We men have such potential to affect the spiritual well-being of our entire families. To this end, Gideon and Noah are an interesting study in contrasts for their effects upon their family.

23 And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

Genesis 7:23

Noah lived in a world that was evil and wicked and grieved the Lord. Noah stood out as one who was just and perfect and who walked with God (Genesis 6:9). This brought him the grace of God (Genesis 6:8) and he and his family were spared the death of the flood (1 Peter 3:20 & 2 Peter 2:5). While Noah's positive report saved him, we see that his family are not so described, yet are saved because of Noah. It is my observation that spouses and children of good people are most often also good, but Noah's wife, sons and daughters in law were saved regardless of their spiritual status and exclusively by Noah's good standing with the Lord.

5 If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.

James 1:5

Wisdom is a constant topic through the scriptures. The Lord considers wisdom to be an important facet of man's life and being the source of all wisdom is ready and willing to provide to any who feel that they lack.

The greatest concentration of wisdom is found within that foremost of the wisdom books, the book of Proverbs. We shall surely spend time visiting the proverbs, but on this occasion, we shall visit some of the wisdom found in the book of Psalms. The psalms are Hebrew poetry that were sung as songs. The majority of the psalms, but not all, were written by King David. David, although a flawed man, had a powerful relationship with the Lord and gave us both prophecy and wisdom in the psalms that he wrote. Much of what we know about God, his attributes and his perspective towards his creation comes from the anointed writings of David.

Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder aloud what the country could do under first-class management.

Doug Larson

The whole process of hiring programmers is fundamentally flawed and broken. I could just stop there, but unless you're in the IT industry it's hard to realize how true this is.

I am looking for another IT job after being out of programming for three years. I applied for a mid-level Java position thinking that would be a good way to ease back into the industry. And then I was sent a link for an online test to take to prove that I was a good candidate for the position and this caught me by surprise. I don't remember the last time I took a programming test. The vast majority of my positions have been by reference where the referring person or contracting company vouched for my technical abilities including Java programming skills and the client accepted it as given fact. Referrals by respected technical people seems to be a powerful way to successfully hire skilled technical folks.

The test in question was a Java 8 syntax test. I last professionally used Java 6, so I knew that Java 8 had some new features and syntax within it, but had not looked into it. I found a reference that told me the new features and showed examples of each. Most of it was inspired by functional programming languages, the rest being much needed improvements to existing Java class libraries. I started the test and found that the test was totally syntax oriented. Lots of examples of slightly different (by a character or two) lines of code and the question asking which one had the right syntax. A few questions in I stopped taking the test and mentally prepared myself for this prospective employer to hire someone else.

I love this shot of the early phase of this morning's sunrise viewed over snow. Everything is grey and dark except for the band of gold that is preparing to launch itself into the sky and bring us light.