Filed under: Baby
“You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them.”
Psalm 139:13-16
The last time I blogged was six months ago to shamelessly self-promote an entry I made into a contest for a diamond. Thanks to your help, I not only won the rock but a beautiful Texan bride to wear it a couple of weeks later. Life has changed for the better, and the same might be said of my writing: I officially reenter the blogosphere today not to promote my own interests, but the interests of others. I could say I am here to push my sister’s new record, but the fact is that she and her band recorded and released a beautiful collection of hymns to bless its listeners, which this Mother’s Day can and should include your mom. You can download it here, burn a copy for your mother, and not even tell her it was free.
Filed under: Friends
A half carat diamond is at stake, and five easy clicks is all it takes. Here’s how:
Click 1: Open this contest page on Facebook.
Click 2: Click “View and vote for entries”
Click 3: Accept the Easypromos contest app (read about privacy here).
Click 4: Vote for Tim!!!
Click 5: “Share” or repost this to spread the word.
Thanks for your support!
Looking for a diversion from the political revelry? Do you wish your vote counted for something in Idaho? Are you mesmerized by objects that sparkle and shine? If you answered “yes” to any of the above, then I ask for your support in vying for a half-carat diamond valued at $2,500! You don’t have to live in Idaho – or even the U.S. of A. – but you do have to be a citizen of the Facebook nation in order to make your voice heard in the Johnson’s Jewelry Dream Design Contest. Just follow these five easy steps:
- Open the contest page on Facebook.
- Click on “View and vote for entries.”
- (Accept the Easypromos contest app.)
- Vote for Tim!!!
- Click “Share” or repost this to spread the word.
I appreciate your help, so if we’re not already friends, drop me an add request, and I’ll update you on the results. If we vote my design to the top by November 15, the next time I call on you might just be to help me elect a wife!
Filed under: Religion
The Prayer of Faith: Having Victory in Your Christian Life contains selections from the journals and correspondence of James O. Fraser, who served as a missionary among the Lisu people of southwest China in the early 1900s. The following excerpts regard the support of others’ prayer in his work:
“‘I am an engineer and believe in things working. I want to see them work,’ Fraser used to say. And because he believed that prayer works – ‘If ye shall ask … I will do’ (John 14:4), and that God means it when he guarantees results from the energy spent in prayer (James 5:16-18) – Fraser determined to provide prayer material for more prayer supporters so that the volume of prayer rising for the Lisu work would constantly increase.”
“Our work among the Lisu is not going to be a bed of roses, spiritually. I know enough about Satan to realize that he will have all his weapons ready for determined opposition. He would be a missionary simpleton who expected plain sailing in any work of God. I will not, by God’s grace, let anything deter me from going straight ahead in the path to which He leads, but I shall feel greatly strengthened if I know of a definite company of pray-ers holding me up. I am confident that the Lord is going to do a work, sooner or later, among the Lisu here.”
“[About three years later]: Knowing as I do the conditions of the work, its magnitude (potentially), its difficulties and the opposition it meets with, I have definitely resolved, with God’s help, to enlarge the place of my tent, to lengthen my prayer cords and strengthen my intercessory stakes, to make a forward movement with regard to the prayer circle.
“I am persuaded that the homeland is rich in godly, quiet, praying people, in every denomination. They may not be a great multitude as far as numbers are concerned, but they are ‘rich in faith,’ even if many of them be poor and of humble station. It is the prayers of such that I covet more than gold of Ophir – those good men and women who know what it is to have power with God and prevail. Will you help me, prayerfully and judiciously, to get some of these to join the circle? The work for which I am asking prayer is preaching and teaching the Word of God, pure and simple. I have no confidence in anything but the gospel of Calvary to uplift these needy people.”
“I am not asking you just to give ‘help’ in prayer as a sort of sideline, but I am trying to roll the main responsibility of this prayer warfare on you. I want you to take the burden of these people upon your shoulders. I want you to wrestle with God for them. I do not want so much to be a regimental commander in this matter as an intelligence officer. I shall feel more and more that a big responsibility rests upon me to keep you well informed. The Lord Jesus looks down from heaven and sees these poor, degraded, neglected tribespeople. ‘The travail of His soul’ was for them, too. He has waited long. Will you not do your part to bring in the day when He shall ‘be satisfied’?
