Hi! Welcome to RayFowler.org and the “Guess the 150th Country” blog contest! It’s easy, it’s fun, and it costs you nothing to enter. While you are here, feel free to browse the Archives Page to get a feel for the site. If you enjoy your visit, be sure to bookmark the site or subscribe by email or feed reader so that you don’t miss any future posts.

The Contest:  I have been keeping track of how many different countries have visited this site since I first started blogging last March. As of today I have had visitors from 149 countries. I ran a similar contest last September when we approached the 100th country mark, so I thought it would be fun to revamp the contest, only this time it is: Guess the 150th country to visit my blog!

The Prize:  a $25 Amazon.com Gift Certificate

The Rules:

1. Respond with your best guess in the comments section.
2. One guess allowed per person.
3. The contest closes when the 150th country visits. (One exception: If you are the first visitor from the 150th country, and you are the first person to guess your country, then your guess will be allowed, and you will win!)
4. When a visitor from the 150th country visits the blog, I will check the comments on this post to see who named that country first.
5. I will notify the winner by email and post the winning entry on the blog.

The Tips:

1. Before you guess, be sure to visit the Stats page first to check which countries have already visited.
2. Also before you guess, be sure to check the comments other people have already left to see if someone already guessed a particular country.
3. When you leave your comment, you may want to place a check in the “Subscribe to Comments” box to track the progress of the contest. (When you check this box, future comments from this post will be emailed to you. You can unsubscribe at any time.)

That’s it! I believe there are only about 40 countries remaining, and I don’t know if they all have internet access, so go ahead and guess while you can. You can find a list of all the countries in the world at the Fun Facts link below.

Fun Facts:  How Many Countries In The World?

Now that is a question that’s somewhat difficult to answer, as there is no one right answer. Many sources offer different answers, and depending on the source, there are 189, 191, 192, 193 or 194 independent countries in the world today.

One of the reasons I started this blog was simply to have a place to publish my sermons on a weekly basis. The thought was that if anyone at church missed a message, they could catch up with it later in the week on the blog. Also, this seemed like a great way to expand the ministry of the messages by making them available to a wider audience than the congregation present on Sunday mornings.

I have been pleasantly surprised at how many people actually find and read these messages while searching for various items online. It is gratifying to see God still using a message that was preached months ago in the lives of people today. So, with that in mind, here is a list of the most read sermons on the blog for 2007.

• Trusting God No Matter What (the final message in the Habakkuk – The Journey from Doubt to Faith series)
• The Sins of the Fathers (a message on generational sin from The Ten Commandments for Today series)
• The Cradle, the Cross and the Wardrobe (a message on the birth, death and resurrection of Christ from the Narnia Christmas series)
• Praising God for His Amazing Grace (a message on God’s grace from the 1 Timothy – Doing Church Together series)
• Straight from the Donkey’s Mouth (a narrative sermon told from the donkey’s point of view on Palm Sunday)
• The Measure of Love (the first of three messages from 1 Corinthians 13 – The Love Chapter)

Related posts:

• Top 20 Posts for 2007 – Year in Review
• Sunday Morning SoundBytes – Each week I post a brief summary or outline of that week’s message under Sunday Morning SoundBytes.

You may have noticed it snowing on the blog lately and wondering, “What’s that’s all about?” This is for the benefit of my friends “down under” (where it is presently summer) and for my friends in Florida (where it is always summer). Basically, whenever it snows here in Massachusetts, I will try to remember to turn on the snow for my blog. So, if you see it snowing on the blog, you will know that we got snow here in Massachusetts, too. That way we can all share the experience. Hey, at least you don’t have to shovel a snow blog!

Related posts:

• A Foot of Global Warming
• At Least It’s Not Condition 1 Weather!
• Somebody Shoot the Groundhog

As we approach the end of the first calendar year for my blog, I thought it would be fun to list the top 20 posts on the blog for the year. These are the posts that generated the most interest throughout the year as far as visitors from outside links and search engines. So, if you want to re-visit any of these posts or if you missed them the first time around, here are the top 20 posts on the blog for the year 2007 (in order of publication):

