I have never given money to a political candidate before. I am usually just not that interested, plus I am careful in how I spend my money. But I have donated to Fred Thompson’s campaign several times this fall. Why? Because I have been impressed with Thompson as a candidate ever since his interview with Chris Wallace back in March. I like his views, I like his policies, and I like his approach. And I am frustrated that he is not getting as much attention as I think he deserves.

Although there are a number of strong contenders for the GOP nomination (for which I am glad), I am surprised that more Republicans have not rallied around Thompson as a candidate. Thompson has been a consistent conservative throughout his entire career. He is strong on national defense, favors smaller federal government, and is conservative on social issues such as abortion and the second amendment. He is one of the few candidates who has been bold enough to come right out and say that Roe vs. Wade is bad law and should be overturned.

Thompson was criticized for entering the political race so late, but one of the reasons he waited until September was because he spent the summer carefully putting his policies together. Thompson has made available clearly articulated and concise position statements on every major issue, including the following:

Federal Government Issues:

• National Security
• Government Effectiveness
• Appointing Judges Faithful to our Consitution
• Energy Security

Fiscal Issues:

• Federal Budget and Spending
• Tax Reform

Social Issues:

• Healthcare
• Building Strong Families
• Immigration
• Education
• Second Amendment

You can read Thompson’s position on each of these issues by going to Fred On the Issues and clicking on each one. (It will take you all of ten minutes.) You may or may not agree with his positions, but at least you can read them for yourself.

Bob Krumm also has several good (and fair) articles detailing Fred’s positions and comparing them with the other Republican candidates:

• It Takes All Kinds
• The Analytical Case for Fred

I would not presume to tell you for whom you should vote for president. Instead, I would encourage you to study the candidates and their policies to see how well they line up with your own views on different issues. Thompson seems to line up best with my views, but if he does not line up with yours, then you shouldn’t vote for him. Study the issues and vote for the candidate who you believe will best lead our country as president. A great tool to help you get started with this is the MPR Select a Candidate Quiz.

I live in Massachusetts, and even though our primary is not until February 5, I am well aware that eight states will already have held their primaries by that time. Some candidates may even be eliminated before I get the chance to vote. That is one of the reasons why I have donated money to the Thompson campaign now. I am still leaning towards him as the best candidate and, as things stand right now, I would like the opportunity to vote for him come February.

Related posts:

• A Fred Thompson Irony
• Thompson Bloggers Contacted By Romney Campaign
• Mike Huckabee’s Sunday Sermon at Prestonwood
• The Cluster Approach to the GOP Nomination
• The MPR Select a Candidate Quiz
• Memo to Evangelical Leaders on Romney
• Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll
• Ravi Zacharias on Electing the Next President
• Should Christians Call Mormonism a Cult?
• Rudy, John, Mitt . . . and Fred?

I live in New England where we are expecting our first major snow storm of the season — 6 to 10 inches of the heavy, white sticky stuff coming our way this afternoon. Today as I am shoveling and throughout the winter, I will just keep reminding myself, “At least it’s not Condition 1 Weather!”

What is Condition 1 Weather, you ask? Just take a look at this video of a weather station in Antarctica.

(Video length: 1:03)

Official Definitions:

• Condition ONE – any one of the following is true:
  • Wind speed greater than 55 knots
  • Visibility less than 100 feet
  • Wind-chill worse than -100F
• Condition TWO – any one of the following is true:
  • Wind speed between 48 and 55 knots
  • Visibility better than 100 feet but less than 1/4 mile
  • Wind-chill between -70F and -100F
• Condition THREE – anything that is better than Condition TWO.
  • Condition THREE means normal, good weather!

Related posts:

• Somebody Shoot the Groundhog
• On God and Chipmunks
• T.G.I.(w)F.

HT: Presurfer

(Note: Sam’s Christmas guitar arrangements below!)

My son, Sam, wanted to wish you all a very Merry Christmas from him and his guitar. Sam is in the eighth grade and just started playing guitar about two years ago. He worked hard doing lawn jobs over the last two summers and was able to save up enough money to buy himself his own brand, spankin’ new Martin D-15 at the end of this summer. Here he is with his new guitar.

I have been teaching him what I know, and he also studied with acoustic guitar wizard Brooks Williams this summer. Anyways, here are three of Sam’s original fingerstyle acoustic guitar arrangements played by Sam for you on his very own Martin D-15. They are all good, but my favorite of these is definitely Feliz Navidad — a nice spunky version with a great feel. Merry Christmas all and enjoy! And remember, you heard him here first!

Click on the song title to hear the MP3:

• Go Tell It on the Mountain
• Away in a Manger
• Feliz Navidad

Related posts:
    • Fowler Family Christmas Project
    • Free Christmas Music MP3 Downloads
    • Click here for more Christmas related posts.

This past weekend was leaf-raking time at our house. We live in New England, so we definitely notice the turning of the seasons. We raked up the leaves, cleared the patio furniture off the deck and put away the garden hoses for the winter. We didn’t get any pictures this time around, but here are some photos from fall 2005.

                    Family photo in front of house: From left to right:
                Me, Ramon, Tim (with Danny), Sam, (with Reina), Rose

                            Sam and Tim in front of their leaf pile

                            Find Sam and Tim in the leaf pile!

Update: Looks like I posted these pictures just in time. I put this post up late Monday night and woke up this morning to snow. That’s New England for you!

