Burning Ones

The Big Picture, as I’ve pointed out many times before, is awesome. This week they have a special on the Sichuan Earthquake that happened over 6 months ago. The pictures, as always, are moving.

I wanted to point out #17 first, because it disturbs me greatly. First off, it’s a great picture. I think the lighting and framing and all of that turned out really well. And I love the perspective. But at the same time, it’s just so wrong for some reason.

Second, and on a lighter note, I wanted to point out #32, because it does exactly the opposite from #17.

I recently picked up Emacs again after being Internet-Slapped by Yegge. It’s funny, but way back in the day after I got my first 13″ iBook (still, in my opinion, the cutest computer every made, which is saying a lot) and began to dive into wondrous Unix (we were still tcsh back then), Emacs was the first program I attempted to learn. Who’s masochistic? /me raises both hands and jumps up and down.

Anyway, I didn’t know any better at the time and over the years I got tired of trying to integrate Console based Emacs into my daily work flow. All that has thankfully changed, and my cheek still hurts like heck.

Intros aside, what I have today is a Wonderful Little Tip™ that will be accompanied by other Wonderful Little Tips™ because Emacs is the kind of app that allows you to find Wonderful Little Tips™ all the time.

I often find myself typing in a title or something to that effect which I would like to have most or all of the words capitalized. The title of this post would be an example. In regular editors, the way to do this is to capitalize every word as you go along manually. This presents a few problems.

1. Because you’re in an editor other than Emacs, when you forget to capitalize things, it’s a messy process to either arrow-key or delete key backwards to the mistake, delete the mistake, and then reenter as a capital.
2. Typing capital letters is hard (OK… It’s a bit of a stretch, but I wanted a list, so I needed it), requiring precise and dexterous finger movements which even for seasoned Dvorak touch-typists like myself, every once in awhile goes awry.

What is the answer to this morass of efficiency conundrums? Who will deliver my hands from this editing of death!? Enter Emacs (OK, now I feel slightly uncomfortable with the subtle Emacs=Jesus suggestion there… That’s just weird, although RMS might actually think that, after all Emacs helps people more than babies do)! Emacs provides these nice text transformation functions that work like magic. They are bound as follows

• M-u: upcase-word
• M-l: downcase-word
• M-c: capitalize-word

The relevant control sequence for our tip here is M-c. The magic of this is quite simple; Type out a phrase, and then either M-b back through the words, M-a back to the beginning of the sentence, or if it’s all on one line, C-a to the beginning of the line. Then, using a combination of M-f and M-c, capitalize to your heart’s content.

This is so much faster than actually typing out the capitalized words. I can’t verify that it would save you time to do this for every capitalization everywhere, but for a long string of them, the added benefit of not having to type a separate key sequence each time you want to capitalize a word is astonishing. In fact, it’s so astonishing that I’m going to put together a little video of this function in action…

You know… because it’s that cool.

OK, here’s the video:

Emacs Wonder: Text Transformation Control Sequences. from Tim Visher on Vimeo.

The organization that employs me began to implement Daily Stand-Up Meetings a little under a year ago. So far, it hasn’t been going well at all, at least in my opinion. First, I suppose I should try to enumerate the purpose, advantages, and disadvantages of the daily stand-up before I discuss what I feel like we’re doing wrong.

What is the Daily Stand-Up?

The stand-up is an attempt to promote high-visibility and co-ownership within a team of people working on a singular project. In lieu of the more traditional status meeting approach to the problem of low-visibility, effort is made to keep have short, sweet, to-the-point, and team- (rather than manager-) lead stand-up meetings. Apparently (I’ve never had the good fortune to be actually involved in one of these atrocious things), status meetings have a tendency to descend into nothing more than low-energy wastes of time where people who shouldn’t be involved with each other drone on for an hour, reporting to the boss about this and that configuration item. Commonly, in a stand-up, the emphasis is placed on answering 3 questions with a great degree of brevity (to be clear, I’m lifting these questions directly from Shore and Warden:

1. What did I do Yesterday?
2. What will I do today?
3. What problems are preventing me from making progress?

In order to maintain energy and to reduce the feeling of interruption, some organic pressure on keeping the meetings short is required. As The Old Boy so elegantly puts it in his excellent essay on daily stand-ups, “We stand up to keep the meeting short.” The thinking is that sore feet and legs will soon remind any gabby team members to speed things up.

