Finally Excited for Christmas

There is a major difference between Jodie and me in our appreciation of holidays.  It comes down to this, Jodie likes to celebrate holidays, I really could care less about most holidays.  To me, the only holidays that rise to the occasion of being a day to celebrate are Thanksgiving, Easter and Christmas.  The rest of the holiday schedule (including Birthdays) could disappear and I wouldn't be terrible torn up about it.

Now, not only does Jodie love Christmas, but she loves Christmas starting in the fall.  This year, she pulled out the Christmas music October 3.  Actually, it might have been earlier, but October 3 was the first time I heard it.  I have a firm rule that no Christmas music may be played before Thanksgiving, and really I could wait until the 2nd week of December to start listening.  It's not that I'm a Scrooge, I just get bored with music, and there are only so many Christmas songs to listen to before you start repeating them, over, and over, and over, and over again.  If I wait longer to start listening to Christmas music, then I don't get burnt out on Christmas music before Christmas even gets here.

What's worse than early Christmas music?  Shopping!  If I could, I would not leave the house on the weekends during the holiday shopping season (we live off of a shopping center, so we get to have fun with holiday traffic).  Drivers start getting punchy, lines get crazy long, and people generally loose common sense when shopping during the Christmas season.  This I find to be odd, since they mostly have common sense the rest of the year.  So, I have been shopping online for many years now, and will likely continue that trend.

Having read this far, you may be wondering how in the world the title matches the post.  To this point, I have complained greatly about the Christmas season.  Well, the title is true, I am finally getting in the Christmas season.  Last night was the Riley County High School Christmas concert, and it was really wonderful.   They had it this year at Grace, and the church was decorated nicely with candlelight around the sanctuary, and the music was great.  Then this morning, worship team practiced our Christmas music set (note: we've been singing Christmas music for a couple of weeks).  Then the kicker, this afternoon Lindsay Arthur came in to practice the Offertory for tomorrow, "Christmas Morning" by Shannon Wexelberg.  First of all, if you have not heard of Shannon Wexelberg, she was the worship leader at the National Worship Leader Conference this year who impressed me the most.  She led worship from the piano, and it was a moving time.  She has released a Christmas album called Love Came for Me, and it is one of the best Christmas albums released in the last couple of years, and the song Christmas Morning is one of the best (if not the best) original Christmas song written in the last couple of years.  Lindsay sings wonderfully well, and it was such a blessing to run through the song today.  If you are in the Manhattan area, plan on coming to either the 8:30 or 10:30 service tomorrow to hear her sing, hear Pastor Flack preach Advent from the Psalms and all of the other Christmas celebration in the service.

Before I leave you, let me leave you with the last verse of the song and a link to buy the cd (or you could listen to it on a service like Rhapsody or MOG).  Trust me, worth it!

This Christmas morning

As families gather all around the tree

Let’s tell the story

That Love was born to die for you and me

To mend the broken

To be what we could never be

This Christmas morning

Let us worship Christ the King

Love Came for Me

Another New Blog????....... Enough Already!!!!!!

Yes, I know, I have launched no less than three different blog sites over the last three years, agerling.wordpress.com, alan.gerlingfamily.com and amos5worship.com with a relaunch on that site.  So, here we are with another place to call blog home.  Luckily, most of my posts have moved with me as I have gone from site to site, with the exception being the posts I wrote while using habari on amos5worship.  I'll probably manually copy those over later.

Couple of reasons for the move back to Wordpress.  First of all, renewal was up for amos5worship, and I just couldn't justify paying for the domain when I don't use it all that often.  Jodie came to the same conclusion and moved her blog to psalm127mom.blogspot.com (I know, Blogspot :-( Ick!)  The second reason was the time needed to tinker within my custom design on my custom install of habari really resulted in me doing nothing.  With this blog, I've got it set up, and Wordpress worries about things like upgrades and design theming, etc.  That means that all I have to worry about is the content!  Oh, and did I mention free.  That's a pretty solid reason.

The last reason that I transitioned away from amos5worship is that I felt a pressure on myself to keep post to subject matter of worship and justice and related matters.  Not to say I didn't stray, but I felt weird writing a long post on Ubuntu on a worship site.  Worship Geek (a light-bulb moment that happened to be available) lets me flex the content since the title is really a description of two passions of mine, worship and all things geeky.  So, my hope is to post more often.  (I know, I've said that before)  I'm also planning to broaden the content a bit.

So, sorry for the change again.  I really do intend that this is going to be my permanent blog for the foreseeable future.  Thanks for being patient, and looking forward to sharing with you going forward.

Goodbye Rhapsody

For those of you who know me well, you know that for a long time I have been an avid user of Rhapsody.  Matter of fact, during my sophomore year, as I was using Audiogalaxy to download hundreds if not thousands of illegal mp3s, I began to feel convicted that what I was doing was stealing.  The biggest barrier to me purchasing all of those tracks on cd was the eclectic nature of my listening habits.  I listen to a lot, and I like to listen to new music often.  That is where Rhapsody came in.  Rhapsody launched in December of 2001, and I quickly subscribed.  For a monthly fee (that has gone up and down over the years, but usually settled around $9.99), I could listen to unlimited tracks by most of the artists I wanted to listen to legally.  The downside was that the service only worked streaming (they later added the ability to purchase mp3s).  This wasn't too much of an issue for me since most of my listening was in my dorm room.  Much has changed over the years, and much has stayed the same.  For many of those years, Rhapsody was a player installed in Windows, and recently, they launched a web player and iOS apps.