1. Narnia Christmas Series
2. John Calvin Lite
3. Reading the Prophets (1)
4. A Messy Desk is the Sign of an Orderly Mind
5. Blogging with Habakkuk (23) – Trusting God No Matter What
6. 8 Great Family Rules to Help Any Home
7. Ruth Bell Graham – Poems
8. The Bob Newhart 5-Minute Counseling Technique
9. “It’s a Major Award. I Won It!”
10. “Don’t Stop Me Now, I’m on a Blog Roll!”
11. Larry Norman Concert in New York City (2)
12. Media Access for the Next Generation (1)
13. Sneaky Sam the Seagull Steals Some Chips
14. The Sins of the Fathers Quotes
15. The MPR Select a Candidate Quiz
16. Bible Curriculum for Public Schools (1)
17. Mike Huckabee’s Sunday Sermon at Prestonwood
18. To Spank or Not To Spank
19. The Golden Compass vs. Narnia Box Office Results
20. Guess the Famous Christmas Trees

You can find a list of all the posts for the year under the Archives tab at the top of the blog. Did you have a favorite post or series of posts from this year? Feel free to share it with us in the comments.

Related post:

• Most Read Sermons on the Blog for 2007

Most blog stats have the capability of tracking what Google search phrases brought different visitors to the site. I often check this feature just to see how visitors are finding my blog. (The visitors remain anonymous; I only see the last search phrase that was typed into Google before they arrived at the site.)

Most of the time the searches are fairly routine: such as “sermons on habakkuk” or “sins of the fathers.” But every once in a while, a search phrase will jump out at me as either odd or humorous.

Here are three search phrases that caught my eye in the past few months:

• Is Squanto in the Bible? – This one happened last week and brought the visitor to the Legend of Squanto post. Somehow I just thought it was funny. Actually, for someone not familiar with the Bible or American culture, it is a legitimate question. And the answer is: No, Squanto is not in the Bible. The contents of the Bible were completed sometime in the first century. Squanto was born in the 1580′s and died in 1622.
• How to get rid of your pastor – I don’t know if this person was serious about getting rid of their pastor or not, but their search brought them to the Pastors archive page and eventually to the joke post, Four Ways to Get Rid of Your Pastor. I hope all is well with their church (and pastor!).
• Ray Fowler dead or alive – You can bet this one caught my attention! This search brought them to the Death archive page and eventually to the post on the death of D. James Kennedy. I am not sure what this visitor was looking for, but I take comfort in the fact that there are plenty of Ray Fowler’s in the world. (Watch out, Dad!)

How about you? If you are a blogger, have you ever had some unusual search phrases lead to your blog?

Al Mohler gave this great advice for bloggers in his keynote address at the GodBlogCon conference in Las Vegas last week. This would apply equally well to commenting on other people’s blogs.

Don’t write anything you wouldn’t want your parents, children, pastor or lost neighbor to read.

Works for me. My parents and children already read my blog. I am the pastor at my church, but my fellow elders read my blog. And I am always praying that my lost neighbors (locally and globally) will be reading the blog, too. We should always remember that our words have the power of life and death (Proverbs 18:21), and guard our written and spoken words accordingly.

Al Mohler’s whole address is well worth the listen as he weaves the fascinating history of Christian influence in media from the scrolls and codices of ancient times to the printing press, radio, TV and internet.

Note: I notice Justin Taylor at Between Two Worlds also has a post on appropriate blog commenting today, too.

“It is so dry in Georgia . . .”     “HOW DRY IS IT?”

Popular Mechanics writes about the future of Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP). “Space-based solar power may become an important energy source as fossil-fuel supplies dwindle in midcentury: A single 1-kilometer-wide solar array could collect enough power in a year to rival the entire world’s oil reserves.”

Wired reports on the proliferation of fake campaign websites. “A growing bag of tricks employed by tech-savvy amateur political operatives now includes a collection of spoofed online forums purporting to support top candidates, while damning them with praise for extreme positions they have never voiced. The operating principle: The best way to undermine a candidate’s supporters is to pretend to be one of them.”

Mark Roberts presented his 18 Theses on the Pastor as Godblogger at the GodBlogCon conference at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Here are the first five. “1. Some pastors should be bloggers. 2. Some pastors should not be bloggers. 3. Many pastors who are not bloggers today should become bloggers. 4. Some pastors who are bloggers today should stop, at least for a while. 5. Blogging can enrich a pastor’s ministry with the pastor’s own congregation, and this is sufficient reason for a pastor to blog.” (You can listen to the audio of Mark’s talk here.)

