“I will both lie down in peace, and sleep; for You alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety.” -Psalm 4:8

Some time back, I had the privilege of having lunch with the president of one of the largest aerospace companies. Following lunch, he took me on a tour of his vast facility.

What really impressed me was the “clean room.” My host explained to me that the clean room is so spotless because no particle can pass through the air conditioning system into that room unless it is small enough to fit on the point of a needle. He told me something I didn’t know before. The point of a needle is really flat. Put a needle under a microscope and you will see that the point is literally flat. And the largest speck that can come into the clean room will be able to rest on the flat part of the needlepoint!

To enter that room, I had to clear security and then they had to make sure I was clean. It was a fascinating as well as a thought-provoking experience.

You should have a clean room at the center of your life. Your mind should be your own personal clean room. You should have security checks on whom and what enters your room. There are some writers I refuse to read because they fill me with negative thoughts, and some ideas and some practices that don’t pass security. Have you been careless? I suggest you begin today to set up your clean room at the very core of your mind – a place so clean that both you and God are comfortable there. God’s dwelling place!

“Assuredly I (Jesus) say to you, I have not found such a great faith; not even in Israel.” -Matthew 8:10

The words in Matthew 8:10 were spoken by Jesus to a soldier who had come to Christ and asked for his servant to be healed. The soldier had just said to Jesus that there is no need for the Master to even come to his house, for this soldier knows that all Christ has to do is say the word, and his servant will be healed. Jesus’ response that he had “not found such great faith” has always fascinated me. I read the words of Jesus in Matthew 8:10 and have so often pondered what kind of faith Jesus would call great.

In my lifetime, I have seen so many declare with conviction that they have faith that all things are possible, yet I somehow sensed there was a hesitancy to their words. That if they were placed on the witness stand before a great litigator, their faith would fold like a cheap tent in a stiff breeze. I for one am guilty as charged. Yes, I believe that with Christ, all things are possible, but there have been times in my life when I wondered why would He do it for me? Who am I? I’m not worthy of such a miracle from the King of kings and Lord of lords.

Early in my faith I remember going through a stage of reasoning that went something like this: Christ healed the sick, raised the dead, caused the lame to walk and the blind to see, but those are just the few who won the holy lottery. Miracles like that just don’t happen today, or if they do, they certainly would not happen for me. Can you relate?

Then I began to witness miracle after miracle happening around me. Miracles that could not be ignored. Great stories of cancers disappearing after prayer with no medical explanation. Sight returning to a man after leaving a church service. A clinically dead man coming back to life while lying in a body bag in a morgue just as his mother was praying for him long distance, several states away.

With each new story, my thoughts would drift back to the soldier in Matthew 8:10. What kind of faith did he have? By the way Christ reacted to him, his was not shallow faith, or a questioning faith, or a fence-walking faith. His was a faith of deep conviction. There was no question in his mind that all Christ had to do was say the word and it would be done. Yet, what convicted me the most was that the soldier was a stranger to Christ, someone Jesus had never met before. Yet, this soldier came to Jesus with a no-holds-barred, no-doubt-whatsoever kind of faith that this miracle worker he’d heard about had the power to heal his servant. From Christ’s reaction, we learn that this soldier, a perfect stranger, had more faith in Him than even Christ’s own disciples!

Now we come to you and I who love Jesus, who have invited Him in to our hearts as Savior, and call Him friend. Yet, so many times we walk through our daily lives with less faith than this soldier had!

My friends, let this story of the solider be a wake-up call to your faith! Jesus Christ performs miracles, yesterday, today, and tomorrow! The key is faith. If you need a miracle in your life, approach Jesus like the soldier did in Matthew 8. Don’t take my word for it. Open your Bible and go read the story for yourself. It will take you five minutes, but there is a miracle waiting for you at the end of that five minutes! When you ask the Lord – in faith, believing – miracles DO happen, and they WILL happen for you!

~ * ~ * ~

What miracle do you need from Christ today? Ask Him!

“And which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?” -Luke 12:25

To my dear grandmother, anyone who spent too much time worrying was instantly called a worrywart. I remember as a teenager asking my grandmother why the term worrywart? As with most of her answers, it came with a sweet chuckle mixed with both innocence and a lifetime of wisdom. “Because,” she said, “when you worry, your face changes, it wrinkles and crinkles into an unsightly wart. You can’t help it. God made your face to wear a smile, not a frown.” And, oh, how my grandmother loved to laugh.

