Random

✽ Arizona is an interesting place in that the people here seem to gravitate to the extreme ends of the poles -- and very few work the middle. Today's case in point, City of Chandler officials are trying to decide the future of the traffic photo-enforcement program. They're either going to double its size or scrap it altogether. There are vocal advocates for both. ~ link

✽ Someone shared a link to a Lori Sealy song on Twitter, which led me to her website. She's writes music for worship. And it's definitely worth passing the links along. ~ website | YouTube Channel

✽ Those in the know are saying that El Niño will continue to bless Arizona with another month of wet weather. This is so weird. It may be a jungle April. And it will certainly be a lively fire season once all this new vegetation dries out in July. ~ link

✽ In related news, the two baby Pakistan Mulberry trees that I'm tending for the Arizona Rare Fruit Growers, are starting to bud. They were rootless sticks when I stuck them in pots a few months ago.

✽ Hans Küng: "Compulsory celibacy is the principal reason for today’s catastrophic shortage of priests, for the fatal neglect of eucharistic celebration, and for the tragic breakdown of personal pastoral ministry in many places." (i.e. clerical child abuse) ~ link

✽ "A small but growing number of school districts across the country are moving to a four-day week, in a shift they hope will help close gaping budget holes and stave off teacher layoffs..." ~ link

✽ "How a Secretary Made and Gave Away $7 Million" ~ link

Random

✽ Jim Hoisington, a friend from our life in Texas, suggested that this clip might be helpful for church planters. He's quite right. And I'd add that anyone wanting to connect with people, including most pastors, might find it a nudge in the right direction. Of course, by sending this message via YouTube through a blog I'm more or less preaching to the choir.


✽ There is a new Twitter feed for Evangelical Covenant Church news. ~ link

✽ No, you were not supposed to reset your clock last night. That happens to many people early next Sunday morning -- when California changes to Arizona time. Like Guam, Arizona does not participate in daylight savings time.

✽ $11.4 million wedding ~ link

✽ Arizona CityFest is starting to take shape with some online presence -- Website | Twitter | Facebook | MySpace | YouTube | Vimeo | flickr. Wow, just keeping all those connections going will be a full-time job for a few dozen people.

Random

✽ I'd like to go on a YikeBike.


✽ We're fooling ourselves if we think that we're actually changing the world because we've joined a Facebook cause.

✽ "The black church is dead" -- Perhaps the white church will soon become history, too. We can hope. ~ link (via)

✽ There are still 5 million people paying AOL for dial-up. ~ link

✽ "A nationwide referendum is taking place in Switzerland on a proposal to give animals the constitutional right to be represented in court." ~ link

✽ The latest e-letter from MasterPiece Church is online. ~ link

✽ Also, check out the tattoo on the MasterPiece website. A college student had one of the circles from James Choung's gospel presentation inked into her foot.

✽ 2 million people are homeless in Chile after the earthquake. Winter is quickly approaching. ~ link

✽ "Only 0.3% of total Christian expenditure is actually directed towards unevangelized non-Christians." ~ link

✽ So, why would anyone stand in line on April 3rd to pay full-price for an iPad, when in a few months the same machine, with the inevitable initial kinks fixed, will be selling for less? Be practical. It looks great but it's still just a machine. ~ link

✽ Fr Ernesto Obregon, the Cuban-born Orthodox priest, speaking through his online alter-ego, Fr Orthoduck, has some keen insight into how to make peace in the Middle-East. ~ link

✽ Richard Mouw on "staying faithful to Genesis 1" -- Exactly, except that many misunderstand when they hear someone say that we shouldn't take Genesis 1 literally. They think that they're saying people shouldn't take it authoritatively or that the credibility of the message is somehow in question. To the contrary, when we read our own cultural assumptions (in our case modernism) into the text without first hearing what was originally being said we're not taking the Bible or its message seriously enough.

✽ Overhauling Detroit for a positive future -- shrink it, raze lots of it, re-farm much of it. ~ link

Missional church

✽ Jeff Maguire's two minute explanation of the missional church. As JR Woodward says, "Pretty good for two minutes."

✽ More fodder for the discussion:

...Church is not a part of life for the missional Jesus follower; it is a way of life with others who are on a similar journey.

The missional life shows up in every endeavor, because the church has been sent by God into the world to reflect his heart for the world. This is what it means to be on a mission with God, partnering with God. It is not a mission that is pursued as something added to daily life, something outside the normal range of activity, a quest to do something beyond life's assignments. It is a way of seeing oneself as partnering with God in daily life, executing the mundane as well as pursuing the sublime, with an intentionality of blessing people and sharing the life of God with them. ~ Reggie McNeal in Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church

Random

★ JD Payne is doing a tweet-a-thon to highlight the influence of missiologist Roland Allen (.pdf).

