August 2006 Archives

Last week
, I studied the first part of Daniel 1
. Daniel is an interesting study of men living for God despite opposition and God using this situation to reveal his ultimate plans for history and mankind. I'm going to finish the first chapter today and talk about how God elevated Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah to leadership within the Babylonian empire.

17 As for these four youths, God gave them learning and skill in all literature and wisdom, and Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams.

I believe the author, Daniel, is atttempting to express irony here. These men were being trained by the king of Babylon to work in his court. The reality was that these men weren't interested in such service. They were pursuing service of God and God was preparing them for work in his Kingdom.

I believe this to be one of the basic foundations of being a Christian. While I may work for a company here on earth and may participate in the political processes of the United States, that's really a secondary loyalty. The Bible admonishes us to follow that secondary loyalty as much as we can, but it is still the responsibility of each Christian to seek God and to do His will above all. God is always faithful to us to prepare us for whichever position we end up in, whether that be a job we like or hate, a place filled with fiends or enemies. God is always more faithful to us than we are to him.

In the case of Daniel and these other men, God prepares them in ways that will make them most suitable to the king's court. The Babylonians believed in the importance and interpretation of dreams. Therefore, the man whom Nebuchadnezzar would find most trustworthy would be the man that could interpret his dreams properly. We might not, in general, believe that our dreams are significant today, but this was not the case then. Being able to understand dreams would have been as significant in 600 BC in Babylon as being able to accurately forecast stock prices is today in the United States.

18 At the end of the time, when the king had commanded that they should be brought in, the chief of the eunuchs brought them in before Nebuchadnezzar. 19 And the king spoke with them, and among all of them none was found like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. Therefore they stood before the king.

These men were so gifted that they stood head and shoulder above any of the others. I think it's important to note that God doesn't often work with individuals to place them into excellent positions of authority like this. For example, the last prophet, John the Baptist, was placed on earth to prepare the way for Jesus' ministry. This very important man lived in the desert (Mark 1:2-4
), ate bugs (Matthew 3:4
), and had no status whatsoever. However, in the case of Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, it served God's purpose that these men be promoted to the highest and most prestigious office in the land of Babylon.

20 And in every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in all his kingdom. 21 And Daniel was there until the first year of King Cyrus.

Amazingly, not only were these men found better than the others but they were "ten times better" than any other wise man in the entire country. From the modern political mind, it might seem that it would be a relatively easy feat to impress the political leader of a superpower with your wisdom if you were even slightly less dull than the average political adviser. However, it's worth remembering that the king of Babylon was more than an elected politician who had to suffer political opinion, public media visibility, and the other issues of modern politics.

Nebuchadnezzar was an intelligent, brutal, egotistical, and calculating man who understood the way others think and feel. He knew how they could be motivated and manipulated to do his will. He would have needed the opinion of others to help him do this most effectively and, given the education process already documented earlier in the chapter, he took this seriously. Nebuchadnezzar was probably not easily impressed, but if these men were an order of magnitude better than his other counselors, he was probably very impressed indeed.

God impressed this man with Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah because God would use these men to shake the empire to it's foundations. He would use these men to show in a very visible way that though God had allowed the nation of Israel to be utterly destroyed and the nation of Judah to be crushed and taken into captivity, He was still watching over His chosen people. It is because of Daniel and these men and the other faithful remnant of God that allowed Israel to remain faithful until the time of Christ and, really, to build the foundation that has hardened the Hebrew culture to withstand over two-thousand years of hatred, oppression, pogroms, and holocaust.

I believe the lesson for us is that God follows through with those who are willing to serve faithfully. Daniel was kidnapped by Babylonians from his home. He was taken to another land where he probably understood very little if anything of the language and culture. By all visible evidence, he could have concluded that God had abandoned Israel or that God was no god at all if he couldn't have prevented this atrocity.

Yet, he seems to have remembered Deuteronomy 7:9-10
, "Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations, 10and repays to their face those who hate him, by destroying them. He will not be slack with one who hates him. He will repay him to his face." I'm convinced that whether he new this verse himself (and likely he did, if he was raised at all in Hebrew schools to be a nobleman prior to his capture), he knew this truth. God is faithful to those who are faithful and he will destroy those who hate him. Babylon is no more. Israel remains.

We must remember this lesson and whenever life get's tough. Remember that hardship doesn't mean God is faithless, but that God is being faithful in a greater way that we might not be able to comprehend from our narrow view of reality. We must be faithful and God will give us the strength and wisdom we need to complete the task before us in a godly way. Amen.

In my next study of Daniel, I will be examining how Nebuchadnezzar had such a powerful dream that he demanded that his wise men interpret for him or he would have them cut to tiny pieces and their houses reduced to dust. God uses Daniel through this episode to save the lives of Daniel and the others and to further establish Daniel's position of authority.

Cheers.

I got a new phone recently. This is both good news and bad news. Boomer has now given me a new Treo 700p from Sprint. It means that I can now drop my personal phone service, which is good since Terri and I wouldn't have been able to afford two phones soon. It's bad because I'm getting a phone because I'm now officially on call for after hours IT support every other week. That's a pretty reasonable trade, as far as I'm concerned. It's also bad because my old phone number will be going away.

However, as I was transfering my photos off my old phone I was struck by a couple things. First, I've had my old Nokia 3650 for a long time, since 2002. I'd forgotten I'd worked for K-State that long (since I bought the phone after getting the job as Systems Coordinator there). The second thing was that I have a Holy-Crap-Load of self-portraits on the phone. I really like taking self-portraits for some reason—the photo that's currently in the upper-right of this site is a self-portrait. Anyway, I had quite a chuckle looking through these, so please read-on and mock.

This is my rare chance to use this blog to create a MySpace, erm, "quality" post. Enjoy. :-D

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This was the first photo I took with my new phone. Exciting. Moving on...

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Okay... so this is me in our old apartment. I'm... what am I doing? I look like I'm feeling hungry and am about to stuff the phone into my mouth.

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Look at that guy. He's a thinker and he's totally filled his whiteboard with the stuff he's trying to convince his students is sooooo important. Poor schmucks...

By the way, given the location of where I'm sitting, my office must have still been in the sub-optimal configuration my predecessor preferred.

