God cares about our concerns, even when we’re not brave enough to talk about them

Dave Farquhar Christianity , ,

Tomorrow night in Bible study, I’m going to cover Mark 5:21-41. Since I actually put some work into preparing and actually wrote something halfway substantial for probably the first time this year, I thought I’d share it here.
Special thanks go to Jeff King for inspiring this largely derivative study, and to God for using Jeff and his talents and insight to answer two simple prayers from last night.

Let’s let Mark start the story:

21When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake. 22Then one of the synagogue rulers, named Jairus, came there. Seeing Jesus, he fell at his feet 23and pleaded earnestly with him, "My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live."

Now remember, most of the religious leaders of the day didn’t have a whole lot of use for Jesus. And being a synagogue ruler in this day and age, he was in the upper crust. But on this day, He needed Jesus.

So this aristocrat comes up to Jesus and wants something from Him. Jesus had this big crowd around Him. Yet Jesus dropped that opportunity and went to help him. Even though Jesus had something else to do. And even though Jesus could have used this opportunity to teach the aristocrat a lesson.

The lesson for me: God does not have better things to do. God wants to hear my voice. Yours too.

And there’s a second lesson: God “teaching us a lesson” doesn’t necessarily have to be painful. Sometimes it is. But He prefers, as we’re about to find out, to be unbelievably kind and loving.

24So Jesus went with him. 25A large crowd followed and pressed around him.

The crowd expected something. I guess Jesus had a reputation. The hard question for me: Do I expect God to do something?

And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. 26She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse.

Anyone who made contact with this woman became ceremonially unclean. (See Leviticus 15-25-33.) She was an inconvenience. A nuissance. This woman lived in loneliness and isolation for 12 years. Not to mention the physical pain she must have suffered.

Now, I don’t know about anybody else, but I can handle pain. I deal a whole lot worse with loneliness. When I’m in pain and lonely, personally, it’s the loneliness that I want to go away. To me, 12 hours of it is more than enough, so I can’t even begin to imagine this poor woman’s plight.

27When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak,

What I want to know is why this woman that nobody wanted to have anything to do with knew about Jesus. And that raises a question: Is there anyone in my life or yours who nobody wants to have anything to do with who needs to know about Jesus?

28because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.”

This has always troubled me, because I’ve wondered whether this was faith or superstition. Faith is good. Superstition isn’t. But God knows faith when He sees it. Here’s a question: What had the power? The cloak, or Jesus? The answer is the difference between the two.

If you think I think there are a lot of superstitious Christians, you’re right. Take the Prayer of Jabez (please!): There is absolutely nothing special about the words, "enlarge my territory." Say that to me and I might give you a quarter if I have one and nobody else has asked me today. But if you say it to God, trusting in the power of God and not in some magic words, and it’s God’s will… then it’s something special. But wouldn’t God rather hear your own words?

Here’s something else that strikes me. She was afraid to just ask Him for what she wanted. Maybe she didn’t want to trouble Him. He was off to stop someone from dying, after all. He had something better to do, right?

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, a million times plus infinity wrong. God isn’t like your overburdened unapproachable boss. God isn’t bound by the constraints of time. God always has time for you.

Is there anything that you’re afraid to ask God for?

29Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.

Jesus healed her. Period. End of story. Right?

30At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, "Who touched my clothes?"
31"You see the people crowding against you," his disciples answered, "and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ "
32But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it.

I used to think Jesus was angry here. Maybe He was mad about her making Him physically unclean. Maybe He was mad about her being superstitious. Maybe He had some other reason. Now I believe differently. Of course Jesus knew who touched Him. He only asked because He wanted her to approach Him. Why? I don’t think Jesus was satisfied with healing just her physical ailment. We’ll see why in a second.

33Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth.

She thought the same thing I used to think. She’s a genius! She agrees with me!

34He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering."

Look at what Jesus said. What word jumps out at you? The word that jumps out at me is "Daughter." "Daughter" is a loving word. It’s a special word. How special was it to Jesus? It’s the only recorded instance of Him using this word.

