Fasting is hard. There are so many stops and restarts before I can hit the rhythm in stride. It is not the physical appetite that breaks it up. No, it is the crashing of waves of the emotions involved, fears and comforts. Even when I seclude myself, I am affected by doubt and long to have the wisdom to do the right thing. But the thing that I find in work in me is that the mask I try to remove does not want to fast, while my true identity longs to engage deep into a fast: explore the soul; read the books of my spiritual forefathers—or my actual forefather August Hermann Francke; and become what Tim McGraw sings, "a friend a friend would like to have." Thus, I am faced with two options:

1. Stay safe where I am with the full panoply of what that means to reject the call and remain caged behind the mask. Just passively let things happen.
2. Choose to step out. Take a risk.

The second option seems obvious, right? With our tub of popcorn at the the movie theater, we want the protagonist of the movie to do just that. But, I am no blue-eyed, flowing blonde locks hero sealed into the schema of an adventure genre—or am I? Ephesians 1:11–14 I have lost so much, whether it was the death of my father when I was 25 and later, my mother when I was 36; or a fundamental disagreement where I have lost my sister and her family; or all of those people who I left behind or left me; or those friends lost down the corridors of time or by paradigm shifts. I will look deep into the night sky and love them all as the people I once knew or I will go out on a night drive and wonder if they are just beyond the reach of the headlight beams. I ache. And I know that I am taking such a short vision with respect to all of eternity. But, I still feel the ache. I know you do, too. When we strip away our go-to comforts, there is no escape. So what will I do?

It is funny: with all the investment we put into titles, whether careers and/or education, those things do not matter. For all that we care about what the letters are after our name or what is within our email signature or affixed to our office door, it matters to no one else. Is that where we find our identity? We sell ourselves far too short with these mud pies.

The miserable ruin, into which the rebellion of the first man cast us, especially compels us to look upward. Thus, not only will we, in fasting and hungering, seek thence what we lack; but, in being aroused by fear, we shall learn humility.

John Calvin

I listened to a valuable sermon from John Piper entitled, The Free Will of the Wind. It is excellent; check it out when you get a chance.

Based on John 3:1-10, the message underscores the sovereignty of God, for the unregenerate cannot believe, much less love God and love Him for all of eternity, no more than can the dead walk, hug us, and give us a birthday party. How messed up we are as people—so PRIDEFUL—our sinful nature thinking that we have the final decision, as if we were God's CEO!

But, I totally get it: I used to believe that we were surrounded by the Walking Dead, who only had to come down and recite magical words to become alive. But, the dead are not animated. A more apt science fiction analogy is from the re-imagined Battlestar Galatica series. The elect are just "flipped on" like Cylon agents who had no knowledge of their true identity before the signal was broadcast. I would flesh that analogy out more, but at 2am, I was lucky just to make the connection.

The first thing, therefore, that God does when He makes any one a new creature in Christ, is to send light into his heart, and show him that he is a guilty sinner. The material creation in Genesis began with "light," and so also does the spiritual creation. God "shines into our hearts" by the work of the Holy Ghost, and then spiritual life begins. (2 Cor. 4:6.)—Dim or indistinct views of sin are the origin of most of the errors, heresies, and false doctrines of the present day. If a man does not realize the dangerous nature of his soul's disease, you cannot wonder if he is content with false or imperfect remedies.

J.C. Ryle

I am reminded of Ephesians 2:1–10.

Awashed by my recent leap into the sea of Logos, I have not had this sort of reading passion in years. As I dig into the resources of the Logos library, I have been finding the need to go beyond its iPad app and employs its full-blown desktop application. After a brief foray into a virtual machine, I made the decision to return to Windows 7 for the first time in maybe a year? I have been running Linux Mint 18 for so long that I found little use of Windows.I was hesitant about making the return because of the bandwidth demands in context of Verizon's "new" approach to their Jetpacks, specifically its recent throttling-to-3G speeds after 10 GB antics for their unlimited customers. I am just glad when God comes to call, I won't have to answer for that shady nonsense. I mean, can you imagine going to an all-you-can-eat buffet, only to be aghast to find that after the first bite, they pour 3-feet-deep of molasses on the floor and switch your plate out with a teaspoon?

I have never viewed the tech industry as the bastion of honesty. Recommended specs, hard drive sizing, data mining, cookies, closed source software, wifi sniffing, backdoor deals with the CIA—they are a bunch of charlatans with eyes that flicker for gold coins. And I got a degree in that? We were all naive once.

As I write, it is 4:30am. I spent a good portion of the night configuring a Raspberry Pi 3 as I offload my desktop's DHCP responsibilities to it. My setup:

1. Jetpack hotspot → Raspberry Pi → Linksys wifi router
2. I have the DHCP servers turned off on the Jetpack and the router of course. Even at only $35, the hardware on the Raspberry Pi 3 is more than I need, especially as its headless, but, I've got more in store for it. I like the Pi Hole project, so I may be implementing that down the road.
3. Clearly, I am a technology adopter—and maybe even being my high school's Who's Who of Computer Science in an age when people had beepers, might make me its champion. But, I don't buy it. We cannot let it consume us:

May we far look into a stranger's eyes
To behold our neighbor's soul?
Nay, we are hooked by eggshell whites
To hide in our android disguise.