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Everything is OK. Wait a minute, am I wearing a T-shirt under that Henley?! What was I thinking. This must be before Terri started forcing me to watch "What Not to Wear."

See all those books on the shelves behind me. Those were manuals to computers the department got rid of sometime in the early 1990's (if not sooner). I set them all on a table in the foyer, wrote "FREE BOOKS" with a Sharpie on a piece of paper, and they were ALL GONE in two days. College students will pick up and carry away raw sewage if someone will just put a FREE sign on it.

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Yes, I'm in the bathroom and taking my self-portrait. I don't remember the reason for the thumbs up anymore, so we'll make this a Choose Your Own Adventure. Was I doing it because I'm Awesome? Turn to page 63. If it's because I'm just a dork, turn to page 7.

You choose page 7? Sorry, your time machine malfunctioned and you are now stranded sometime in the mid-Jurrasic Period. THE END.

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Poor guy. This was sent as a multimedia message to my wife to let her know that I forgot to go buy whatever it was that I was supposed to buy listed on that little yellow card.

By the way, have I mentioned how much I loved that whiteboard? Look at all the pretty stuff on it. I really hated having that table in front of it. I moved it soon after this was taken. Scarily, I still wear that shirt too...

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This was the image that somehow got configured for my phone startup. I never did figure out how to get it back off. I'd say I look cool in this photo, but if you look carefully, I actually look kind of constipated.

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Speaking of constipated. This is my constipated country-bumpkin impression.

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Oh, yeah. I am awesome. This is in the attic of Flint Hills Christian School. I believe this was taken during my tenure as head of the visuals team, which runs the PowerPoints at church.

Did I mention I'm awesome?

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Hehe. Okay, do I look like an axe murderer? That may be because when I was the Systems Coordinator for CIS, I occasionally had secret hopes of becoming one when folks came by my door and asked for the forty-second time during the day, "X is broken," so I can answer one more time, "I Know That! Leave Me Alone So I Can Fix It!"

Those were good days. Yep, good days.

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Oh yeah, baby. Look at that gorgeous head of hair. Actually, my barber, Phil, often comments how much he likes my hair. It's also the reason Terri married me.

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Next to Trumpy (that's the son I fathered that hasn't yet been born or given a real name yet), these are two of my three favorite short people in the world, the third had not yet entered the world.

My nephews are fascinated with digital cameras, as any real men should be.

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This is one of my favorite photos ever. Terri thought I was posing seriously for this shot. She also allowed a portrait when she wasn't all fancied up. This has been the wallpaper on my phone ever since we took that photo and it's still the wallpaper on my new phone.

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I hate shopping. Man, I really despise shopping. I'm bored. I don't like shopping. Is she out of the dressing room yet? How many things did she take in there? I don't like shopping. Is this place ever not having a sale? Is she coming out yet... hey, let's play with my phone! That will be at least slightly more exciting... right?

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Uh, oh. Here she comes. Look happy.

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Again with the bored. There are too many people and too much noise at a wedding reception for my introvertedness. Hey, let's get out the phone and take yet another self-portrait.

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Hey! There they are again. Those dudes are soooooo cool. Especially the one in the middle.

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I have no idea when I took this. It must have been during one of those black out periods after I got asked the two-hundred-eleventh time about the latest email outage.

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I believe I took this photo in a Hobby Lobby somewhere out there because Terri said something to me that deserved that face. What did she say...?

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Good morning! This was meant to be sent to my wife who was at a conference at the time. Man, I am so dorky.

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I'm evil. This was taken at the airport when I got to Jacksonville, Florida for my brother's graduation from TBC. I meant to send it to Terri, who was stuck at work in Kansas, while I was waiting for my folks to pick me up.

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Uh... I haven't the slightest clue where that was taken, but boy do I look happy about it.

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Again with the constipated coolness. I really should eat more prunes.

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And this brings us up to the present, or at least the present of three months ago when I was working my butt off at work. This was the latest night of all, where I stayed until well into the morning working on something for The Launch That Never Was, Part 1.

And yes, that is 21" x 2 of buttery, flat-screened goodness behind me. My workstation setup is about as awesome as I could ask—except for the speed of my workstation. Though, that will be remedied shortly.

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That concludes this year's tour of my phone self-portraits. I hope you've enjoyed the tour. Please don't forget to visit the gift shop on your way out.

Cheers.

Well, I have to post on behalf of my wife. It has just been announced that her school, Ogden Elementary, will be awarded, by Scholastic and Intel, the Schools of Distinction award.

There were 4,000 schools that applied for this award and it had already been announced that Ogden was one of three finalist in the Mathematics Achievement category. For each of 8 categories, 6 finalists where chosen, 3 elementary and 3 middle schools. Out of those three, Ogden has been chosen as the elementary school for the award in Mathematics for 2006. This puts them in a group of an elite 16 schools awarded. Each school gets a $10,000 award and three individuals will be flown to a black tie event in Washington D.C. for the award ceremony. At the award 1 elementary school will be chosen for the "Best of the Best" and 1 middle school also. These schools receive an additional $15,000 award and Ogden is in the running.

I'm very excited to say that Terri is a part of this story. She's worked very hard and I'm very proud of her. She will be one of the three flying to Washington D.C. in October and I plan to go with her. Also going will be Mike Berndt, fourth grade, and Jim Armendariz, the principal.

Despite Ogden's alleged reputation, I think it's obvious that it is among the very best schools in the district. It may, perhaps, be the best school in the district even despite the fact that they are understaffed for their needs and have such a heavy special needs case load. It's been fun to be a part of this school through my wife and to see how things have developed over the last four or five years. Even though Terri will not be working there after our son is born, I hope that we will still be able to help Ogden in small ways in the future.

Cheers.

Okay, I'm going to try to make this quick because my wife is starting to turn into a pumpkin, so I need to get her to bed.

I just wanted to say that God has really been focusing and drawing my attention over the last few days. Fellow New Hopers have reported a similar thing over the past few months and it's a little exciting. I don't know what it means. Maybe it doesn't mean anything other than God is tugging on a bunch of us at once, but it's still kind of exciting.

With the Boomer web site launch, my relaunch of this site, my renewed interest in working on the church web site, my renewed interest in praying and focus on God, etc. I'm feeling kind of jazzed.