Jesus’ life was all about joy. He came to give us restoration with our Heavenly Father. He came that we might have life and have it abundantly. He came to share with us that, through Him, all things are possible. He came to share with us that we are the light of the world. To tell us that God the Father truly loves and cares for our needs.

Our passage today is right in the middle of one of my favorite teachings of Christ. In Luke 12:28, Jesus says, “If then God so clothes the grass, which today is in the field and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will He clothe you, O you of little faith?” If you find yourself being, or becoming, a worrywart, spend some time reading Luke 12:22-34 and let Jesus, the Master Healer, Teacher, Friend, and Savior, share with you that there is nothing to fear. You will not add one cubit to your stature by turning into a worrywart.

“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” -I Corinthians 13:7

We hear messages from those we love. Sometimes they say something that hurts our feelings. Sometimes they don’t say the things we long to hear and that, likewise, hurts our feelings – these messages heard either by words said or words left unsaid – they leave us hurt. Some of the messages “heard” are not due to words or lack of words but actions that speak louder than words.

However, the message is heard. And whatever message is heard, we have a choice as to what we will believe about that message. Too often messages are heard that are wrong. The person never gave the message that we received. Our insecurities can hinder our hearing, filtering out the positive so we only hear the negative.

So, when you receive a negative message, I challenge you to question your hearing. What if you heard wrong? What will you believe about the one you love? Will you believe – the best? About them? About you? About God?

We all have a choice about what we will believe. Believe in love today – for yourself! Believe you are loved! By God! By your loved ones! Yes, you think that by believing the worst, you are protecting yourself. However, more often than not, you are hurting yourself far more than you are protecting yourself. You are losing out on love.

Believe the best – today and always. That’s true love!

We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. ~Joseph Campbell

Not that I should listen to this “follow your bliss” guy.. but this is interestingly how I have been feeling lately.

The problem I am having now is the need to set up links on the Intranet to documents on a Windows server.

The one I downloaded and use constantly is the Image Resizer.  It installs straight into your (right-click) context menu.  Simply select your images, right-click, and a window will pop open asking for sizes and whether you want them renamed or not.  It is a pretty neat utility.  :)

.. well, except when it decided (on my special themed sites) to take my background image and put it in the iframe for the editor.  As in this example, on a number of the sites it is a rather dark image which makes the editing process a bit harder.

Happily, upon searching, I found a comment in the “Tips & Tricks” section of drupal.fckeditor.net that I don’t think had anything to do with my weird image issue.  They mentioned adding the following line to the “Advanced options” section of the FCKEditor administration:

EditorAreaStyles = "body{background:#FFFFFF;text-align:left;}";

… and voila! White iframe happiness.  :)

At our core, interaction designers are anthropologists. We design interactions between people and people, and people and things. There is only one way to better understand people and better anticipate how they behave: observe.

The user experience profession is pretty weird. Some argue it isn’t a profession at all because you don’t need to belong to any associations or hold any certifications in order to call yourself a practitioner. We’re an occupation or concentration, or maybe we’re just a mindset.

I see us at an intersection, as a liaison. We combine principles of design, psychology, statistics and computer science to bring humanity into technology. Whether your day to day activities include drawing wireframes or interviewing prospective users or conducting usability tests, we are ultimately advocates for change — and in order to change the world, you have to see the world as it really is.

Most of my life I have been an avid people watcher.  I am constantly noting peoples movements and actions through life. I started doing this at a young age because I had issues with depth perception.  I needed to know what people were about to do, simply to move around in the world.  So, I note.. how people walk, what they look at and how it affects movement, etc.  Growing up around various religions and psychology, I can understand why people react to and do things the way they do. Years of this information has been taken in and assimilated, so I usually can predict what people are about to do spatially.. and comprehend the rest of why they do what they’ve done.

My problem is that I never found a way to put that information into words.. or even cohesive thought.  I know these things.. I just never developed a voice (even internally) enough to write things down or speak them.  I’ve thought about buying a journal for years in order to write stories that I have in my head, but I always talk myself out of it.  So, how does one develop this?

I wonder if I should just do as Whitney says, and force myself to write down those basics.. and maybe the rest will follow.