A daily stand-up can also be attended by non-developer stakeholders in the product. This involvement can take the place of a typical status meeting but can also be somewhat destructive. The problem comes when the people who don’t need to be directly involved in the stand-up start to take too much attention away from the real task at hand. For instance, gasping or getting visibly angry if a team member reports that they were not able to progress far enough on a particular configuration item and thus have to push a release date back would be trouble on many fronts. First, it would reduce team members’ ability to speak freely about development issues they are having for fear of blow-back from the stakeholders. Other issues can be left to the reader to imagine. However, despite the danger, oftentimes the stand-up can be a terrific opportunity to state which stories you’re working on, how their coming, whether you think you will meet the project guess date, etc. which in a properly organized team with high customer involvement should be most if not all of what your stakeholders are interested in knowing.

To sum up, the daily stand-up is a tool for promoting visibility among a team and the relevant stakeholders working on a single product or tightly knit set of products via a low-cost daily event that helps focus the team on important issues and increases the likelihood that any problems faced by a team member will be known to the whole team quickly (at most a day late).

What isn’t a Daily Stand-Up?

A daily stand-up should not be any of the of the following.

1. An opportunity to inform an entire organization of the goings on within a specific project.
2. A status report meeting used by a manager to gain insight into the goings on of every project under his or her command at one time.

I’ll address each of these points one at a time. However, before I do that I’ll just point out if you didn’t already catch it that the common theme here is using the stand-up to do more-than-one-team operations. I believe this is a perversion of the stand-up concept and should be rooted out as quickly as possible. This, unfortunately, is how my organization uses the stand-up meeting, and I believe it is contributing to the relative hair-pulling nature of our practice.

First, the meetings cannot be used to inform an entire organization of the goings on within your project. This misses the whole point of the stand-up in the first place! The idea is to foster communication between interested parties and team members, not to try to report to people who have no stake in what you’re doing. Beyond missing the point, it’s impractical. In my organization, for instance, there is implicit pressure to dumb down what you are reporting on because most of the other people in the room aren’t aware enough of what you’re talking about to be able to intelligently listen (I’m at the very least speaking for myself… 3/4 of the developers at my organization are Main Framers, and I’ll be the first to tell you, I know nothing about main frame programming). Notice, please, that I’m not saying they aren’t intrinsically intelligent enough to be capable of understanding, just that they aren’t aware of the project enough to be able to listen to statements as compact as what a true stand-up calls for.

We recently began to do a stand-up meeting with just the team members of the project that I’m on (a :cringe: VB6 DB-driven Inventory Tracking System) and the difference is night and day. I feel free and encouraged to share deep technical issues that I’m dealing with because I know the people I’m talking to have knowledge about what I’m referring to. Beyond that, there isn’t as much of a need to preface everything that I’m talking about with lengthy and pedantic explanations because the people I’m talking to know the system at least as well as I do. We’re all in it together. Comparatively, in the whole-organization stand-up I take part in, I know 3/4 of the people have absolutely no stake and very little knowledge about what I’m doing. This is counter-productive and as such it’s harmful to morale and motivation. My manager has to virtually drag people to the stand-up every morning and encourage people to get started, rather than it being an organic, team-led event, I believe specifically because people know that the rest of the developers there are mostly uninformed.