There's a lot happening right now and I'm just trying to patient to let it happen when it happens---because as it happens, even when things are happening, things still seem to happen slowly even while they're happening a lot.

I've got some cool plans for a new forms system for the planning tools at work, I've got some cool plans for fixing up the interface and added collaboration tools to the New Hope web site, and I've got a couple nifty ideas up my sleave to try out here. And I've secretly launched another web site I hope I can ramp up over the next few months around the passion dearest to my heart, seeking out the truth through God's word. I may also have a pending article to be published on Perl.com (which I need to finish editting, btw).

That's just the web stuff. I've got a son on the way and I'm really excited about that. Lots of cool stuff is happening and I hope to be sharing more of the details in the future without being all excited about something vague in messages like this...

Cheers.

After last week's debacle
of a topical study, I'm returning to exposition. Topical study requires much effort to do it correctly and I simply lack the training. I am much more comfortable with exposition anyway, since it's much harder to ruin the context.

I've decided to work my way through Daniel
for this study. I've never studied this book in detail before, but I've long wanted to do so. It covers the bravery of four godly men during the captivity in Babylon. These men stood for what they believed despite the fact that they could lose their life for doing so. In fact, all four are given a death sentence during this book and all four are delivered from that sentence by God: Daniel (aka Belteshazzar) faced the lion's den and Hananiah (aka Shadrach), Mishael (aka Meshach), and Azariah (aka Abednego) were thrown into a fiery furnace. Each of them survived his respective ordeal. The book also contains a great deal of apocalyptic writing, which I would also like to study more.

The book begins with a brief summary of the setting in chapter 1
:

1In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. 2And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the vessels of the house of God. And he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his god, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his god.

The book takes place during the captivity of Judah in Babylon. The quick overview of the history of ancient Israel is this: Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt to Canaan (modern day Israel), Joshua led the Israelites in and conquered the land (previously occupied by the Canaanites, Jebusites, Perizites, Hittites, et. al.), Israel was alternately ruled by no one and rescued from sinfulness by various temporary leaders called the judges, Israel appointed Saul to king, his dynasty ends at the end of his life and he's replaced by David and Israel's golden age of prosperity occurs under David's son's reign, King Solomon. After Solomon dies a civil war divides the kingdom into two nations, Israel (north) and Judah (south). After a couple hundred years, Israel falls to the Assyrians and essentially disappears from history. After another 150 years, Babylon also destroys Judah, but the Jews taken into Babylonian captivity keep their culture and society largely intact during this captivity and eventually return to rebuild Jerusalem about 400 years before the time of Christ.

The particular event recorded here happens a little before Judah is destroyed by Babylon. King Jehoiakim stood up to King Nebuchadnezzar because he was a puppet for Egypt, but then became the puppet of Babylon, which is why Babylon did not destroy Judah at this time. (Though, had Judah remained faithful to God, they wouldn't have been destroyed at all.) However, as the passage mentions, Nebuchadnezzar does rob the temple and carry a number of Jews (including those from the royal family and nobility) into captivity, including Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. This gives us the general setting of the book.

3Then the king commanded Ashpenaz, his chief eunuch, to bring some of the people of Israel, both of the royal family and of the nobility, 4youths without blemish, of good appearance and skillful in all wisdom, endowed with knowledge, understanding learning, and competent to stand in the king's palace, and to teach them the literature and language of the Chaldeans.

We see here one of the tools Babylon used to assimilate the nations it conquered. The best of the royalty and nobility of the lands conquered would be assimilated into the Babylonian king's court. This would give them authority, train them to think according to Babylonian ways, and distract them from trying to usurp the authority of the King. This program would not have been without it's risks, but given the amount of power Babylon wielded, it must have been relatively effective.

5The king assigned them a daily portion of the food that the king ate, and of the wine that he drank. They were to be educated for three years, and at the end of that time they were to stand before the king.

These men were even given portions of the best food and drink in the land. They were given the best education possible and were groomed for service in the highest offices attainable.

6Among these were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah of the tribe of Judah. 7And the chief of the eunuchs gave them names: Daniel he called Belteshazzar, Hananiah he called Shadrach, Mishael he called Meshach, and Azariah he called Abednego.

Finally, the men brought into service were not only taught the Chaldean language (the Chaldeans were the highest class of people that ruled the empire centered in Babylon), but they were also given Chaldean names. In fact, each of these names is a play on their Hebrew names, but named after Babylonian gods rather than after the Almighty God. The obvious intention was to help them forget their own nationality and to help them fully assimilate themselves into the Chaldean culture and worship.

These seven verses completely introduce the setting and give us the background we need to understand the real meat, which comes next.

8But Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the king's food, or with the wine that that he drank. Therefore he asked the chief of the eunuchs to allow him not to defile himself. 9And God gave Daniel favor and compassion in the sight of the chief of the eunuchs, 10and the chief of the eunuchs said to Daniel, "I fear my lord the king, who assigned your food and your drink; for why should he see that you were in worse condition than the youths who are of your own age? So you would endanger my head with the king." 11Then Daniel said to the steward whom the chief of the eunuchs had assigned over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, 12"Test your servants for ten days; let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink. 13Then let our appearance and the appearance of the youths who eat the king's food be observed by you, and deal with your servants according to what you see."

This conversation reveals a number of interesting facts. The first thing it strikes me with is how faithful Daniel is. Daniel wishes to glorify God. He would do so on the simplest of levels: simply by not defiling himself with the King's food. He immediately sets himself apart from the rest of the students that are being given this treatment. Doing so was risky because that culture was much more bloody than modern western culture. The king could have you beheaded just because he felt like it, he didn't need any justification. If the eunuch had decided to report these young men instead, the king might have decided they were trouble and taken care of them quickly and permanently.

Of course, why go to all this risk? What's wrong with the king's food? The problem is that the Jews had a strict code of food preparation guidelines—Orthodox Jews follow similar guidelines today, i.e. Kosher
food. Food prepared by non-Jews (Gentiles) is considered unclean under the Mosaic Law
. The food may also have included meat like pork, which is forbidden. However, the most serious offense would have been the fact that the food was almost certainly part of an offering to Babylonian gods. Many ancient cultures in that region slaughtered animals ritually and offered the death to their gods. Even the Jews performed ritual sacrifice for the Living God. After the sacrifice was made, the parts that were not burnt up were eaten. Daniel wanted to demonstrate that he did not worship Babylonian gods by refusing to eat food that had been sacrificed to them.