Now, if you’ll indulge my overanalysis for a minute: She’s in pain and she’s lonely. If she could get rid of her bleeding, then human contact suddenly becomes a possibility. Solve the root problem, and then she can see about finding some companionship. Maybe she had some relatives. Maybe she could make some friends. She didn’t dare ask Jesus to love her.

But what she wanted wasn’t nearly as important to Jesus as what she needed. Jesus didn’t dare keep on walking without telling her that He loved her.

The Eastern Orthodox church has a legend that this woman’s name was Veronica, and that she followed Him literally to His death. The legend says that when Jesus fell underneath the weight of the cross on His way to Calvary, Veronica reached out to Him and wiped the sweat, blood, and dirt off his face with a handkerchief as the soldiers seized Simon of Cyrene and made him carry Jesus’ cross the rest of the way. She was there for Him when His disciples had abandoned Him. It’s only a legend, but isn’t it a beautiful picture of a reaction to God’s love?

35While Jesus was still speaking, some men came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue ruler. "Your daughter is dead," they said. "Why bother the teacher any more?"

If “trouble” wan’t Jesus’ least favorite word before He was incarnated, it was by the time He died. Remember what I said before about God not being bound by the constraints of time? You’re not any trouble for Him.

36Ignoring what they said, Jesus told the synagogue ruler, "Don’t be afraid; just believe."

Faith is enough. The amount of faith doesn’t matter. The smallest possible amount of faith in the right thing–God–is more than enough.

37He did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James and John the brother of James.

Peter, James and John were Jesus’ inner circle. This was one of many things they alone were priveliged to see.

38When they came to the home of the synagogue ruler, Jesus saw a commotion, with people crying and wailing loudly. 39He went in and said to them, "Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep."

As far as God is concerned, death and sleep are the same thing. Jesus wasn’t lying.

40But they laughed at him. 41After he put them all out,

God isn’t mocked. But Jesus didn’t punish them; He just gave them the same fate as the other 9 disciples: They had to wait outside.

he took the child’s father and mother and the disciples who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, "Talitha koum!" (which means, "Little girl, I say to you, get up!" ).

Look at some of the words here. Gently. Taking her by the hand. “Talitha” is an endearing way to say “little girl.” Jesus loved that girl.

42Immediately the girl stood up and walked around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished. 43He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Let’s look at the two halves of verse 43. First half: Jesus didn’t want to be famous. Jesus wanted to help people. Jesus was the very embodiment of humility. This raises a tough question for me: How many times have I boasted about something God did, hoping that someone would think more highly of me simply because I happened to be there? Don’t we sometimes seem to be preoccupied with appearing to be spiritual powerhouses? I hope I’m the only one.

Second half: Jeff King, a friend of a friend, brought this one up. Do you see the parallel with verse 34? Jesus raised this girl from the dead, and once again, He wasn’t satisfied. First He’s concerned that she’s sick and in pain. Then He’s concerned that she’s dead–a valid concern, possibly. Did she believe before He raised her from the dead? Not likely. I’m sure she did afterward. So now that He’s healed her ailment and saved her soul, what’s He concerned about? He didn’t want her to be hungry.

God derives no pleasure from your hunger or mine. None.

I’ve asked a lot of questions tonight, but I want to ask one more. What have you been afraid to talk to God about?

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®: NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Fair use statement: NIV quotations are permitted without express written permission provided they are fewer than 500 verses, do not amount to an entire book of the Bible, and do not constitute more than 25% of the total text of the work.

Why my ramdisk techniques don’t work with XP

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , , , , ,

I got a question today in a roundabout way asking about ramdisks in Windows, specifically, where to find my instructions for loading Win98 into a ramdisk, and how to do the same in XP.
I haven’t thought about any of this kind of stuff for more than two years. It seems like two lifetimes.

