For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age.

- Titus 2:11-12 (NIV)

She had an idea but was having difficulty in understanding exactly what the verse was saying. And so we began to converse about the verse’s subject: grace. Before we could speak of how exactly grace teaches us to live such lives as described, first we had to understand exactly what grace was. And so I asked what she thought. She shared her ideas about grace and we began to go back and forth on the topic. Slowly a crowd began to form around us, and many people were sharing what they thought it meant and thus how it accomplished the goal mentioned in Titus.

And so I thought it might be a fun and enlightening experiment to open the same question to you, my Internet friends. What do you think grace is, and, as result, how does it teach us to live as the Scriptures say. We’re not trying to come up with a general, simplistic answer to the question. I’m sure that we’ve all heard the easy definition that grace is “getting what you do not deserve” or “unmerited favor.” The reality is that the full magnitude of grace is greater than the vast expanse of the known universe. It’s just too big for our little human brains to fully grasp or understand holistically. But perhaps if we talk it out we might be able to understand just a little bit more about it.

So what are your thoughts? Share them:
On the blog
On Facebook, or
On Twitter

No? Not buying it? Ok, well then the truth that I will now convey to you is simply this: I have either been (1.) extremely busy or (2.) extremely lazy or (3.) a combination of both. As it stands it seems that I am now no longer unemployed but rather currently find myself daily walking down the hallowed corridors of Terrence C Reilly School #7 in Elizabeth, NJ as a substitute teacher. The 4th and 5th grade antics keep me rather busy during the day and, relatedly, cause me to drop into deep coma upon arrival at home. In addition, upon waking from previously mentioned coma, I then find myself either planning for the work I daily do with my 8th graders of Digital Media Technology or planning for what I do with my fine and highly intelligent colleagues of The Bridge Youth Ministries or planning for other things I do with Connection or planning for how to transition from a lowly substitute position to a full-time paid staff position at work or planning my plots for world domination. I tell you, there has been much planning going on, and concurrently many meetings (argh!). In addition there has been, as well, the execution of much of said planning. Resultantly, there has been little time to do much else, Internet related or otherwise.

Fortunately, due to being a substitute teacher and constrained to the schedule of a public school, I have been fortunate enough to have had the last week and one-half free due to Christmas vacation. Fortunate in the fact that I have had a clear schedule since December 23 but not quite as fortunate in the fact that, being substitutive in nature, I am unpaid for such time off. Alas, I am grateful for the vacation and time to sleep and Xbox venture out into worlds of fun and then sleep some more. Likewise I am also excited to get back into the swing of things come Monday.

And so, I come to the end of this brief update into the past four months. I do have some photographic wonderfulness that I will attempt to post soon as I have had time to process the images I have taken since September in the past week. And I hope that our next meeting will come some time before Spring Break sometime in a few months. I hope you have missed me as I have missed you, but I will forgive you if this is not the state you find yourself in.

Clean! from William Hartz on Vimeo.

Also, it is Retreat season for The Bridge and we have Jared Hall coming this year!

The Bridge’s Retreat X: Jared Hall from William Hartz on Vimeo.

That is all.

Enjoy.

Me: Do you have to pledge allegiance to Jerry Falwell in addition to the Christian flag while at chapel?

Liberty Student: “We do not pledge to the Christian flag.”
Liberty Student: “…just to Doctor Falwell.”

Wonderful.

I found this little gem by accident while looking around Apple’s new operating system, “Snow Leopard.”

It seems that Apple has chosen, by default, to have an on-screen keyboard option available. I’m pretty sure this visual keyboard has been part of OS X for some time now, but what is interesting is that it is now front and center when you install the OS.

As of right now it only shows a visual representation of whatever key you press on your physical keyboard, but it leads me to believe that all the “Apple Tablet” rumors are quite true and impending.

Why else would this feature be placed right there by Apple if it were not soon needed to enter text via a touch-screen interface of sorts.

Apple is holding a special presentation on September 9th where they’re expected to talk about iPods, but let’s see if they don’t have one more thing up their sleeve before the day is through.

It all started earlier today, as a part of my morning routine, I was checking my websites for updated content. And lo, I noticed something particularly odd while refreshing my Twitter feed via iPhone. The site seemed to time out. Repeatedly. Thinking it just a API glitch or something of the sort, I moved on to the Facebook app. Oddly, this would not refresh either.

It seemed a bit strange that both sites would be in-operational simultaneously, so I reset the phone. This did not help. Clearly, I deduced, this must be the fault of AT&T’s, for we all already hate them. Yes, to them must go the blame.

No. All the other sites I tried worked fine. What? How could this be? I checked my home’s WiFi connection. It was operational. And I began to realize the serious, and disastrous reality befallen us this 6th day of August in the year of our Lord, 2009.

Twitter was down. Facebook was down. Together. But how? How could this happen? And I realized… the Internet Apocalypse has commenced.

The sad irony of this tragedy is that we are unable to share the news of the sites being down with the rest of the world due to the sites being down. It is a vicious circle of grief and sadness and evil.

What shall become of us? Without our precious social networking sites available to us society may revert back to its archaic primitiveness pre-dating the Web 2.0 book. It will be like we’re back in 1999! Or worse – we may have to start using MySpace again! ::cue terrifying music::

Let us hope and pray that the Internet gods that they restore our beloved Web 2.0 sites, and with haste. Until then, MG Siegler has compiled a list over at TechCrunch of 15 Alternative Things to Do while Twitter is down.

See you soon. (I hope).

And even if you don’t repost it, it’s quite a catchy little song.

Here’s his story (from YouTube):

In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didn’t deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say no to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world. United: Song 1 is the first of those songs. United: Song 2 has been written and video production is underway. United: Song 3 is coming. I promise. Follow me at http://twitter.com/DaveCarroll . Video Produced by Curve Productions of Halifax, http://www.curveproductionsinc.com.

And here is the full, detailed story from his blog: United Breaks Guitars.

Bridge: Midtown’s Independence Day Weenie Roast from William Hartz on Vimeo.

In honor of the United States’ annual tradition of grilling processed meat in order to celebrate the anniversary of our nation’s outmaneuvering the collective might of the British Empire’s military with a bunch of farmers, The Bridge: Midtown hosted a weenie roast, aka Independence Day barbecue, in the back lot of the Liberty Center, as this was the only suitable location for fire-making in the urban heart of Elizabeth, NJ.

Combining some archaic technologies (such as “fire” and “barbecue sauce”) with the latest advancement in meat-cooking (aka the “greatest grill you will ever see”) four individuals, some young and some not so much, endeavored to prepare a vast array of weenie for consumption by both the Bridge’s Midtown group and its “Bridge, Jr tykes.

And so, while most remained inside for music and games and laughing in celebration of this, our nation’s 233rd birthday, this is the story of the brave souls dedicated to crafting the perfect hot dog.

A full set of images from the grilling and night inside can be seen here: bit.ly/weeniepics.

I try to have some kind of organizational method to how the apps are arranged, but one or two of the pages always end up being just a hodgepodge of randomness and discontinuity. And there are always apps doing their best to get promoted to the main page. Facebook, currently, is in the runnings for a promotion right now. We’ll see how he behaves in the days to come.

What do your iPhone pages look like?

Have it Your Way from William Hartz on Vimeo.

Here’s a short video we shot as an aid for @carloscedeno’s teaching for Sunday morning.