Blogging Ottinger (tim)

A friend and a very good man had to say goodbye to his dear wife, a wonderful woman taken by an awful disease. One could hardly meet them and not care deeply for them both. Things will be very different for Steve now.

I have said things that are critical of how my church works, and you find them on this blog. However, I have not said every negative thing you’ve ever heard, nor every negative thing you can imagine. Things are tough enough without anyone adding falsehood and further vilification. Really. I don’t know who you’re helping.

Re: the firing. I’ve asked people not to take sides, but said that I just want to know what’s really going on. I’ve been quick to publish corrections and have tried to incorporate all facts that show up. I am really wanting to escape a few conclusions that bother me very deeply, but seem inevitable.

If you add false rumors, rumors we have never heard, to the list of charges against me and my wife, you will stop me from getting to the truth, and create further hard feelings that will be hard to get over. This is the worse thing I can imagine. I’m hearing some of these rumors for the first time when people I am supposed to have accused falsely ask me why I did it — I’m heartbroken. I can’t imagine it.

Let’s not get carried away. This is confrontation, not war.

The doctrine of depravity is hard to hear. This doctrine is harder to hear the younger you are. It is unbelievable to the youth, and obvious to the elderly.

It certainly is much more pleasant to just think about the more positive side, that we are made in God’s image. It is so very good that there is a spark of the eternal in us, waiting to be fanned to life in Christ. But there is another side, as well. We have it well articulated in Article V, and I won’t suppose to improve upon it, but would like to give my opinion.

Natural man is separated from God. He lives within his own skin, a collection of his fears and desires, unable to see rightly what is right and what is wrong. It is easier to think of what is pleasant and what is unpleasant, what is tasty and what is repulsive. The natural man at birth is innocent, but with his raw ability to reason so hide-bound, sin is inevitable. Indeed, we are born with the nature to sin, without the nature to truly desire holiness above our immediate needs and wants. Indeed all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

A sense of justice exists, based mostly on personal fears and desires, how we would like or dislike to be treated. From this comes the “everyone goes to heaven” and “any loving god would love me as I am, without judgement” and “it’s all about motivation — if you mean well, you aren’t wrong.”
Some manage to do away with even the natural urge to justice, since there is no true bent toward holiness. If such a man robs you, it is your fault for not being sufficiently secure. If he hurts you, it’s your fault for being weak. If he lies to you, it is your fault for being gullible. There are no ethical problems, because there are no ethics.

This is truly sad. The acts of unethical men cause misery. Self-focused men do little to alleviate it. Overall, people become bored with causes and problems and are moved by more personal desires. There are those who do good, again calling on their personal sense of justice (and I thank God for his prevenient grace that men can still do good things).

Are we made in God’s image? Indeed. But we bury this in our own systems of morality and ethics and survival and ultimately our own fears and desires. We are hopeless. Unless God’s favor rests on us, nothing ultimately good can come of us, and we cannot end well.

What is wonderful in a new Christian is that the Lord has begun to peel away the layers, like the old rotten skins that fall away from black walnuts in the fall. The regenerate suddenly connects with his original intent. He touches on a desire for holiness that well surpasses his desires and fears, and is suddenly brave and kind. Love overflows, peace inhabits. There is something more.

It isn’t easy to change from the natural to the regenerate, though. There is much to be unlearned, and one can easily fall back on old fears and new desires. One has to learn to be something different, and to think in a new way (”the renewing of your mind”).

Often people stumble and have setbacks, but they continue on toward holiness. Eventually, they are able to look back and see how they were naturally wrong, not necessarily intentionally wrong.

Still, people we love and respect, children we hold in our arms, neighbors we wave to, coworkers we spend our working hours with, our fellow brothers and sisters are tightly wrapped balls of their own desires and fears, victims of their fears and desires, and ultimately nothing good can come of them. But for the intervention of God, they will ultimately be nothing and less than nothing.

This is the origin of the desire to preach and teach, that we love people and see them not as walking demons to be stopped, but as human creatures who need to be connected to their true origins and true destination. We desire that the peace of God come upon them, and that they grow in grace and wisdom.

It’s hard to understand, and harder if you’ve not moved beyond the fears and desires and hide-bound ethical systems. The system doesn’t make sense, and it can be hard to believe. Thereby sin is able to continue, and not all are saved.

