This is Who My Wife Wants to See so Badly

Little kids are really funny at times, especially when they are REALLY tired. Here is my 3rd grandson. Rose will see him and his two older brothers Monday night.

Another Issue Above His Pay Grade

This in from the upcoming issue of World Magazine.

Grammar as an Emotional Trigger

I've just returned home from a Commissioning Service for a team of missionaries (oops, I forgot to call them Global Partners), composed of 3 couples and a single woman. They are affectionately called the B-Team, a name that bears some significance because of the place they are going, while at the same time hiding some of the details. For their security, I will refrain from using their names. They are all dearly loved.

During the service, I found myself becoming more emotional than used to be common for me, being the rational person that I am. I found it interesting that grammar provided my emotional trigger. We sang a Marie Barnett song that is commonly sung, but the words were changed (changing the focus) from the first person singular to the third person plural. The lyrics were intentionally changed to focus on the people the B-Team will be going to reach, at first singing in a prophetic sense, "You are the air they breathe. . ." At that point in the song, I was thinking, "Nice touch!" The emotions started coming later in the song:

You are their daily bread.
You are their daily bread.
Your very word, spoken to them.
And they, they're desperate for you.
And they, they're lost without you.

Think about it. That's the very reason the B-Team is going there. They don't even know how desperate they are for Jesus. May God bring fulfillment to our future-looking praise!

A little later in the service, Beau Hamlin, our High School Youth Minister, sang a song he had written in conjunction with one of the B-Team Members. I want to share the lyrics with you.

I'm not sure, what to be saying
So, I'll just start talking, maybe you'll see
The anticipation, oh it just keeps building
I don't want to leave but, I don't want to stay

It's like a mourning process, leaving on this mission
Do you know my feelings? Can you feel my tension?
'Cause, I love my family, but I know my calling
And I love my Savior, and my heart is willing

Uneasy? Yes. We're scared to jump.
But, we took the trip and we saw enough.

He's our strength. So we're going to jump.
We took that trip. And we saw enough.

People we met, faces we saw; broken buildings, torn down walls
History of war, crying for life; broken people, needing light.
We didn't see it all . . . but we saw enough.

It's intimidating, 'cause the ones before us
Never found a system, not a one they could trust

We better be longwinded, if we choose to run this
We better keep our focus, we gotta' know we're His

Uneasy? Yes. We're scared to jump.
But, we took the trip and we saw enough.

He's our strength. So we're going to jump.
We took that trip. And we saw enough.

People we met, faces we saw; broken buildings, torn down walls
History of war, crying for life; broken people, needing light.
We didn't see it all . . . but we saw enough.

About 33 years ago, my wife and I were at the same jumping off place. I can remember some of those same emotions. I thank God for these young adults, for their commitment, and for what they will accomplish in His name. Soli Deo Gloria.

CNBC's Jim Cramer calls Obama's Policies "The Greatest Wealth Destruction Ever"

On the NBC Today Show:

I Found an "As You Are Going!"

The idea of this blog entry comes from my devotional reading in the Greek New Testament. On Thursdays, I meet with a small group of guys during what used to be one of our chapel services. In our small group today, students were asked to fill out a Student Satisfaction Survey, designed by Noel-Levitz. The survey was designed to take 20-25 minutes of our time.

I decided to read some of the Greek New Testament (off of my phone), while I was waiting. I remembered where I had left off, having finished Matthew 9, with the great passage on missions. I began reading in Matthew 10, where Jesus names the apostles, and then sends them out (Matthew 10:5). They were to go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. When I got to Matthew 10:7, I thought, "Eureka! I have found it! The great lost "As you are Going!". Here is verse 7, just as I encountered it:

πορευόμενοι δὲ κηρύσσετε λέγοντες ὅτι ἤγγικεν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν.

The NIV text follows the Greek word order more closely than the ESV.

NIV: As you go, preach this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven is near.’
ESV: And proclaim as you go, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’

The word πορευόμενοι is a present participle, usually translated as an -ing word. For years I have heard people assert that the Greek Commission text of Matthew 28:19-20 does not command people to Go! Usually they will identify the "go" word in the passage (πορευθέντες) correctly as a participle (though they seem not to recognize it as an aorist participle), and will state that there is only one imperative verb (make disciples), insisting that the participle (πορευθέντες) should be translated "as you are going."

