Cloud Computing And The Sovereignty Of God

     One theme I have picked up in my own life as a programmer and in watching the posts other programmers put on Twitter is this: we can swing from hero to swamp-thing in minutes flat. One minute we are Superman. Able to do anything. Not troubled by the lowly failures of other mortal programmers. And a minute later we can be frail mud-dwellers, scrabbling to avoid getting sucked under the sludge.

    The thing that can tip the balance between these two extremes is very small. All that is needed is for our programs to crash. And they do. Sometimes we fix them like superheroes. And sometimes we're at a loss. And dead in the water.

    In the days of office computing, this was not quite so insane. PC crashed? Well, you do usually have another sitting around. Keep backups. Network down? Check the cables. The number of moving parts was not quite so insane, and all the parts could be visited by you in your sneakers.

    But in today's world, your database is frequently not in your office closet or computer room. It's in some Google data center. And the networking involved between end-user and your database? It traverses possibly the entire globe. How many miles of cable would you like to examine if users cannot connect? Login rejected? Well, in the past, the login info was stored in plain text in your user table. Go check it out. But what if the login is some 128-char token that an outside provider manages in a data center. What if the provider says the login is bad, and you cannot figure out why your users cannot connect?

    On and on it goes. When all is well? We're Mr. Incredible. Or Elastagirl. And when things break? We stare into the abyss and consider alternative forms of employment.

    Which brings me to my point. The more complicated the working system is, the more proud we are of our accomplishments... and also the more we realize how delicate it all is--and how much is beyond our control--when things don't work.

    Which means that cloud computing starts to look a bit like the rest of our life. Our bodies are miraculous things when they work. And they're still miraculous things when parts of them do not. But our feelings about 100% functional vs 99% functional are remarkably different. We are miserable when 1% of our function is lost.

    How about the world around us? Same thing. Perfect health is awesome, but if a family disaster hits? One phone call can take us to the lows plumbed by Job himself.

    This brings me to my personal reminder to self. God is sovereign, Pilgrim. You are not. You are desperately weak and in need of God. When things aren't working, and also when they are. When you doff your work hat and tackle OAuth2 login protocols. And when you sit down at the dinner table. And when you vote. And...

    Pilgrim. Listen. You are not in control. You never were. Rest in the trust that God is. Let God be God. And you? Get used to being a mortal who trusts in a very big God.

    PS -- It wasn't more than three days before I had a "My life is mud" day at work. (CI/CD pipeline hell, for the record.) God was good, but this blog post rattled in my brain all that day while I struggled with things I couldn't control and didn't understand.

Evangelicals Love Romans. And Ignore It.

     A short reflection regurgitating stuff written by better scholars than myself, but I just feel the desire to get these thoughts down for myself.

    Evangelicals gorge on the book of Romans. The Protestant love affair with Romans began with Luther and the affection for this book has not diminished with the passing of time. I'll say no more here about that because I'm not a scholar. Less is more. People can finish this paragraph imagining all the great stuff I'm thinking about right now. It's probably better that we leave it at the imagination stage.

    Moving on, I just want to throw down some things I've noted that Evangelicals, in particular, love to not notice (or love) about this book. Now it must be noted that I'm being a bit harsh. My most recent source of choice information is from the latest edition of Christianity Today (CT), a bastion of evangelical thought. So it's with a broad brush (more like a crop duster) that I lay down this criticism. And that's not fair.

    But... in a lot of churches I attended and from my more conservative friends... I still see the "women in leadership" question being answered too often with either (a) the "that's a good question" dodge, or (b) a bad answer: "women shouldn't be there".

    Which I find awfully surprising, given the following from the first few verses of Romans 16. Here we go.

I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church in Cenchreae. 2 I ask you to receive her in the Lord in a way worthy of his people and to give her any help she may need from you, for she has been the benefactor of many people, including me.

3 Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my co-workers in Christ Jesus. 4 They risked their lives for me. Not only I but all the churches of the Gentiles are grateful to them.

5 Greet also the church that meets at their house.

Greet my dear friend Epenetus, who was the first convert to Christ in the province of Asia.

6 Greet Mary, who worked very hard for you.

7 Greet Andronicus and Junia, my fellow Jews who have been in prison with me. They are outstanding among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.