This is mostly just funny stuff, though a little language might be involved. Don’t read it while eating, unless you’re in a bib.

About the firing, please see additional comments about Sense Of Loss.

Sometime it’s hard to name a function. It is partly because of wordsmithing issues (we can’t always describe operations succinctly). That’s normal, and it is probably worth the time to bring up a problem with a coworker and maybe put some wear-and-tear on your thesaurus. Other times it can be a code smell.

Other times, it is because of violations of the basic characteristics of good function design as described in Behold! The Function!. A partial function, a function with more than one operation, or an ill-conceived function could be hard to name.

But there are other times when the problem is that the function is merely a wrapper or adapter for another function, built for convenience. These things can be called “add-a-file-to-the-cache-with-the-add-a-cache-function-after-checking-that-the-checksum-is-correct”, but that gets tedious to type and tedious to read. Merely finding names which mean essentially the same thing, colored for special cases of adaptation an be difficult and names can become arbitrary and ugly. In most cases, suffixing or prefixing suffices.

Other times functions exist purely as a refactoring to take a chunk of repeated lines out of two other functions. Ahh, here is an interesting bit. Once and Only Once is a very good thing, and I have full agreement with it. But if it is hard to name the extracted commonality, for reasons other than wordsmithing, then it may be that it was extracted into one function when it should have been two, or it hasn’t been fully extracted — it is a ‘middle’ bit instead of an operation, or it may be that it was extracted from two ill-conceived functions which each were hard to name and explain. After all, not all patterns are good.

This post contains marked revision

Regarding the post entitled sense of loss, a different voice was heard tonight. This new voice gives a different picture of the story of the loss of beloved ministers.

In this narrative:
1) The ministers were not caught flat-footed, but were warned in advance.

This is not agreed by all parties

2) They were given an opportunity to continue unpaid, but both decided not to do so.

This is false, a misunderstanding from a source.

3) Were given more time to turn in keys than I reported (I said on-the-spot v the next day)

Substantiated

4) They were not stripped of ministry access, but are being allowed to use the facilities.

Addition: they were invited to continue as regular non-ministry members of the church

I want to believe this version more, because it is more the kind of thing you want to believe about people who have been your friends. I would so love for my original story to be wrong.

I understand that more facts will be surfacing as time goes on, may they all sound like this version of the story.

When it comes to software design, in procedural languages, the primary unit of design is the function or method. Even in OO, don’t start to think it’s not so. If your functions and methods are well-designed, the whole program will be more easily understood and more easily maintained.

So how do you design a function? The first and biggest thing to remember is that a function performs A FUNCTION. One meaningful operation, done completely and well. That means that the function should be relatively easy to name, or at least describe in a very short sentence. Now this is true of user-visible functions. There may be private functions (defined within other functions or in classes), and there is a little more slack given for the invisible.

The second feature of good function decomposition is that a function has limited effect: no side effects. The name of the function and the parameter list should be good documentation, and one should not have to go poking around in variables and the file system and memory locations to see if something else happened.

A third feature is that the function is dumb. It lives by need-to-know. If it can operate on less information than it is given, then it is rewritten to use less. It also doesn’t require more intelligent parameters than it has to. It doesn’t seek out information from its environment if that information is not necessary for the task at hand.

Finally, the function is complete, so it doesn’t need to pass back a whole lot of complex data for further processing. Instead, it reports the information it was created to collect in an obvious and minimal useful form. The data set returned is the obvious data one would expect from any function so-named, and in harmony with a single-sentence explanation of the function.

Rephrase: the number of useful operations in a function should approach 1 (one), the number of side-effects should approach 0 (zero), the number of parameters is as close to 0 (zero) as you can get it, and the amount of unnecessary data carried by the parameters is as close to 0 (zero) as practical. And the result set is as simple and small as possible.

He says:

There are a number of obvious reasons why Linux is not the dominate operating system in today’s computing environment…

And he says:

One of the less widely recognized reasons why Linux has not yet toppled Windows, despite it many advantages, is how divided the resources available to Linux are.

Arriving at the idea:

Time for Linux Consolidation?

Have we had monopoly so long that we’re convinced that it is not only the natural state of things but a good idea besides? Have we had so many articles on Windows v Linux that we now think we’re looking at a horse race? Are we so full of ill-will toward our one monopoly provider that we’d be just as happy to see another monopoly take its place? Isn’t that just “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”?

