Jeffrey C. Long

I remember sitting in class at Bible college while my teacher would explain different points on a timeline of the end times. It all seemed so speculative to me, though shared with such an air of certainty. I’ve always been a skeptic regarding end times prophecies, including those that are interpretations of the authority itself, the Bible. Then I happened across the Bible teaching of Steve Gregg and discovered that the current school of Biblical prophecy interpretation is very modern. Someday I’ll write more about it… I’ve been meaning to. Suffice it to say, the beliefs popularized by the “Left Behind” books are very different from that of the historical church.

This has left me with the germ of a thought that I would like to research more. Why are we so fascinated by end-times prophecies and speculation. I don’t really know where to go to research the psychology behind it. So I thought I’d ask you, my readers. What do end-times prophecies mean to you? What meaning do they give to your life? Why is studying them important to you? Do prophecies help you by making the future more tangible? Do they make you hopeful or afraid?

I hope to hear from you.

All around us, we are seeing signs that the economy is going south. The dollar is weak. Gas is nearly $4 a gallon here in Idaho. People are losing their homes and those who are selling theirs are having a hard time.
I’ve spotted another sign: checking cashing and high interest loan businesses. My wife and I both work full time jobs. And we have the added income of student loan money. But still times are tough for us. Because I had to take a job living away from the family we have an additional rent cost. And I drive over 30 miles to work every morning. So we have troubles making ends meet. When we find our selves with more month then money, I often find myself noticing all the check cashing places on the boulevard and thinking “there but the grace of God go I,” and worry that God’s grace is going to run out and there I’ll be.

Recently I noticed that there seemed to be an awful lot of these places. So yesterday I drove down the boulevard and counted. I discovered there is a whopping 13 of these businesses in just two miles.

I think that this is a sign of the economy we live in. The cost of my yogurt, milk and gas have gone up, but my earning power has not.

A couple months ago I was with my wife at a debate contest. We sat down at the judges lounge with an acquaintance of hers who travels with the team. I sat uncomfortably through his demeaning talk about the poor clients in his social work and how they take advantage of the system. But then he decided to minimize the pain of the recession by comparing it to the depression. I blew up. People who are comfortable don’t understand the pain lower income people are in as the economy turns south. They don’t understand that the working poor are becoming trapped by the cycle of credit at these predatory lending businesses. 13 of them!

There but by the grace of God go I. These institutions are preying on the working poor. We need to show more compassion for those who are working hard but having trouble making ends meet. I know I’m talking about myself here. But I have also fallen prey to the lure of judging the poor, thinking they are getting a free ride by the system. That they have control of their situation if they would only work hard. It’s not as easy as that. Poverty is a complicated problem. And part of the equation now are these yellow buildings with red trim offering temporary relief at a high interest rate.

