Blessings Padre.

Michael Card ended up recording one of my favorite Cello songs with John Catchings, called “Joy in the Journey”. “There is a wonder and wildness to life”.

I’m big on computers. Things in the computer world change rapidly. If you want to work with computers you have to keep up with relativity. You can’t just work with the computers themselves, you also have to work with the people who rely on computers.

There’s an article by Eric Raymond that really goes into detail about what sort of mindset you need to be a “keeper” of computers. It talks most importantly about how you need to think in order to serve others and yourself with efficiency.

The main link is here:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

But the true points are very well distilled:

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.
4. Freedom is good.
5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.

Funny, that sounds interestingly familiar in a lot of ways.

Most of his writing talks about thought processes and life dedication, but one of the main points for me, aside from self-evaluation, is the concept of freedom.

When we think of the word “free” these days, we tend to think of “buy one get one free” or “sign up now and get two months free” or “buy $25 worth of stuff and get free shipping!”, but that’s not “free”. That’s contingent on something else. That’s a gift at cost under certain circumstances. It’s not free, nor is it freedom.

When I think of “Free” I think of the really early software development days, from when I was in diapers, that I can only read about, but can still experience the spirit of in others.

Richard Stallman, although an occasionally controversial figure, has told a bit of his story to this effect here:

http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/

The evolution of culture and personality over a 20 year period where computers were finally evolving rapidly and hadn’t yet made it into popular culture in the true gestahlt sense.

I think that may be because very few people actually study history in a way that’s applicable to modern life.

It’s great to know that we have mobile phones at our disposal and easily obtainable computers at most workplaces, and the ability to send letters without postage stamps and pictures without film development, but that’s just a part of life, the same way the church is.

We go to church, or bible study, or youth group, we check our facebook, or myspace, or e-mail, or bank balance, and we don’t always think about the crazy folks with ridiculous ideas who made it possible to gather together by finding new ways to gather in secret by drawing the IXOYC in the sand and got the word passed to like-minded people, or made proprietary software developers useless by writing their own way to make mainframes and printers communicate while they were staying up for 20 hours a day in college.

One of the things that gets glossed over the most is how much time is involved in making change possible. It’s a journey, not a happy meal, and there is joy in the journey.

Since your trying to put together a sermon with the help of people on the internet I think you should somehow relate your topic to the internet as well. That being said here are two crazy ideas.

“Jesus is my facebook friend!” – maybe talk about Relationships and the internet and God. Could work well on a second level because of the medium your doing this sermon thing on.

“You’ve got Prayers” – this is kind of a spin off from Bruce Almighty when Bruce send all his received prayers to his email. This topic could just focus around prayer. Maybe you could also relate prayer to the internet by talking about high speed internet connections vs dial up.