Pastor Kim,

Thank you for your open heart, your open doors.

It’s sometimes hard to to go back after a time away. What will they think? What will they say? How will it feel? Am I wearing the right clothes? Should I bring my Bible? Is it the right Bible for this church? What if I’m late? What if I’m too early? Will I be judged? Questioned? Or welcomed?

What if?

I could have stayed home. I could have gone to a different church. I could have fretted and procrastinated and decided to wait another week, another month, another year.

As I unzipped the cover on my Bible, I saw some flyers from the church. From 2009. It’s been nearly five years. More shame. I don’t deserve to go back after so long, I thought.

But God nudged me.... Read More »

Drop the worries. It’s not God’s will that we should worry. Worry is one of the many faces of fear. And perfect faith has no fear. Are you worried you are not enough? You are. God made you as he intended. Worried you will not have enough? You will. You are living in the world God made, as he intended. Worried that others will... Read More »

There was a time I had forgotten who I am. But now I am reawakened.

No longer must I fall into the trap of attempting to be who you would have me be. I know who I am. I am God’s child. I am God’s extension. I am God’s creation. I am wholly connected to God. I am of God. I am God.

Your every judgment of my lovelessness is incorrect. Your every choice to not trust me is based only on your fear. I have no need to suffer on your behalf, for I am whole.

We are surrounded by the vast, endless ocean that is God’s love. There is only peace in that ebbing and flowing tide that touches us, washes over us, fills us, sustains us. In this perfect knowledge of the pervasive presence of God that is our every thought, every touch, every movement, we are in absolute safety.... Read More »

Choosing to follow the higher path requires much commitment and fortitude. It’s not easy to go against the tide, to choose to remain vigilant and aware of the importance of each and every choice we make. The path of least resistance is to follow. Bosses, government, laws, societal whims. It’s easy to simply deny the higher truths which our hearts and souls know matter most. It’s easy to be a follower. It’s easy to lose ourselves in the winds, to be blown where those winds blow. And it feels natural. That’s the trap. We hear something and we believe it. Someone tells us to do something and we simply do it. 

But easy is rarely rewarding. The easy path is rarely that which our highest selves, our souls, our spirits, our connection to divine, know to be the right and righteous way.

Remind yourself today of what matters. Remind yourself of your... Read More »

If cognition is an ability to forecast and to react, the algorithm of thought can be represented as a function of observation, recall, pattern matching, selection, and finally, decision. Sentience is simply an awareness of the process (or algorithm) of cognition. Creatures of increasingly higher thought have increasingly higher awareness of the facets of the process. The level of sentience is directly proportional to the acknowledgement and understanding of will and resultant choice.

For mutual understanding of this theory, we first need to address the symbology used in representation. Words are funny things, having slightly differing meanings to each person.

I’ll commence then, with definitions and exploration of the terms used thus far, beginning at the base, and moving up the sundry levels of the model. But before that, let me point out that the process is often circular. Ofttimes, the observation, the starting point, is the observation not of external influences... Read More »

The whole idea is flawed, the idea that a complex undertaking in a single domain can be cooperatively built well by a team is simply a bad one. Why? Because complex undertakings require a high level of talent, knowledge, and finesse, not a high degree of cooperation. It simply does not work well, regardless of the lovely (or not so lovely) buzzword used to describe it.

Corporate IT and BT directors point to the open source movement and all the wonderful successes and try to mirror the approach. They come to the problem with a critical misconception: that big open source projects have been successful because they were created by hundreds or thousands of programmers. But it’s not true. Looking a little deeper at every single success in the open source arena, we find that in every instance, there was one visionary. (Or occasionally two or three.) And that’s what makes... Read More »

A real agent of change needn’t have precise goals as not only do we embrace the practice of constantly changing and improving ourselves, we understand and honor the truth that as we change, so too does our horizon change. There is no end game. There is no finish line. There is no top of the stairway. The result is not the goal. Transformation itself is the goal.

These truths we hold sacred, in... Read More »

Unfortunately, “Big Data” is too often used as a cool new buzzword with little real understanding of what it is (and isn’t) and its value.

Big Data is, quite simply, a volume of data too large for traditional database systems. Usually it’s from a variety of sources, in a variety of formats. Usually it’s added to frequently, often in real time, or nearly so.

It started mostly with Google. Google had a simple goal, to become the best search engine in the world, and part of that was the indexing of the entirety of the world wide web. It’s a lot of data. It changes every day. It was far too much data to be stored and updated and accessed reasonably with any current database system. So they invented some stuff. Google File System. And MapReduce. Other things too. Very technical. Very cool. And effective.

Simplified, here’s how it works:

Instead of... Read More »

He noticed the front license plate on my Mustang; it reads POET. He first remarked in that stupid cliche, “So you’re a poet and don’t know it.”

I didn’t quite know how to respond to that, so I simply said, “Yes. I’m a poet.”

He asked what sort of poetry I wrote and I told him that most of it was of a spiritual nature. He said he was pleased to hear that. Then, I said, “God is good.”

He twisted his face as if confused, saying something I didn’t quite catch, but the gist was that God was only good when we do our part.

It shouldn’t have surprised me when he moved quickly to other matters, business matters, and his displeasure at the situation with a project I’m involved in. When I didn’t immediately agree with his viewpoint, he decided to minimize my efforts, telling me he knew someone who said she... Read More »

Rebound relationships are natural. We feel hurt. We seek comfort.

The key to stay in a healthy space is to seek comfort in a healthy place. Love yourself. Feel God’s love. Talk it out with a trusted friend or advisor. Give yourself time to heal. Lick your wounds. Go to... Read More »