I’ve had a couple of conversations in the past week on the subject of abortion. One was with a friend telling me about the abortions he was involved in and another was with some people defending the right to choose abortion.

The friend who was involved in the abortions was regretfully of them and said he didn’t know when life began but he believes that if they were children that they are with Christ. His reasoning had to do with an age of accountability. He asked what I thought and I saw that there was a burden on him so I told him that I believe that God is a more loving and gracious father than I could ever be and I trust Him with my children more than I trust myself. I could have pointed to the Psalms to say that a child had died, but that would have been Law applied unnecessarily.

The people defending the right to choose abortion also say that they don’t know when life begins. In this case, these people needed to hear the Law. They weren’t Christians, so appeals to Scripture would be pointless, but simple scientific arguments would force them to consider that life begins at conception and taking that life is wrong. (of course “personhood” then becomes the point of contention).

These two interactions really highlighted the importance of distinguishing Law and Gospel so they can be properly applied in the course of living in ones vocations.

I’m a geek and one way that this comes through is how I manage my blogs. I use a DreamHost Virtual Private Server (VPS) account to host this blog, my wife’s blog, Wittenberg Media, The Parental Office, and Joyful Games just to name a few. I do this because I can control plugins and manage podcasts and other resources at very reasonable costs (storage and bandwidth is unlimited with a DreamHost account). If I tried to do this with a more turnkey solution, I’d either be limited with what I could do (Blogger) or have to pay a lot to host all these sites (WordPress and TypePad).

With those blessings come the curse of troubleshooting technical issues. For the past couple months I’ve been getting intermittent messages telling me that my VPS has exceeded memory usage and gone down. Luckily the VPS seems to bounce back up after about a minute so there isn’t too much downtime. This week I decided that I was going to track this down because the problem seemed to be getting worse, and I really wanted to get rid of the nagging feeling that there was something I should fix.

The first thing I did was monitor the memory usage (watch free -m) of the system and saw that if I hit more than a couple of the sites the memory usage would balloon and the server would reboot. I then went to my account and bumped up my memory allotment (+$5). I tried hitting a bunch of the sites and that seemed to do the trick. The memory usage would get near the limit, but seemed to hold at that level and didn’t tip over to where it would cause a reboot.

That lasted a couple of days, but this morning I got hit with another message that the VPS had rebooted. Since the problems definitely revolved around hitting multiple WordPress sites, I did a search for optimizing WordPress on DreamHost and found this page. It turns out that the default setting when configuring a domain is to use FastCGI. This is a memory pig and overkill for WordPress. I switched all the sites to use CGI and memory consumption plummeted without a noticeable hit to performance!

So I’m thankful that God has given me the aptitude and interest that allows me to work through these problem which are caused by the aptitude and interest I have for these problems (classic Lutheran paradox!). I am also thankful that I have these gifts that I can use to serve others through the sites I mentioned above. Hopefully some find them edifying and if not those sites, I have such a wide range of interests I hope I eventually put one up that does.

Last plug. DreamHost is pretty cool in that they will host a 501c3 for free. We use them for our church and preschool.

In my quest to build a technology business around confessional Christian products and service, I’ve come across lots of advice from other Christians about how to find what God has called you to do and build a business around that “calling”. What this typically leads to is the idea that you need to look at how God has uniquely gifted you in terms of ability and interest and that is how to determine what He has called you to do.

Vocation

I find this really problematic because it is dangerous, for any reason, to look inward at ourselves to determine what God wants us to do. While the Holy Spirit dwells in us, that Old Adam still exists in us and corrupts whatever good intentions we have. No, the best way to determine what God wants us to do is to look outside of ourselves, at His Word and the people He has put around us. We know from His word that He would have us love our neighbors and our neighbors are those He has put in our lives be they spouse, children, co-workers, etc. This is the doctrine of vocation that aside from “salvation by grace, through faith, for Christ’s sake alone” is the most comforting teaching Luther uncovered in the Reformation.

Mission

The other problem with looking inwardly for your calling is that your career/business becomes primarily an expression of your desires and not about how God wants to use you to serve your neighbor. This leads to the idea that mission/evangelism becomes the way in which we serve our neighbor and that anytime we are serving our neighbor we are doing evangelism. That’s how building homes, passing out water, and cleaning up the neighborhood become “evangelism” without any hint of Christ crucified for the forgiveness of sins. In no way am I denigrating theses acts of mercy, it’s just that this confused “evangelism” without the proclamation of the Gospel isn’t going to save anyone.