The next thing I note about this passage is Daniel's wisdom. The eunuch was afraid for his life that if he did this, Daniel and the other three would end up in poor health. If it was revealed that they had a different diet than everyone else, his life would be on the line for neglecting these men. Daniel spoke with the steward working for Ashpenaz to make his final plea. However he knew it, Daniel approached the man that could help him and gave a practical plan to a practical man. Daniel offered the steward a safe way to try out the diet and see if it really was a problem. If it didn't work, there was no reason that the steward couldn't turn around and force them back to the king's diet. This shows wisdom, a spirit of godly compromise, and trust that God would provide the appropriate result that would glorify God most.

Finally, and most importantly, we see that God has his hand in place to aid Daniel in this. God had softened the heart of Ashpenaz and made his steward open to Daniel's suggestion. Without God softening hearts, God's work doesn't get done. If the eunuch hadn't been softened to Daniel's plea, the steward might not have had the will to allow the plan to go forward. Without working with the steward, the steward could have reported on Daniel and his life could be in danger. This little piece of the greater story demonstrate's God's central role in working through people to achieve His goals.

14So he listened to them in this matter, and tested them for ten days. 15At the end of ten days it was seen that they were better in appearance and fatter in flesh than all the youths who ate the king's food. 16So the steward took away their food and the wine they were to drink, and gave them vegetables.

Whether the diet of vegetables was truly superior (I consider it likely) or that God simply made these men healthier simply for their obedience, it was obvious that this faithful diet was superior. The steward was so impressed by how good they looked after only 10-days, that he let them stay on it without defiling themselves.

I see the basic conclusion of this the lesson is that faithfulness to God may require standing up for your beliefs despite personal risk. However, it may also mean working with those who do not believe, but are in authority over you. At work, you might be asked to do something you believe to be immoral or underhanded. Perhaps before blustering or arguing, you should consider if there's another possibility. Has God provided a way out of the situation that will avoid defiling yourself and glorify God without offending your boss? It's possible that you can't without taking a stand, but if you can come up with a better compromise that allows each party to fulfill their agenda, God will use you. Even if the outcome results in a reprimand or worse, if you remain faithful to God, God will give that faithfulness its due in heaven and possibly use it on earth in ways you will never see.

Okay, well, I think that's a long enough study for today. Come back next time when we read how God raises these four faithful young men and gives them positions of authority in the land of Babylon.

Cheers.

Anyone that knows me should know that I'm often goofy, but not often really happy. I really feel frustrated and grumpy, a lot. If folks would just listen and do things the right way, I wouldn't feel this way. Seriously, that's how I feel a lot of the time. Yet, I occasionally get sappy. Prepare to be sapped.

I got a job working for Boomer Consulting, Inc. in February. I develop the software that runs the web site, or at least integrate and hack it. Prior to getting this job I was feeling really stifled at K-State. I liked what I did. I liked the folks I worked with. The pay wasn't terrible. The perks were alright. The medical plan was excellent. Yet, I felt stifled. I'd started losing interest. I was getting more frustrated than usual. And I wasn't doing the thing I like most: building web sites.

Moving to Boomer has allowed me to engage in my favorite occupation, but it also has done something more. It's freed me to think about things I hadn't really dealt with for months. I'd started to let the New Hope web site slide. My own web site practically vanished for months. My ~Sterling site went down and still hasn't come back (I still plan on it, by the way, for holding my resumé and such), and I'd really gotten kind of burnt out on everything.

I'm not sure what it is about the move to Boomer, but a great weight has been lifted in the process. Of course, the weight of deadlines and hard work weigh down on me more than my last position. I think the other part of this that has shifted the tide is that I've given up on the frivolous plans to build a CMS. I have new plans for contentment.org, but those plans don't feel nearly so urgent as my plans to build Contentment the CMS.

Anyway, I'm feeling really good about the things God has done in my life over the last six months. I've started getting back into my Bible again, praying, and taking time to do things besides stare at a screen 20 hours a day (I think I'm now down to 17). :-P

Cheers.

I was reminded of how fragile human relationships are yesterday. It is tragic to see friends and their marriages begin to break up. In this specific instance I am thinking of, I pray that that's all that will happen and reconciliation will happen. However, I want to talk about the key for a lasting marriage that apply to all: faithfulness.

Ha! Oversimplification, you may say, but no. Faithfulness merely sums up a host of issues.

You might first note that I did not say love. No, love may be helpful, but is not the key to a lasting marriage. Love is a fickle emotion and it comes and it goes. If you are faithful, however, love will come more than it goes.

I can describe faithfulness with this analogy. If you've ever driven a boat or a plane before, you know that it can be hard initially to keep your course. However, if you've had someone help you in either case, you will be told to focus on some landmark along your path and guide your vehicle straight towards it. If you look away and start to veer, you look back, focus on the same object, and you'll be back on course again. This is faithfulness. Choosing an object of faith and directing your path towards him or her. When you waiver, you turn back and fix your course. Faith returns even if briefly drifts.

Okay, analogies are great, but ultimately, they don't really tell you what you need. In our marriage, Terri and I have chosen to be faithful to each other. That choice was solidified when we each took an oath in front of our families and friends to remain faithful to each other. Unfortunately, our society puts very low value on the purpose of this ceremony. America is full of oath breakers who have turned aside from their promises in marriage and everything else. If an oath becomes inconvenient or difficult, we give up and move on. Why do we even bother to make them? Sad.

America also frowns upon the accountability those in attendance are meant to provide. We move so often that it's difficult to have a close-knit community helping to enforce the marriage oath. If someone does have the gumption to actually try and hold someone accountable, that's "None of their business" and "How dare they judge!" However, this doesn't mesh with the historical meaning of the wedding ceremony. Accountability is important.

Faithfulness means keeping your oath even when you hate it. Faithfulness means keeping your word is more important than being happy. However, this needn't be a burden.