Second, and related, the status-report-to-the-manager mentality has no place in a stand-up meeting. In fact, according to the best literature on the subject, a well-run stand-up meeting should eventually have no need at all of a manager. The intrinsic value of knowing what your co-team members are doing, having difficult problems that you face solved with your team members’ help, not having to attend long status meetings with every interested party etc. should eventually garner interest from the team. At my organization, this is decidedly not the case. In fact, a new rule was recently instituted that stand-ups don’t have to happen unless my manager is present. This is of course, counter to the whole idea. A manager should be present when they can be there, but in the end they should only be there as an outside observer, rather than a direct participant (unless of course the manager is specifically acting as the team lead, in which case that is the role they would be appearing under, not as the branch manager). It is this status report mentality that The Old Boy addresses in the Reporting to the Leader section of his essay. This is a surefire way that I have personally experienced of killing the stand-up. When people are not talking to each other and are instead talking to the manager, the stand-up is going to feel impersonal and worthless.

Are There Any Disadvantages to a Daily Stand-Up?

The main disadvantages talked about in the literature seem to indicate the following:

1. When a stand-up is run wrong, it quickly becomes just one more unwelcome interruption to your day rather than a time for team communication.
2. Even if a stand-up is run right, there is a possibility that it’s timing will distract people from getting work done because either the stand-up starts the day late, or it isn’t at a good time to set the focus for the team.

Obviously, point one is easily addressed. The remedy for a poorly run stand-up is to stop running it poorly. This might include getting some help for running your stand-up from a more experienced team or consultant firm. The Old Boy does contend that a poorly run stand-up will almost certainly not just ‘fix itself’ and if it is not helped, the likelihood that it will simply die is very high. Point two is a much more difficult problem, however it’s something of a non-starter. The challenges of finding the best time to do your stand-up are small compared to the benefits of a well-run stand-up.

So How Could We Fix the Stand-Up At My Organization?

In brief, there are two basic teams at my organization: Main Framers who program mostly in COBOL, and what has heretofore been referred to as Client/Server folks (I think we’re updating that name to Web Appers). The former comprises roughly 3/4’s of the developers. To this day (yes, even after almost a year of stand-ups), I’m still not sure I understand what the Main Framers are working on. I know that there are basically 2 products that the Web Appers are working on and an additional one that is in a state of regular maintenance. That’s our situation to the extent of my knowledge. There are several solutions that I see to the problem we’re facing at my organization, and maybe your organizations face similar issues that could be addressed in similar ways:

1. Depending on how closely knit the Main Framers’ side is (I sometimes get the impression that it is very closely knit, although I know there are multiple products), the stand-up could at least be split between Main Framers and Web Appers.
2. The stand-ups could be split up on a per-project basis (this would be a ‘traditional’ stand-up).

First, there is one advantage to the model that everyone participates in one stand-up. It means that no one has to attend multiple stand-ups. Unfortunately, another characteristic of my organization is that most people are assigned to multiple active-development projects. This is of course quite separate from the notion that once a project is put into maintenance mode, you go on to developing other things more actively. So, if you approach things this way one does not have to do multiple stand-ups. Wonderful… Of course this approach ignores the fact that when you include everyone in a single stand-up, they either have to report on everything that they would have reported on in their smaller per-project stand-ups (yielding the same time spent on balance, and in a much less focused way) or they have to simply not report on things the way they would have otherwise (mucking up the purpose of the stand-up to begin with). Both of the approaches above don’t directly address this problem, however they don’t necessarily have to as the goal is to have only interested parties at any given stand-up anyway so the problem of having to ‘pick and choose’ is a moot point because people will want to be at these stand-ups.

