October 31, 2008 by Deryck Hodge
I’ve been coming back to Psalm 24 over and over again in the last few days. It begins:
The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.
And from there, the passage talks about the type of person who can ascend from this world to the Lord’s holy place:
He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to an idol or swear by what is false.
He will receive blessing from the Lord and vindication from God his Savior.
I have been stuck by the generousness of the first verse, the graciousness of God in it. That there is no difference in sacred and secular in the Lord’s eyes. The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it. And yet, there is this call to holiness — not only clean hands but a pure heart also. And then the Psalm says:
Such is the generation of those who seek him, who seek your face, O God of Jacob.
This reminds me that this is who we need to be. This is what this generation is called to — a devotion to holiness along with a recognition that this world, which Christians all too often deride as wicked and devoid of goodness, is indeed the Lord’s.
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September 3, 2008 by Deryck Hodge
I’m thinking about the idea of “excellence” in worship today. I ran across a blog post from someone whose church I know well from back when I was playing professionally. I won’t link the post here because I don’t want to seem like I’m calling the guy out or being critical, but something he wrote has kind of stayed with me. He wrote something to the effect that his church expected excellence from singers and musicians in the church worship groups. Nothing wrong with that on it’s face, but the exact line was something like “we expect excellence in everything, and anything less is unacceptable.” It’s the anything-less-is-unacceptable part that has me thinking a bit about what we have to offer God and what exactly pleases Him.
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Posted in blog | Tagged arts, church, music | No Comments »
August 14, 2008 by Deryck Hodge
God has really been dealing with me lately about the way in which we believers in Christ are called to die to ourselves. As Colossians 3:3 says:
For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
As I’ve grown up in the church, I’ve often heard some form of the following — that I need to die to myself, that the only life I have is in Christ, that everything I am is by Him and for Him — and so on. I don’t mean to downplay these statements, for they are indeed true, but I’ve heard them so much in my life that I’ve taken them for granted, or thought that I understand this concept of dying to myself.
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August 4, 2008 by Deryck Hodge
I’ve tried a thousand Bible programs (or at least it seems like that many), and none of them seem to suit me. Now I’ve found one that I can’t say enough good things about. It’s an online, web-based Bible reader called YouVersion. It’s literally the best Bible software I’ve ever found. You can select practically any version of the Bible, which is one nice feature. And I love how you can link directly to verses. See, for example, this link to John 1:1.
I discovered the site when looking for Bible apps on my iPhone. YouVersion has a great, I mean great!, iPhone app that makes use of the site. This is a project from LifeChurch.tv, which I know about from a visit to their island in Second Life. I seriously can’t say enough good things about this site.
The only negative is that you can’t get to the program without a network connection. I love this app so much, I would donate the programming time to add Google Gears support to get the thing working in offline mode. So if you’re looking for a great Bible reader, check out YouVersion. And if you’re from LifeChurch.tv, feel free to ping me about Gears if you all want to consider that (deryck [at] [this-site's-domain-name]).
Posted in blog | Tagged bible, church, software | 1 Comment »
August 3, 2008 by Deryck Hodge
There may be some folks who drift by here from my other blog, so first, let me offer a qualifier about the differences in this site and that one. Devurandom is my work/tech-related presence on the web. It is a site that came to life as I was getting into professional web development. It’s never been a very personal site and has always existed purely as a testing ground for my technical interests. I’ve always kept the topic loosely on web development and media because that’s what I do for living, though honestly, I’ve just not put much thought into that site. It’s just my little playground on the net.
This site, however, is coming out of an interest in writing about a particular topic. I’m now at a point in my life where I want to write about some very personal things for me — my love for music, my faith in Jesus Christ, and the combination of the two, music in the church. And, I suppose, I’ll end up writing on being a Christian and artist more generally, too (where “artist” means someone involved with creating and appreciating art).
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July 30, 2008 by Deryck Hodge
I’ve settled on a purpose for this site. I originally thought I’d just play around with WordPress and this domain, but now I think I want to do some blogging aside from my normal work-related tech blogging. Even though Devurandom is my personal site, I use it exclusively for work and it’s not all that personal. So this will be my personal blogging site from now on. More about what I want to write about in the next post.
But for now, I’ve updated the image to reflect the new topic. The Taylor guitar image is via Flickr from Jason Gulledge. Thanks to Jason for using a Creative Commons license that allowed reuse and modification. I cropped and scaled the image to fit the header here.
Posted in blog | Tagged about, meta | 1 Comment »
July 24, 2008 by Deryck Hodge
Just testing out how the wordpress iPhone app works. Hard to type, but otherwise, it seems cool.
Posted in blog | Tagged meta, testing | No Comments »
July 10, 2008 by Deryck Hodge
I’m seeing this site turn up for my name in Google now, so if you’re looking for me, see my main site Devurandom. This site is just me playing around with blogging software, since I haven’t played with wordpress, et al, in awhile.
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July 2, 2008 by Deryck Hodge
I believe I’ve finally settled on a look for this blog, not that I’ve put all that much time into it. I really want this to be more about the writing than the design or coding. More about that later.
In the meantime (and to give credit where credit is due), the photo in the header is by Ant Smith. I cropped and scaled it to fit the space here. Thankfully, Ant used a Creative Commons license that allowed me to do so.
Posted in blog | Tagged about, meta | 1 Comment »
