Vision

If you have 58 or so minutes to spare from your busy life, watch this video preached at a youth conference by Paul Washer. As a disclaimer, I don’t know him, however the message he proclaims is excellent.

Start laughing (or crying) whatever suits you.  I’ve decided to again move my personal web log or blog. 

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This time, I decided to go all the way and host it on my own site at http://www.joshchampagne.com/blog   I can now control every nit picky aspect of my Wordpress installation as well as having access to all the wonderful plugins that I’ve been wanting to try out. 

The other thing is, I can now successfully cross post to xanga!!!  Matter of fact, I wrote this post in Performancing which posted it to my Wordpress install on joshchampagne.com/blog which in turn cross-posted it to xanga.   Now that’s what I call Web 2.0!   
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That’s all that comes to mind at the moment…

I spent the last two weekends in Oregon. Two separate trips; two very different yet similar experiences.

Weekend #1 consisted of an 8 hour road trip to the town of John Day, in Eastern Oregon. I visited a shooting range, the wonderful people of John Day Mennonite Church, and a newly built mansion built to look somewhat like an old castle (see photos below this post).

The second weekend, I went down to Western Oregon with my family, for the Bible Conference at Hopewell Mennonite Church. The theme was Unity in the Brotherhood. A visiting speaker, Raymond Harnish, from Keystone Mennonite Fellowship over in PA, gave most of the messages. What he had to say was excellent. The devotionals by some of the local young men and leadership were also very good. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss any of it. I’d go into more detail, but I think blogs are limited in their ability to convey the spirit of an event except for those who participated in the event, if you know what I mean. If you were there, I don’t need to tell you what it was like I’ll leave it at that for now.

Here are some photos from Eastern Oregon:

In school I absolutely loved mathematics… until algebra came on the radar.  All of a sudden, there was no absolute answer and no absolute way to come to that variable answer.  It took me by complete surprise and I don’t think I ever recovered.  Mathematics still fascinates me (yes even Algebra, Calculus, Geometry and the more advanced forms the science takes), however my interest changed and today I find myself in the computer and information technology sector focusing on the human/psychological, social and user interface aspects, not developing the latest mathematics-laden algorithms.  With the exception of markup languages like HTML and XML, I couldn’t code if my life depended on it.  Mental block or something.  I’ll leave that area to others.  I can sure recognize good programming in the end product though :-)  Apple Computer, the Mozilla Foundation and Wordpress come to mind.  Microsoft lost it long ago, though I love their new Office 2007 user interface.

Sorry, this isn’t supposed to be a software/tech rant.  I was just thinking about how our lives are like algebra and software.   So full of variables.  Variety is the spice of life as the old adage says.  Yet with all the variety and complications of our culture, most of us want a foundation, a constant, a coordinate in the x,y,z 3-dimensional grid of time and space.  As Christians we find that constant in God.  He was, is, and will be.  When we realize how all encompassing and awesome He is, and what His Son has done for us, we repent of our own attempts to create a viable life for ourselves here on earth and give everything to Him to manage.  In turn, He shows us how to live and gives us this planet to “have dominion over”, and provides other human-beings to build relationships with and to lead to Him.  We have such a short moment to influence the world, after which we move on to another world where the constants and variables of existence are so different from our current experience that we can’t fully comprehend it until we are immersed in its reality.  “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)

What other understanding of the universe is as complete as that of a 21st century Christian?  We have so much to be thankful for and to believe in.  Let’s not keep it to ourselves, but share it with others.