I see solution one as an incomplete but perhaps necessary solution. The problem is that some people have to be involved in multiple projects and in theory the more stand-up meetings you have, the harder the scheduling becomes. Ideally, my manager would simply travel around to the various stand-ups and listen in to get his status information. Anyone who had multiple stand-up commitments would simply have to work out a schedule with his or her various team members that works for everyone. If absolutely no solution can be found (I can’t imagine this happening, unless severe interpersonal issues were already present), then I would expect the correct solution would be the removal of the person from one of the teams for the sake of focus. However, it’s possible that on the Main Framer’s side there is really only one system that has many parts that they all work on together. It’s not the case on the Web Appers’ side, but it’s a possibility. If this is the case, then the Main Framers at least could gather as one body and this would reduce the chance of scheduling conflicts, as well as promoting chances for self-organization between the different parties. Also, this would at least keep people in their various expertise domains. This would allow people to refer to specific but widely-applicable technical issues they are facing (problems with a specific tool, issues with a particular coding construct, etc.) that the people present would be likely to be able to address.

However, the true Holy Grail here would be splitting things up into teams. Most of the teams at my organization are no more than 3 or 4 people (usually less) as far as I can tell. That would mean that a given stand-up could go into great technical detail and yet still last for maybe 5 minutes. In contrast, when the whole group gets together and things are time-boxed to 15 minutes, the emphasis on brevity and the problem of global comprehension make it difficult to communicate anything significant briefly. In this solution, people would schedule, of their own accord, stand-ups involving only the team members specifically assigned to that project and would inform the relevant stakeholders (including my manager) of that time. Allowance would have to be made for every stand-up to occur at a unique time (to give floaters the ability to attend them all) unless a situation easily allows for multiple stand-ups to be happening at once. Then, the stand-ups would occur, regardless of my manager’s or stakeholder’s presence, as a team-led effort. As the teams get better at doing these stand-ups, will to do them would also increase. I don’t see the issue of floaters as being a viable one for the reasons I stated above: They should be reporting on everything they’d say anyway, and because of the people involved in any one stand-up, they should feel encouraged to do so.

Conclusion

Well, that’s all a mouthful. It boils down to this: Stand-Ups should be brief, to the point, and single team. The challenge of involving a second uninvolved party of any kind simply increases friction and reduces energy. If your organization is doing something like mine is, consider writing something like this as a proposal for change, because the stand-up is too good of an idea to just let go because of bad implementation.

For Further Reading

I’ve linked to The Old Boy and Shore and Warden in the article, but here they are in a nice list:

• It’s Not Just Standing Up - Martin Fowler
• The Art of Agile Development - Shore and Warden
• Stand Up Anti-Patterns

For Pity’s Sake

I think I understand why my manager is doing this. The culture at my work place is distinctively non-agile. I think that approaching a very valuable practice like the stand-up in this manner is seen as a way to ease my co-workers into the practice. The problem is that the way it is being done is making people less interested in the stand-up, not more. If we really want to get this practice going, we need to do it right.

I just wanted to push this out there since I enjoyed making it so much.

A number of years ago (probably pushing 5 at this point), my then fiancé and I came across a video for an astonishing product, the Neti Pot. As most people came across it, I’m sure, we saw the video on You Tube and immediately thought it was a joke. I mean, the ad’s actually kind of creepy. But, time goes on, and little did we know that a young friend of my brother in law, Jeff, would change how we felt about it.

Jeff comes from something of a more natural household (shops at Whole Foods, believes in using some combination of homeopathic and more modern medical tools for curing illness, etc.) and apparently one day had a bit of a stuffy nose. ‘Well,’ said his mom, ‘I suppose we should use the Neti Pot.’ Jeff had never used said pot before but figured he’d give it a go. As he reported to us later, it actually really kind of helped and felt good afterword. So we found out that the Neti Pot is actually real and apparently works, but one more event would be needed before the Nasal Cleansing Pot would come into our lives.

Just this past Friday, on our weekly visit to Whole Foods, I came across a product I had not heard of previously: The Nasal Cleansing Pot. The Nasal Cleansing Pot is not quite as pretty as the original Neti Pot, but at the same time it comes in at a slightly lower price tag of 14 bucks. That’s what ended up selling me on it. I had been intrigued by the pot ever since Jeff’s report but not enough to purchase the original highfalutin Neti Pot. But hey, 15 dollars? Come on, who wouldn’t?

