Stuff Michael Meeks is doing | |
This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit Collabora Productivity a subsidiary of Collabora focusing on LibreOffice support and services for whom I work. Also if you have the time to read this sort of stuff you could enlighten yourself by going to Unraveling Wittgenstein's net or if you are feeling objectionable perhaps here. Failing that, there are all manner of interesting things to read on the LibreOffice Planet news feed. Older items: 2023: ( J F M A M J ), 2022: ( J F M A M J J A S O N D ), 2021, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, legacy html
- Up earlyish, bid 'bye to G. & S. and off to NCC. Derek preaching on Sin - If you want a talk on plumbing - ask a plumber, if you want a talk on swimming - ask a swimmer ... - and so they asked me to talk on sin. Rather droll, quite interesting.
- Back home with Ryan for lunch - just back from Belgium on exercise. Great to catch up with him, apparently one of the young Lieutenants had temporarily liberated all his underwear while his flight bag was in the hall; poor old Ryan.
- Ryan re-convinced me that the US foreign policy is fundamentally isolationist, 'foreign' to the average US citizen being in the next state. Interesting to talk politics.
- A rather good sermon on 'Love' - from the famous 1 Corinthians 13 by Gordon:
- The passage breaks down into the necessity, character and permanance of love. Despite almost everyone's professed desire to love and be loved, it's celebration in the arts etc. most of us hardly have a clue what love is. We think of love as something that you 'fall into' or 'fall out of' and (by the way - if you fall out of it you can't fall back into it - or so we're told). Or we think of love as something you 'make' not infrequently with someone you barely know. And even if we have a firmer grasp on it's true nature, very honestly most of the time we're not putting it into practice.
- Despite the attention society gives to 'love' we seem to be utterly blind to our failure to love. The introduction to Fromm's The Art of Loving - not how to become more lovable, nor how to find a more worthy object of love; the problem is with you not with your workmates, boss, wife/husband.
- We suppose it's perfectly easy to love, the only difficulty is finding the right person; a 30yr old leaving Park-Street having 'scoped out all the eligable men' - all deficient in some way, amazing having 450 people, majority single in that age range; a picture of our situation.
- A 1977 survey of high-school seniors in SAT tests, ~1million high school students were asked to evaluate themselves vs. their peers. wrt. Athletics < 10% rated themselves as below average, same with 'Leadership ability' - the most astounding feedback on 'the ability to get along with others' [how great are you as a lover] - 829k students answered, not one rated themselves below average - not even by mistake. 15% rated themselves average, 60% in the top 10%, and 25% rated as in the top 1%. Everyone assumes if there is a problem - it's got to be the other guy. It can't be so: Psalm 36 ... for in his own eyes he flatters himself too much to detect, much less hate, his own sin.
- Very few at church troubled by their inadequate ability to love others - 1 Cor 13 a call to wake up; our desparate need to love the people we already know more.
- If I speak in the tongues[1] of men and of angels, but have not love ... - the necessity of love; Jesus when asked to prune back the law: Matthew 22 - "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." - If God had just told us to 'love each other' at Sinai, we would have deluded ourselves that we were doing that - so God teases it out into the law, with explanations of what Love is, what it's got to look like.
- The radical claim is - without love, nothing else matters, closing Corinthians 15v14 - Do everything in love. Some scholars with (apparently) nothing better to do suggest this chapter doesn't belong here; but - in context the whole point is that the spiritual gifts are about love, and to be used with love. The gifts are not about you, but about each other - for the common good. 14v1 Make love your aim and so earnestly desire the greater gifts.
- It's true Chapter 13 - is not in the middle of teaching about Weddings - although that's where we frequently hear it. The examples about indispensibility are all spiritual gifts. Speaking in tongues could have been speaking with eruditon, glib words etc. but if not spoken in love - it all amounts to nothing.
- Augustine's besetting sin was an irrepressible tendancy to correct other people wrt. their pronunciation or grammar; he cared less about what they said but how they said it. For us the love of learning can become a lethal substitute for the love of others.
- C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man of the academic - "It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion, that marks many intellectuals out. Their heads are no bigger than ordinary; it is just the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so."
- The true test of knowledge is that it feeds your love of your fellow creatures; Not to throw away knowledge but invigorate it's persuit with love.
- It's not what you do, if I give all I posses to the poor - but you have to have love; in affection and deep care, preferring other's interests to our own.
- Love is: 'Patient', 'Kind' - passive and active; of which the following 8 negative characteristics are just expressions, outworkings of that.
- 'I slept like a baby' - said by folks who have never had a baby. Gordon went for 6 years without a single night's uninterrupted sleep; the problem not to avoid being rude, but patience. You need patient love faced with cholic, inconsolable crying etc. At the end of life; celebrating a 50th wedding aniversary - wedding bliss for 1/2 a centuary, often if you know the couple well enough - what is most needed is a love that's patient, one finds a surprising prickliness / irritability about minor things.
- Patience - resliance, so we don't get unhinged by every little mishap. Prov 19:11 A man's wisdom gives him patience, it is to his glory to overlook an offence - a love that covers a multitude of sins;
- Don't mis-construe patience as an invitation to apathy; God has been patient with us, we should be patient with others. It's not permission for bystander apathy. God cares deeply about our lives, but gives us space to repent. Old translations render 'patience' - 'suffers long', do we love in a long-suffering, patient way.
- Very challenging indeed; how foolish and impatient I am.
- Bed early.
My content in this blog and associated images / data under images/ and data/ directories are (usually) created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0 license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes / improvements / corrections by private mail.
In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE, Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International), or anyone else. It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy. Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences or fun.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@collabora.com) 