It always amazes me that ones understanding of vocation has such ripple effects, but I guess it shouldn’t because we all want to know how God wants to use us. However, instead of being curved in on ourselves (incurvatus in se) and looking at our gifts we need to look outside ourselves and serve the one who is right in front of us. You could take the most brilliant scientist who has the passion and ability to come up with a cure for cancer and if his child is sitting in front of him with a dirty diaper it should be quite obvious how God wants to use him.

As soon as I open the garage door my 4-yo greets me with, “Let’s take a bath with Jesus!” My first thought was, “What in the world have the girls been doing today? I hope this isn’t some type of ‘Jesus is my Homeboy‘ thing.”  Turns out my wife had gotten her a toy set with Jesus, the Apostles (I wonder which one is Judas), and a boat. Well she spent the afternoon splashing around in the sink. I told her that Jesus could walk on water (this one sank) because he was God. Although we didn’t take a bath with Jesus, I did get a chance to teach her a little more about our Savior.

I was getting more and more dissatisfied with my blog theme, so I modified the header and went to a cleaner theme.

I’m also dissatisfied with the content of the blog. This blog was meant to be about all my vocations not just the vocation of LCMS layman. I’m planning to blog more about my other vocations especially those that touch on the more technology-oriented aspects of my life and how theology influences me in those areas.

I don’t think anyone will actually notice any content changes except for maybe a few more posts that you can ignore

I’ve been listening to some old Issues, Etc. episodes that happened to be focusing on vocation and they certainly helped me get through yesterday. While my wife was taking the girls to their swim lessons, no small feat, I went to Costco to do some shopping. Then after putting away the oversized package of cheese and diapers I cleaned the bathrooms, mopped the kitchen floor and cooked dinner. While cooking dinner I noticed a few dishes in the sink so I figured I should do them now rather than after dinner. In the middle of rinsing a dish the fatigue hit me and I just wanted to throw the dish across the room and sit down on the floor with a beer. I restrained myself and fought through the last few pots but I was done. Except I knew my wife had a meeting to go to and I had bath (can’t skip after swimming) and bedtime with the girls. At that point the only thing that held together my sanity and held back my sinful rage was the Doctrine of Vocation. Knowing that God had given me this time to help relieve some of the burden of the housework my wife does and given me my daughters to shepherd in body and spirit gave me the peace I needed to get through it.

Now I didn’t list all those things to toot my own horn. In fact, I needed to repent of those things which I should not have let pile up in the first place and of the frustration in trying to get a 3 year-old to take her bath and dry her hair. I say all this to remind myself of all that God has blessed me with and the simple and obvious ways He uses me to do His will.

What follows are the download statistics for the first full week that “Cwirla” was available. I have no idea what they mean. I’m just surprised that France and China were 2nd and 3rd in downloads.

I received approval last Friday evening for my first two iPhone Applications (they work on the iPod Touch and should work on the iPad when it is released). The inspiration for the Apps came from Pastor Todd Wilken when, after discussing the video I made “There’s a Pastor for That“, wished for a “Cwirla App” for his iPod Touch. Well, I couldn’t resist the inspiration and put together the Cwirla app which is available in two versions. The free version is a collection of wisdom from Pastor Cwirla excerpted from episodes of The God Whisperers. The $0.99 “blue” version includes the same excerpts, plus it includes the story about Pastor Cwirla’s confirmation class which includes some “home schooler alert” language. It also includes some risque quotes if you “shake” Pastor Cwirla. All proceeds will go to the God Whisperers coffers.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to write a report on the LCMS Regional Gathering for the CNH, Northwest, PSW, and English districts because there have already been reports (here, here, here, and here) that did a good job of covering them in general. However, I think I have something to add to the conversation, and I also haven’t posted in a while.

The Great

I got to spend time getting to know the pastoral delegate from my circuit, Pastor John Bestul. My pastor said he was a very solid guy and I found him to be exactly that. I feel fortunate that my circuit has two such fine confessional Lutheran pastors. I really appreciated pastor Bestul’s thoughtfulness, thoroughness, and clarity. He helped me to focus not just on the stated goal of the proposals, but also the long term affects. Thanks for making the whole thing worthwhile Pastor Bestul.