I began this by writing a short biography for my “About me” page. It gradually took on a life of it’s own and I decided that it belonged as a blog post.I am a husband, father of seven children, elementary music teacher and musician. I enjoy reading and playing chess.Since turning 40 I have realized that I have been living off of the dwindling energy of dreams from my teens and early 20’s that have not come to fruition. It is time to dream new dreams. To reinvent myself. I don’t know what that will include yet. My life is being remodeled at the same time as my blog.One thing I’m discovering is that I have wanted to do too many things and as a result have not done any very well. When I experience great music, I want to be as good as that musician and think that I can. When I read great books, I want to be a great author and think that I can. When I watch a great preacher and pastor, I want to be a great pastor and think I can. Unfortunately to do any of these requires that I set aside a lot of time that I simply don’t have as a father and breadwinner. And I can’t be great at all of them. So I’m trying to narrow down the things that I want to pursue into probably one area that I can devote what little spare time I have.In place of all this dreaming, I’m learning to be a fan. When I listen to Pat Metheny, I am able to enjoy his music, rather then imagining that one day I could play like him. I am a fan of my former pastor Doug Murren. Perhaps one day I will be a successful minister. But for now it is enough to be amazed at his communication skills. I’m also a fan of author Neil Gaiman. Of Star Wars. And of Anabaptist theology.One thing that I’ve set out to become is a good fan of baseball. I’m still figuring things out that for most fans are basics. I’m currently watching the DVDs of the Red Sox’s successful effort to win the World Series in 2004. I’m currently at game 3 of the American League Championship against their rivals the New York Yankees. Remarkable that they lost the first three games and then went on to not only win the championship but then the World Series.Along with being a fan, I need to figure out who I am as a minister. While many of my ministry dreams have died, I still have a sense of calling inside me that won’t go away. I’ve not been very successful as a traditional pastor. I have some ideas for how I’m going to minister freed from the expectations of congregational ministry. I don’t know what I’ll do yet. I’ll find a way to play worship music. And hopefully to preach and teach.However, life is very much on hold right now. Our goal is to move the family back to Washington this summer. That requires three dominoes to fall. First, I need a job in Washington in an area close to a school so Deana can finish working on her nursing program. Second, we need to sell our house. And third Deana needs to find a job. That’s a lot of dominoes to fall in the next 5 months. We covet all your prayers.So this puts me in an on-hold position. I can’t figure out who I am as a minister because I’m not settled in some where that I can try new things. Right now, life is revolved around cleaning up, cleaning out, getting finances in order and trying to find a new job. I’m learning to put dreaming on hold while I am faithful to do the work that needs to occupy my time right now.I guess that’s who I am right now in a nutshell. Putting some things to rest and looking forward to a new future.

I’m in the midst of a giant remodel of my website. I’m moving from Typepad to Wordpress.  Stay tuned. I don’t know how long this will take.  

I’ve put a lot of time into trying to organize my world and read a lot about personal productivity. Always with the mindset that I am not accomplishing all I could, and am dropping balls. But this quote from Howard Thurman on the Inward/Outward site says that there is something else to be gained from ordering our lives.

It Takes Time

               

Howard Thurman

                

               

It
is true that for many people the demands upon their lives are so great
that only careful planning in terms of a workable time table can see
them through. Even where the demands are not great and overwhelming,
the economy, the efficiency of an established way of functioning, is
undeniable. The purpose of such a pattern is not merely to accomplish
more work and with dispatch, but it is to increase the margin of one’s
self that is available for the cultivation of the inner life. It takes
time to cultivate the mind. It takes time to grow in wisdom. It takes
time to savor the qualities of living. It takes time to feel one’s way
into one’s self. It takes time to walk with God.

               

Source: The Inward Journey

From website “stuff” comes this startling bit of news.

It may come as no surprise, but almost every email sent in 2007 was spam.About 95 per cent of emails this year - up from 70 per centin 2006 - were classified as junk messages, according to a report fromUS security firm Barracuda, Agence France Presse reported.Most of this is deleted by email filters run by Internet providers before it hits inboxes.Barracuda analysed more than a billion emails received each day by its 50,000 customers for the report, AFP said.

A few months ago I was trying to find free sheet music online of which there is plenty of copyright free texts available. I went to a website that offered me music but I had to fill out a survey. It asked for my email address so I gave it the one I use only for registering at sites and gave it a bogus mailing address. Thank heavens for this. I have never seen such an onslaught of spam. We’re talking anywhere between 20 and 40 messages per day.Fortunately, I have really good spam filtering. My mail provider dreamhost runs Spam Assassin on their server which gets a lot. Then my second line of defense is Spam Sieve on the Mac. As a result I only see a spam email once ever couple days. But I think anywhere between 20 and 50 are being filtered daily from my multiple accounts. Thank heavens for good filters.   