A man who is faithful to his wife will pursue his wife with at least a fraction of the vigor he pursued her before marriage. A man who works at making his wife feel special on a regular basis will think of his wife as special. This is one of those interesting cycles. If you think your wife is special, you'll want to pursue her. If you pursue her, you'll think of her as special. If you don't pursue your wife, you'll start to feel ambivalent toward her. If you start to feel ambivalent, you won't be interested in pursuit of her. However, faithfulness demands you get up and pursue your wife even when you don't feel like, even if you want to run away from her.

As for women, I'll let a woman blogger handle that issue. I'm not qualified, except to say be faithful and keep your oath.

If you're a man and you haven't done anything for your wife lately, get off your ass and do something for her. Take her out. Buy her flowers. Give her a card. Talk to her. Turn off the television, stop working, and focus on your wife. It's important that you take care of this right now. I'll just finish by quoting Ephesians 5:25: "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her." Anything less is a failure and sin.

Amen.

Okay, so I'm announcing here the first mini-launch of the New Hope Church web site. The site is now running on a later version of Drupal and should have most of the old features intact, with a very few additions. I need to get the login information to Eric so he can start on the theming now so we can have the full launch.

I'm most excited right now about the new features that are coming rather than the few I've added. I'm going to talk about both and the features we already had as a reminder.

Existing Features

The New Hope Church web site has featured these capabilities to date:

Blogging

Any staff member or ministry leader in the system has had the ability to create a blog within the site. However, a very limited set of members have been given the appropriate permissions and of those, they generally have blogs elsewhere or not at all.

Comments

Any authenticated visitor to the site may add comments to most of the stories, audio messages, and events on the site. Again, however, this has never been used. It has never been advertised and I don't know if anyone has noticed the comment links since the current site design works to hide them.

Contact Forms

Each staff member has a contact form on the site. This was the only available way of contacting staff members during the previous iteration because I never implemented a better way. The main problem is that the contact forms require registration to work.

Events

This was one of the most heavily used features. The only serious issue with this was that recurring events weren't possible, so we couldn't add events like the Fusion youth meetings or Sunday gatherings unless we wanted to add each and every occurrence. I don't think anyone on staff has that much time to spare.

Messages

This is the single most used feature of the site. We upload audio to the site and then visitors can read notes about the sermon, download the audio, and listen to Podcasts.

Map

There is a map on the site showing the location of the old church office, Flint Hills Christian School where we meet for on Sunday, and the location of our land. Unforunately, an IE bug I documented a while back keeps that from working properly for anyone using IE.

Notifications

Staff, ministry leaders, and administrators (i.e., me) can setup email notifications when the site changes. I originally use this to watch for when Tony uploads the audio and to check back to make sure things were working. However, I confess that I've been simply deleting the notifications lately.

Pages

Various informational pages have been placed on the site. So far, this isn't much used, but I think that we'll see the amount of information on the site increase over time.

Biographies

Each staff member has a bio on the site associated with their user page. Any member of the site may also have a biography. More information could be added to the member profiles in the future, but I have no direction on what kind of information folks would like to see.

Search

The Drupal search abilities were a little pathetic in 4.5 and 4.6, but it looks like things are quite a bit better now in 4.7.

Announcements

In addition to events, some announcements don't have a specific date associated with them. These are heavily used in the current system and this should continue.

Categorization

Currently, categorization is only used to differentiate between which announcements and events belong to which ministries. With this update I've replaced the original categorization system with a different system that I think will serve us better.

Throttling

The site does have some throttling capabilities. That is, when it starts to see heavy loads, the site will start disabling some features of the site to keep it from being too overloaded. I've not configured this very well yet, so it probably needs to be looked at some more.

TinyMCE

No one visiting the site needs to know HTML. All pages can be editted using an editor with a Word-like interface.

Upload

Staff and ministry leaders can upload files to the site to associate them with stories, pages, events, etc. Unfortunately, our hosting service limits uploads to under 10MB, so this doesn't always serve us very well.

URL Filter

All documents on the site will automatically convert unlinked URLs and email addresses into links. This is also meant to simplify how the site is used for the non-tech-savvy.

Okay, that's what we already had. Now, on to what has been added.

New Features

Here's the list of new features that I've added with this update of the software running the web site.

Categories

I've switched the system from the "taxonomy" plugin to the "categories" plugin. One of the main reasons Drupal is popular is it's "taxonomy" system which provides a very rich language for describing metadata. Metadata, in this case, is basically just extra keywords associated with any particular page on the site.

For example, an announcement might have a taxonomy term associated with it named "Announcement" in the "Section" vocabulary. It might also have a term of "LIFE Groups" associated with it in the "Ministry" vocabulary. Each term is a particular keyword and each vocabulary is just a set of related keywords. The taxonomy system is very nice, but it has a shortcoming in that you can't describe the terms themselves very well. For example, what are "LIFE Groups"? What is a "Ministry"? These might be legitimate questions we'd like to answer and the taxonomy provides only a very rudimentary solution to this problem. I used some weak solutions in the previous version of Drupal to address this problem, but they didn't really work very well.

With the latest version of Drupal there's a new module called, "Categories" that promotes each vocabulary to a first-class citizen called a container and each term to a first-class citizen called a category. Each of these have the same full power as a regular web page and can contain a full description of what they are. This is a cool enough feature, that I will probably start using it on this web site soon. Kudos to Greenash for pioneering this.

Repeating Events

This resolves the old problem of not being able to have recurring events on the calendar. We can now create an event for Sunday morning worship and then make it a recurring event that repeats to a certain date. Handy.

Feedback

In addition to the Contact forms already in place. I've now added three new feedback forms that do not require creating an account to use. This will surely mean a little more spam for those of us on the receiving end, but that's not easy to avoid. There's now a form that is kind of an online "white card" like we pass out in church, a form for prayer requests, and a form for site problems.

Google Analytics

The chuch site has started collecting more statistics about visitors to help us improve the content of the site. I used Google Analytics because it's free, though, we've had some worries about it's accuracy at work. I'm hoping it will be better than nothing.

Just in case, I have also added a couple other stats modules to Drupal as well, to use Drupal's built-in statistic gathering capabilities to track things directly from the site too.

Google Sitemap

The site will start generating a Google sitemap, which should help improve how our search results show up in the most popular search engine.

Menu

This is a de facto improvement that comes just with upgrading 4.7, but we can now create much nicer menus in the system than we could before.