As I stated earlier, I have heard this for years, usually from people who trained for the ministry at a sister school. The most recent time I heard it was over a year ago, when a prominent speaker (who trained for ministry at that school), made that same comment in a message in our chapel. I asked my boss if he could explain to me why people who studied there (have you guessed that I asked him because he went to graduate school there?) insist on making that false assertion. He speculated that it may have had to do with a very popular professor in the theology department that should have paid more attention to Greek before passing on wrong information (though he probably stated it with more grace that have I).

Concerning the Great Commission text, last year I found a document written by Daniel Wallace, author of the textbook we began using this year as our 2nd year Greek textbook. Last year, I made the article available to our 2nd year Greek students. Unfortunately, the document is no longer available on the web. If you would like to receive a copy of it, I can e-mail it to you, with the annotations I made.

As I continued reading into Matthew 11, I found another construction identical to the Great Commission structure--in Matthew 11:4:

πορευθέντες ἀπαγγείλατε Ἰωάννῃ ἃ ἀκούετε καὶ βλέπετε.

No Greek translator who knows what he or she is doing would dare render that verse as follows: "As you are going tell John what you hear and see." No! The clear meaning is "Go and tell John what you hear and see."

The grammatical structure is what Wallace calls attendant circumstance. Other grammars refer to this a coordinate circumstance. Daniel Wallace describes what happens:

The attendant circumstance participle is used to communicate an action that, in some sense, is coordinate with the finite verb. In this respect it is not dependent, for it is translated like a verb. Yet it is still dependent semantically, because it cannot exist without the main verb. It is translated as a finite verb connected to the main verb by and. The participle then, in effect, “piggy-backs” on the mood of the main verb. (Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, 640)

The participle "piggy-backs" on the mood of the main verb, being connected to the main verb semantically by the word and. So when a participle piggy-backs on an imperative verb, it gets imperatival force. We join them by the word and, which does not appear in the Greek text.

So, the Great Commission text does not say "As you are going . . .", but rather, "Go and make disciples . . ." Anybody who tells you differently has not read much Greek.

The Joy of Inductive Discovery (Greek)

I have been reading through the Greek New Testament once a year for the past several years. I enjoy it very much, and I think it helps me be a better teacher of Koine Greek, DUH!

This year I started off with the Gospel of John (easy), then I read John's epistles (easy), and from there went back to Matthew, at which time I will read straight through the New Testament, skipping over the books previously read.

First year students of New Testament Greek learn a couple pretty common deponent verbs as vocabulary:

πορεύομαι = I go
ἔρχομαι = I go, come

Students sometimes have difficulty with the concept of ἔρχομαι being either I come or I go. Which is it? In my reading today, included in the passage was the healing of the centurion's servant (Matthew 8:5-13). In v. 9 the centurion tells Jesus that he tells one servant to go and he goes, but to another one he says to come and he comes. Both words are used in that narrative:

καὶ λέγω τούτῳ· πορεύθητι, καὶ πορεύεται, καὶ ἄλλῳ· ἔρχου, καὶ ἔρχεται.

At least in this setting, πορεύομαι is the one meaning go, and ἔρχομαι means come. Now you ought to take this knowledge, add $3.50 to it, and be able to buy at least something at Starbuck's.

Who is "The Forgotten Man"?

Late last year I read through Amity Shlaes' book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. The phrase "forgotten man" was used by Franklin D. Roosevelt in a radio address given on April 7, 1932, in a time of economic crisis that many say is very much like our current economic crisis. FDR said,

These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

That quote reminds me of our president's speeches during the electoral campaign, where he "made a career" of criticizing the "failed policies of the last eight years" that expect prosperity to "trickle down from the top". Rather, Obama advocates a "trickle-up" approach to economics, believing that to continue in what he calls "the failed policies of the last eight years", will result in "trickle-up pain" rather than "trickle-down prosperity". For an example of his campaign rhetoric, watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1VzBqqO_M0