The original instructions appeared in my book, Optimizing Windows (now in the half-price bin at Amazon.com), and instructions to use DriveSpace to compress the disk appear here. You can get the freeware xmsdisk utility this trick requires from simtel.

These techniques absolutely do not work with Windows NT4, 2000, or XP. Despite the similar name, Windows NT/2000/XP are very different operating systems than Windows 9x. Believe it or not, they’re much more closely related to IBM’s OS/2 than they are to Windows 98. Since there is no DOS laying underneath it all, there’s no easy way to do the trickery that the bootable ramdisk tricks use. What these two tricks do is literally intercept the boot process, copy Windows into the ramdisk, then continue booting.

There’s a $99 piece of software called SuperSpeed that gives the NT-based operating systems this capability. I haven’t used it. I imagine it works using the same principle, hooking into the boot process and moving stuff around before booting continues.

The downside, no matter what OS you use, is the boot time. XP boots in seconds, and my book talks about the trickery necessary to get 95 and 98 to boot in 30 seconds or less. But any time you’re moving a few hundred megs or–yikes–a gig or two of data off a disk into a ramdisk, the boot process is going to end up taking minutes instead.

Is it worth it? For some people, yes. It’s nice to have applications load instantly. A lot of things aren’t CPU intensive. You spend more time waiting for your productivity apps to load than you do waiting for them to do anything. Web browsing and e-mail are generally more bandwidth- and disk-intensive than they are CPU-intensive (although CSS seems determined to change that).

But a lot of games aren’t especially disk-intensive, with the possible exception of when they’re loading a new level. So loading the flavor-of-the-week FPS game into a ramdisk isn’t going to speed it up very much.

Of course, XP is far, far more stable than 98. Windows 9x’s lack of stability absolutely drives me up the wall, and for that matter, I don’t think 2000 or XP are as stable as they should be. Given the choice between XP or 98 in a ramdisk, I’d go for XP, with or without speedup utilities.

I’ve made my choice. As I write, I’m sitting in front of a laptop running 2000 (it’s VPNed into work so I can keep an eye on tape backup jobs) and a desktop PC running Linux. I have a 400 MHz Celeron with Windows 98 on it, but it’s the last Win9x box I have (I think I had 4 at one point when I was writing the aforementioned book). Sometimes I use it to play Baseball Mogul and Railroad Tycoon. Right now it doesn’t even have a keyboard or monitor connected to it.

I guess in a way it feels like hypocrisy, but I wrote the first couple of chapters of that book with a word processor running in Red Hat Linux 5.2 (much to my editor’s chagrin), so I started down that path a long, long time ago.

More on tiny but potentially modern Linux distributions

Dave Farquhar Linux ,

I found a couple of interesting things on Freshmeat today.
First, there’s a Linux-bootfloppy-from-scratch hint, in the spirit of Linux From Scratch, but using uClibc and Busybox in place of the full-sized standard GNU userspace. This is great for low-memory, low-horsepower machines like 386s and 486s.

I would think it would provide a basis for building small Linux distributions using other tools as well.

What other tools? Well, there’s skarnet.org, which provides bunches of small tools. The memory usage on skarnet’s web server, not counting the kernel, is 2.8 megs.

Skarnet’s work builds on that of Fefe, who provides dietlibc (yet another tiny libc) and a large number of small userspace tools. (These tools provide most of the basis for DietLinux, which I haven’t been able to figure out how to install, sadly. Some weekend I’ll sign up for the mailing list and give it another go.

And then there’s always asmutils, which is a set of tools written in pure x86 assembly language and doesn’t use a libc at all, and the e3 text editor, a 12K beauty that can use the keybindings for almost every popular editor, including two editors that incite people into religious wars.

These toolkits largely duplicate one another but not completely, so they could be complementary.

If you want to get really sick, you can try matching this kind of stuff up with Linux-Lite v1.00, which is a set of patches to the Linux 1.09 kernel dating back to 1998 or so to make it recognize things like ELF binaries. And there was another update in 2002 that lists fixes for the GCC 2.72 compiler in its changelog. I don’t know how these two projects were related, if at all, besides their common ancestry.

