My Sincerest Thanks

   It is not the first time. I will never forget the feeling of walking out of a Latin class in 1989 to find that my Nissan truck had been stolen from the school parking lot. With it one of the most gorgeous, newly leather bound Greek texts I had ever owned, mouldering, to be sure, in a landfill somewhere. Then there was the break in at home where they took the gold ring my wife had given me when we had been dating for six months. But this is the first time I can remember thinking, whenever I leave home, or the office, about how I might better hide this or that, is everything locked, etc. An odd feeling.

   In any case, I wish to express my sincerest thanks to the wonderful folks who have responded to the evil acts of others and blessed us so greatly. As you can see, my tablet is back. Well, no, of course, not the one that was stolen. But its replacement, and most importantly, its fully functional replacement. Though it required overnighting the unit to a wonderful brother in Texas who, I have been informed, created a monstrosity of cables to provide a way to boot the thing into Norton’s recovery environment (lesson learned: switching to a backup program that will allow for a bootable thumb drive, since tablets do not have built in CD drives) so as to install my backup data files. But, the extra-ordinary effort was successful (though I now owe its life to Unix, and I’m sure I’ll never hear the end of that), and that means all the programs, settings, and data, are as they were the evening I returned from California and speaking for the men of Grace Life on the subject of Islam. That also means that barring any disasters, this little unit will be with me in Canada next weekend (I enjoy speaking from it), and will be my resource in the Caner debate, the debate on baptism, and the Spong debate.
   Though not pictured, the kind brothers who had originally provided me with my iPod replaced it as well, and another brother even sent me a slightly smaller one that I use when riding (for example, when I played the Jeff Miner sermon promoting a homosexual interpretation of Romans 1 I had listened to the mp3 earlier while riding using that new iPod). And so to everyone who gave, including those who gave financially so that we have been able to embark upon a very serious “lock down” of our new offices (i.e., making this place secure in numerous ways), I extend my heartfelt thanks. So many expressed their desire that I be able to continue to do what I do—the DL, the blog, the debates—and a recognition that these items are very important to that work. And so to all my brothers and sisters in Christ who have given and prayed, I thank you. Keep us in prayer as we press forward with the final installations of redundant security systems on the high tech side, and on the low tech side—bars on the windows, new doors with meaningful locks, and the like.