26 Ways IT Support Differs from being a Pastor

1. People come to you for help — instead of assuming that, if you really knew your job, you would intuitively know they needed help, and come to them without being asked.
2. Everyone immediately tells you, to the best of his ability, what his or her actual issue is.
3. Everyone who asks you a question really wants to hear the answer.
4. Everyone who asks you for help really wants to he helped.
5. Everyone who calls you really does want his/her computer to work the very best it can.
6. You and your callers agree that computer bugs and problems are bad, and should be done away with.
7. When you identify viruses, spyware, unwanted popups, and crashes as "bad," and target them for elimination, the folks you help don't accuse you of being harsh and judgmental.
8. Nobody who calls you is actually in love with the computer problems and misbehaviors they're experiencing.
9. When you identify a computer malady you want to eradicate, nobody can wave a book or point to a Big Name who argues that it is actually the latest, greatest "thing" in computers, and should be earnestly sought after, cherished, cultivated, and spread abroad.
10. Nobody who calls you for help thinks that he's hearing a little voice in his heart telling him that what you're saying is just so much smelly cheese.
11. Everyone to whom you give sensible counsel will hear, heed, remember, and follow that counsel — they won't insist on "feeling an inner peace" before doing it.

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Prayer Vigil

they kept up, night and day, a continual repetition of the English Liturgy; being divided into relays and watches, one watch relieving another, as on ship-board; and never allowing at any hour the sacred fire to go out. - The Life of Nicholas Ferrar

They are extraordinary well reported of by their neighbours, viz. that they are very liberal to the poor; at great cost in preparing physic and surgery, for the sick and sore (whom they also visit often), and that some sixty or eighty poor people they task with catechetical questions: which when they come and make answer to, they are rewarded with money and their dinner. By means of which reward of meat and money, the poor catechumens learn their lessons well; and so their bodies and souls too are well fed. - Introduction to the Life of Nicholas Ferrar

In Nicholas Ferrar himself, " the Levite in his own house," we have the rare spectacle of a man whose one end in life " was to make himself or others better ;" by his veneration for saints and martyrs entitling himself to like veneration; " spending eighteen hours out of the twenty four in useful business, serious study, devout prayers, or heavenly meditations;" comforting and supporting his companions in every trial; on his death-bed "passing the days and nights in heavenly counsels to all the family;" reprobating the fatal and still prevalent delusion that literary power atones for an author's want of moral purpose...- Introduction to the Life of Nicholas Ferrar

The volume of business in religion far outweighs the spiritual capital of its leaders. The initial consequence is that leaders substitute image for substance, satisfying the customer temporarily but only temporarily, on good days denying that there is any problem (easy to do, since business is good), on bad days hoping that someone will show up with the infusion of capital. No one is going to show up. The final consequence is bankruptcy. The bankruptcies are dismayingly frequent. - Eugene Peterson

The deepest need is not food and clothing and shelter, as important as they are. It is God. - Thomas Kelly

Earth is crammed with heaven
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Eugene Peterson & Annie Dillard

"Annie Dillard prays with her eyes open. She says, Spread out your hands, lift up your head, open your eyes, and we'll pray…. She gets us into the theater that Calvin told us about, and we find ourselves in the solid biblical companionship of psalmists and prophets who watched the 'hills skip like lambs' and heard the 'trees clap their hands,' alert to God everywhere."

ANNIE Dillard is an exegete of creation in the same way John Calvin was an exegete of Holy Scripture. The passion and intelligence Calvin brought to Moses, Isaiah, and Paul, she brings to muskrats, rotifers, and mockingbirds. She reads the book of creation with the care and intensity of a skilled textual critic, probing and questioning, teasing out, with all the tools of mind and spirit at hand, the author's meaning.

Calvin was not indifferent to creation. He frequently referred to the world around us as a "theater of God's glory." He wrote of the Creator's dazzling performance in putting together the elements of matter and arranging the components of the cosmos. He was convinced of the wide-ranging theological significance of the doctrine of creation and knew how important the understanding of that doctrine was to protect against the gnosticism and Manichaeism that are ever-present threats to the integrity of the incarnation. Matter is real. Flesh is good. Without a firm rooting in creation, religion is always drifting off into some kind of pious sentimentalism, or sophisticated intellectualism, or snobbish elitism. The task of salvation is not to refine us into pure spirits so that we will not be combered with this too solid flesh. We are not angels, nor are we to become angels. The Word did not become a good idea, or a numinous feeling, or a moral aspiration; the Word became flesh. It also becomes flesh. Our Lord left us a command to remember and receive him in bread and wine, in acts of eating and drinking. Things matter. The physical is holy.... (read the rest here)

"Skilled bowyers [bow makers] ... will agree that a perfect bow never begins with a perfect stick of wood. In fact, there is no such thing as a flawless stave from which a bowyer begins the process...The same can be said of people...Once sin entered the world all who have been born begin from day one to grow like wood - twisted, crooked, knotty, hard, and often difficult to work with...God's determination to use us is not thwarted by our flaws!...imperfect people...[become] perfect examples of the Master Bowyer's willingness to choose and use flawed individuals. Thankfully, the human demonstrations of His willingness to use crooked bows are not confined to people found in the pages of the Bible. There are living and breathing examples among us in our times." - Steve Chapman

Roller Coasters

“For a full six minutes or so a person could enjoy a neck-popping, vocal-chord-stripping, hip-bruising ride on a state-of-the-art machine that boasted some of the highest peaks and lowest valleys known to those who thirsted for a violent, near-death experience. But to enjoy those six precious minutes the riders had to stand in a line that resembled the winding path bowels take through the human abdomen.” - Steve Chapman