BTW: for the rest of the semester, this blog is focused on my thoughts about life and God…come Christmas we’ll get focused…

Other note: Suffering is very hard, and I want to point out systemic issues, not act like suffering shouldn’t exist.

At church yesterday, the pastor says: “everyone bow your heads, and close your eyes” which as a preachers kid, I quickly learned meant “squint your eyes enough that he *thinks* they’re closed, but they’re still open enough to see all the people who raise their hand.” Don’t hate.

He then says: “everyone who is suffering, raise your hand so I can pray for you as we begin.” and without any qualifications to what that means, half the room shoots up their hand. HALF? there were about 200 people in the room, so that’s 100 suffering people, and 100 not-quite-suffering people.

Right now, I have no solutions. But if in the family of God, half of them are suffering, is that broken?

Or how about this: I *thought* there were about 1/4 suffering people, before the poll. Is that broken?

Love ya.

I follow a very specific philosophy of connecting with people on the internet. That means I want to connect, but not everyone does. As far as I can tell, my breaking point is following 300 people. Beyond that, Twitter is *only* a tool for publicity and random narcissism for me.

But not everyone agrees. Some people follow 16000, 25000, or even 100,000 twitterers. To me, it’s like this: we’re on the phone, but instead of a conversation, I just sit and listen to you talk. It’s one-way communication in a two-way age. “follow *everyone* who follows you.” The problem is, they don’t want to know me, and I don’t want to know them. So it’s mutually assisted narcissism.

Not only that, *my* tweets go from valuable to them, to spam as well! Can you see how good content becomes spam so quickly? Spam is quietly threatening Facebook, Twitter, and basically all of social media. But unlike email, you can actually fix it!

Ok, that’s the end of my three post rant on spam. I really just think it’s valuable to clean up your digital life.

Digital Spam is like a disease. It’s the “Signal/Noise” principle. as the noise increases, it gets much more difficult to even detect the signal you were hoping for in the first place! I want to hit some quick areas spam has killed me, and hear from ya’ll.

• Twitter: I like Twitter. A little bit. I want to go through all the tweets on my front page, and rank them, scale of 1-5(high) based on how much I like the tweeter, and the content of the tweet:
  3, 5, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 2, 2, 5, 1, 2, 5, 1, 3, 3, 5, 2, 3, 1. Averaging a 2.3. My hope is to get it to a 3.6, I’m not sure how that’s going to happen. For an idea, see my last post
• Facebook: Now I love Facebook, but let’s do the same thing, except this time I’m *just* ranking how well I know these people.
  2, 4, 3, 3, 2, 4, 0, 2, 5, 0, 2, 0, 0, 5, 2, 3. Averaging a 2.1. I simply don’t know a lot of these users.
  and Notifications as well! a bunch of them have *nothing* to do with what I care about.
• Google Reader: No ratings now, just the simple fact that about 1/3 of the posts I read (and write probably) are recycled, or simply dull.

Now the solution. Whenever you sign up for a new service, your first question is always: “how do I maximize the information I take in.” The answer is: Unsubscribe, Unfollow, and Unfriend. Do what’s necessary to connect with the people you take information from, and if they’re not interested, hit the button.

This morning I was sitting down to some pancakes and oatmeal, and had this thought:

Twitter is nice. I like it a lot, and use it all the time. They’ve made it very easy to follow someone, but not so easy to unfollow them. Good luck trying to unfollow a bunch of people. The thing is, the cost to follow one useless aggravating spammer is low, but following hundreds of them makes Twitter useless for anything but publicity. Connecting becomes impossible.

So what if a tool was built called “the Chopping Block.” Here’s how it would work.

• You set a cap for most people you intend to follow. Say 250.
• Once you follow the 251st person, the Chopping Block automatically kicks out the twitterer of lowest value to you.
• This is decided by their spam-value, if you’ve ever @ed them, their follower/followed ratio, length of time on twitter & following you etc.

So using all these factors, you slowly bump off the annoying tweets, while adding high value people that you enjoy. At the same time, it’s painless, and makes for a better experience.

Ok, this doesn’t exist yet…as far as I can tell…let’s make it happen.

Maybe you’ve known about this forever, but I just discovered it, and I’m super excited.

BibleGateway offers a daily reading plan. You can pick your version, and the style of reading: Chronological, OT/NT, Historical, 90 Day Bible, or Beginning. But the exciting part is, if you use a blog reader, you can subscribe to the feed to get it with your blogs. Or a daily email, but I greatly dislike daily emails.

So yes, if you have trouble “making time” (me too), to read scripture, and get off track or whatever, this tool is for you!

At Catalyst, Aaron Keyes was leading Worship, and he said something that really helped me.

He said that when the priest would inspect the lamb for the burnt offering, it wasn’t the priest that was up for inspection, or the person giving the lamb, but the lamb itself. And that once the priest declared the lamb pure and clean, it was good worship.

Just a great reminder that my worship is contingent on Jesus pure life and his work on the cross, not my holiness.

So I suck at posting regularly (or ever). Semester is killin me, good reasons, whatever. Come November, it’ll be back, yea.

I’m at Catalyst right now, and have been thinking over the course of this packed day…

1. Why do churches suck at connecting with other churches?
2. What needs to happen to help needs get met with resources?
3. What is the best “model” to see that happen?
4. Does it matter enough to fight through the differences?

I’m going to start researching these questions, and I’d like your feedback.