Sorry about the overall shabby appearance of my site and the fact that it was down for three days. I'm sure lots of my faithful readers were seriously let down by my site's non-existence these past few days. I'm working hard on getting things improved.

A little Tech Perspective

Ran across this at mcpmag.com

Well over 70 percent of all support calls that come to Microsoft support services that start out as Active Directory or Exchange calls end up being DNS calls. Yet, as you’ll see in this article, most of these issues don’t require extensive diagnostic work or sophisticated tools to isolate and resolve. I liken it to the days when automobiles had carburetors; a mechanic could fix most engine performance problems by fiddling with the choke—spritz a little WD-40 into the throttle body, charge $50 and retire in the suburbs after a few years. Nowadays, the same is true for DNS. Check the TCP/IP settings, run a few utilities to verify the zone records, charge $350 (correcting for inflation) and retire to Arizona.

Sounds entirely too simple. No, I definitely haven't arrived here yet.

A Beautiful Life...

There is really nothing I want more than to live a beautiful life. But it seems that life's cruel intent is to dash that desire and turn it into something more practical, more doable, something to do more with survival or success than true Life. I guess I've often despaired of ever living a beautiful life, especially recently.

But just yesterday I was given this picture of a person who could live a beautiful life. I'm sure you'll know what I mean. This person knows how to live life and live in complete happiness. This person knows how to deal with daily stress. This person knows how to deal with heart-crushing tragedy. This person knows how to deal with difficult people. This person knows how to live. This person delights in most everything.

To describe this person is not all that easy. This person has a real relationship with God, but it's more than just a relationship. This person has an incredible faith, but it's so much different than hardened belief. This person has a positive outlook, but it's not the kind that regularly irritates realists.

This person possesses a beautiful spirit.

I'm seeing it now, and for me it's an awesome discovery. I'm sure lots of you have known this for ages, so you'll have to pardon my naive joy. In the last year I have seen and experienced very sharply the pain and heartache that permeates our planet. I have hated it. I have wondered how anyone can live a sane life in the face of all this. My faith has been small, weak at times. It still is. Every now and then I would see people living lives obviously full of joy and I was glad, very glad that there was at least a little happiness in the world. It amazed me that they could do it and I thought they must have their heads in the sand, at least partially. But now I am seeing that the beauty and the happiness in these people's lives comes not so much from the actual circumstances of their lives as from they way they respond to them. There may be little or no beauty in the events of these people's lives but these normal, dull, and ordinarily ordinary events are turned into things of great beauty and joy by the way these people experience them. Is this making any sense? Like I said already, this idea has probably been perfectly obvious to most of you for years. However, I think if I could truly live this out, and it could only be with lots of help from Jesus, it would revolutionize my life!

Trying to make some sense out of life...

has been a very real struggle. Why all the pain, all the hardship? And not only for me, but the whole world is afflicted. But it seems that when I experience deep hardship myself, I look around and see the rest of the world experiencing similiar or worse things, and then I wander if there is any hope for things ever getting better.

Life is just as much unmitigated suffering as exuberant joy. A genuine feeling for life will show a person the deepest contrast between extreme happiness and extreme pain. It is only when we taste the lot of all, when we become involved deeply in world suffering, one in heart with the need of man, that we can win through to that vocation which is the calling of man, and which, therefore, can alone be joy.

That's by Eberhard Arnold from the bruderhof website. OK, so we need to taste the lot of all and become "deeply involved in world suffering" to enter our vocation which is the "calling of man." OK. Done. Now, just what is that vocation he is talking about? Let me go back and read more. Ah, this is good.

No one has felt men's suffering as Jesus did, and He it is who has penetrated to the root and disclosed the source of suffering.

Now that is a serious consolation!

Only a complete change of our nature—only the return of life to God—can free us from misery, suffering and ruin. The wrong of our life is both a personal wrong and a universal one. To recognize it as our own guilt and at the same time as the need of the whole world

But can a "complete change of our nature" really and truly "free us from misery?" Maybe complete and total misery, but it certainly does not seem to rule out periodic bouts of sharp pain. But when there is hope even in that pain, I guess that's not real misery, even though it sure feels like it sometimes.