Or you could try using a 1.2 kernel. Of course compiling those kernels with a modern compiler could also be an issue. I’m intrigued by the possibility of a kernel that could itself use less than a meg, but I don’t know if I want to experiment that much.

And I’m trying to figure out my fascination with this stuff. Maybe it’s because I don’t like to see old equipment go to waste.

Yes, I’m still alive

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , ,

I had to take some time away to clear my head and find myself. It’s a survival tactic; the guy other people wanted Dave to be hasn’t been getting the job done.
Besides, anyone who’s worth anything will like the real Dave better than Dave the Chameleon anyway. Those who like Dave the Chameleon better can go find themselves someone else to be a chameleon. There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of people who are willing. But I think it’s rude to ask someone to change before you really get to know him or her, don’t you?

So I’ve been ignoring the site partly because when I’m paying attention to it, it’s really tempting to try to figure out what to write to make myself popular. And partly because it’s a distraction when I’m trying to figure out who I am. Writing is a big part of me, but it’s only part of me.

So I dug out some things I enjoyed in the past. I’ve been reading F. Scott Fitzgerald and listening to Peter Gabriel and U2 (early stuff, long before they got popular) and Tori Amos and Echo and the Bunnymen. The way I used to do things was to go look for stuff that most people overlooked, rather than letting current trends tell me what to like. So none of that’s cool anymore. Big deal.

The majority isn’t always right. Exhibit A: Disco.

I remember when I was in high school, either my freshman or sophomore year, a popular girl a year older than me came up to me and told me I needed to be more of a rebel. I thought about that and came to the conclusion that I was a rebel. She and her crowd were rebelling against authority figures. I was rebelling against conformity.

Oddly enough, I ended up sitting next to her boyfriend in Spanish class not long after that. We couldn’t stand each other at first, but then it turned out we had a lot more common ground than either one of us could have imagined and we became friends.

I can’t help but think of Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was the spokesman of his generation, a generation not at all unlike ours, a generation that lived to excess and partied harder than any generation before, and up until GenX came along, or since. It’s obvious from Fitzgerald’s writing that he saw the excesses and even though it fascinated him, obviously there was a lot about it that he didn’t like. Yet his lifestyle didn’t change much. The result? The Voice of the Twenties was dead, aged 44, in 1940. Although some of his contemporaries recognized his greatness then, he was mostly remembered as a troublesome drunk.

Would Fitzgerald had lived longer if he’d been more of a rebel of a different sort? Well, I’d like to think so.

I’ve also been playing with computers. I pressed my dual Celeron back into duty and upgraded to the current version of Debian Unstable (I last did that sometime last summer, I think). It’s much, much faster now. I suspect it’s due to the use of GCC 3.2 or 3.3 instead of the old standby GCC 2.95. But I’m not sure. What I do know is the machine was really starting to feel sluggish, and now it feels fast again, almost like it felt to me when I first got it.

I’ve also been playing with PHP accelerators. I know I can only speed up a DSL-hosted site by so much, but my server serves up static pages much faster than my PHP pages, so I want that.

I’ve played around with WordPress a little bit more. It appears the new version will allow me to publish an IP address along with comments. I like that. I’m sick of rude people slinging mud from behind a wall of anonymity. I’m sure they’re much smarter than I am. So they ought to set up their own Web sites, so they can say whatever they want and enlighten the masses. If, as my most recent accuser says, what God wants is for Dave Farquhar and people like him to shut up, it won’t take much to drown my voice out.

OK, I’m done ranting. I’m gonna go in to work tomorrow and be my own person. I’m going to do what’s right, and not what’s popular, even when doing what’s right makes me unpopular. I’m going to stay focused and driven. The possibilities ahead are more important than the mistakes of the past and whatever happens to be missing from the present.

