Jeremy Taylor was a 17th-century pastor and devotional writer who isn't well-known today. I've revised some of his practical comments from "Holy Living" on learning humility.

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The grace of humility is exercised by these following rules:

• Don't think better of yourself on account of things that happen outside yourself. You may be better than another person, by virtue of the gifts you've been given, in the same way that one horse may be better than another by being of more use to others. As a human, you have no reason to be proud of yourself except by what distinguishes you from the animals, namely what you choose and refuse.
• Humility consists not in reviling yourself, wearing shabby clothes, or being quiet and submissive, but in holding a genuinely low regard for yourself. Be heartily convinced that you are an unworthy person, just as you believe yourself to be hungry, or poor, or sick, when these things are true of you.

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9:42:40 PM #    comment []  trackback []

I wrote my first computer programs 25 years ago. In that time, i've programmed in Basic, Fortran, Lisp, C, Icon, awk, Prolog, sh and csh, Emacs Lisp, Perl, and too many other languages to even recall. So i'm not exactly a novice when it comes to programming. But when i start out to write a new program, i almost always begin the same way: by finding a template. I look for some program i've already written that has some of the right structure or functionality, copy it, and then modify only the bits that need to change. 

I don't start from scratch, because there's so much commonality that i want to retain, and too much complexity to recreate each time. In Perl, where i've done most of my recent programming, i choose to enforce certain constraints every time. I predeclare variables so typos don't create nightmare bugs (use strict;). I don't buffer output ($| = 1;). I always want a usage message, and command line argument handling. There are frequent idioms for file I/O, iterating through a file's contents with regular expression matching, etc.

It's not that i couldn't create a program from scratch: i could, and sometimes still have to. But it's so much more productive to start with a template that works, and only change what needs to change, retaining what's already proven its value.

Discipleship and church organization ought to be more like this. The church has been making disciples for 2000 years: why should we reinvent small group leadership, or how to teach Scripture, or how to share the Gospel? Sure, these are complicated topics, just like computer programming (and people are much less predictable). But why is it so hard to capture the experience of those who've gone before, in a way that we can reproduce and tailor today?

Surely by now we ought to have developed some templates for discipleship. You want to become more humble? Here's how. You want to learn to pray? This will help you. Instead, our response to new disciples is often tantamount to rewriting computer programs from scratch. We offer a book, a sermon tape, or other resource, tell the new disciple we'll pray for them, and leave them to recreate their discipleship from scratch.

8:45:36 AM #    comment []  trackback []

Book recommendation from Brian's sermon yesterday: Leisure: the Basis of Culture, by Josef Pieper, apparently a prolific writer (51 Amazon titles).
7:40:18 AM #    comment []  trackback []

As i spend more time writing, i find more ways that blogspace intersects with lifespace, and ideas cross over freely between the two. Donna and i were talking Saturday about blog readership and style: wondering if anyone reads what we write, the futility of writing a lot just to see if you can snag attention and increase visitors (over 500 visits to Blogos so far, though the vast majority are probably me), the necessity of determining who and what you're really writing for and focusing on that.

Yesterday's sermon by Brian really spoke to this (streaming audio here). Our most serious chemical addiction is to adrenaline, claims Archibald Hart: we're hooked on the "rush" of hurry. These verses from Proverbs address haste:

... everyone who is hasty comes only to poverty (Proverbs 21:5, ESV)

Do you see a man who is hasty in his words? There is more hope for a fool than for him. (Proverbs 29:20, ESV)

The poverty of haste applies to blogging as much as other areas of work and life. Fast and furious writing leads to poor thoughts, little direction, and no lasting value. I want to focus on things that will last.

7:35:35 AM #    comment []  trackback []