President Obama seems to fashion himself after some of our highly-esteemed past presidents: Abraham Lincoln (using his Bible in the inauguration), Franklin D. Roosevelt (see Time magazine's cover from November 24, 2008), and John F. Kennedy (see Slate magazine's article from early in campaign). Obama's (Non)Stimulus Plan (parenthetical editorial comment added for effect) shares many of the attributes of FDR's New Deal, with heavy emphasis on infrastructure spending. My father lived through the Great Depression. I'd like to pick his brain about it, but I can't because he's already in heaven. I promise I won't try to get you to eat Potato Soup, Dad. Those who lived through the Great Depression that I have polled seem to be unanimous in the belief that what brought the U.S. out of the depression was World War II, not any of FDR's policies. Shlaes' book seems to agree, and offers unemployment statistics and market values to show how FDR's policies failed:

Obama's plan indeed may help the forgotten at the bottom of the economic pile. Julio Oseguedo and Henrietta Hughes are two such people (though Ms. Hughes' request was fulfilled by the wife of Republican Representative Nicholas Thompson). The reality, though, is that it is incorrect to call the person at the bottom forgotten.

In 1883, long before FDR, William Graham Sumner of Yale University used the phrase "the forgotten man". He (correctly, I believe) identifies the middle class as the truly forgotten--that the burden for trickle-up prosperity fall upon the middle class. This quote is insightful:

As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or in the better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X. . . . What I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is the man who never is thought of. . . . He works, he votes, generally he prays--but he always pays. . . .

A and B are represented by the fat cats among our president's friends. Many of them evade paying taxes. Some of them even make it into our president's cabinet. Julio and others (represented by X in Sumner's quote) are helped, but it is always at the expense of C. As a member of C, I am in favor of helping X. But the reality is that the greatest help is not always in the form of a handout. The current administration seems not to understand that, as long as they can:
1) pass stimulus and bailout bills
2) print more money
3) reach into our pockets, and pass the bill onto our children and grandchildren

I don't like it. The economy is in a crisis, which is portrayed as the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Such hyperbolic rhetoric is blatantly false. FDR's New Deal did not bring the nation out of the Great Depression. Obama's New New Deal has the likelihood of taking us into the greatest economic crisis ever. Those of us who stand to suffer the most are the forgotten ones in the middle of the socio-economic pile. We are mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren, soaking them with the sins of the fathers, to the third and fourth generation. I pray to God that I'm wrong.

Pelosi on the Urgency of Passing The Stimulus (sic) Package

I can imagine that the Aflac Duck is saying "Huh?":

Is there a preacher in here?

We watched this video in our Faculty Meeting on Friday. This video is rather long (about 8 minutes), but is worth watching. It is of a 5th grader, Dalton Sherman, who is addressing an assembly of 20,000 from the Dallas (Texas) Independent School District. Enjoy!

2 Bibles and 2 (or was it 3?) Presidential Inaugurations

I originally planned to write this short piece a couple days ago. When I saw the video done by CatholicVote.com that I posted yesterday, this post got 'poned (if you don't understand, insert another post at the point of the apostrophe).

This month we have seen two African presidents installed (though "African American" is the proper description of one of them): President Barack Obama of the United States of America, and President John Atta Mills of Ghana. Both of them took a presidential oath with a Bible. The fact that President Obama took a do-over oath (almost secretly--citing an abundance of caution) is really an afterthought to this post. I really wanted to talk about the Bibles used.

Obama took his oath, not on the Quran, but on the same Bible that was used in the first inaugural of Abraham Lincoln. John Atta Mills also used a Bible, but when I saw the photo (click on the link just to the left to see a larger image of the photo above), I was taken back. It is an English Standard Version, which is a relatively new entry (2001) into the world of English Bible Translations. The ESV site, linked above describes their translation philosophy in these terms: we have sought to be “as literal as possible” while maintaining clarity of expression and literary excellence. The more I use the ESV, the more I like it. In fact, I am reading through the Bible devotionally this year from the ESV. If you do not have an ESV, you also can read it online at the ESV site. It was earlier this year, when reading in Genesis from the ESV, that I noted a play on two Hebrew words in the same verse that I had never noted by reading any other English Bible. I checked the Hebrew text, a sure enough, two consecutive words, built off the same root. The ESV is the only English Bible I have ever read of that text that allowed me to make the mental connection between the words in the original. Try it, you just might like it!