And there’ll be less missing with my vacationing coworkers back in the office.

And everything that’s true about work is true about life at home as well. Speaking of which, when I was out this weekend I noticed I was drawing second looks from girls again. Eating healthy again must be helping. That can’t be bad.

Well, this has to be the most disorganized and unfocused thing I’ve written in years. But I need to post something.

I’ll be back when my head’s more clear.

That wasn’t the Sunday I had planned

Dave Farquhar Personal , , ,

I was hoping that by now I would be upgraded to WordPress, the successor to the b2 blogging program that I use, and that I would have a running DietLinux box on some system, and that I’d be coming back to you with some cool tricks you can do with a Knoppix CD.
I’m 0 for 3.

WordPress is up and running inside my firewall, and there are some nice things about it, but if I move, I lose some stuff. Such as? Most of the code I had Steve write for me won’t run under WordPress. No recent comments, no scoring whatsoever, and searching gives you the posts, rather than links to the posts, which could be deadly if you searched for the word “the.”

Seeing the entries right away when you do a search or hit a category link is fine on blogs that don’t have a lot of entries, but when I have 1,200+ of them, that’s bad. It’s better to return titles with links to the entries.

What do I gain? The ability to make entries and not publish them just yet. The ability to close entries to comments. Movable Type-compatible pingbacks and trackbacks. In a future version, multiple categories per post. That’s all worth a lot.

So I’ll move. Not just this weekend, sadly.

A big chunk of the day went to fixing Gatermann’s web server. The nice thing about Linux is you never have to reboot it. (If you run Debian, you can even upgrade across versions without having to reboot.) The bad thing about Linux is that since you never have to reboot it, if you power it down, you really don’t have much way of knowing if the system’s going to come back up. After jumping through way too many hoops, we got the thing booted with a rescue disk, and when I looked at it, I couldn’t figure out how the system ever booted the first time. For one thing, I couldn’t find a kernel. Obviously at some point in this system’s life, something went horribly, horribly wrong.

Nothing we could think of would repair it, so we ended up archiving all the important stuff like /etc, then wiped and reinstalled. I’m sure if we’d persisted, we could have brought it back to life, but from the time he got here to the time I started reinstalling, three CDs had played on my stereo. I can install Debian in 15 minutes on a fast system, and 35 minutes on a slowpoke.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not mad or upset or anything. I’m a little disappointed that I wasn’t able to fix it in 10 minutes though. But then I remember that two of those CDs that played during that timeframe were by The Cure. If two hours straight of The Cure doesn’t make you feel a a little down on yourself, nothing will.

But I’ll have to give Bob and his revolving door of bandmates credit for making me think about it. There was a time when I would have given almost anything to be the biggest Unix guru in St. Louis. That’s over. These days system wizardry is a means to an end. It pays me enough money to give me a house in a middle-class neighborhood, and a car that’s practical yet draws looks, and leaves enough left over to do nice things for people. Although the job can be demanding, I have more free time than Dad ever had. I mean, I found out this morning that three of my friends have started a band and I got to hear a very early mix of their CD. I can get excited, because I’ve got enough time to at the very least go see them. And if they need someone to write some propaganda for them, I can do that.

After dinner, I re-tackled the WordPress project, but that part of my brain’s just fried. I had to laugh at a question Steve asked me in e-mail. He asked why weekends take more out of him than the workweek. I know the answer to that one. Since we’re low-tier aristocrats, we’ve always got stuff that needs to be done. And the stuff around the house can very easily be more draining than the stuff we do for 40 hours a week. And when the workweek gets to be too much, you just call up a friend and take a long lunch–make up the time at the end of the day after everyone else has left and the office is quiet–and talk about home ownership and other low-tier aristocratic things to get your mind off work.

So as much as I’d love to go find some vexing question and solve it and then turn it over to Google to direct people with the question to my answer, I just don’t have it in me. Not today. And thinking about work to try to escape the drains of low-tier aristocracy seems, well, sick.

