Musings on the "Why?"

Why would God allow a deranged person to kill innocent people?  Why were some spared and not others?  How could anyone have deserved this?  Why does God allow suffering to continue?

If you're looking for some simple answers you'll be disappointed.  We don't have any.  

Everyone goes through loss, and most of us ask these questions.

At the same time, I have found some things helpful in terms of my mindset and focus.

Faith is expressed by drawing conclusions about how God operates (and thinks) based on Jesus versus what I think and feel in the moment.  What a challenge that is...  

In Jesus' day people tried to put everything in a neat little box - "if something goes wrong then somebody must have deserved it."  Jesus confronts this approach and lets us know where our long-term focus is to be -- "look instead for what God can do."

I love the story recorded in John 9.

Walking down the street, Jesus saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked, "Rabbi, who sinned: this man or his parents, causing him to be born blind?" Jesus said, "You're asking the wrong question. You're looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause-effect here. Look instead for what God can do. We need to be energetically at work for the One who sent me here, working while the sun shines. When night falls, the workday is over. For as long as I am in the world, there is plenty of light. I am the world's Light."  (Message Version)

Then Jesus healed the blind man.

There is someone to blame for the shootings in Aurora and the Bible assures us justice will be served sooner or later.

But our primary focus is on what Jesus wants to do in our city in the aftermath of this horrible tragedy.  

For the victims who are asking "Why?" we can walk quietly with them.  We can listen, bring comfort and pray for healing.  We can encourage them to be honest with God about everything they are feeling.

We can fight the temptation to give trite answers to make us feel better.  Have you ever tried to give an answer to someone who is suffering and had them say, "Hey, thanks for those insights.  That totally answers the 'Why?' question for me and I feel so much better now..."  Probably not.  Most people just say "thanks for listening and being with me" (even if we tried to give answers).  

As local church communities, instead of being overcome by evil we're going to try and "look instead for what God can do."

For sure Jesus wants to destroy the works of evil.  And for sure He wants to reveal His love and life-changing power to the youth of our city.

Shootings in Aurora

First thing this morning my cell phone was going crazy with texts from all over, "Is everybody okay?"  "We're praying for you..."

What horror.  After reading the news I first wondered about my son Blake.  Sure enough, he had been invited to the movie.  After a few minutes I was able to reach him and he in fact didn't attend and neither did his friends who were planning to do so.

The Aurora Mall was blocked off except for police and media.  I got to Gateway HS at about 9:45.  There were lots of friends and family in shock, awaiting word.  There were police, pastors, counselors, victim's advocates, etc.  And they were keeping the press outside.

Updates were coming every 20 minutes or so.  The guy in charge was doing a nice job relaying as much info as possible and calming everyone given the situation.  

When I left a couple hours later they were still waiting, being told info may not come for another 2-3 hours.

What is going on with Aurora and the Denver Metro area?  It seems like we have a bullseye and evil is pulling the trigger.

For me it is a reminder of the power of evil.  It is a time to grieve as a city with the victims and families.

And it is time to join Jesus in what He wants to do in this city.  Who is going to go after the youth of our families and city and call them to something more?  Who is going to extend the loving acceptance of Jesus?  Who will reflect the affirmation of a Father who loves them?  Who will call them to a greater purpose than finding what makes them feel happy in the moment?  And who will lovingly ask what is going on in their lives and challenge unhealthy anger, bitterness and evil?

"The thief comes to steal, kill and destroy, but I have come to give you life and life to the full."  Jesus, in John 10:10

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us.

Build your own app, p. 3

Guest blogger Chandos

Blog: Entry 3

Wow...how time flies!

It seems like just yesterday I was filling my digital blog pages with iOS info and mildly humorous musings.

I'm back, obviously.

And I wasn't skipping out.  I'd like to title this week's blog "The Wall."

It was a huge lesson and painful reminder for me. I realized this week that I don't know everything. Shocker, right?  I'd worked on SHV's iOS app for two solid weeks and had great progress, then two solid weeks of despair.

So how can this help you?

My biggest problem wasn't ideas, or dreams, or style for my app.  It was know-how.  I jumped into this project headfirst, probably a little too proud.

I ran into an issue where I couldn't get the church's podcast to feed into the app.  After two weeks of furious Googling, as well as watching half of the videos on youTube, I finally figured it out.  And you know how?

The grace of God.

I say that with absolutely no jest, humor, joke, sarcasm, spite, malice, or misdirection.  I firmly believe that God helped me out on this one.  Granted, he didn't supernaturally fill my computer with the correct code, but he used tiny little snippets of things I saw to kickstart my brain and push me in the right direction.

It was an amazing reminder of how I get so reliant on what I know, think, and do, that I forget to credit my Creator.

So how can this help you with your app?

We'll get there.

Last time, I talked about design ideas, and following trends to make your app look nice. For the remainder of this post, and the next, I'd like to talk about building your app.

If you've checked out Xcode yet, you're ambitious and eager to learn, so you've probably figured out a few things.  If not, I'll show you how easy it can be, and the insanely difficult parts that you may not have a clue about.  So here goes.

When you open up Xcode (Which, for a refresher, it's Apple's program to create iOS apps.  If you do it yourself, this is the ONLY way to do it.), you're presented with the option to create a new project.  If you click "Create a new Xcode project," (easy, huh?) you get a window that looks like this:

How great is that?!  Apple set up some of the most common types of apps and made templates.  This is what excited me from the get go.  Anytime someone else creates a starting point I'm more than happy to use their help.

For SHV's app, I decided to use the Tabbed Application.  It's the most common type of app, aside from games, that I see in the App Store. If you click next, you get to name your app, add company info, and check some check boxes.  For the sake of our walk through, make sure Device Family says iPhone, and Use Storyboards and Use Automatic Reference Counting are checked, and click next.

Great!  We made our first app! In the top left corner is a button that says Run.  Click it, and watch some magic happen. You should see an iPhone on your screen!

That was easy....but before you gloat too much, let's look at one more thing.  Not that I want to scare you, yet, but if you go back into Xcode, click on the file called AppDelegate.m.

Ahhhhhh!  So many colors.  So much code.  Such a weird language!

That's the deep end, kiddos, and that's where we're going next time.

I'll also finish my story on how God used Google to help me solve my problem. :)

Bye!