    I'm just going to point out some stuff and be done. For openers, the opener is a reference to Phoebe, who (I credit CT for drawing my eyes to her) is a deacon, most likely the person who delivered Paul's letter, and therefore very likely the person who would answer any questions the church members might have about what Paul wrote.

    Let that sink in. No. Seriously. Let that sink in. We consider Romans to be a blockbuster theological treatise worthy of doctoral dissertations by the dozens. A woman was tasked with explaining it to the first people to ever hear it read aloud.

    Second, our old friends Priscilla and Aquila pop up. Again. And in this husband-wife team, Priscilla is mentioned first.

    Let that sink in.

    It also must be noted that half the awesome people noted by Paul here are women. I counted. If I can be forgiven for extrapolation (and we're in November, with election fever still running high), according to this exit poll, women held up half of the early church. If an awful communist regime figured out that much (Chairman Mao had women holding up half the sky), it doesn't seem too much to ask that the modern church to pile on to what St. Paul already knew.

    Finally, Paul refers to Junia as an apostle.

    Let that sink in.

    But give evangelicals a bit of credit for sheer head-in-the-sand obstinancy. Because too often it's not new thoughts sinking into heads, but rather heads sinking deeper into the sand. Examples? Two.

    First, even in my Bible before me, a footnote suggests that Phoebe might be a deaconess. Crediting CT again, I'd point out that there is no such word in the Greek. That word got invented so that women who were deaconesses could be given less authority than men bearing the same title. That's not in the Greek, folks. It's just a convenience invention for evangelicals of a different persuasion regarding the proper place of a woman in the church.

    Second, let's talk about this Junia, counted as outstanding among the apostles. If you can imagine people 2,000 years from now arguing that Tiffany "was sometimes a boy's name back then", you can guess where evangelicals have gone in their attempt to prevent a woman from being considered an apostle. Nuff said.

    In closing, I doff my cap to St. Paul, who in no way deserves the shade getting thrown on him by feminists who hate the Bible for its misogyny. Their frustrations should be directed toward some modern church movements. Jesus and Paul didn't get us into trouble with women. We did.

He's Right: The Election Was Stolen From Him

     I can understand his anger and frustration. It's not right that illegal tactics and other underhanded tricks were used to steal the election from him.

    He sought aid from the courts, and he had every right and reason to do so. People attacked his character because he didn't concede. They called him a sore loser, but this was so unfair. History will show that he really did win the highest office in the land, despite what everyone in the media said. And, as he claimed, when the illegal votes aren't counted, he won the popular vote, too!

   However, I speak here of Al Gore, a democrat in the year 2000. Gore graciously offered a concession speech and gave the presidency to George W. Bush--despite the fact that, had Gore held out, it would have been shown in due time that he actually and truly did in fact win the election, to say nothing of the popular vote Gore won by about a half million votes.

    As for that shell of a man holed up in the White House today? History will show that in the year 2020 democracy in the US stood on a precipice, looking into an abyss as dark as his soul.

    By God's grace it is he, rather than democracy, that will be thrown into outer darkness.

    But what then should happen to his enablers still ensconced in Washington, D.C.? Let us hope that history will record their ignominious departures too, and their evil intentions with them.

PS -- Lest this pilgrim be mistaken for having political leanings... For the record, in 2000 this pilgrim was pretty thankful that Bush won. Elated. Jubilant! In hindsight, this pilgrim is more transfixed by the fact that Gore placed the country's needs ahead of his own ambitions. Time passes and hopefully our priorities and values get refined. A good sign that this has happened is when political affiliations wane in influence and affection for Jesus grows stronger. This pilgrim wants no association with any party whatsoever.

The Connection Between MJ, Donald J, And John 16

     The connection between MJ, Donald J, And John 16? If you must know the answer, all secrets are revealed at the bottom of this blog post. But in the in between, I'll get down a few thoughts rattling in my brain.

    It's always, always dangerous to read scriptures along with your news feed. Nutcases predicting the end-times generally think themselves gifted at such things. And, when we're honest, we do too. It's one of those recognized traits of humans that biologists (especially those of the evolutionary sort) talk about. They're not making this stuff up. When we're honest, we'll admit that it is we, not them, who are making stuff up.