Automatic Path names

No more "node/123" links! I've added this in to automatically create easier to read and link paths within the system. Anytime someone joins our site, they're user profile will be at "user/user_name" rather than "user/123". Similarly, whenever an event is created, it will be at "calendar/2006/08/13/some_event_name". There are still a few irritations to work out of the names being generated, but I'm much happier with the way this is working already. By the way, the old links still work too, so they won't be broken either.

That's what's already new. Now on to the stuff that I think's going to be freakin' cool.

Upcoming Features

Here's my wishlist:

Google Map Improvements/Location/Geocoding

I've already started playing with this a bit. One thing a lot of folks have asked for is an online directory. I've been thinking about how to do this and I think I can provide an online directory for members that will not compromise anyone's privacy.

In addition to providing a directory, I will be able to provide a map showing the map location of all our members on a single map. So, you'll be able to see how close you live to fellow New Hope members. This will probably include a more public way of publishing LIFE group and event locations as well.

Forums

I would like to add forums to the site. Drupal 4.7 now includes the ability to create a pretty decent forums system directly in site. I think we could have various forums for things, particularly site suggestions and problems. This will be combined with my next item...

Organic Groups

This is a feature added by the CivicSpace crowd to allow members of a Drupal site to create groups on an ad hoc basis. With some controls on the system, we could allow staff members and ministry leaders to create mini-sites in the system with their own stories, events, audio messages, forums, etc. I see this as being a really exciting feature for the web site with the potential to revolutionize the communications abilities of thte staff and other leaders.

Okay, that's not the full list of what I want to do, but that's plenty long enough. It will probably take some weeks before any of the latter bits are implemented and I'm still looking for and waiting to hear bug reports on this latest update.

Cheers.

One of my favorite songs is by an obscure Christian band called Hokus Pick, "I'm So Happy." The song itself isn't specifically a Christian song since it just features a bunch of reasons to be happy. For example, one stanza goes:

Playing guitar in a band Just got back from Disney Land Driving my new four by four Ed McMahon is at my door

Stocks I bought just went up
Canucks won the Stanley cup
Bill Gates put me in his will
Someone paid my VISA bill

In church today, we sang a song about happiness as well. Since I'm trying to reinitiate my old habit of Sunday afternoon quiet times, I figured I'd tackle at least a surface examination of happiness.

The first thing that strikes me is that in all my searching for the words "happy" or "happiness" in the Bible, I find that the word is actually used in English translations very infrequently. In the New American Standard Bible, the word "happiness" is used only 4 times and "happy" just 15 times. Leah names her son Asher, which means "Happy" in Genesis 30:13. In Deuteronomy 24:5, God commands that men be allowed to make their wives happy for at least one year after marriage without being drafted into the military. 2 Chronicles 7:10 records that Solomon sent his men to their tents happy because God had so blessed Israel under his rule. God's discipline is marked as a source of happiness in Job 5:17. Psalm 128 recounts how happiness comes to those who fear the Lord. Having wisdom makes one happy according to Proverbs 3:18. Graciousness to the poor is a source of happiness by Proverbs 14:21 and so is keeping the law by Proverbs 29:18. The results of our labor are a source of happiness according to Ecclesiastes 3:22. Ecclesiastes 4:16 states that the people will not be happy with their rulers. Solomon says that external mourning with a happy heart is better than laughter in Ecclesiastes 7:3. He also tells us to focus on happiness during prosperity in Ecclesiastes 7:14. Solomon sardonically suggests we find happiness in life now, in Ecclesiastes 9:7, because we will soon die. Isaiah 52:7 says, "How lovely on the mountains Are the feet of him who brings good news, Who announces peace And brings good news of happiness, Who announces salvation, And says to Zion, 'Your God reigns!'" In Jeremiah 20:15, Jeremiah laments the happy news of his own birth. In Lamentations 3:17, he again laments that he has forgotten happiness. In Jonah 4:6, Jonah is made pathetically happy when God grants him a brief respite from the sun by causing a large gourd plant to shade him. And Romans 14:22 states that a man should be happy that he approves food and drink for the right reasons rather than for the wrong ones.

Looking through that summary, I note that the primary factor that is present in all is that "happiness" is just a transient and fleeting emotion. Jeremiah has forgotten it. Jonah is happy about a plant that only shades him from the sun a single day. A man is to make his wife happy for at least one year before he can be drafted into the military. Happiness is not a true spiritual blessing or something we seek beyond the transient moments of happiness that come and go. We should take satisfaction in our work. We should look forward to moments where we are glad despite mourning. We should work to know God so well that we can approve of godly actions for the right reasons.

However, if I stopped here, I feel that I would be a little disappointed. All in all, this happiness seems like the sort of thing that Solomon would have called "vanity" and "a chasing after the wind." It's here and then it's gone. What's left?

Rather than happiness, I think we need to seek blessing. Blessing is a synonym for happiness, but has permanence. Why? Because blessing comes from God and is not an emotion. Merriam-Webster defines it as: the act or words of one that blesses; approval, encouragement; and a thing conducive to happiness or welfare. When God blesses, that is a treasure that lasts forever. It can lead to the emotion of happiness and attitude of joy and, ultimately, a treasure that we have waiting for us in heaven.

Of course, when we look at where blessing is found, it's often not what we might normally link with happiness. First and foremost, God's choice is a blessing, "Blessed is the man You choose." (Psalm 65:4) Blessing comes to those who know Christ (Matthew 11:6), who believe and have faith (Galatians 3:9), whose sins are forgiven (Romans 4:7).

But then come the verses that are harder. God's reproof is a blessing. (Job 5:17; Psalm 94:12) Suffering for Christ is a blessing. (Luke 6:22) After you know God, even death is a blessing. (Revelation 14:13).

The Beattitudes in Matthew 5 really make this clear, and I will end by quoting them.

3¿Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4¿Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. 5¿Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. 6¿Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. 7¿Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. 8¿Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. 9¿Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. 10 ¿Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness¿ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 11¿Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. 12Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Amen.

I'm going to make this quick because Terri needs a counter-weight in bed (we have a waterbed) and I've already wasted much time responding to Slithy on Brent's blog on the history of sexual promiscuity in western society.