The Notable

The 4 other delegates at my table were pastoral delegates. They were all very nice and were very interested in getting a layman’s perspective on the proposals. They were also very kind in thanking me for taking the time away from work and family. However, they weren’t exactly the most conservative pastors I’ve met and if I were a conspiracy theorist I might think I was purposely put at that table to mute my voice (I spoke my mind, but I wasn’t about to engage in arguments on 4 fronts). It was tough being at a table with 4 pastors who were behind pretty much all the proposals to one degree or another.

President Kieschnick was very presidential. The man is a very good politician. Friday was his birthday, his anniversary, and his wife’s step-father passed away on Friday. Obviously he did not orchestrate this, but this stuff didn’t hurt in softening the crowd which was already sympathetic. I pray that Matt Harrison will be the next SP, but I feel a lot less hopeful after the gathering. Dr. Kieschnick is just getting so much face time and he’s also able to deflect from the more controversial BRTFSSG proposals by pointing out that he has a response to the final report that is critical of it in some areas. So, if you don’t know the specifics of his response (I need to read it), it would be pretty easy to assume that he doesn’t agree with the parts you don’t agree with, especially if you are already leaning in his direction.

My question to the panel was the second one asked in the Q&A. I asked about the proposed change in wording from “Encourage congregations to strive for uniformity in church practice…” to “Encouraging a common understanding…” Dr. Sohns gave the response which was first to say that the current phrase is being used legalistically to enforce uniformity of practice and then by walking through the history of this article. Starting in 1847 with “uniformity of ceremonies” which he says meant only special ceremonies like baptism (this didn’t sound right and I would like to check on this with the Gottesdienst crowd), then changing in 1917 to “uniformity of practice and affairs” and then in 1927 to “uniformity of practice”. He says that “common understanding” would lead to common practice and that was the original intent of the article. I’m sure this was sufficient for most and I’m sure some felt like the liturgical crowd got its smack-down. But I’m not buying it. I remember from the district convention that we used “encourage” all the time in proposals and it never had a legalistic tone. This was just one example, I’ll give a couple others later, where the strawman that the liturgical crowd is trying to impose things was put forth.

I was hoping to put up one big post, but I’m still groggy from the event (another part of my report) so I’ll hopefully put up part 2 tomorrow.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Christian vocation is not just about a career, it’s about God’s will for our entire lives. When we are born, we are automatically put into a vocation. We are children of our parents, and if we have any brothers or sister we are siblings. What does it mean to have the vocation of child or sibling? The vocation of child is put forth by the Fourth Commandment, “Honor your father and your mother.” The vocation of sibling has more in common with our other vocations and comes from Christ’s command to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Our neighbor would be our siblings in this instance. As we grow older, we are naturally put into new vocations like student, friend, roommate, worker, citizen, spouse, parent, driver, etc. Pretty much anything we do is a vocation which falls under Christ’s command to love your neighbor as yourself.

Okay, we’ve established that we’re supposed to do everything in our lives with love for our neighbor (yes, even driving in traffic). The caveat is that we all know that we don’t come close to being loving in all aspects of our lives (just ask my wife about my driving). So we rely on the salvation that Christ bought for us on the cross and do our best to love our neighbor in gratitude for that salvation.

So that leaves us as both saints and sinners relying on Christ for our salvation. But that doesn’t tell us what job we should take or how to put food on the table. Since the Bible doesn’t say, “Thou shalt be a fireman” we have freedom in what may become. Still sounds like a bit of a dodge? Without a clear word from God, anything I say is just my opinion, but here goes…

I think that how we show love to our neighbor can expose our interests and talents and lead us to specific job choices. For example, when I was in junior high and practicing my vocation as a student, we had a science fair. My teacher and I decided that based on my talents and interests I would write a simple video game and that was the humble beginnings of my career in software development.

Showing love for your neighbor may not always lead you where you want to go, but often leads you where God wants you to be. My college choice was a classic example of this. I got accepted to RPI under my second choice of majors and told my dad that I’d go there if they let me in under my first choice. I was all set to go to San Jose St. assuming that they wouldn’t bump me into my choice of majors. Needless to say, they did and I felt obligated to honor my father and do what I said I would. I really wanted to just stay near home and hang with people I knew. However, in the course of honoring my commitment to my dad, I had the best experience I could have had in college. I made lots of mistakes there and I learned a lot and I know it had a profound effect on who I am today.

Based on these examples, it might seem like I’m saying that following your vocation is the path to worldly success. That is not my point at all, I’m simply trying to point out how my career developed based on the vocation of student and child. In my next post, I’ll explore how following your vocation can negative worldly impact and how not following your vocation can have both positive and negative impacts.