We Need Icing (February 14, 2022)

How do we understand ourselves in relationship to God? Isaiah 6 challenges us to think about that.

Songs for Our Temple (Week 7: Psalms 19-21)

Melanie leads us into Psalms 19-21 tonight as we continue exploring the Psalms and what they tell us about our God.

Self-Sacrificial Love

To love someone, and to have those feelings returned — romantically or platonically — is a beautiful thing. And there is much joy to be found in it. But the everyday level of actually loving differs greatly from what has come to be the airy concept of love. Cupid’s bows and love without obstacles make for pleasant fairytales, but real love requires work and self-sacrifice.

A beautiful essay on love, reflecting on one of the best episodes in all of Trek. It nails the powerful picture of love and friendship in “Measure of a Man,” where Cmdr. Riker must take up the role of prosecutor against his friend Data in a place that lacks one or Data will receive a devastating summary judgment in lieu of a trial. Riker has to choose between the comfortable, but self-preserving path versus a deeply personally painful route that offers Data hope:

It’s also about how we love when we are stuck between difficult choices. How we love when that loving gives us back precious little but pain.

We as humans are called to do this, but it is mighty hard. Yet, we learn how to do it more as we follow the Savior who perfectly demonstrates what we can only achieve through Him in this life.

Getting Midnight in the UNIX Epoch from Perl

Many computer functions dealing with time are calculated in the number of seconds since the UNIX Epoch. I wanted to get midnight tomorrow in those Epoch seconds so that my Bible word Wordle clone Biblicle could say when the next word would be available. I couldn’t easily do the entire calculation on the client side in JavaScript, because when the next word is served varies: if the user is logged in, it is at midnight for the user’s specified time zone on FaithTree (which may or may not match their computer’s time zone), but if the user is not logged in, it will be at midnight Central Time (“US/Chicago”).

The calculation needed to be done on the backend on the server, which is written in Perl. This page had a suggestion how to get the number of seconds so far elapsed in the day, which could easily be modified to instead give me the number of seconds remaining. Problem: I want to calculate on the basis of the local time zone not UTC/GMT. Thankfully, using Perl’s DateTime object, that isn’t difficult:

use DateTime;
my $tomorrow = DateTime->now(time_zone => $timeZone);
my $secs = ((23 - $tomorrow->hour) * 3600) + ((59 - $tomorrow->min) * 60) + (59 - $tomorrow->sec);
$tomorrow->add( seconds => ($secs + 1) );
my $tomorrowStarts = $tomorrow->epoch;

With that little code snippet, $tomorrowStarts will return the first second of tomorrow located to $timeZone and relative to the Epoch.

At the Playoffs (February 7, 2022)

As we live as Christians, we face struggles and opposition. Shouldn’t life be easier? Should we find a way to make it easier?

Songs for Our Temple (Week 6: Psalms 16-18)

I turn to Psalms 16-18 that point us to the lasting treasure of God’s love on tonight’s “This Week at Little Hills.”

Not Enough Green Squares (January 31, 2022)

Sometimes the deck appears to stacked and it’s hard to see how life will do anything but go from bad to worse. How do we have joy then?

Songs for Our Temple (Week 5: Psalms 13-15)

Join us as the Psalminizers come together for a discussion about the problems of life and the solution in Psalms 13-15.

Sorry, Sold Out (January 24, 2022)

As we think about joy in dark places, Paul turns to those who are actually preaching the Gospel with the aim of discrediting him. What do we do when people and circumstances seem to want to hurt us?

The Zippy Christmas Extravaganza

I meant to post this link ahead of Christmas, but it is still the 12 Days of Christmas, so…

The Zippy Crew takes you over the river and through the woods with a review of a fantastic new Nat “King” Cole Christmas album, sharing of Christmas memories and reflections on the upcoming 12 Days of Christmas. Also, Special Guest Jim Krenning joins us for a preview of an adventure through the Psalms in the New Year.

This episode was so much fun. I hope you enjoy it!