I've started the module update and have gotten most of the replacement modules installed that can be installed. However, I've had to get a replacement for the taxonomy_assoc module (as I thought I probably would), since that module has been discontinuied in favor of the Category module.

The Category module is a drop-in replacement for Taxonomy that replaces vocabularies with "containers" and terms with "categories". The difference is that both of these are now nodes. Not only this, but any content type can be treated as a container or category, effectively giving you a node for every term. Unfortunately, it's not quite as flexible in some ways as it doesn't seem to have a "folksonomy". Though, I haven't yet looked at it far enough. If it does have tagging or it can be added, I will probably migrate this site to it as well.

This module also replaces the Book module, but I haven't really looked into that since we don't use the Book module for anything at New Hope yet, though I think we might after talking to Dan and Tony a couple weeks ago.

Other than that, I've also added, but haven't tested the eventrepeat module. I've updated the various other modules that are available that I mentioned previously. I also need to see if Tony wants me to do anything to add image galleries, forums, and some other pieces. Finally, I think things are now to the point that Eric can start working on the design whenever he feels like it.

Cheers.

Well, I'd hoped to get the new photo gallery up for show before making this post, but it's starting to get late. So, I'm going to make the post now and I'll come back and add the pictures and other information I want to share tomorrow.

Today, I took the afternoon off from work because my folks came up to give us some furniture for the baby's room. We know have a dresser, most of a changing table, and we put together the crib Terri and I got last August at the highly excellent Fort Riley All Post Garage Sale. From that last sentence, you might be wondering why it's only "most" of a changing table... well, that's an excellent questions.

Terri gave a training class for the new teachers out at Ogden Elementary today, so we just met my folks at Little Apple Brewery for lunch. They had the furniture in the back of their pickup. We ate and Terri headed out. We got up and found that it was pouring outside. The furniture wasn't protected from the rain at all, so we hurried home. I had my folks back straight into the garage and we hurried to rip open the packaging and get all the parts out as quickly as possible. This is typical do-it-yourself particle-board with veneer furniture, so it wasn't going to tolerate water on it's sensitive parts very well.

Well, we got all the furniture in and found that all were fine, except for four pieces of the changing table. The hard-board pieces that got wet were immediately warped and there was one piece that had a crack in it. We built the dresser and as much of the changing table as we could without the wet pieces that were damaged. My dad is going to order replacements for those pieces. It's not too bad a hardship since they were planning on coming back in a couple weeks with a hutch for the changing table that hasn't arrived yet. Anyway, the baby's room is now panted and partially furnished. I'll post pictures as soon as I have them uploaded to the server.

This brings me to the second part of this blog. I've installed the gallery module for Drupal and Gallery so I can start posting photos, as I know all of our friends will be wanting instant updates. I'm going to open up site registrations for that purpose in the near future as well to allow full access to pictures for those who are interested.

Anyway, the gallery plugin is a pretty simple solution that pulls in pieces of the Gallery web site within Drupal, but it does work very well. I haven't yet integrated the theme yet, so that will have to be done too. Well, it's late, so I better wake my exhausted, pregnant wife up from the lazyboy and put her to bed.

Cheers.

I've started the software update for the New Hope web site. I've got the main Drupal system updated, but I haven't started on the modules. I'm doing the updates to a copy of the site so the current site can still run in the meantime (so don't bother looking for changes as they won't show up until we're done).

The trickiest bit is going to be that some of the modules we use on the current site are used because Drupal was lacking certain features that it no longer lacks. The other tricky bit will be the modules that are being discontinued in favor of better solutions--i.e., I'll have to do some conversions.

Here's the list of modules that need to be updated:

• event. I also plan to install eventrepeat as part of this process so that we can start showing recurring events, like Sunday mornings and youth meetings.
• flexinode. I'm going to replace this module with the content construction kit if I can. If it will be too painful, I may leave this for an update in a month or two.
• form_mail. I don't know what to do with this. I don't know what is available for this functionality.
• forms. Ditto.
• notify. This will either be an upgrade or I'll use a better notification module (not that there are many good choices for this functionality, according to my recent research).
• sermon_customizations. I hacked in some functionality to make Podcasts and some other bits to work correctly. Most of this can probably be ripped back out.
• taxonomy_assoc. This module associates nodes with vocabularies and terms. This is used in some important places, so I'll have to see what to do about this one (or just update, if possible).
• taxonomy_context. I can't honestly remember what this does at the moment, but I think this is a ditto of the last comment.
• theme_editor. I'll have to find out from Eric if this is still needed. I may just turn it off.
• tiny_mce. This is important. This makes it possible for our staff to post to the site without knowing any HTML or special document formats. I'll probably need to discuss with other stakeholders what features to include in the future too. There has been some disagreement about which functionality should be available to authors.
• urlfilter. This is used to turn http://... strings into links when someone doesn't link a URL. This is probably a trivial update.

The last bit that I'll need to update is making sure the script I've written to allow Tony to upload recorded audio also gets a face lift. It'll surely need a few changes. I wrote this script to get around upload restrictions set on PHP code on our host and to help standardize the MP3 tags in the audio for the Podcasts.

That pretty well summarizes my plans for the next launch. Eric is going to be responsible for importing the design that Jay Risner has put together for New Hope. I hope we can get the first release knocked out by the first week of September. I'd like it to be before the students return, but that may not be realistic given the data conversion I'll have to perform and some of the remaining design questions Eric has. We'll get it done.

Cheers.

My web site was never so popular as it were when it were Drupal. Now I'm back to the glory days. Well, maybe. I lost a lot of prestige in the months that I quite maintaining my blog very well while I was attempting to build up Contentment. It also hurts that the paths I had have changed and broke and are incorrect. However, I now have better paths due to my friend, pathauto.

I've now finished importing all the content from my previous WordPress and Drupal sites. I did the blog posts by hand because many of them needed editting and I took it as an opportunity to remember the olden days. There's still more work to be done if I'm really going to get the archives correct since some links have changed and some of the text encoding is screwed up in a few places still, but it may just stand as is.

I've been thinking of bringing in my Blosxom posts as well and even thought of going back to the stuff I built in Everything and back in the static HTML days of yore, but if that happens it probably won't be this month. ;) I'm tired of imports, but I may end up doing it.