I remember my first latte. A pretty remarkable feat given the proliferation of espresso stands. But I lived in King County 20 years ago when Starbucks was just getting its start in downtown Seattle. I was still going to school at Northwest College in Kirkland, studying to be a pastor. Newly married, living in the married student housing and with newborn baby Alexis in the house, I would sometimes escape downtown to walk through the art gallery. I soon discovered the new coffee shop across the parking lot. I wasn’t much of a coffee drinker… I got most of my caffeine from Mountain Dew. So I tried one of these newfangled lattes and was pleasantly surprised. I found the coffee shop a stimulating location so I began taking a small notebook with me and would journal ideas I had about God and ministry.This was my first latte. But it was also my first notebook. I’ve been writing ever since. When I moved back to Ephrata and started planting a new church, I graduated to legal pads and three ring binders. I researched and wrote, and brainstormed and wrote some more. When the church closed five years later, I had five 3-inch 3 ring binders full of ideas. I still have them.About 4 years ago I graduated to a program called Devonthink. It is one of many digital junk drawer applications for the Mac. I’ve written about it here and thought it was time for an update. Here are some things that I’ve changed about how I work with it.I no longer use Devonthink as my all-in-one repository of all things digital. Instead, I use it to archive either my own writing or articles that I have researched. There are tools in Devon to suck in your contents from your address book, email, del.icio.us bookmarks and pretty much any digital scrap that you have lying around your computer. At first I faithfully imported all this stuff. But when I went through and organized my database today this no longer made sense.For starters, I had imported my del.icio.us bookmarks in awhile ago. And had ferreted away various links in groups. As I was going through, this didn’t make sense to me anymore. When I am bookmarking a page, I am on the internet. And I bookmark in del.icio.us. Keeping links in two places made no sense because it requires constant gardening to keep both places synchronized. And I discovered from the Devon Technologies forum that links don’t impact the artificial intelligence used for finding similar results via “see also.”So, new procedure #1. I deleted all links from my groups. But I still wanted to be able to access them when I was in that group. So in their place I created a single link to my del.icio.us tag for that group. For example, instead of a list of links in my lifehacks group, I now have a single link to del.icio.us/jeffreyclong/lifehacks. Much cleaner, and no syncing required.Devonthink first came out when Mac was running Panther. This was pre-Spotlight. So one of DT’s claims to fame was its ability to search inside documents, not just the document name. This was a wonder at the time but then along came Tiger and Spotlight and suddenly we were able to do this to every document on our computer, with the exception, unfortunately, of what was in DT’s database. At the time, this made it advantageous to move everything you wanted searchable into DT. So I dutifully sucked in all my mail from certain people. But as I went through my database, I found that I had a bunch of stupid correspondence that really wasn’t worth keeping. And like bookmarks it is redundant to keep the data in two different places. With Spotlight I can no put my fingers on any pertinent email I need to.Another area that got purged was my archive of websites. When I first got Devonthink, I was all gee-golly-whiz! about this thing that could suck in entire websites. I was big into the magazine Credenda Agenda at the time, so I thought “wouldn’t it be great to have every issue searchable in my database? So I sucked the whole website in. Pretty cool. Except it made my search results utterly useless. I was constantly getting hits to articles that really had nothing to do with what I was looking for.So procedure number #2 was to purge this entire archive. Now I am going to be much more selective about what I archive.The bottom line purpose of this post that I want to end with is that I no longer believe it is useful to import everything into Devonthink. It requires too much gardening. When I need a contact, I’m going to go to address book, not DT. Mail stays in mail.app. Links in del.icio.us. What _does_ go into devonthink is all my writing. I use the personal wiki program Voodoopad for brainstorming, journler as my Getting Things Done project and task management system, and Bean or Google Docs for writing. Every program has the ability to export as either html or .doc so periodically I export what I want to keep and import it into its appropriate group in my database. This has cleaned up my search results and has also made “see also” far more useful. Hope you find this useful.

