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I grew up for my early years in a place called Lomalinda, in the rolling plains of the Meta province in central Colombia. Google Maps image at 3 degrees, 18', 17.17" North 73 degrees, 21' 43.65" West.

Lomalinda means "beautiful hill" in Spanish, and the name fit.

The land was donated to the government for the use of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) by a Colombian army officer who owned the ranch land in that area. Settled in 1964 by a group of a dozen or so SIL workers including my parents, Lomalinda grew to a population of around 300 during the height of its use. It served as the center of operations for SIL in Colombia for thirty years, a time in which much was accomplished to analyze the languages of the indigenous peoples of that country.

Neil Cole provides a brief summary of his vision for Christians associating and collaborating in simple and effective ways he calls Organic Church in this Leadership Network interview. He is a key influence in the house-church direction I and my family have chosen.

A great place to find useful sites is the PC Magazine 2005 Top 100 Sites You Didn't Know You Couldn't Live Without. And don't miss their Top 100 Classic Sites.

Wait, why not just include the whole list here:

If you suspect something fishy has made its way onto your system and your virus and spyware programs aren't picking it up, download HijackThis , unzip the program to a new location, run the program and produce a log file, then copy and paste its contents into the space provided on this web page: this HijackThis log analyzer.

This process will tell you what experienced people believe about the programs running on your system. If you have any BAD items, search the list of spyware removal strategies found on the same website.

The kids love to visit the tide pools below Cabrillo National Monument in Point Loma. Check out the tide prediction and go some time! The park closes before dusk so be sure to plan your visit to coincide not only with low tide but also the hours of operation.

Having grown weary of the enmity between the compassionate, hard-working, generous people I know from all points on the political spectrum, and having watched for a long time the forces at work, I've identified what I believe is the key point of tension and my personal strategy for addressing it.

The two-part key point of tension is this: people are continually tempted to use problematic means to achieve admirable ends; people tend to justify their own means by focusing on their own intentions and criticize the means chosen by others by ignoring their intentions. In short, we are comfortable with our own shortcuts but find fault with those of others. People of all shades of social/political persuasion do this all the time. I'll come back to this in a second, but first let me offer my solution.

CivicSpace and Politics

Is the following a fair characterization?

What this means is that conservatives like to have power concentrated in the hands of a few, trusted “people like us� who give orders to an obedient mass. They like it when things are expensive because they have more money, and they like to keep things expensive by quashing competiton, securing an ever-larger slice of an ever-shrinking pie. Progressives like to empower everyone to send messages to the leadership and value a diverse range of opinions. They like it when things are cheap or free, allowing everyone a sufficient slice of an ever-growing pie.

Jason Evans posts this insightful as.it.is: Interview w/ Jim Henderson who reflects on the challenges faced by young Christian leaders, plus some other stuff. Here's an excerpt:

Young people intuitively know that using people to "fulfill their vision" is bogus and bankrupt but aren't sure what to do in its place. They feel caught in a double bind and think that the only way out is to drop out or sell out. I have a suggestion: Drop the money and the titles (if need be) and go lead anyway.

It looks like one of the key points of stress between the conventional church and the house/simple/organic church movement will center on a disagreement over what the goal and trajectory of the Christian church really is. This disagreement is rooted in diverging views of what Scripture tells us about God, ourselves, and God's purpose.

On the one hand, we have people who say they would really like others to respond to God but live as though they are convinced no more than a few actually will. On the other hand we have people who believe an ever-increasing number of people will respond to the call of God. East San Diego County pastor Mark Hoffman, in his book On Earth as it is in heaven presents from Scripture his view that Jesus' chief mission was to establish the Kingdom of God on earth. It was the center of His teaching and activity. He believes the Kingdom is for now, not later, and that it comes through Christians, not governmental power.

Tired of those smoking exhaust pipes belching smog in front of you on the road? File a complaint with the State of California and a letter goes to the owner!

http://www.arb.ca.gov/enf/vehcmplts/complaints.htm