    Making what up? Connections. We come up with all sorts of connections in our frail brains. Connections that aren't really there.  There's a biological reason for us having this tendency, and while some of the false connections we make are silly...

some of them can do some real damage--to your 401K, for example. Economic literature is riddled with studies on what drives bad investment decisions, and bad connections in our heads rank high among the causes. ("That stock has been rising for weeks! Time for me to pile in." Well, actually, No. That'd be a sign you might not want to pile in.) So much for silly and serious. How about life-threatening? When there's a fire in a movie theater, we are tempted to flee to the exit that was our entrance. Even when a different exit is much closer and in view!! That inappropriate connection in your head ("I have to escape the same way I arrived") can cost you your life.

    But I'll here focus on the spiritual hazards of false connections. Example: this morning I sat down feeling jubilant. Very jubilant. As in, jubilant like the battle-fatigued warriors were in LOTR  after seeing Sauron's ephemeral cloud-shaped form get blown away by a wind after the ring was destroyed. That kind of jubilant. A great evil has been removed from the White House. There are a few cleanup battles and a few orcs to take down--and more than a few Shires need scouring. But it's over. Biden won.

    So I sat down in jolly good spirits and asked God to speak to me through Jesus. I then flipped the Bible open randomly "in the neighborhood of the gospels". I didn't figure I'd find actual Jesus dialog in Esther, so I made sure to help God along with the task. The Bible opened to John 16 and I began to read on the page I was on. The section header was, "THE DISCIPLES' GRIEF WILL TURN TO JOY". Roger that! A few verses in I found, "Very truly, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy." Amen! The Bible is coming alive for me.

    And therein lies the problem. Nearly half the nation is not feeling joyful right now, politically speaking. Many professed Christians who voted for Trump are grieving now (to greater or lesser extent), while I'm busy rejoicing. So the danger is for them to read those verses as describing their current grief--and for people like myself to read them as referring to my current joy.

    I speak not here of the danger that one side of the divide is actively opposing God.

[Sidebar note: Sauron serves himself and Morgoth. Anti-Christs serve themselves and Satan. I said it four years ago. Nuff said. The perils of aligning yourself with Sauron or an Anti-Christ... for another day. We digress.]

No, the danger I here refer to--and I preach here to myself--is the risk of reading recent politics into this passage of scripture. Breaking news: the passage is about Jesus' death and his coming resurrection.

    Someone reading this might not resonate with anything I am saying. Good! Because it's insanely stupid to read your day into the scriptures. What we should be doing, rather, is reading scriptures into our day--and carefully!

    On this day, I submit that John 16 ought to remind me that political victories come and go, but Jesus is on track to win planet Earth. It's already a done deal--not at all unlike our current situation here in the US as things stand this morning.

    Joseph Biden has already won. It was a close shave (pan camera to Gollum teetering on a precipice above the lava pit in Mt. Doom), but when the last votes were cast on Tuesday, the facts were already on the ground. Now we're just (don't mind me as I ignore Sauron's fuming and distractions) tallying the facts. Pennsylvania tipped toward Biden an hour ago and now it's just some procedural stuff (including the tallying of a few more ballots) that will have to take place before Biden assumes office. Notice that I do not refer to Biden as Aragorn. They may be approximately the same age, but most of the similarities end there.

    Jesus, too, has already won. When he rose from the grave, it was all over. But there are still things to be done (don't mind me as I ignore Satan's fuming and distractions) before Jesus assumes his throne in the heavenlies. That, my friends, is what we should be rejoicing over. That Jesus has won, and that our names are in the book of life.

    And on that note, I now return to John 16 for a better read than I got on my first pass.

    Oh, and the connection? MJ, Donald J and John 16 all have the letter 'J' in them. Which isn't a connection at all. Blame my fertile imagination for that one. Ironically, it took me several days after posting this blog before I realized that I had connected the three things in my mind, however playfully. I renamed the blog post accordingly.