I have been a faithful customer for all of those years.  Rhapsody really has been a part of my music life, especially now that I'm a worship director, listening weekly to new albums and artists.  So, why am I saying goodbye after all of these years?  Simple, something better and cheaper came along.  This week, the Chrome app store launched, and one of the reviewers commented that the Chrome version of the MOG web player was really nice.  To be blunt, it blows Rhapsody away, and it is an early beta with features missing.  Rhapsody has been slow to change (in 9 years, the player changed little), and has become in many ways bloated, including the web player and the amount of resources it uses.  In my geekiness, I have switched to Ubuntu, and the only way to play tracks is through the web player, and it's just plain awkward, and it hasn't changed in two years.

So, MOG it is.  Maybe someday I will return to Rhapsody, but for now I'm going with the new kid on the block.  Oh, and did I mention that MOG is half the price of Rhapsody.  Makes a big difference!  I figured out how much I have paid to Rhapsody over the last 9 years, but I will spare you the wincingly large amount.

Goodbye Rhapsody, you will always be my first music streaming love.

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It's been a long day. This Sunday, the Flack family had gone out to Tuttle Cove (if you didn't know our Church Picnic is out at Tuttle Cove), and they came back and said that the site was pretty torn up. So, I went out this morning, and pretty torn up was a gross understatement. It is more like a grassless mud-hill. Certainly not a place where you can have 500+ people walking around, sitting, etc., much less building a stage on with sound equipment and a generator. So, the picnic is cancelled. Yes, yet another event cancelled. After trying every other possible venue in town, I ended the day frustrated. Thankfully, things like the meat had not yet come in, so the order could be cancelled, but honestly, I really look forward to these combined services.

If you look back through my blog, you will see that I often talk about my desire to see the congregation together more. It is a healthy thing for the members of the Body to occasionally see the whole Body gathered together. So, stick it on your calendars. Easter 2011 is coming up fast! Actually after all my calls, it looks like City Park might be a better venue for us for the college, so I'm starting to plan now!

That being said, I look forward to see God work Sunday. After the let down of this week, I am again reminded of God's providence (sovereignty). Nothing is outside of God's control or plan... even a muddy slick instead of a grassy hill! Poor example, but today I needed to be reminded. I think sometimes we get into the habit of talking about God's providence in the big things. When things are going really good, or when we are going through tribulation, we think of how God is sovereign in the situation. We forget that God is in control in the little things too. After all, in addition to naming and counting the stars, He also numbers the hairs on our head (Matthew 10:30).

If I may, let me quote quickly from Kevin DeYoung's book, "The Good News We Almost Forgot: Rediscovering the Gospel in a 16th Century Catechism"

"... Like most of us, ... students are much more at ease using passive language about God's permissive will or comfortable generalities about God being "in control" than they are about stating precisely and confidently to those in the midst of suffering "this has come from God's fatherly hand.... If God is a Father, then surely He exercises His authority of His creation and creatures for the good of His beloved children. Providence is nothing more than a belief in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, brought to bear on our present blessing and troubles and buoying our hope into the future...."

Lord of the Rings, Programming and Karate Kid

Poor kid, this morning started out with Isaac's 9 month appointment. All continues to go well. He's 93rd percentile in height and head circumference and 76% in weight. Healthy kid.

The worst part about these appointments are the shots. Jodie of course will have nothing to do with holding him down, so it inevitably falls to me. Every time, he has laid there calmly, making eye contact with me. Then out of the corner of my eye I see the nurse jab, and then a split second later, I see a jump, a realization that something just hurt big time in his eyes, and then the tears well up. Then the screaming..... You get the idea. Anyway, poor kid took a really long nap this afternoon.

So, while the Gerling family worked on their naps, I headed downstairs to continue my whirlwind quest to get all of the programming projects that have been piling up done. I hunted a bit and decided on Lord of the Rings for a background movie. I can't really say that I watched it all that closely as I was engrossed greatly in converting Jodie's Joomla website into a Habari one. Again, I love Joomla, I've worked with it a lot, and it works great for sites like the church website. However, the major complaint from Jodie has been that the comments don't work. I really have no idea why such a thing would happen, and therefore had no idea how to fix it. Habari has a nice elegant comment solution, so I spent my day learning how to create a template for Habari! You can see the result at psalm127mom.com. If you saw the site before, you actually really shouldn't notice that much of a difference (other than the fact you can leave comments), but rest assured, the site is now actually on a blogging platform!

This leaves one final project. I need to redo the Jodie Gerling Designs & Photography page. Jodie actually has had a design done for several months now, but I just haven't gotten around to it. I've spent most of the evening looking at various platforms for photo blogs with a nice gallery layout and after some consideration of PixelPost and ZenPhoto, it looks like the winner is ye old classic platform, Wordpress. Anyway, that's tomorrow's goal, so hopefully you can see the results soon.

Now, while I was trying out various CMS platforms, I put in Karate Kid II. I just can't believe that I always forget how much I love this movie. I know, some of you are saying that Karate Kid I is better, but I have always loved the sequel far more. Sure, the original has lines like, "Don't forget to breathe," and "Wax on, wax off," but how does that relate to you in real life? Really. The second movie teaches us about things like honor and sacrifice and has a wonderfully pure love story between Daniel and Kumiko. What could this be? A love story without any make out scenes or other junk that manages to work its way into modern movies? No, just a story where two people get to know each other by spending time together, realizing that despite being from different worlds, they have a lot in common and they fall in love. Note, it isn't till after they declare their love for each other that they even consider kissing! This is so much more like real life.... well, the way it ought to be, than what most movies portray.

Anyway, I digress. Let me just throw some quotes out there for digestion.

Mr Miyagi: "Daniel-san, never put passion before principle. Even if win, you lose."

Mr Miyagi: "Lies only become truth if other person chooses to believe them."

Would you not agree? So much more profound than, "Paint the fence."