I think that the goal of Linux is to be useful and free. If having a useful and free alternative causes microsoft to topple, so be it. But if it doesn’t, fine. Microsoft will eventually wear out their remaining adherents through coercive and underhanded practices, and I’d really rather see that monolith fall to the will of the people than another major would-be monopoly.

Consolidation might have advantages. I suppose that if people are working on similar enough goals, then joining up is a fine thing, as long as others aren’t coerced into joining. Consolidation of that kind is called “cooperation”. I don’t know of any restriction that prevents gnome developers from helping KDE developers, or any compulsion for them to do it. But when groups decide to cooperate, it’s good. Even without consolidation.

But I think that there needs to be some place to escape *to*. If someone hates Debian, then it’s good for them to be able to escape to non-debian distributions. That’s how I got to Debian from RedHat-ish distros. It’s good. And it’s good that Linux users can “escape” into BSD or whatever. The goal should never be to eliminate competition and variation. There are other ways to cooperate.

One of those is the LSB effort. This is a fine thing. I would love to see dozens and dozens of LSB-certified distributions (cooperation without consolidation). I don’t think they need to form a single company. I don’t think buy-outs are necessary or corporate mergers.

Consider other kinds of art: should there be only one guitarist (I would nominate Larry Carlton)? That would unify the support of the music community and make that one musician more effective in marketing and selling his music. Only one keyboardist (Bob James maybe)? One bassist (no question, Stanley Clarke)? Only one band? Only one style of music? Or is it a kind of wealth that everybody and his brother forms up a band and plays rock, blues, jazz, country, sometimes fusing them together, sometimes only doing covers. Is it bad for music that there is so much of it? Or only hard for the music business? Is it bad that the casual listening audience has trouble telling John Scofield from Derek Trucks? Is that confusion damaging to the market?

There is much to enjoy. Sure, it’s hard to make a decision in a for-pay space (free: just try them all), but is it a problem? Really? I don’t think that diversity is a problem, but if the author is (and he may be much smarter than I), I still think it’s a better problem than consolidation. As an American, I’ve seen too much consolidation for my tastes already. After all, wealth and power are not the same as virtue.

In America, thorugh pressure of conformity, there is freedom of
choice, but nothing to choose from. — Peter Ustinov

p.s. More is good..

Strangeness. All of a sudden this evening I had a sudden rush of peace and joy. It’s been a while, but suddenly I had all this energy and felt good about my prospects. A strange thing to happen. Maybe after yesterday’s announcement I have come unblocked. Scripture is opening up to me again, I’m enjoying music and reading, I’m able to feel for people again. How wonderful!

You think, “where did THAT come from?” And then you realize where it comes from. And you smile.

There are a lot of web sites which are pro- and anti-tithing. Thanks to google, I have no need to go make a list of them. The statements tend to be either that tithing is required absolutely (”without neglecting the former”, Christ said) or that it was abolished with the old code (for freedom we were set free).

Me, I don’t think that it hurts. I won’t tell you that you have to tithe to be a Christian, though there are some who will tell you just that (and others that tell you it’s unChristian).

I look at it this way, originally the tithe was partly party money, partly benevolent fund, and partly charity to the poor Levites who worked in the temple all day (essentially a cross between custodian and butcher, but with lots of prayer) and who owned no capital property from which to make a living outside of ministry.

We still have Levites, positionally. We have ministers who work full-time in the church, live in church-supplied housing, drive church-supplied vehicles, etc. They have no other line of work, and on retirement they have noting to fall back on unless they’ve managed to sock away a little here and there, or their church provides for them. I figure that supporting working ministers and retired ministers is a good thing.

In addition, we’re certainly told to give generously without looking for anything in return. And we’re told to spread the good news.

Guess what? In my denomination, the tithe is used to cover the church’s operating expenses, including pastor’s salaries, and missions giving (we’re a very missional denomination) and pastors’ retirement pay. It pays crisis relief and emergency funds. My church uses some of the money to hold yearly events for area families, with all the attractions being free of charge.

It is well-administered. It’s a world of good tied up in one little knot: Party money, benevolent fund, Levites, missions.

