Do you ever test your humility? How deep are its roots? How wide are its walls? This poem got me thinking about the authenticity of my humility:
I want to be
famous
so I can be
humble
about being
famous.What good is my
humility
when I am
stuck
in this
obscurity?
-“Dilemma” by David Budbill, cited in Good Poems by Garrison Keillor
Gateway Worship just released their CD God Be Praised. While the entire CD may not suit your delight, one song undoubtedly will: “O The Blood” sung by Kari Jobe. Here are the lyrics and a video of the song:
O the blood
Crimson love
Price of life’s demand
Shameful sin
Placed on Him
The Hope of every manO the blood of Jesus washes me
O the blood of Jesus shed for me
What a sacrifice that saved my life
Yes, the blood, it is my victorySavior Son
Holy One
Slain so I can live
See the Lamb
The great I Am
Who takes away my sinO the blood of the Lamb
O the blood of the Lamb
O the blood of the Lamb
The precious blood of the Lamb
What a sacrifice
That saved my life
Yes, the blood, it is my victoryO what love
No greater love
Grace, how can it be
That in my sin
Yes, even then
He shed His blood for me
From the poet, Wendell Berry:
I dream of a quiet man
who explains nothing and defends
nothing, but only knows
where the rarest wildflowers
are blooming, and who goes,
and finds that he is smiling
not by his own will.
-Wendell Berry, Given (Berkeley, Counterpoint, 2005), “Sabbaths 1999,” pp. 70.
Picture: Michele Asselin for The New York TimesThe New York Times recently published an article following two men who are using social media and telecommunication technology to change the way diplomacy is done. The article tracks the lives and ideas of Alex Ross and Jared Cohen, both of which are State Department employees. Here’s an excerpt of some of their developments:
It is fair to say that Ross and Cohen are obsessed with mobile phones; they speak at length about telemedicine, tele-education and something called telejustice (the details of which they haven’t quite worked out yet). At an early-morning meeting in Palo Alto with mobile-banking experts, they looked for ways to expand a successful pilot program used to pay policemen via mobile phones in Afghanistan to another conflict zone in Congo. In both cases, as truckloads or planeloads of cash meant to pay policemen dwindled on their way from the capital cities to the provinces, so did the chances for lawful governance. Mobile banking is well established in places like Kenya, and cellphones are ubiquitous worldwide, even in poorly developed regions. Here was a way to use technology to address diplomacy, development and security concerns at once: direct payments to officers’ phones, which would be transferable to the phones of their distant families, could become a powerful tool for stability, even in Congo. Or at least that was the hope.
Read the full article here.