I can’t resist sharing this. I’ve been watching this show for awhile now. If you have never heard of it, enjoy (and now you have).
I thought this was an amazing short film about hope and struggle. Thanks David for sharing it with me. I would also encourage you to check out the story of Nick Vujicic on his website, Life Without Limbs
It’s interesting how a little cleaning can make you remember old friends. You go through a closet and find a bunch of old pictures and you hit facebook looking for familiar names. Another thing that happens for me though is that I get a little free space and usually my guitar makes it out of the closet.
A little tune up and maybe a light dusting brings it to happy life once more.
As of late, new friends have been encouraging me to get out the ol’ git fiddle again regularly. My friend Mark, especially. Tonight I got another surprise. Another new friend who I’ve played with at church a few times… well, I never really realized how good he actually was. His name is Nathan Hiltner. Check out his video below. The sound and framerate are a little off, but you will get the idea.
I’ve seen too many people live with this kind of facade where all they do in front of other so-called “Christians” is live a lie.
I found this video on Vimeo earlier today and really liked the metaphor in it for Christians. I’ve met a lot of so-called Christians who put this perfect front up that everything is fine when things in their personal lives are really screwed up.
- They may go to church like a regular couple on Sunday, but minutes before they walked through those doors they were ready to kill each other. The show continues till they get back in the car.
- They avoid talking about that relative who molested another family member because they fear being rejected by their family for opening up about the “family secret”.
- They struggle with private sins and habits and don’t ask for help because they fear that they will no longer be accepted in the church if it were to become known.
- Worry about looking and acting perfect has taken a toll on their lives, their stress levels and their faith. They don’t know who they are anymore.
I’ve seen too many people live with this kind of facade where all they do in front of other so-called “Christians” is live a lie.
What happens when we become authentic in situations like these?
… when your pastor confesses that he still doubts at times?
… when your worship leader admits that he has a drug problem?
… when your youth pastor’s wife leaves him for someone else?
… when your teenage son or daughter tells you that they are going to be a parent?
Oh, we say we want authenticity.
We say we are seekers of the truth. But how do we respond when people show that they are in fact marred by sin and regardless of position or pay, still in need of forgiveness and the hand of God working in their lives.
I remember there was this song we used to sing in children’s ministry when I was young:
He’s still working on me to make me what I ought to be.
It took Him just a week to make the moon and stars,
The sun and the earth and Jupiter and Mars.
How loving and patient He must be, He’s still working on me.
How often we proclaim our perfection and refuse to let Christ work in our lives!
Okay, I’ve seen some people who were really good at jumping rope. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a lot of people who were good at jumping rope doing it at the same time to music in a choreographed dance routine. If you aren’t hooked in the first minute, wait another and keep watching. This is pretty impressive.
You know there are times in your life where something happens and you really can’t control how or why it happens, but it leaves you feeling frustrated and powerless? Okay, I had an experience like that. I am a collector by nature. I keep lots of pictures on my hard drive. I know I shouldn’t but it just happens like that. Ultimately, I think they all need backed up somewhere online, but I haven’t figured out where yet. Well, after my son was born in January, I had tons of pictures laying around in various places on my computer. I had bought a one terabyte hard drive and decided to start using it as a backup. I backed up everything. You know the way you are supposed to. Then I deleted everything off my computer after verifying everything was backed up.
A Month goes by, quickly, I might add. A first time dad. I was working at Olan Mills at the time. I kept the external drive plugged in, thought, why not just use it as my “my documents” folder. Everything is backed up to it. It will keep my computer cleaner and save the extra step of backing up every time.
One night, returning home much intoxicated from one of my haunts about the town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence…. oh wait, that’s Edger Allen Poe’s story, not mine.
One night, returning home, we had just opened the door, when I heard something fall. It sounded heavy. One of our cats was sitting in the middle of the floor, poised, ready to strike, and beside him was my external hard drive. Being the curious animal he was, he had jumped up on my desk and knocked the hard drive to the floor. Since my computer and the hard drive were on, the hard drive began making clicking noises. I plugged it in. Nothing but clicks. Everything gone. I gave it up as a total loss. I got frustrated, loaded up a linux distro I had laying around and got the hard drive working, at least until I posted about it.
While backing everything up from the drive, it failed again. I was too frustrated to post again that the thing had failed… miserable and angry at the whole ordeal, I again gave it all up for loss. I had small images that I had posted when he was born. Those would have to do. Family started asking questions about getting larger images. I told them what had happened. Now it wasn’t just me, other people were ready to kill one of our cats.
I remembered something this morning when Animoto, sent out their newsletter. I had made a video with them and used higher quality images to make it than I have on my blog.
I emailed them this morning if I could get a download of those images.
They emailed back wanting the exact url for the video I had put together.
I emailed it to them.
They emailed back with an individual url for every picture I had uploaded to the video.
I have since downloaded them all and backed them all up online.
Thank You Animoto. I also really loved the slideshow I put together using your service.
This is more of a why does decloned even exist? type of podcast with an emphasis on the future of the site and cartoons.
You don’t have to watch. It’s even boring. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
by the way, this is a screenshot of the podcast rendering… aaaahhh ooooohh, yeah, I’m not impressed either.
When you are doing any amount of video editing, there is always that portion of time where you are waiting for the thing to render completely.
I guess you could view it as a time where you can get up, stretch, use the bathroom, get something to eat and maybe take a nap… because it’s almost impossible to do anything else on the computer while you are “rendering” cause you might throw off the processing.
Maybe I just need a better software for rendering video?