Anyway, I felt that this historic moment must be caught on tape, and that’s exactly what we did. What follows is ~9 minutes of wonky fun:

Don’t Forget: Nasal Hygiene Is The Key… from Tim Visher on Vimeo.

And finally, the video that started it all:

On an interesting sidenote, since using the Nasal Cleansing Pot, I have gotten sick for the first time in months. Granted, it’s finally starting to get cold in south eastern PA, but I wonder…

The Big Picture’s done it again…

I’ve always been a huge fan of macro-photography, especially the über-closeup shots of bugs and other micro-organisms (I think this is left over from my humble nerdy beginnings where I would collect bugs and place them in Tupperware my mom declared as blessed-for-bug-storage). Favorite shot this time around has gotta be #16. The curl of it’s… Nose?… is particularly beautiful.

Hope you enjoy it!

Wow… This comic summarizes my life so well right now.

Fail.

[Edit] - To be clear, I wrote this in response to Dutch Sheets’s recent open letter responding to the elections published on 6-11-08. I would recommend reading that, as I feel it is a good example of what I think might be the wrong paradigmn towards God’s sovereignity.

‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.

‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us… [Behind Bilbo finding the Ring] there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the ring, and not by it’s maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.’ - The Fellowship of the Ring: The Shadow of the Past.

I’ve been struggling lately with the concept of God’s sovereignty in the context of these elections.

Some background: For a long time I was what I will refer to as ‘pure predestination’. This means that, for lack of a better way to describe it, we are all essentially puppets under the hand of God and he is playing out a play with us, even though the puppet is not directly consciously aware of the puppeteer’s actions. This attributes absolute sovereignty to God and zero free will to us. Of course, the problem with that is that it flies in the face of experience completely and it also doesn’t seem to jive with several passages of scripture. That being said, I definitely believe that it does jive with several other passages and it is a very comforting thought. After all, the idea that ultimately you don’t have any real responsibility for anything that’s happening around you and in you (including your sin) is comforting if you attribute perfect goodness to the one who is controlling you. Ultimately, even if he were to send you to Hell, it would be OK, because the one who had made that decision is perfectly good. That’s ‘pure predestination’. Verses in support of this would be Romans 9-11, or Ephesians 1:3-10, etc.

Then, I listened to a few things and met a few people that shook that belief (and ultimately gave the Bible more of a right to speak to me about who God is and how he works) and I became what I’ll refer to as a deterministic free will (that’s an awful word). This means that, if I take into account all of the scripture that I know of, I have to account for the fact that God clearly predestines people to either be in his family (saved and having their end to be with God for eternity, ascribing him glory and majesty and beauty and power, and dwelling in his everlasting love) or out of his family (unsaved and having their end in Hell and everlasting torment and separation from God, the end we all deserve but do not all receive because of the free gift of mercy). Another way to put this would be that some people are sheep and others are goats. A sheep cannot be made into a goat, and a goat cannot be made into a sheep. It’s just a non-issue. I can’t become a monkey. I can want to be a monkey, I could in theory probably even take some weird hormones developed by our intrepid scientific community and make some inroads towards becoming one. But ultimately I am a human, and that’s really all I’ll ever be.

However, then on our side of things and from God’s perspective, things are somewhat up in the air. God has a plan, which is perfect and meant to bring about the greatest vision of his glory and the greatest good for the greatest number of people through the least amount of pain and judgement possible. How he accomplishes this is by partnering with us, who he has elevated to a level of dignity in our relationship with him that is really beyond comprehension. If we do not partner with him, his plans are delayed until he can find a person to partner with him to accomplish his purposes on the earth. Verses such as Ephesians 4:1 and Hebrews 12:1-3 and Romans 12:1-2 all seem to point to this willing in our lives to do what God has called us to do and partner with him. Of course, one of the most famous verses that proves this theory is Ezekiel 22:23-31, where God seems to lament the fact that he could find no man to stand in the gap between him and his people which caused him to have to pour out his wrath on them. Also, James 5:13-18 where we learn that Elijah was the cause (in partnership with God) of the drought and the ending of the drought that occurred during the reign of Ahab and Jezebel.