One of the coolest new custom features I built this time around was the Categories block to the side there. The most exciting aspect of that is how I order the categories so that both quantity and how recently the tag was used. I built a corresponding Popular Tags page describing how the process works containing a complete list and shows individual scores. It's not perfect, but it's relatively nice.

I still need to tweak the design more. Comments look terrible and I'm not very fond the sidebars. They should match the curviness of the banner. I also need to tweak margins because there's not enough whitespace. However, I wanted to launch as soon as possible because it's a drag having a sucky blog...at least for me.

Cheers.

This is the list of all tags I've used in my blog to those point (this includes or will include tags used in content aggregated from other sites as well).

Categories

$container_id = 181;
$sql =
"SELECT d.nid, d.title, c.description, ".
" MAX(n.created) AS updated, ".
" COUNT(*) AS count, ".
" SUM(2.5/LOG(0.25*((UNIX_TIMESTAMP()-n.created)/2592000)+1.5)-1) AS score ".
"FROM {node} d ".
" INNER JOIN {category} c ON c.cid = d.nid ".
" INNER JOIN {category_node} cn ON cn.cid = c.cid ".
" INNER JOIN {node} n ON n.nid = cn.nid ".
"WHERE c.cnid = %d AND n.status = 1 ".
"GROUP BY d.nid, d.title, c.description ".
"ORDER BY score DESC";

$count_sql = "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM {category} c WHERE c.cnid = $container_id";

$result = pager_query($sql, 30, 0, $count_sql, $container_id);

while ($category = db_fetch_object($result)) {
$items[] = array(
l($category->title, 'node/'. $category->nid,
array('title' => $category->description)),
$category->count,
round($category->score, 1),
t('%time ago', array('%time' => format_interval(time() - $category->updated, 3))),
);
}

print theme('table', array('tag', 'count', 'score', 'last update'), $items);
print theme('pager');
?>

How it works

The list is sorted in order of popularity using an inverse-logarithm scoring method I developed myself. Basically, the most recently used terms get a very high score that tapers off to a relatively low score once the post is a year old or older. Each use of a term is cumulative so the more commonly used terms will appear higher on the list even if they haven't been used as recently as others. This list will sort itself as time goes on according to whatever my latest posts are about.

Originally, when I used the built-in taxonomy module of Drupal, I used this SQL query to do the calculation:

SELECT d.tid, d.name, d.description, 
    MAX(n.created) AS updated, 
    COUNT(*) AS count, 
    SUM(2.5/LOG(0.25*((UNIX_TIMESTAMP() 
        - n.created)/2592000)+1.5)-1) AS score 
FROM {term_data} d 
    INNER JOIN term_node USING (tid) 
    INNER JOIN node n USING (nid) 
WHERE d.vid = ? 
    AND n.status = 1 
GROUP BY d.tid, d.name, d.description 
ORDER BY score DESC

However, since I recently switched to the Category module, I updated the SQL to reflect this with:

SELECT d.nid, d.title, c.description,
       MAX(n.created) AS updated,
       COUNT(*) AS count,
       SUM(2.5/LOG(0.25*((UNIX_TIMESTAMP()-n.created)/2592000)+1.5)-1) AS score
FROM {node} d
     INNER JOIN {category} c ON c.cid = d.nid
     INNER JOIN {category_node} cn ON cn.cid = c.cid
     INNER JOIN {node} n ON n.nid = cn.nid
WHERE c.cnid = ? AND n.status = 1
GROUP BY d.nid, d.title, c.description
ORDER BY score DESC

Here's the function describing the math involved. I developed this function for calculating the score by arbitrarily modifying the log curve to suit my needs.

In the equation, s represents the final score, n is the number of terms and i is the iterator over the terms. The m_i represents the number of months since the creation of the post the ith use of the term belongs to. Since Drupal stores time in seconds since the epoch (i.e., January 1, 1970), the current time is calculated by subtracting the node's creation time from the current time and then dividing by 2,592,000, which is the number of seconds in a month.

If you view a curve plot for an individual iteration, you would note that when the delta (m_i) is 0, the score for that term will be around 5.2. When the delta is 12, the score is about 1.

We sang a song in church today titled, "Psalm 19." I'm sure we've sung it before, but while reading the lyrics this time, I wanted to know more about the context. I looked up Psalm 19 in my Bible and after reading through Psalm 19 I was a little let down by the song because the Psalm is magnificient, but the song seems to concentrate on the least significant verse, verse 14:

14Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart     be acceptable in your sight,     O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

That's a good verse (there aren't any bad ones), but this has very little meaning without the context. Therefore, I'd like to give the full quotation for Psalm 19 here to give it the full meaning it deserves:

To the choirmaster, A Psalm of David

1The heavens declare the glory of God,
    and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
2Day to day pours out speech,
    and night to night reveals knowledge.
3There is no speech, nor are there words,
    whose voice is not heard.
4Their measuring line goes out through all the earth,
    and their words to the end of the world.
In them he has set a tent for the sun,
5    which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber;
    and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy.
6Its rising is from the end of the heavens,
    and its circuit to the end of them,
    and there is nothing hidden from its heat.

7The law of the Lord is perfect,
    reviving the soul;
the testimony of the Lord is sure,
    making wise the simple;
8the precepts of the Lord oare right,
    rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is pure,
    enlightening the eyes;
9the fear of the Lord is clean,
    enduring forever;
the rules of the Lord are true,
    and righteous altogether.
10More to be desired are they than gold,
    even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey
    and drippings of the honeycomb.
11Moreover, by them is your servant warned;
    in keeping them there is great reward.

12Who can discern his errors?
    Declare me innocent from hidden faults.
13Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins;
    let them not have dominion over me!
Then I shall be blameless,
    and innocent of great transgression.

14Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
    be acceptable in your sight,
    O Lord, my rock and my redeamer.

The first stanza declares how creation glorifies our Creator. How the creation itself speaks for and glorifies God. The second stanza declares how God's scripture glorifies him as the perfect lawgiver and that anyone who takes the time to learn the scriptures is blesssed.

The third stanza declares the Lord blameless and David begs the Lord to help him become so as well. The final stanza then compares everything that comes before and basically askes that his lowly words be made acceptable and pleasing to God. It's almost as if David didn't feel that even these worshipful words were really good enough to truly praise God in his perfection.

Lord, please let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.