Life--Imagine the Potential

President Obama has championed a woman's right to choose for years. Since taking office, he has been loading his agenda onto the office White House website, on which he reaffirms his commitment:

Under the heading of Reproductive Choice, the website says:

Supports a Woman's Right to Choose: President Obama understands that abortion is a divisive issue, and respects those who disagree with him. However, he has been a consistent champion of reproductive choice and will make preserving women's rights under Roe v. Wade a priority in his Adminstration. He opposes any constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's decision in that case.

CatholicVote.com has produced a stunning video called Life--Imagine the Potential. What do you think of it?

Just for Play on Inauguration Day

Today, January 20, 2009, with incredible fanfare, the 44th President of the United States, Barack H. Obama, will assume office. After my second-year Greek class takes their weekly vocabulary quiz, they will translate this:

λέγει αὐτῷ ἡ γυνή· οἶδα ὅτι Μεσσίας ἔρχεται καὶ ἀναγγελεῖ ἡμῖν ἅπαντα. ἀποκριθεὶς δὲ ὁ τοῦ Μαθθαῖου εἶπεν πρὸς αὐτήν· Ἰδοὺ σήμερον Μεσσίας ἔρχεται μετὰ τῶν νεφελῶν, καὶ ὄψεται αὐτὸν πᾶς ὀφθαλμὸς, καὶ ἄρξονται κράζειν· χαῖρε, βασιλεῦ Ὠβάμα.

A Cardinal for whom I can Cheer

Kurt Warner is the man! His story was a Cinderella-story turned Phoenix-story, recounting his rise from obscurity to prominence, his fall back to obscurity, and finally, to the rebirth of his career with the Arizona Cardinals.

He played college football at the University of Northern Iowa (not really a powerhouse), was sent packing by the Green Bay Packers, and ended up throwing paper towels down the aisles of a Hy-Vee grocery store.

From there he had a shot at the Arena Football league, where he starred, which catapulted him to another shot at the NFL, making the St. Louis Rams team. When he got his shot, he made good on it, leading the Greatest Show on Turf to the Super Bowl championship. It was a feel-good story. The fact that he openly professed allegiance to Jesus Christ made it even better.

Now he's been around a long time, and is 37 years old. When the Arizona Cardinals drafted hot prospect Matt Leinart in 2006, the talking heads thought Warner's career was ebbing. In the end, it was Warner, not Leinart, who kept the QB job. Now Warner and the Arizona Cardinals are going back to the Super Bowl. Go Cardinals!

Harry S Truman and the "Get a Dog" Quote

An interesting quote is frequently attributed to one of our former presidents, Missourian Harry S Truman (I understand that the initial S is not supposed to have a period after it): "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog." I don't know if Truman said it or not. According Ralph Keyes' book Quote Verifier (2006), there is no hard evidence that Truman ever said it. Lots of famous quotation sites will have that quote attributed to him, for example, here, or here, or here.

Regardless, it seems that most recent presidents get a dog. I just recently received an e-mail with a link to the upcoming issue of World magazine. In it I found this Gary Varvel cartoon (Indianapolis Star) of President-elect Obama's dog:

44 Presidents Morphed to Music

Sports Potpourri

OCC College Football Pool. The faculty and staff at OCC participate in a college football pool each year, which is run by Terry Bowland. I usually try to make my picks, and come out a respectable distance from the leaders. Going into the bowl games (can you believe how many bowl games there are?), I was right smack-dab in the middle of the upper division. However, at this writing, I am under .500 on my bowl picks. I don't remember ever doing this poorly.

