a tool. Musical styles come and go, and the sooner all of our church's generations embrace that, the sooner we can move on to the real business of being that community of love that the world so desperately needs us to be.

Labels: church