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Luke 2:10-11 10 And the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring good news to you of great joy which will be for all the people: 11 that today a Savior, who is Christ the Lord, was born for you in the city of David.

Isaiah 51:1-3 1 “Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, who seek Yahweh. Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the excavation of the pit from which you were quarried. 2 Look to Abraham your father, and to Sarah; she brought you forth. For I called him alone, but I blessed him and made him numerous.” 3 For Yahweh will comfort Zion; he will comfort all its sites of ruins. And he will make its wilderness like Eden, and its desert like the garden of Yahweh. Joy and gladness will be found in it, thanksgiving and the sound of song. Joy in the Father # On the heels of yesterday, I’m still struggling with Joy, but here in Isaiah some context aligns Joy with Gladness (which feels very much in-line with my association of Gratitude with Happiness). So where will joy and gladness be found? It sounds to me like “Zion”. Zion is the Mountain of God. In the ANE gods lived on high mountain tops with lush gardens. Think of the cartoon example of Hercules with the pantheon up on Olympus.…

Psalm 105:43 And so he brought out his people with joy, his chosen ones with rejoicing. Joy is a toughy right now if I’m honest… Today marks the 3rd week of Advent, today we light the Joy candle. But honestly, joy is one that’s not just tough now, it’s a hard thing for me in general… “Hope” I feel like I get, I long for the consummation of Heaven. “Peace” is another one that I can’t say I experience all the time, but I know what it is, and I have felt, and do feel, “peace” to divine degrees at times. Joy though… I’m an excitable person, I’m passionate about the things I’m passionate about, but “joy” isn’t an emotion or state-of-being that I feel very familiar with. It’s probably not correct to use the word “emotion” for the Advent-pillar of, but it doesn’t feel wholly inappropriate either… I think of ‘joy’ as an outward response to a thing, and if I were to be pressed to think about what “inward-joy” might be, I think I’d default to how I understand “peace”. Joy, though, can’t only be…

Ephesians 4:1-6 4Therefore I, the prisoner in the Lord, exhort you to live in a manner worthy of the calling with which you were called: 2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, putting up with one another in love, 3 being eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace; 4 one body and one Spirit (just as also you were called with one hope of your calling), 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all, and through all, and in all. Unity and Peace # Once again I say “Praise God” this morning for more words of Scripture that succinctly highlight the beauty of the Gospel. “I, the prisoner in the Lord…” No one knows better than Paul that if Jesus says “Come to me” you have no choice but to obey. “with humility, gentleness, and patience put up with one another in love, be eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace”. Christian community was literally the talk of the town in the early church - it was so odd that historia…

I am cooking up some stuff at home and want to put it on the interwebs, but I don’t want it on the same infra as my homelab. Now… I only have a server or 2, so to some degree it will be, but networking-wise I didn’t want to funnel extra traffic through my reverse proxy. So, I’d heard about Cloudflare Tunnels - they sound like P2P VPN to me, but I know there’s layers of the networking stack I’m blatantly ignoring. “What the tunnel is” isn’t much the point - I’m here to show you how to set one up and get yourself a fancy https://app.mydomain.com for your web app running kind of wherever you want Example Repo linked at the bottom Requirements # Terraform or open-tofu. I currently use open-tofu but either would be fine. is a simple way to get going Cloudflare account with a domain API token with permissions: (the example repo runs cloudflared in a docker compose stack) Tunnel # The module is simple and has just a few resources: We see there will be the a DNS record that tofu references by…

The reflection in the BP calendar for today was only verses 14-15 but they made no sense to me without some more context Ephesians 2:11-22 11 Therefore remember that formerly you, the Gentiles in the flesh, the so-called uncircumcision by the so-called circumcision in the flesh, made by hands, 12 that you were at that time apart from Christ, alienated from the citizenship of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, not having hope, and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you, the ones who once were far away, have become near by the blood of Christ. 14 For he himself is our peace, who made both one and broke down the dividing wall of the partition, the enmity, in his flesh, 15 invalidating the law of commandments in ordinances, in order that he might create the two in himself into one new man, thus making peace, 16 and might reconcile both in one body to God through the cross, killing the enmity in himself. 17 And coming, he proclaimed the good news of peace t…

Colossians 1:19-20 19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile everything to himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. I feel like there’s so much that could be unpacked here… “all his fullness dwell him in” - so besides the entire Gospel of John how can anyone deny that Jesus is God? I don’t understand anyone who claims to take the Bible as an authority and then deny Jesus’ divinity. “through him to reconcile everything to himself” - not all people are saved, it’s a clear reality. So what does it mean for all things to be reconciled to God? Feels like that could go a lot of places. “making peace through his blood” - before the cross there was an absence of “peace”, and through Jesus’ blood peace has been made. Moreso than just that, the “make” (eirenopoieo: εἰρηνοποιέω) is in the aorist which I understand to be a tense that means a thing “has happened” and “is done happe…