That’s why I give tithe. It ties me to a very good and very old tradition, it does some real good. Don’t confuse my disdain for tithe reporting within the church with any kind of anti-tithe feelings, and don’t confuse my choice of giving the tithe with any kind of legalistic works-based salvation plan. It is a good thing, and doing good is good.

Well, our first attempt. It’s weird, and the burn is delayed, but it’s good.

Jalapenos, onion, salt, oil, vinegar, boiled 1/2 to death, blended, strained.
Added some peach preserves at the end.

It’s odd, sweet and heatless at first, followed by a pretty good burn that lingers. Not so good on chips — too sweet and onion-y, but it’s amazing on hamburgers. I can’t wait to try it in a few more applications, like chops or chicken. And I wonder what it would be like to add some other spices, like maybe alspice or ginger.

I have a dozen more peppers (or so) to try again, and I think the next should be tomato-based. Or loaded with lime. Hmmm. Pineapple? But in the meantime, it’s something different and hot.

Since I had written a piece earlier on dissent, I think it would be irresponsible of me if it didn’t mention that all of those abuses were not at my present church (soon to be former church). In particular, writing about the electrical code was not any church in Indiana so please don’t accuse my pastor of that. Some are local, some are not, but all are real.

Deciding to be a follower of Christ means deciding to live your life by righteousness and compassion. A simple search of the bible for the word “righteous” turns up a daunting number of places where men are either praised for their blamelessness, or else cursed for their intrigues.

Isaiah 59 speaks of a time in the life of Israel when the mechanizations of its leaders (religious and otherwise) were unfit for blessing. In general, it speaks to a time when men have forsaken righteousness and when justice is hard to find. In our times, a leading cause of unrighteousness is self-righteousness. The main difference between the two is that the righteous try to do whatever is right, where the self-righteous try to make whatever they do right. The righteous are self-searching and listen for a rebuke, whereas the self-righteous push their own agenda, and condemn those who disagree with them.

What is right? If one is a Christian, one believes that God will judge the righteous and the wicked, and that God is reliable (unchanging) in his commandment to man to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God”. Moral direction is given, never to mislead, never to seek your own profit at another’s expense, never to covet, etc. Those who seek to be righteous in all things are loved by God. Christ’s rebuke to the Pharisees in Matthew shows the centrality of righteousness in Christian thinking. He was echoing a statement from Zechariah (most of what He said was recitation from known and accepted scriptures).

The Christian is concerned about this in two regard: 1) desiring that the wicked turn from their wicked ways and are saved, 2) the Christian does not himself wish to be distanced from God by personal wickedness. Hence, the righteous are self-searching and necessarily a little confrontational.

Being righteous is not a simple thing, and not an easy thing. It requires transparency and often can put a man at odds with people he loves, as the song says “though none go with me, still I will follow.” It is hard because one must search out whether he is right, not just by looking for proof texts against those who disagree, but searching for personal direction and personal correction in the bible, and through accountability with others.

You should get a load of the crazy stuff they’re selling here in Indy this week. I’m a fan of boutique and lesser-known guitar brands, but there is a limit to how far my sense of novelty wants to be stretched.

Well, deceit is certainly common in management of some companies. I’m glad I don’t work for SCO.

I tried to adopt an amorphous blob of jello from spacefem.

This is not an endorsement of all of the views on that site, though I agree that blobs are cute. I think I’ll name mine “blog”. He is nearly as cute as the other little blob, but has better social habits.

But I will happily endorse some other pages.

This is an old post. It was three churches ago for me, and since then I’ve not seen this pattern repeated. In fact, I understand it’s not being repeated at that church either. It’s good to see things change for the better. As new people pick up this blog and read the articles, I want to make sure that they know that this practice is old and stopped, and not part of my current church.

• Yes, I believe in tithe.
• Yes we tithe, and have since I was saved (at age 32).
• No, we don’t use the tithe envelopes, so as far as the church knows, it’s all offering.
• No, they don’t know that it’s our offering.
• Yes, the church talks about members’ tithing even though it is supposed to be between us and God, and
• Yes, that makes some people look down on us, assuming us to be non-tithers.
• Yes, it bothers me (hence blogging)
• Yes, that means that the current leadership limits our ability to participate in the church.
• Yes, it is a kind of rebellion. No, I don’t want to repent of it. I believe that dissent is necessary.

