Painfully Hopeful

The Hobbit Battles to the End

This past Monday I took in a viewing of The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies. I was actually rather surprised to be going at all, as I had no intention of finishing the trilogy in the Theatre after the travesty that was The Desolation of Smaug. My neighbor had insisted for a year that the was buying…

Scrivener and Ulysses III — The Stuff of Writers’ Dreams

About two years ago I was looking for a decent application on my Mac which could help me create ebooks from my writing – mainly devotionals, blog posts, and studies I write for the congregation I pastor. I also was looking to create an eBook version of our weekly bulletin to augment our digital version….

The Amazing Editor that Could – Editorial

A little over two years ago I moved to using markdown for the majority of my writing. For those who don’t know, Markdown is a light-weight markup format which uses plain text for it’s files – if you’re interested in learning more about how to use this amazing tool, follow this link. For me, the…

Create works of art with Phoetic

I have always been fascinated by word clouds. I first discovered them through a web-site called wordle, which takes text and created a spiffy-looking word cloud based word usage. The site’s engine is smart, it’s able to skip linking words such as “and,” or “a,” or “the” and concentrate on the words which make up…

Some days…

There are days when I just don’t think I have any pastoral gifts at all and my calling is just a joke people are playing on me to which I haven’t figured out the punch line. Then there are days when I manage to do something useful by God’s grace. When I turn around and…

Dear Donald

I don’t typically write “open letters” to other Christians, but your recent blog post made me want to reach out to you. Your follow up post offers a lot of clarity to your first thoughts. I especially love your thoughts on the “not about you” section. This quote was amazing, But this is a much…