The Naked Green

I’ve been seeking God’s direction in my life for a while now. I just don’t seem to hear what He’s saying. I realized before that He wasn’t being quite, but I just didn’t have the ears to hear, so to speak. I’ve come to a different conclusion recently, that it isn’t about not hearing His voice, but not recognizing it.

Our small group has been going through a video series by John Bevere called, Drawing Near. One thing that hit me was what he said about God wanting us to learn to discern His voice. God wants intimacy with us and real communication. He can certainly let me know something even if I’m outright trying to ignore Him, but perhaps He wants to be a bit more subtle…to draw me to Himself. That helped me a lot allowing me to seek after relationship with Jesus in the ways I know how, speaking to Him and listening…though I still don’t feel I hear clearly.

There are two sorts of beliefs and I can’t quite separate them nor find their roots. One is more about choosing your path by the grace of God, according to your understanding of His will. The second is listening for God’s direction and obeying. As I said, these are very much intertwined, but it seems that a Christian comes from one side or another in making decisions. The problem for me is I seem to be stuck in the middle…or on both sides, actually. Perhaps I’m making more of it than it needs to be.

I believe that we can’t sit around waiting for God to speak. Love and obedience means action and we must be that moving car (in a worn out analogy) for God to steer us. I also believe that God speaks directly to His children through the Holy Spirit, The Bible, others, etc. This may not even be a problem, but it causes me much confusion. I don’t think or feel that I know Him well enough.
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I sent an email to my boss on Friday with that magical phrase: “Two weeks notice”. I believe it’s time to move on and I’m looking forward to what God has in store for me.

There will be plenty to do as I have my first paying client for web design and others on the horizon. I will be working with my Dad who just started a flooring business and of course, snow plowing when it comes. I’m also looking forward to taking some of the load off of Jamie with house work (can you believe it?).

This move will give me much more flexibility to explore different venues of work and education. I will remain open to missions work in the near future and be able to work toward that. I’m excited about the change! Hey, change is good (if it’s smart change).

This is the first semi-regular (as opposed to weekly or daily or some sort of nonsense like that) “Green Cite”. It’s where I recognize bloggers with love for, or some sort of obsession with the wonderful color green. Ooh…ahh!

So, without further ado (except of course for the obligatory parenthesis to annoy the reader, belabor the point and work up suspense), I announce the winner of this grand and unknown award: Queen Green!

Of course my wife is going to win the first one with a title like that. I mean, she’s my wife after all. Her love for the color green is based more on her love for the person (Mr. Green), I think. Congratulations, Jamie!

Changes in my work schedule mean more work and less blogging. I’ll be spending about an hour and a half each day at my company doing the billing for the orders I do here. How I love changes!

I worked today on tweaking Justicca’s new design. The problem was her blog title was hard to see on top of the cute puppy picture. I figured I could easily make an opaque background behind the title to make the words stand out a bit more.

I found Ove Klykken’s excellent explanation of “CSS Transparency” and quickly had it working. All was good until I checked it out in IE. I was greeted there by a ugly white box covering up the cute puppies. I then proceeded to spend way too much time fumbling around for a solution.

I eventually had to download Ove Klykken’s page and start changing things one by one to mirror Jessica’s site. It wasn’t in the structure, so I started deleting CSS properties one by one. This is when I realized that IE must have the width specified to show opacity. [In fact, I remember something else with a width problem, let me go check. Okay, that was the floating problem and the one problem was actually when I added width. So much for a method to IE’s madness.]

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Why do I consistently capitalize all letters in the word spam? I think maybe I wrote it that way for emphasis a few times. My brain went into gear and said “spam must be capitalized!” When I questioned it, I just figured it was an acronym (don’t ask me for what). There’s the brain doing weird things. It doesn’t make sense, so I won’t do it anymore.

That does bring up another question, though: Why doesn’t weird follow the rules (i.e. “I before E except after C and when sounds like A as in neighbor and weigh” [punny])? That’s bad enough as it is, but weird just has to be…weird.

I’ve pretty much solved the comment SPAM and now I’m getting hit with tons of trackbacks. It’s not that I don’t like poker, but come on!

I have now implemented MtDewVirus’s Trackback and Pingback Moderation plugins. This means that if you trackback, it WILL go into moderation until I approve it. This is annoying and unfortunate, but necessary until I can find something better.

Apparently, much of the trackback SPAM has turned into DOS attacks, so I am also using Burningbird’s Throttle Hack.

MeanDean has a good post about this issue at the Heal Your Church Web Site. It discusses ways to use the .htaccess file to combat the SPAM. That’s something I may look into in more depth later.

Thanks to the WordPress Support Forums for the help on stopping the nasty trackback SPAM!

A little known fact that I think even my wife is in the dark on: My favorite color as a child was yellow.