Tourist Syndrome as a Feature, Not a Fault

"Learn to renounce your own will in many things, if you want to live in peace and harmony with others. It is no small matter to live in a monastery, or in a congregation, without expressing complaints, and to persevere faithfully until death. Blessed are they who have done this well and reached the end of their lives in happiness. If you want to comport yourself well and continually make progress, consider yourself an exile and a pilgrim upon earth."

Thomas à Kempis

I'm not sure there's a hard, fast definition of "Tourist Syndrome". I looked it up and found patchy references to such a thing. Google wants me to make it "Tourette syndrome"!

But one definition I found fit what I had in mind; it referred to "looseness of attachment". That about captures it. To me, tourist syndrome is that ability to find local habits and culture amusing, provided you're only staying for a little while. You can even live somewhere for a number of months and still hold onto this perspective.

But after a year, it just cannot hold. You start to get irritable and despise those "cute" things that are now driving you nuts.

And I think there's something to be gleaned, spiritually, from all of this. We can tolerate a day, a month, even half a year, perhaps, of weirdness: just so long as the rest of our life feels untroubled by what we are encountering. But as soon as the irritant starts feeling like part of the fabric of what we'll be experiencing indefinitely, well that's a problem.

But what we read in 2 Peter 2 ("I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires...") and what we read in the opening quote suggest that Tourist Syndrome, applied appropriately, is precisely what we need for this life. We need to remember that "it's just a short stay."

When we remember that our visit to this planet in these frail bodies is bounded by some pretty strict time constraints, and that eternity is, well, a bit longer than that, we can more easily be gracious with the locals. Endure more hardships with a cheery disposition. Avoid the sins that entrap us.

Now on the one hand, this observation is not new and described well enough elsewhere. I've not discovered new lands, here. On the other, I know for a fact that I'm nowhere near applying these truths to my life. I am acting, most of the time, like an entitled foreigner stuck here with some irritating locals. 

What's ironic about it all is that I'm part of the irritating landscape that others here have to deal with. Some of them consider me to be the problem. And they're not wrong.

So I wrote up this reflection as an admonition to myself. Try to be a more gracious tourist, Pilgrim. The trip will be more enjoyable if I do. For me. And for the other tourists.

Open Source Software, Christian Faith, and Trump

I don't have time to do this post justice, but I will jot down a few ideas. With apologies, this ain't gonna be a polished esssay.

It's interesting how Evangelical Christians are so worked up in their fears regarding socialism that they will vote for Trump. That one word. Trump. It must stand in place for all that is known about the man, and I have made my opinions on the man clear elsewhere. I'll spare all (myself included) the rant.

That one word. Socialism. I'm actually warming up to it a bit of late--in certain regards. But let me walk that back a bit. Communism is a disaster of epic proportions. Socialism (such as seen in Venezuela) is not far behind, unless we're counting corpses, in which case Maduro has a ways to go before he catches up with the tens of millions of people who died under Stalin and Mao.

So, No, (Um, make that NoOOOooOOOOooooOO!) I'm not here to sell socialism proper.

But that said, Luke's description of the early church in Acts is distinctly socialist in flavor. But with Jesus in charge, and people supporting the cause voluntarily.

Pivot point. As I look at my life in recent years, I'm struck by what has blessed me most, work-wise, and top of the list is OSS. FOSS, in fact. FREE Open Source Software.

That's kinda.... socialist-ish, don't ya think?

Yes, it is. Everyone shares in the spoils, and as is sadly often the case, not everyone shares in the labor.

I'll say that again, tangibly. I have contributed just a hair more than zero (0) lines of code to support FOSS. (I'll count a few documentation suggestions as good for one or two lines.) But I have benefited wildly from the stuff. Linux. ASP.NET Core. Visual Studio Code. PostgreSQL. GraphQL.NET. Dapper. How much time ya got? I could list ten more, easily. EASILY. I use this stuff all day long.

So what has this all got to do with anything? Well, it's a fact that we cannot all be superstars. But when the church does what it should be doing, I think the benefits can be a wee bit analogous to some of the benefits of FOSS. For starters, nothing is lost on God. Any efforts kicked in to make the church what it ought to be? There are rewards for that. God will not ever lose sight. We gain his approval. Is there anything better than God's approval to be had in this universe we inhabit?)