Ben Witherington warns parents about The Golden Compass, a new children’s movie coming out this Christmas season. The movie is based on the first book of the trilogy His Dark Materials, written by noted English atheist Phillip Pullman. Apparently the books have a stong anti-God and anti-Christian bent, alhtough that has been toned down for the first movie. “In short, avoid this movie like the plague this Christmas. It appears to be a Trojan horse for its sequels, and you will remember what happened to Troy when that horse was allowed entrance into the city and lives of the Trojans.”

Meteorologist John Coleman, founder of The Weather Channel, calls global warming the greatest scam in history.. “I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the ‘research’ to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus.” Come on, John, tell us how you really feel!

Nancy Beach shares about Bill Hybels’ “traffic light” invitation at the end of a service. “At the close of his message, Bill Hybels simply showed three lights on a flipchart – green, yellow, and red. He asked everyone to honestly decide which light represents where they currently are spiritually:

• Green: I’m a member of God’s family, trusting Him to be my Leader, Savior, and Friend.
• Yellow: I’m still in a searching place, and haven’t yet decided.
• Red: I am in a place of rebellion, or fighting God…

Bill invited anyone in the yellow or red categories who would like to come pray with us in Guest Central to show up right after the service.”

Here are some interesting numbers related to the world of blogs:

•     3 million =  the number of new blogs started each month
•   57 million =  the number of existing blogs (as tracked by Technorati)
• 100 million =  the projected peak number of bloggers in the future
• 200 million =  the number of people who started blogging but quit

HT: Christianity Today; Information Week

Hi! Welcome to RayFowler.org and the “Guess the 100th Country” blog contest! It’s easy, it’s fun, and it costs you nothing to enter. While you are here, feel free to browse the Archives Page to get a feel for the site. If you enjoy your visit, be sure to bookmark the site or subscribe by email or feed reader so that you don’t miss any future posts.

The Contest:  Just for fun I have been keeping track of how many different countries have visited this site since I started blogging in March. Today I had two new countries pop up in the stats: Namibia (country #98) and Chile (country #99). So, I thought it would be fun to run a little contest: Guess the 100th country to visit my blog!

The Prize:  a $25 Amazon.com Gift Certificate

The Rules:

1. Respond with your best guess in the comments section.
2. One guess allowed per person.
3. The contest closes when the 100th country visits. (One exception: If you are the first visitor from a new country, and you are the first person to guess your country, then your guess will be allowed, and you will win!)
4. When a visitor from the 100th country visits the blog, I will check the comments on this post to see who named that country first.
5. I will notify the winner by email and post the winning entry on the blog. (If no one guesses the right country, then no one wins. )

The Tips:

1. Be sure to visit the Stats page first to check which countries have already visited.
2. Be sure to check the comments others leave before you to see if someone already guessed a particular country.
3. When you leave your comment, you may want to place a check in the “Subscribe to Comments” box to track the progress of the contest. (When you check this box, future comments from this post will be emailed to you. You can unsubscribe at any time.)

That’s it! Have fun, and may the best country-guesser win!

Fun Facts:  How Many Countries In The World?

Now that is a question that’s somewhat difficult to answer, as there is no one right answer. Many sources offer different answers, and depending on the source, there are 189, 191, 192, 193 or 194 independent countries in the world today.

Dane Carlson has a fun little application at his Business Opportunities Weblog which computes and displays your blog’s worth based on the link-to-dollar ratio used by AOL-Weblogs Inc.

Here is my blog’s “worth” compared to some other blogs I visit:

I am truly a small fish in a very big ocean.

Of course, there are more important ways of measuring a blog’s worth than link-to-dollar ratios. Here are just a few:

• God being glorified
• friendships strengthened
• relationships formed
• lives touched
• truth communicated
• encouragement given
• laughter spread
• information shared

Can you add some others?

Well, we’re off for a couple days. I was hoping to get our trip to New York up on the blog before I left, but it will have to wait until later, maybe Friday or Saturday. In the meantime, feel free to visit the Archives and explore some of the back pages of the blog. Or even better, turn off your computer and go outside and enjoy God’s good creation! See you in a few days.

I have now added a Writings page to the blog. You can find the Writings tab at the top of the blog just to the right of the Stats tab. This page will collect various writings that I have produced over the years – articles, poems, songs, etc. (Maybe I will even get around to posting my doctoral thesis here some day – a guaranteed cure for insomnia!) Right now I just have a few poems posted, but this is an area of the blog that I would like to develop in the future.