A Peter Gabriel CD and a book would be really good right about now.

I’m taking everyone’s advice and doing what I love

Dave Farquhar Personal , ,

I cracked out my IBM PC/AT-turned-K5/100 today and fired it up for the first time since I bought my house. I wanted to download some ISOs and play with some things like DietLinux and Knoppix, but my aged AT is the only system I have with a usable CD burner. The hard drive in my box that contains my good CD burner died back in February or so, and I had other priorities (ahem), so I never replaced the drive. Now I’ve got different other priorities (which I won’t talk about just yet), but even if I had another drive, I can’t seem to find my Nero CD. So it just makes more sense to pull the AT off the bench.
I must have pillaged it for parts at one point because the SCSI host adapter and NIC were both missing. So I replaced them, and fired it up and the HD was gone. I know I saw an HD in there, so I checked the BIOS and found it wasn’t set up right. So I autodetected everything, rebooted, and Linux refused to boot. I popped out the Debian installation CD, selected the “mount a previously initialized partition” option, and saw the partitions on /dev/hdc, rather than /dev/hda where I would expect them. When I was pillaging, I must have pulled the IDE cables and plugged them back in the wrong place when I was finished. I can’t remember those kinds of details anymore. I’d rather spend those neurons remembering details about a girl (like, say, that she likes Tori Amos and Train and Delerious?) than obscure details about a computer I rarely use.

I probably could have fixed it by editing /etc/fstab (actually /target/etc/fstab when you’re booted from the Debian installer) and then re-running LILO, but I’ll always be more confident in my knowledge of hardware than of any operating system, so I reached for a screwdriver and went for the sure thing. Popping the case for the 12th time and rearranging the cables rendered the system bootable again.

The machine’s hostname is burn. Nice. That’s one of my favorite songs by The Cure. I tried a couple of the usual suspects for the root password, and I was in.

Incidentally, I’m doing all of this stuff in pursuit of answers. You’ll be hearing from me again later this weekend.

The best news I’ve heard in a long time: The Public Domain Enhancement Act

Dave Farquhar Copyright , ,

The Public Domain Enhancement Act, which is the result of the Eric Eldred petition, has been introduced to Congress by two representatives from California. It’s now known as H.R. 2601.
This is excellent news.

Write your Congressperson and remind him/her that s/he represents you, not Walt Disney, not the RIAA, not any of the other special interests. Remind the Congressperson that roughly 2% of all copyrighted material retains commercial value after 55 years. So for every Mickey Mouse, there are 98 works that the copyright holder simply abandons and can’t be used by anyone. While that material may not be worthwhile to the copyright holder, it’s still of value to historians, archivists, and hobbyists. Which probably means you. If you’re not one of those three, the products produced by one of those three probably will trickle down to you, in which case you still benefit.

This act will not force Walt Disney to give up Mickey Mouse. What it will do is free any and all works that aren’t worth $1 to the copyright holder to renew.

Some have argued that once a work falls into the public domain, consumers are the losers because there is no commercial incentive to preserve and reproduce them. That’s wrong. Under current copyright conditions, the movie “Cinderella” could have never been made. Freeing old works allows a new generation to adopt and adapt them and make new classics.

While most public domain material is obscure, so is most copyrighted material. But the best public domain material is anything but. The reason Tom Sawyer is so cheap is because it’s free for anyone to copy. And we all benefit from that.

A question for pastors and other church leaders about singles’ ministry

Dave Farquhar Christianity

I want to ask those of you in the audience who are pastors or who are leaders within your church–because I know there are a number of you–a question about singles’ ministry.
Someone asked me the other day if my church has one. It doesn’t. There are lots of reasons why.

I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of creating a Christian meat market. I know where to find one of those already. If I wanted a date tomorrow, I know what church to go to and at what time, and I could walk out of there with a date without trying all that hard. And if I don’t like what I find, I can always go back next week.