So when we serve, those we serve are blessed. And God notices.

That kinda reminds me of FOSS. Recipients are blessed mightily, and for free! But there are eventual rewards also for those who do FOSS. Recognition (and consulting income!) come to mind.

Anyway, I'll say no more here except to note that I live in a more and more socialist world, where software is concerned. And it's working a lot better than the one Microsoft dominated 30 years ago.

I think the church would do well to burnish its socialist credentials. The world would be a lot better off if it did.

And maybe evangelicals (don't count me under that name!!) will one day be forgiven for appointing Trump to the top job in 2016, if instead they stopped obsessing about socialism (which is not what Joe Biden is about) and voted for Biden in 2020.

They won't however. They'll vote for Trump. And so they won't be forgiven by history. If they're lucky, best case scenario is that their actions will be forgotten. By people, at any rate. But not by history and not by God.

I will have to answer for much when I face God, but one thing I don't envy many of my peers for is the fact that they will have to explain to God why they thought, twice in a row, that Trump was the best choice on the ballot. If it weren't sick and scary (and that will be a terrible moment, indeed), I'd suggest that I'd love to see the look on Jesus's face when they try. But really, that truly is a terrifying thought, once we're past the humor. God help the Evangelicals. Republican senators are fleeing the Trump ship like rats. Evangelicals are still sitting in the galley getting drunk.

"The fact that the rats are starting to abandon the sinking ship now doesn’t change what they did and who they are."

Those are fair words regarding Republican senators. But when the same words apply to churchgoers, it's time to find a nearby toilet.

So Joseph Biden will win. The nation will swing *toward* socialism from the freakishly dark and Nazi-ish tilt of the past four years. And that will be a good thing. And the pendulum will never get close to what's going down in Venezuela. It will eventually be recognized universally for the good shift that it was. And Evangelicals will be remembered (as we also remember the footage of whites spitting on blacks--or doing worse--in the 60's) for having tried to stop it from happening. Which brings me to pivot yet again back to FOSS.

"Former Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer once considered Linux users a bunch of communist thieves and saw open source itself as a cancer on Microsoft's intellectual property. But no more."

Ballmer eventually admitted that he was wrong. I doubt he ever admitted that his hatred for FOSS was driven by personal greed and ulterior motives. But he at least admitted that FOSS is not communism, but a rather benign and good form of socialism, so to speak.

I wonder if it will take Evangelical Trump-lovers twenty years to realize how wrong they were about him and in thinking Joseph Biden would be an even worse president. He won't. You heard it here first.

Joe Biden is not my hero. I'm pro-life, and he's not. He should be, as a practicing Catholic, but for political gains he has abandoned what his church preaches.

But neither Trump nor Joe is going to change the abortion scene in America. Let that sink in. Neither of them can change that scene. Americans will have their way. If we want change where abortion is concerned, we'll need to work on attitudes from the bottom up. Not laws from the top down. Isn't that an obvious home-spun truth straight from the book of Romans???

Meanwhile, Joe is a decent man who will help preserve democracy and respect for the constitution here in the USA. The same cannot be said for Trump on any of those counts. Not one. And this is... news? Yes. Twenty years from now the Evangelicals that voted for Trump today will cringe at the yellowed papers and try to say they never liked him. But many did. And even those who didn't... voted for him all the same. It will be remembered.

The Post article link above? I could have written it myself. Spot on. One comment at the bottom that I particular liked: "After May 1945, you could not find a single Nazi in all of Germany." Well, consider today to be "March, 1945". And by the year 2050, "June, 1945" will have reached full bloom. Trump will rank below Senator McCarthy and above Hitler in the annals of political figures. And it will be nearly impossible to find a single Evangelical in America. But when any are found, they'll just be ignored along with irrelevant Fundamentalists and Dispensationalists.... Which is a fitting fate for those who elected Trump because they feared being ignored.

[Sidebar note: People voted for McCarthy because they believed the shit he was serving up in the name of protecting America from Commies. But it turned out he wasn't protecting America from Commies. He was just amassing power by means of endless lies and skillful fear manipulation. Any similarity between McCarthy and Trump is strictly in the minds of those wise enough to see the parallels.]

You heard it all here first.