These are the Chandlers

They don't know me. The dad there is Matt. Pray about his brain -- it'd be OK if he's waiting to find out the previous brain scan was a mistake. That's enough of a miracle.

Lord: any miracle will do.

And if you thought that was bad

Check this out from my Facebook. Someone named "Charles Page" handed out this gem over the holiday weekend:

Is that awesome or what? Fred Phelps and John MacArthur are the same -- except for their style.

What would we do without Facebook?

The worst of our generation

The London telegraph is calling "Climategate" the worst scientific scandal of our generation".

So at what point does Al Gore have to give his Nobel back?

At some point ...

... they just have to turn out the lights and lock the door. Apparently, "scientists" at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

Can we now dispose of the myth of peer-reviewed climate science which points to an unequivocal human cause for an alleged unprecedented spike in global temperatures?

You thought I missed this, dincha?

Global Warming exposed as actually ginned-up "science" with no foundation in reality.

I was just waiting a bit to make sure the hacked e-mails weren't made up e-mails instead. When the Telegraph is reporting this stuff, the gig is up.

I am also going to burn some styrofoam cups out in my back yard this long weekend to celebrate.

You prolly could have googled this, but here's the bird recipe we make at my house when we make bird. For those of you who can't stand turkey, pheh upon you -- but you can make this recipe with two medium-sized chickens. You won't get by this week without it:

Well, they say that a Turkey recipe will get hits this close to the season, so I'm going to give you my recipe for roasting a Turkey in order to add content that everyone can use to the blog.

You do not have to be "truly reformed" to use this recipe. You just have to like Turkey and stuffing.

Roasting a turkey isn't as hard as it sounds. Here's a basic recipe to get you started. In this case, the turkey is stuffed. DO NOT stuff the turkey and put it in the fridge overnight: that's bacteriologically a bad idea, and we want you all to enjoy Thanksgiving on the sofa, not on a hospital gurney.

Ingredients:

12- to 14-lb. turkey, thawed if purchased frozen
1 bag, your favorite "Italian" croutons
2-4 bouillon cubes
2-3 stalks, celery, chopper or cubed
1 cup carrots, chopped
½ cup onions, finely chopped
1 tsp, dried parsley
1 cup, cashews (Mrs. Cent prefers walnuts; use the nut you enjoy most)
Pepper and Garlic Salt

STEPS:

1. Preheat your oven to 325. Remove the cooking racks, then place one rack into oven at the lowest position.
   
   
2. Unwrap your THAWED Turkey in a clean sink, and remove the giblets – that bag of stuff that you never thought you would use for anything because it looks gross. It's not gross. You may have to unhook the metal clip which holds the legs together in order to get all the giblets out; you may have to run some warm water into the bird to get the giblets out. Don't be afraid.
   
   
3. Start a medium-sized pot of water boiling – not more than 3 cups. Put your packet of giblets in the water (sans wrapping paper), along with your bouillon cubes and the onions, carrots, celery and parlsey. (FWIW, the leafy parts of the celery are great for this recipe, so don;t get squeemish) 2 boullion cubes will make a somewhat-mild flavored stuffing; 6 will make a very salty and spicy stuffing. You know what you like best, so add the cubes to the low end of your tolerance for spicy. For your reference, I usually use 4 cubes. Boil this mix for about 30 minutes – long enough to cook the giblets thoroughly.
   
   
4. While the soup (yes: you very smart readers knew that we were making soup, didn't you?) is cooking, wash the Turkey thoroughly, inside and out. I wouldn't use soap as you might miss a spot in the rinse and ruin your hours of hard work here, but washing the bird is an important health safety tip. If we were deep frying the bird (that's the Christmas recipe), washing is pretty much unimportant because if some germ can survive the deep fryer, it will kill you before you eat any of the dinner. Anyway, clean the bird thoroughly and put it in a large roasting pan. For this recipe, the deeper the roasting pan, the better. I suggest a large disposable roasting pan from WAL*MART even though it might possibly ring up at the wrong price.
   
   If you get bored waiting for the soup to finish up, this would be a good time to rub salt and pepper into the skin of your bird. Visually, salt and pepper the skin so that it looks like very light TV static. Do the top (the breast side) and the bottom (where the shoulders are); do not worry if you put less on the breast side. Because of the way this bird is going to cook, pay special attention to salting and peppering the wings and drumsticks.
   
   
5. You now have a clean, prepped bird and a very delicious-smelling pot of soup. You have to make stuffing now. Remove the soup from the heat and remove the giblets. If you are a complete carnivore (like me), take the fully-cooked giblets to your food chopper and chop them up and put them back into the soup (you can't chop up the neck, but if you have 20 minutes, de-bone the neck and put your neck meat into the soup).
   
   Those of you grossed out by chopping up the giblets can throw them away. The rest of us will weep for you.
   