Chicago Cubs. The team that plays at the corner of Clark and Addison in Chicago (Wrigley Field) has a habit of breaking my heart. 2008 was worse than normal. I really believed the Cubs would make it to the World Series. When they were swept by the Dodgers in the playoffs, I even mentioned giving up on them. In my heart of hearts, I knew that come 2009, the Cub juices would be flowing. Right now I'm thinking (a la Ernie Banks) that The Cubbies will Shine in 2009!! Aaron Worshek, the student assistant in the OCC Learning Center(also a Cub fan), mentioned to me almost a year ago that his father travels frequently to Seoul, Korea, where Cub jerseys are sold considerably cheaper than in the U.S., and offered to try to get me some jerseys on a trip. I told Aaron that I would love to have a chance at getting some jerseys. His dad made a trip in November, and I got jerseys for the family (not for the married kids, sorry) for Christmas. You can see Rose, Kim and me with our Cubs jerseys on. Kim and I got 1984 Cooperstown Hall of Fame Collection Ryne Sandberg home jerseys (mine is larger than hers), and Rose got a current Alfonso Soriano home jersey. Thanks, Aaron.

Roger Powell Jr. In the past, I have written about Roger Powell Jr., called "The Rev" by his teammates at the University of Illinois. Roger played in the NCAA Championship game in 2004, losing to the University of North Carolina. The following year he played for a CBA team in Rockford, Illinois, winning the CBA Rookie of the Year award, which got him enough notoriety to make the Utah Jazz roster at the start of the next season. He was waived by the Jazz in January 2006, and landed in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he played for the Arkansas Rim-Rockers, leading the NBA Developmental League in scoring. The following year he played professional basketball in the Italian League, in Teramo, Italy. This season, he was on the pre-season roster of the Chicago Bulls, but was released shortly before the regular season started. He has been playing in Israel, with Hapoel Migdal Jerusalem, an Israeli pro team that competes both in an Israeli pro league, and in the European pro league. In the photo you can see the Hebrew letters spelling Migdal, which means tower. Go, Roger! Play well, and may Yeshua Ha Mashiach be seen in you, as you play in the land where he walked.

The Joy of a Laptop Hard Drive that can Breathe

Kim's laptop has been crawling along, rather than running, which is what one wants his/her computer to do. I fought with it today, and won! It is an old Dell Inspiron, and doesn't use a SATA drive, which limits the size. I was shocked to find out that the drive that came with the machine was only 25GB, and it was full to the gills (pardon the Fishy expression). I found a 60GB drive at a good price, and set out to clone her drive. Dell had two hidden partitions (one in FAT16 and one in FAT32). I had to outsmart the machine to clone those partitions, then expand the primary partition to its max size. It is done, though.

Veni, Vidi, Vici!!!! Below are the images of her old and new c:\ drives, as evidence. Now her computer can breathe. The first image is of the new drive, and the second of the old.

9 Miles from Mexico--or "Four Nations, (Hopefully) Under God"

I do not share the pessimistic views of some of my brethren about the nation in which I live. My ultimate allegiance is to the kindgom of God, but I am patriotic. You could almost say that I'm proud to be an American (even though I bristle at the ethnocentricity of our use of that term--ask me what I mean sometime if you don't understand). I'm a strong advocate of leaving the words under God (and, to a lesser degree, of the words one nation) in our pledge of allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag
of the United States of America,
and to the Republic, for which it stands,
One Nation, Under God, Indivisible,
With Liberty and Justice for all.

While I recognize that there are many things that are "not right" about our nation, it is still a wonderful place to live. If it were not so, nobody would be talking about the issue of illegal immigration. What is the future of our nation? Nobody knows--not even Barack Obama. A Russian professor has been predicting the fall of the United States for years, and has now fixed the date: 2010 (that's only half way through Obama's term). Igor Panarin, a Russian university professor and former KGB analyst, has even created the map. The 48 continental states become four nations, and according to that map, I will live only 9 miles from Mexico (what is now Oklahoma, according to Panarin's projection, will be part of The Texas Republic, which "will be part of Mexico or under Mexican influence"), even without moving. You can read Andrew Osborn's report of this from the Wall Street Journal by clicking here. According to Panarin, I'll be Canadian, but where I currently live is only 9 miles from Mexico!

From One of Our Favorite Places

David & Rose; Jennie, Rose & Patty (3 sisters)--from a very special place overlooking Table Rock Lake.

For those tempted to put cookies out for Santa . . .

You never know what might happen when you sleep.