The writer’s guild strike hasn’t hit us where it hurts yet, i.e. the interruption of new episodes of our favorite shows. If it does, I will lose some favorites. NBC seems to have suddenly discovered that there is a market for science fiction and given us shows like “Bionic Woman,” “Journeyman,” and my favorite, “Heroes.” Fortunately, Heroes is written in Britain so even if the writer’s strike eventually causes an interruption, “Heroes” will go on. And I think the final season of my ultimate favorite “Battlestar Galactica” has already been written. For some God-awful reason they are making us wait until March for that.Anyway, I’m already in a world where the writer’s guild strike will not have as much of an impact on my entertainment as it will on others. Sure I’ll miss “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Numb3rs.” But really, since moving my TV watching to my computer, I am less dependent on network programming. With Joost I can start watching “Babylon 5,” an old science fiction TV show that I didn’t catch the first time around. On Miro I can watch “The Lab with Leo,” a tech TV show that originates in Canada. And while I won’t get any drama via video podcasts, losing network shows would free up my time for net shows like “Tekzilla” and “Cranky Geeks.” Netflix will also come in handy if the writer’s strike goes on. I’m currently watching the Fox cartoon “The Critic” and have queued up old shows that I didn’t watch like the first time they aired, like the first seasons of “Alias,” and “24.” And finally, lets not forget audio books from Audible and the good old fashioned paperback and hardcover.All told, I think the networks are going to be hurt more by this writer’s strike then the writer’s themselves. They are going to discover that through the avenues of new media we have plenty of things to entertain us besides network television. I know I do.

I’m not big on mornings, but it seems this famous Celtic prayer could get things off on the right foot.I Rise TodayI rise todayin the power’s strength, invoking the Trinitybelieving in threeness,confessing the oneness,of creation’s Creator.I rise todayin the power of Christ’s birth and baptism,in the power of his crucifixion and burial,in the power of his rising and ascending,in the power of his descending and judging.I rise todayin the power of the love of cherubim,in the obedience of angelsand service of archangels,in hope of rising to receive the reward,in the prayers of patriarchs,in the predictions of the prophets,in the preaching of apostles,in the faith of confessors,in the innocence of holy virgins,in the deeds of the righteous.I rise todayin heaven’s might,in sun’s brightness,in moon’s radiance,in fire’s glory,in lightning’s quickness,in wind’s swiftness,in sea’s depth,in earth’s stability,in rock’s fixity.I rise todaywith the power of God to pilot me,God’s strength to sustain me,God’s wisdom to guide me,God’s eye to look ahead for me,God’s ear to hear me,God’s word to speak for me,God’s hand to protect me,God’s way before me,God’s shield to defend me,God’s host to deliver me,from snares of devils,from evil temptations,from nature’s failings,from all who wish to harm me,far or near,alone and in a crowd.Around me I gather today all these powersagainst every cruel and merciless forceto attack body and soul,against the charms of false prophets,the black laws of paganism,the false laws of heretics,the deceptions of idolatry,against spells cast by women, smiths, and druids,and all unlawful knowledge that harms the body and soul.May Christ protect me todayagainst poison and burning,against drowning and wounding,so that I may have abundant reward;Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me;Christ within me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me;Christ to the right of me, Christ to the left of me;Christ in lying, Christ in sitting, Christ in rising;Christ in the heart of all who think of me,Christ on the tongue of all who speak to me,Christ in the eye of all who see me,Christ in the ear of all who hear me.I rise todayin power’s strength, invoking the Trinity,believing in threeness,confessing the oneness,of creation’s Creator.For to the Lord belongssalvation,and to the Lord belongs salvationand to Christ belongs salvation.May your salvation, Lord, be with us always.

Years ago I acquired the domain www.jeffreyclong.com which I use for my website and email. From the beginning, for some reason you haven’t been able to get here by simply typing jeffreyclong.com without the www. It is interesting when I look at my stats to see how many people get here by doing a search for “jeffrey c long” in google. And then there is the occasional misspelling “jeffEry c long.” All seem to get here. But it is now just a little easier to find me. You may simply type jeffreyclong.com without the www and you’ll get here fine.