Thus, deterministic free will.

Lately, I would say that I’ve begun to swing back towards pure predestination. The reason is that I find it to be a fairly weak argument that is constantly thrown around that the reason a promise from the Lord didn’t come true is because ‘our faith failed’. In the prosperity movement, this concept rears its head in a particularly ugly way. The faith healer will pray and tell people that they’re seeing cancer, or osteoporosis, or blood clots, or heart conditions, and then they’ll tell the people that healing is available for those conditions and that if the person will only have faith, they will be healed. If it doesn’t happen, they don’t tell the person to go grapple with the fact that a sovereign god does not have to heal them nor does he promise in all circumstances to heal them nor is it the fault of Satan that they are sick in the first place but in fact the will of God nor that it may be that God wills for them to suffer that they might learn righteousness (as Jesus did) but instead that God wanted to but they were unwilling.

It’s the convenience of it that bothers me. Instead of grappling with a God who for his own reasons and glory is willing to choose to send people to hell (I find no theological route around this, no matter what God has chosen to send people to hell. He made the rules in the beginning, he didn’t have to create a hell, so even if we chose in the end to violate laws that would ‘force’ God to put is in hell, it was still him in the beginning who gave us the ability to make that choice, so it’s still his choice ultimately that has us there) and yet is still perfectly good, we feel guilty and confused that our God who really wants us to be happy and healthy and all the rest has to partner with weak little us to get anything done. The blame and power are shifted to us irreversibly. We don’t deal with a God who, like Romans 9 says, created some vessels for honorable use and some for dishonorable; instead we implore those around us to ‘let God use them for honorable use instead of ‘forcing’ his hand to use us for dishonorable use’. That is a much harder challenge to wrap our hearts around.

So, back to the elections. The issue I see is that I believe God is shouting to this nation that Abortion must come down. As his heart was set against slavery before the civil war, so now his heart is set against abortion. This is not to say that we couldn’t theorize that there are many other evils in the world. The way we (the church) treats the poor and needy in our world is appalling, and there will be judgement and answering for that behaviour. However, as God is sovereign, he has the right to focus on any given issue at any given time (as he could just as well choose to focus on all issues).

As an aside, I believe the reason God focuses on an issue at a time is his mercy. If God were to confront me with all of the darkness in my life right now in one fell swoop, I would be killed. I simply cannot know how dark I really am. Instead, he deals with me in little steps on the progressive road to sanctification and unity with Christ. I believe the same holds true for a nation. If God were to come to America or Mexico or Russia or Africa and say, ‘This is everything I have against you’, the nation would be destroyed. OK, aside over.

So, God is choosing right now to focus on the moral and social issue of the sanctity of pre-natal life. We condemn murder (the killing of a human being) in every circumstance (although even that has begun to be questioned in the case of euthanasia, which I have found a surprising amount of support for, and many people support capital punishment, and I believe to the conservatives everlasting shame many people who are ‘pro-life’ in the case of abortion are also pro-war, which couldn’t be much more pro-death) except the life that is still mostly in the womb (OK, maybe that’s a bit of barb against people who are OK with partial birth, but whatever. It’s a heinous act so I don’t mind vilifying it). We approach the definition of a human in all sorts of wonky ways so that we can justify aborting a ‘fetus’ while still not feeling foolish when we congratulate and expecting mother on her ‘new baby’ and ‘little life’. Who among us would look at a mother, flushed with joy at the prospect of her little baby coming, and straight faced tell her, ‘well you don’t actually have a baby yet, it’s just animated tissue without any real substance. Don’t get excited till it’s all the way out of you because, you know, then it’s an actual baby.’ That is the issue on God’s heart. 50 million babies, killed in the name of convenience, health, and freedom.