Creating an evening church service for lonely people to go to is slightly more conducive to fostering healthy relationships than the local singles’ bar, but they both have a number of things in common, and one of them is that God isn’t going to be the main focus of the majority of the people at either place. It’s simple human nature.

My church has had Bible studies for singles using the small-group model in the past, but those groups had similar weaknesses. Usually the groups started out really well. But the group would implode over the course of a year or two. After a few weeks, half the people in the room would be trying to impress other people in the room, and the other half would be talking and giggling about how their last date with so-and-so went. And as time went on, you’d have couples there who were clearly more interested in each other than with the Bible study. The couples would eventually drop away, and the frustrated people would drop away, and pretty soon you’ve got no group. And God wasn’t much in focus for more than a few weeks with this model either.

There are approximately 170 single people in my church. Some of them inevitably are perfectly happy being single. Some of them inevitably are miserable. Probably most of them would seek someone out if they knew where to look and what they were supposed to be looking for.

So I’m wondering if it isn’t time for a new approach. There are lots of books that tell you what to look for and how to find it. There are also lots of venues for trying to find Christian singles, so I don’t see much point in trying to compete with them. I’d rather do something supplemental: Create groups where people walk together through the process of learning how to find and develop a healthy relationship.

So here’s the idea. Get a few small groups together. Perhaps go smaller than small groups and use the accountability group model with five or fewer people. Definitely don’t mix genders. Smaller groups and keeping the gender the same encourages people to be open and honest, rather than shy or trying to be impressive. Walk through any number of the available books on singlehood together, doing the exercises and talking about them. It’s one thing to know all this stuff. It’s another to think about it, understand it, and have people walking beside you every step of the way, offering mutual encouragement and accountability.

The encouragement is necessary because the process can be frustrating. The accountability is necessary because some people just aren’t emotionally healthy enough to have a good relationship just yet, and without help it might take years but with the right encouragement and with leaders to point them in the right direction, the time required could be much shorter.

As more people get interested, you form more groups. As groups get smaller due to people getting attached, you merge them or add new people to them.

I think this might be an idea whose time has come, but I’d like to hear some other opinions.

A trick to give your fictional characters some consistency

Dave Farquhar Writing

So I was reading up on character disorders (shaddup Steve) when I stumbled across an incredibly useful site: http://www.writersvillage.com/character/
Let’s say you’re writing a work of fiction. (Contrary to what some people have told me, I do that occasionally, not every day.) And you want your characters to be interesting. Normal is boring. The most interesting people in the world have something wrong with them. (Say yes.) (Steve, don’t say another word.)

Hey, think about it. Think of the greatest novel ever written: The Great Gatsby. I can think of two characters who showed any symptoms of healthiness in the whole book: the narrator, Nick Carraway, and I’m not even positive about him; and Gatsby’s dad, who only shows up in the end. The rest of them are very interesting people. But you’re in deep trouble if you live next door to any of them.

So give the characters in your story a character disorder.

If you’re like me and don’t remember character disorders from college psychology class, there are basically two types of mental illnesses. There are neurosises (I know I spelled that wrong), and character disorders. A neurotic can be pretty messed up, but a neurotic’s problem(s) are generally treatable and a neurotic still has enough grip on reality to be able to take responsibility for his or her own actions.

Character disorders generally aren’t treatable. A person with a character disorder is generally less pleasant and considerably more dangerous. A person with a character disorder generally won’t take responsibility for his or her actions, or a problem he or she caused. I once had a landlord who liked to threaten to shoot people and put a gun in their hand and drugs in their pocket. He probably had a character disorder.

So what’s this have to do with writing fiction? Basically you answer about 300 questions about a character in your story, and it comes back and tells you what character disorder the person might have. Then you can read a profile and a few symptoms, which will give you some insights into how your character will behave in different circumstances and allow you to give the character some consistency.

No fair trying to use it to diagnose your coworkers, OK?

And no fair trying to use it to diagnose me either. I’m a neurotic. (There. That quote will keep me out of public office.)