I am told that we should not let the right hand know what the left hand is doing in terms of giving, and that we are absolutely not (by commandment of our Lord and Savior) to give in order to be seen and respected. If we do, then the opinion of other people is “payment in full.” I think that’s far too cheap. Instead, if we give in secret “then your Father, who knows what is done in secret, will reward you.” THATS what I’m talking about — slice me a piece of THAT.

Sadly, at our church they use tithing records to decide if you can be on the praise team or on other ministry teams.

I agree that it’s a sign of spiritual maturity to tithe, but I disagree that the sign is to be public. Nobody other than the treasurer (for tax reporting) has any “need to know”. Any such requirement from any leader is manufactured from whole cloth. It may be a leader’s preference, but it’s not one that I’d want to defend on the last day.

If I gave in such a way that it was visible to the church, not in secret, and I did that in order to be given ministry opportunities, doesn’t it come dangerously close to simony? Maybe you disagree, and that’s okay, but from where I sit, it’s like this:
1) give in a recorded way to please men and “earn” volunteer office
2) give in a secret way to please God

I’ll take the chance on angering other people, thank you very much. I want to please God, not people. He will provide the opportunities one way or another.

No, I didn’t write this to impress you, but maybe I do hope to inspire you. Open your Bible, and work it out for yourself. And feel free to disagree.

My friend Glen invented a new word: Methodocracy!!!

Trogdor the Burninator lives in 3D!

Progeny is sort of “the commercial face of Debian”. That’s something that get’s bandied about, often with the follow-on quesion “why does Debian need a commercial face?”

It doesn’t. Debian is a wonderful volunteer organization, militantly free. It is a major part of the “great hope” that Linux is free to the masses and has a huge range of free software available for it. There is an army of package maintainers ensuring that Debian users can track changes to “upstream” software, and that security updates and version upgrades are available. It is a well-managed distribution. It isn’t easy to see what Debian needs (other than maybe some grants or participation) that commercial organizations are uniquely suited to provide.

But Industry needs a face for Debian, a place where they can get aid and comfort in their attempts to serve their primary business needs of providing useful products or services. They need Debian, because Debian provides a lot of value for absolute minimal cost (like “free”). If you know what you’re doing, you can build almost anything out of the various linux parts.

So why does industry not work directly with Debian? Because the open-source strength of Linux can also be its commercial weakness — it develops and advances very rapidly. In a business of building assembly-line machines, a seven-year old piece of capital equipment is almost new. Contrast that to the idea that the three-year-old Woody release of Debian is considered “stale” — it’s a dinosaur. Progeny, as a commercial face, can be a buffer between the rapid rate of open source change and the comparatively glacial rate of equipment adoption. We can keep the old versions current longer than the community cares to.

Remember that GNU/Linux isn’t one thing. It’s a bazillion free software packages which are funnelled together, and combined into any number of OS products. What progeny has learned (through CL) is how to put together many different Debian- or RedHat-based proto-products, where each proto-product is a reasonable starting point for a custom distribution. Think “standardization with customization”, rather than “one size fits all” or “unique operating system”.

And of course, there is always a tradeoff between “new hotness” and “tried and true”. Some product developers may want the hottest versions of some packages, and the older, more stable versions of others, depending on their areas of exposure and value. And it’s not unusual that a commercial wants to add software that isn’t part of the free Debian releases — stuff that isn’t free or is only released for other distributions.

Progeny has guys who really know their Linux, inside and out. These guys are experts in making custom distributions, custom installers, and many other arcane arts. Sometimes those guys let me sharpen their pencils. They’re cool. We have the talent and the tooling to manage custom distributions that run ahead or behind standard versions. Progeny Transition Services has proved this rather nicely.

A Debian face is good for business. It’s good that that face is separate from Debian because monied interests can otherwise exert pressures that benefit them alone. It’s better that Debian is free and makes decisions for a community, and it’s good for companies that someone helps them leverage Debian without exerting leverage against Debian. If a business works through the proxy of Progeny, they are not open to the criticism that they are trying to take over the project.

And now, we’ll be shortly announcing new ways of efficiently managing more distributions and more proto-products. This will not only will help us to deliver our services much more efficiently, but will be lending some CL super-powers to distro managers who don’t even subscribe to our services! This is new stuff, and we expect people to get pretty excited about it. I can’t make any announcements, but I’m betting it will knock your socks off.