   Now empty the bag of croutons into the soup. If you used about 2 cups of water, you will get a somewhat-damp bread-and-soup mixture; if you used about 3 cups of water, you will get a very wet bread-and-soup mixture. I like the latter better, but some people like their stuffing more dry than others. The extraordinary secret here is that a soupier stuffing makes for a more-moist bird in the final product. After the soup and the bread are well- mixed, add the cashews and mix again.
   
   
6. When you have this mixing complete, use a tablespoon and start loading the stuffing into the bird. Pack the stuffing down into the bird to get the cavity of the body completely full of stuffing. Don't leave any air pockets. Once the Turkey is completely stuffed, position it in the roasting tray breast-side down (I learned that from watching Emeril) in the center of the pan, and load the pan with the rest of your stuffing mix.
   
   
7. Cover the Turkey, and place it inside your oven. After 2 hours in the heat, remove the cover and roast for another hour. In this final hour, the skin of the exposed parts should turn golden brown. At the end of the third hour, test the bird with a meat thermometer; the center temperature should be 175-180 degrees F. It will be the most unbelievable bird you ever ate.

also

as seen on TV

I am aware that you want more of the rationale behind bad art and rap, and we will get to it eventually. I have about 20 minutes today, and something came up on twitter of all places, and I wanted to share.

The tweet stream looks like this:

Actually, it all started when maBoo johnMark tweeted: “Commented on Is salvation available for all men? / Reason To Stand http://tinyurl.com/yl4vf4w”

To which I replied: “@hereiblog -'available'? Where does the Bible say salvation is 'available'? That's a bad category.”

And the exchange with kai5263499 ensued.

Here’s where I have been trying to go with that, and Kai can respond or not, here or someplace else, and I’ll be essentially done with this:

[1] The act of “saving” in the Bible is not something that is somehow procured by the one being saved. This is a critical foundational point which most people don’t get – and it’s not just a reformed systematic thing. This is about how the Bible spells out what Salvation is, and it is something God does.

[2] That means that “salvation” is not merely “available”. Consider, for example, Acts 4 (exp. Acts 4:12), or Phil 1 (esp 1:28). Salvation there is not a commodity which you go get. Salvation has at its source a savior who is bringing it and who makes it happen. Salvation is brought; salvation is delivered; salvation is made; salvation is announced. It is not in some way procured.

[3] Now consider this carefully: a Savior is available. That is, the place from which salvation comes is made known to all men through the Gospel. Consider Acts 17 in that regard – Paul says that because Jesus is raised from the dead, the time of ignorance about God is over.

[4] In that, it might be right to say that Jesus is available -- although again: I think this soft-soaks the entire force and hope of the Gospel. To say that Jesus is only “available” makes it seem as if Jesus is passive in His role – but Jesus Himself says that He came to seek and to save and to serve. Jesus is not merely “available” to men.

So what this question of whether “salvation is available” or not drives me to is “why ask the question in these plainly-casual terms?” That is: what is achieved by asking about salvation in the category of “availability” rather than in some other biblical category – such as the necessity of salvation, or the motive of salvation, or the source of salvation, or the consequences of salvation (and there are more categories, but you get the idea)?

Why frame “salvation” in terms of its “availability”? I suspect the goal is to cause the person who is listening to consider the convenience of salvation, therefore encouraging him to do what they call in retail, which is to make an “impulse buy”. That is: it looks good right now, and it’s easy to get one, so I’ll just put it in my cart.

It’s available: I’ll take one.

Let me say: that’s a horrible reason to choose Christ. It undermines His greatness and our lack which only he can fill up; it minimizes our offenses and His great mercy. It minimizes the cost of discipleship and the cost of the sacrifice made. Framing the Gospel in terms of “availability” is a minimization of all the necessary attributes of salvation, and makes opportunistic buyer out of people who are dying in their sins.

You can’t explain something like that in twitter. But that’s why I have a blog.

A Crisis of Hiatus

Der Speigel is reporting that Global Warming is actually on a 10-year hiatus:

Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue. For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.

"It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community," says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. "We don't really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point."

Uh huh.

Driving home from AWANA, we're listening to Van Morrison, and my daughter says, 'is this a black guy?' I laugh a little as Jackie Wilson segues into Beautiful Day, and she says, 'Now THIS guy is WHITE.'

Take THAT, Bono.

It's already here

Bad Art excursis

I just wanted to point out that in the US, more than 172,000 new titles of books are published every year. That's one new book for every 1744 people.

Most of those are not Christian books, you understand. I wonder how many of those can be considered artistic -- let along "good art". I'd grant them all "good craft" for binding and distribution, but good art?

You tell me.

I am 100-percent sure I will regret this

I am following @fakejohnpiper.

and loving it.

Why you read this blog

Wherever you are, sit down and raise your right foot up and start drawing clockwise circles with it. Just little circles so you don't look like a crazy person, for about 15 seconds until you get into a rhythm.

Now raise your right hand, keep your foot circling, and draw the number "6" in the air just like they taught you in kindergarten.

Yeah: I don't believe it either.

Bobby Grow

We take a break from taking a break blogging here to ask for prayer for Bobby Grow.