★ Send some of those "curry people" our way! There are lots of vacancies in Phoenix and I definitely miss the smell of cooking curry wafting through the neighborhood, as it did on our street in Turlock. ~ link

★ Wooo... Betel nut has been banned in the Marshall Islands. That is a gutsy move. ~ link

★ The late North Korean dictator, Kim Il Sung, "while publicly denouncing 'Western decadence and imperialism' -- had an extensive luxury car collection that included Mercedes, Lincolns, Fords, Cadillacs and Citroens," according to a tell-all book by Col Kim Jong Ryul. The former North Korean military aid spent 16 years under cover in Austria buying stuff for the dictator and his family. ~ link

★ ECHO is fantastic -- creative micro scale (think tires) sustainable farming en route to refugees in Haiti ~ News Video | ECHO Website

★ In Great Britain they're using classical music as a tool for social control and a deterrent to bad behavior. No wonder young people loathe it! ~ link (via)

Random

• Haiti housing options and dilemmas. Time is running out. ~ link

• Cheryl made a key lime pie and then gave me Jake Shimabukuro's latest, Live, for my birthday. (There are some advantages to aging.) Jake is definitely at his finest when he is in concert, absorbing and rebroadcasting audience energy. Live feels like you're there in the room.

• Capt Sully, America's favorite pilot, is retiring. I am guessing that there will be more than a fleet of water spraying fire trucks out for that one. ~ link

• "Holy Holograms!" -- And the Word became a hologram and projected his image into our midst. ~ link

• More natural disasters: 2 killed, 6 injured as giant waves slam cruise ship in the Mediterranean | 6.4-magnitude earthquake damages buildings and major bridges in Taiwan.

• Pirate season has begun. ~ link

• There is a shortage of tomatoes and some restaurants in the US are eliminating them from burgers. I'm guessing that the Aussie readers are saying, "No worries! Just stick a beet and an egg on it!" ~ link

• There are 100,000 abandoned mines in Arizona. There is also a move afoot to fill some of them with used car tires. Sounds like an environmental disaster waiting to happen. ~ link

• Another use of the Moravian Daily Text and TRIP method ~ link

Random

• The internet is changing shape again: "...What is clear is that today a significant portion of Internet traffic does not flow through the backbone networks of giant Internet companies like AT&T and Level 3. Instead, it has begun to cascade in torrents of data on the edges of the network, as if a river in flood were carving new channels..." ~ link

• Proposed legislation would "make Arizona the only state to criminalize the presence of illegal immigrants through an expansion of its trespassing law. It also would require police to try to determine people's immigration status when there's reasonable suspicion they are in the country illegally." ~ link

• Facebookers prefer broadcast news -- Googlers prefer print media ~ link

Eliminate Saturday mail?

The US Postal Service wants to eliminate Saturday mail delivery. ~ link

Because of electronic communication I'm now more open to that than before. I wonder, though,

• if perhaps it would make more sense to cut Wednesday service so that there are fewer days in a row without delivery.
  
  
• if in addition to eliminating a day of regular delivery another option would be to do PO box deliveries seven days a week and charge slightly more for those boxes (and that specialized service).
  
  
• if merely eliminating a day of service will make enough of a difference. One of the greatest challenges for the USPS is that Congress mandates a level of service that is economically unsustainable without subsidies.
  
  For example, I'm not against subsidies for rural service to Alaska or Guam. We currently pay the same price for mail service to remote locations as we pay for urban service in the lower-48 states. That doesn't make business sense. But it makes sense for national unity. Such services, which are in the national-interest, should be subsidized. Just as some highways which are critical to the greater good of the country (e.g. the Interstate system) are subsidized so should some services of the Post Office receive national-interest subsidies.
  

I realize that in some ways this last suggestion will be seen as a step backward. Many see the best way forward as complete privatization of the Post Office. I'm not against the concept. However, the only way that privatization would actually work is if the mandates were totally eliminated -- or at least reduced. But if that happened the expense of privatization wouldn't be necessary. With fewer economically unfeasible mandates and some limited subsidies tied to certain national-interest services the current quasi-governmental agency would be sustainable.

We Americans like to rag on our post office. But the fact is that we've created a lot of unrealistic expectations for them and then we're unhappy when they can't meet them. We set them up for failure and then laugh about how they've failed us. That's not fair.

Disclosure: Neither I nor anyone in my family has ever worked for the USPS. However, I am a postal customer who uses PO boxes and I am used to standing in Post Office lines on a fairly regular basis. I've had a lot of time to observe and ponder why things are the way they are.