Now, we had two candidates for this election, as you all know. Barack Obama is pro-choice to an extreme. He has been very candid about this (a fact for which I thank him. If politicians could just be honest about their beliefs and stop with the theatre of neutrality I think our country would be in a vastly healthier state.) and his voting record backs up his claims. John McCain couldn’t really be classified as pro-life, but he certainly would not have done anything to strengthen the pro-choice agenda. On most other issues, I think I actually agree with Obama. I am for reform in the government, I am probably more socialist leaning than is actually good for me, and I like the idea of the rich giving back to the country that made them rich in a meaningful way. Of course, I understand that this is a gross simplification of his policies and probably a gross misunderstanding of what his ideas would do to our country, but honestly, after Wall Street, irresponsible and unsustainable lifestyles on the part of the American people, and the Economic Crisis that has hit our nation, I’m for a shaking up of our systems, no matter how painful it might be. I hate most of John McCain’s policies, he’s pro-war, he’s pro-big government (well, same goes for Obama, I suppose, and probably in a greater way, but he’s pro-big government that the rich will pay for), and honestly he ran his campaign in such a sleazy way that I no longer believe (as I did in 2000), that he is a principled man.

But what do you do when you believe God is dealing with the nation on one issue? Well, for me and my house that was voting based on the one issue. I wanted a pro-life candidate in office, especially given the fact that they are projected to install 3 new justices on the Supreme Court (allowing it be stacked obscenely in either direction). I believed that having a pro-choice president in office would mean that those seats would be filled in the wrong direction. But there-in lies the rub.

Daniel 2:21 (ESV):

He changes times and seasons;
he removes kings and sets up kings;
he gives wisdom to the wise
and knowledge to those who have understanding;

Well, what the heck? I mean, if God was so dependent on who sits in the Oval Office in a little over 70 days, then what does that state about his sovereignty? I read an article this morning published by Dutch Sheets (probably the single greatest influence in my life regarding the shifting of my understanding from pure predestination to deterministic free will) in which he basically states that the reason Barack Obama is president is because the Church failed to pray enough and that this indicates that we are headed towards judgement. But, wait a second. I thought that God removes and sets up kings? Doesn’t that mean that it was God’s will that Obama be president? Doesn’t that mean that, even if this is a signal that judgement is coming, that the judgement was in God’s plan all along? But more importantly, doesn’t the idea that just because Obama is president we will have pro-choice judges in the Supreme Court which will call down unwilling judgement on our nation fly in the face of God’s sovereignty. I just can’t accept that God is ever forced, against his will, to do something he would rather not do. Yes, this flies in the face of the free will verses, especially Ezekiel 22, and at the same time, I don’t know, I just can’t believe that God could allow himself to be thwarted like that simply because we didn’t reach some sort of critical mass of prayer.

It’s the system that seems so wonky to me. I picture God on his thrown looking at a one of those applause meters going, ‘OK, I put the bulletin out to my people that they are to pray for this issue. Oh, darn it! The prayer meters only 30% full. Come on, pray more and louder people! 50%… Almost there! Shoot, only 15 more days till times up. 75%! Come on! No!! Times up. Shoot!.’ The picture is almost pathetic. I can’t reconcile it with the verses that ascribe sovereignty to God. And I can’t reconcile the image that God does not need us at all and simply allows to play in a theatre of partnership with the verses that ascribe free will and co-ruler-ship to us.

Anyway, I have no conclusion here, except for the fact that I still believe we should be trembling as a nation about the issue of abortion and praying that God would end it sovereignly. It’s the sovereignly that is important. Obama doesn’t pick Judges, I don’t think. God does. I guess that is actually a conclusion of sorts, just not a concluded one. I still can’t imagine how this all actually works, nor do I have any real confidence that I’ll ever get to that point.