Reader, please realize that since this was written, other versions of the story have been coming to light, and I am continuing to try to unravel the story. I have a number of contradictory reports from reliable sources, all of whom found this painful for different reasons and who are at different levels of closure on the incident. I have placed a variation on the story in another post and have been told of corrections to that version as well.

The only thing that seems to be sure is that there is not closure on this, and that maybe nobody really knows the whole and entire truth of the thing.

I have added some revisions and they are clearly marked in the same style as this very comment.

Some of the ministry staff of my church were recently let go.

As far as the financial realities go, I understand. We are on a four-year decline in membership, and many of our people are under-employed or unemployed as a result of the economy, and especially of the Indy airline pullout. On top of that, we are overstaffed compared to the paid staff at churches several times our size. I don’t doubt that something had to give.

However, the ex-staff weren’t warned in advance, but were surprised. They weren’t given an opportunity to leave voluntarily, nor to go on working without pay. It is not uncommon for people in youth and children’s ministry to take jobs to pay for their “ministry habit”, and indeed both of these fine people would have been willing to do so by their own admission.

Making a sad fact from a happy one is that both of them are within weeks of ordination, and being fired just before ordination is not a good career starter. It’s an awful way to begin your ministry career.

Note: recent reports suggest that the pastor was against this timing, but that the board pressed for it even though there was no financial incentive (the severence package provides the same pay, regardless).

Admittedly, there was a severance package, so they weren’t just dropped on their ears. It was better than most people in industry get, though resources (and therefore the package) are limited. It may honestly be the best we could give them, and I am thankful for that.

But worse, their keys were taken on the spot, and they no longer have ministerial access to the church at all. That hardly sounds like a straightforward cost-cutting measure. Had they been fired for misconduct I could see treating them with suspicion and restricting access, but they were valued members faced with difficult times. That bridge has been burned.

The “keys taken on the spot” was wrong, a misunderstanding. My apologies. Also, they are allowed normal access to the church, and one minister is allowed to continue to use the church to fulfill prior commitments. They were, however, stripped of their duties, even though they were invited to continue attendance and membership at the church.

It’s sad. I have a lot of respect and admiration for each of them, and I’m ashamed for the hurt they’ve received from an organization I belong to.

It couldn’t have been done much worse with an axe.

There are wrongs, corruptions and violations of church managers, which might motivate one
to find more Christlike leadership. Are they individually or collectively enough to justify
leaving? How many would it take to erode trust away totally? How oft-repeated?

• Lack of transparency, scheming (’winking with the eye, pointing with the feet’) among leaders
• Individual tithing records not kept quiet, but discussed in committees and boards
• Individuals repeating the rebellion of Absalom (II Sam 15), without rebuke
• Use of spin-doctoring, manipulation, “selective fact-sharing”… as a management skill.
• Poor handling of finances, against better counsel.
• Squelching of rightful dissent
• Increasing legalism (continually adding special signed covenants and and other “requirements”)
• Primary focus on programs and numbers
• Sermons on membership retention rather than application of scriptural truth?
• Focus on imitating distant megachurches rather than finding God’s plan for the unique local community
• Inability to trust private or public statements from leaders.
• Use of ego-stroking rather than problem resolution
• Selective enforcement of policies (some being “more equal” than others)
• Selective keeping of promises (some being more “equal” than others)
• “Church bosses” who are roughshod and dispassionate.

When is it time to play Nathan? When is it time to go quietly?

Acceptable reasons for leaving:

• Going to serve somewhere else: ALWAYS the best possible reason. Let’s have more of these.
• Moving to follow a job: you must look after your family
• Keep the whole family together rather than splitting the family on Sundays
• Apostasy: going to a bible-believing church instead
• A notorious ethical failure: sacrificing self to avoid dragging the church down
• Having received a false and injurious reputation: find a place to start over

I think those are the no-brainer reasons to go. It’s always better when you run to something than from someting.

Reasons insufficient for leaving a church:

• Anger with or dislike for other members: we are to reconcile. What will you do in heaven?
• Don’t like what the bible has to say: we can’t argue with God. That would be a problem with us.
• Personal failure: if anything, it would mean you need the church more!
• Not getting one’s way: we are to submit
• Upset: you will feel better later
• Giving more than receiving: the churchman’s job is to pour himself out
• Unhappy with either lack or abundance of growth: we don’t tell God how to move
• Style, color, and volume