“Anything must be done rather than let this prayer-service be dropped or even allowed to stagnate. We often speak of intercessory work as being of vital importance. I want to prove that I believe this in actual fact by giving my first and best energies to it, as God may lead. I feel like a businessman who perceives that a certain line of goods pays better than any other in his store, and who purposes making it his chief investment; who, in fact sees an inexhaustible supply and an almost unlimited demand for a profitable article and intends to go in for it more than for anything else. The demand is the lost state of these tens of thousands of Lisu and Kachin – their ignorance, their superstition, their sinfulness; their bodies, their minds, their souls; the supply is the grace of God to meet this need – to be brought down to them by the persevering prayers of a considerable company of God’s people. All I want to do is, as a kind of middleman, to bring the supply and the demand together.”
For being a sleepy college town in North Idaho, exciting changes are afoot in Moscow. Most encouraging of all are the lives being transformed by the gospel on a weekly basis through ministries like the Big Haus, the Nuart Theater and Resonate Church, where Heather is currently spending the academic year in full-time music ministry. (Read more about my sister around the corner.) One means by which God is providing me the privilege of engaging in His Great Commission and the invisible warfare of my city is through the tangible work He has given me to do. In Genesis, the first two words He spoke to Adam and Eve were to “be fruitful” (1:28). Thus began our first commission to subdue the earth and exercise dominion over His creation. Theirs was a distinctly earthly job, not only in “becoming one flesh” (2:24), but also in “tending and keeping” the garden (2:15). God instituted manual labor before the fall, meaning Adam and Eve (2:18) were designed with work in mind. Simple as it may seem, this realization has helped me to understand my calling in the daily grind of a desk job. I could elaborate but instead would like to share some recent developments that have made that calling particularly rewarding.
I have been working with Economic Modeling Specialists International (EMSI) for almost two years now – years that have been marked by transition. When initially hired as a web developer, I had been out of the field for most of the three years prior, the last of which I spent without a regular paycheck, trying my hand at a home business as well as part-time ministry. Not only did this entail an adjustment back to the professional world, I also had to adapt to the unfamiliar territory of web programming. Since EMSI has a philosophy of blessing our community, we often hire hard but inexperienced workers with the intention of training them on the job. For me, that training eventually led us to the conclusion that the experience I did have was better suited to a position in data processing. Working with databases entailed another new paradigm, but while it has proved to be a better fit, there was still something lacking. That missing ingredient was customer interaction, and with the insight of one of our advisers, my manager and I recently agreed on yet another transition into a more outward-facing role that will utilize my personal strengths while better meeting the growing demands on our Data department.
One reason those demands are on the rise is because business is booming. Our expertise is highly sought after – especially in this struggling economy – and we are the the leader in what we do (which this page will tell you more about). EMSI’s vision stretches far beyond blessing our local community to moving the needle on the national – even the global – jobs crisis. To keep up with our growing clientele, we have been hiring at a pace that has exceeded the capacity of our current office. This week, the R&D departments got the boot to a temporary overflow space downtown, just across the street from where the ball is already rolling on acquiring and remodeling a more expansive headquarters. Lord willing, it will be ready for us next year.
Another reason we expect growth to continue is thanks to a new partnership announced at our second annual conference in Coeur d’Alene. While many may recognize CareerBuilder from their Super Bowl commercials, they are a global leader in human capital solutions who acquired EMSI last month in a deal that promises to unify the uniquely complimentary strengths of each organization – with a heavy emphasis on EMSI’s data – in order to better achieve our common goal of ”empowering employment.” (Read another pertinent article on what’s working.)
Returning to the understanding that we were designed to work, and having witnessed the impact unemployment can have, especially on the life of a young adult, it makes it that much easier to show up to my desk every morning with the conviction that not only am I performing my God-given mission, but I am helping others to fulfill theirs as well. Combine this with the inspiration of meeting and hearing from a couple of CareerBuilder’s top executives, including CEO Matt Ferguson, who visited Moscow this week, along with the contagious energy and motivating generosity of EMSI’s own leadership team, and it truly is an exciting time to be working in Moscow.
To get an idea of what has been keeping me busy, both companies recently spotlighted a project for which I supplied the data. One dimension of what EMSI delivers is wages by occupation and geography. While it is difficult enough to accurately report how much a given occupation earns in a particular region, we recently developed a methodology for calculating how much that same occupation should be making in the same region based on national figures. The math gets a little complicated, but the results can be applied in fascinating ways to a variety of recruitment scenarios. A couple of those applications are available on CareerBuilder’s HiringSite as well as EMSI’s own blog.
Jason tipped me off to a great sermon he heard on John 5:17-21 at Real Life last Sunday by guest speaker Ritchie Shaw. It’s well worth the 30 minutes: listen here.