When I was in seminary one of my professors had the following notice on his office door.

All work must be handed in by the assigned due date. Late work will only be accepted in the case of an unavoidable catastrophe. Note: Failure to back up your hard drive is not an unavoidable catastrophe. It is an inexcusable stupidity.

Well, I am now guilty of an inexcusable stupidity. My hard drive crashed last week, and I did not have everything backed up. The computer was working fine on Wednesday night, and on Thursday morning I came downstairs to a blank screen with the following words blinking ominously in the upper left-hand corner: “Operating system not found.” I tried rebooting but got nothing. A friend who works with computers came over and tried, but the hard drive was not spinning. We couldn’t even look at the files on it. My hard drive is dead.

I thought I had a good system synchronizing files on my work and home computer over the internet, but after the crash I found some gaping holes in the system. The system worked well for word-processing files, but because photos are much larger I did not always synchronize them at the same time. Also, not all files were being kept in the folders that were synchronized. As a result we have now lost our most recent photos plus other important files. I contacted several hard drive data recovery companies, and the average quote for retrieval is about $1500. So, my poor hard drive now sits in a zip-lock bag filled with data that I cannot retrieve.

It could have been worse. Just read this guy’s story. (And he was far better at backing up than I am.) Thankfully, I still have all my document files stretching back some 20 years – sermons, Bible study notes, thesis, church documents, etc. We have all the boys’ school work. We have all of our photos up through 2006 and some scattered photos from 2007 that happened to be on CDs. But we lost a lot of important files, and it was all completely unnecessary.

Lessons learned:

1. Things don’t last forever. Love God, love your family, enjoy your friends. (That’s the big philosophical lesson for the day.)
2. Back up! (There’s the highly practical one.)

I am now backing up and synchronizing all data on both computers via external hard drive. Much more efficient and no more gaps. I am using Laplink Gold software for this. PC Sync is a cheaper solution, but I already had the Gold version. I also signed up with Mozy, an online backup company that gives you unlimited storage for $5 a month. (They also have a free service for backups under 2 gig.) The initial backup with them is painfully slow, but once everything is backed up, you can set and forget, and they automatically keep all your designated files backed up for you. You can read about other online storage options here.

Do you have a good backup system in place? If your hard drive crashed right now, without warning, would you lose anything of importance? Remember, failure to back up your data is not an unavoidable catastrophe. It is an inexcusable stupidity. Just ask me. I know.

Twenty years ago this September I attended my first day of seminary. I was serving as youth pastor at a church in Burbank, CA at the time, and figured if I was going to continue pastoring, I should get some theological training. So here I was headed back to school three years after graduating from college.

I opted to go to Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, CA to work on my biblical languages first. They offered language intensives where you could take a full year of Greek or Hebrew in just ten weeks. I decided to take Greek in the fall and Hebrew in the spring. So off I went to Greek class in September of 1987, my very first day at seminary. (I eventually transferred to Gordon-Conwell in Massachusetts the next year and completed my seminary training there.)

I was a little nervous going back to school after three years, so I tried to prepare myself the best I could. I got my syllabus early and purchased all my textbooks in advance. I scoped out the campus the week before and found exactly where my classroom was located. I packed my briefcase full of books and left extra early the morning of class to make sure I got there on time.

We all crowded into the classroom, and the professor introduced himself to the class. He wrote his contact information on the board and told us to write it down for future reference. I opened up my briefcase to get out a notebook when I realized that I didn’t have one. In all my preparations for class I had forgotten to get a notebook. I searched frantically through my briefcase for a piece of paper, any piece of paper, but I had none – just a bunch of Greek textbooks that I didn’t want to write in.

I got the attention of the student seated at the desk next to me. “Excuse, me. Could I borrow a piece of paper?” He looked at me a little strangely, but opened up his three-ring binder FILLED with college-ruled white paper and gave me several sheets.

I was so embarrassed. Here I was at my first day of class for my Master’s degree of all things, and I had not even brought any paper. “Oh well, Lord,” I prayed, “I guess it’s good to be humbled.” I opened my briefcase again to get out a pen to write down the teacher’s contact information. No pen. I got the attention of the student next to me again. “Excuse me, could I borrow a pen?”

That’s all I remember from my first day at seminary. But God is good, and I got through, and yes, it is good to be humbled.

Related posts:

• I can relate to Billy going back to school in this video clip.
• Here is a little poem on learning Greek (or Latin, as the case may be.) [Pun intended on the word “case.”]

Special guest blogger today: my wife, Rose!

Fifteen years ago today, Rose and I went through Hurricane Andrew together in Homestead, Florida. We had just recently moved from Massachusetts. I like to tell people we moved to Florida, and Andrew unpacked our bags for us. Rose wrote the following account of our experience for our Christmas letter that year. She is a much better writer than I am, so enjoy the change of pace! Here is our Christmas letter from 1992.

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Larry Norman in concert; Saturday, 8/4/2007
Calvary Baptist Church; New York City

Yesterday I shared some personal notes about the events leading up to the concert. (Click here for Part 1.) Today I would like to share some more about the concert itself. Can you tell I’m a fan? 🙂

The following write-up will probably make more sense to you if you are familiar with Larry and his music, but either way it should give you a good sense of what the concert was like. Larry talks a lot between songs, so I have tried to summarize some of what he said during the night. I have also included snippets from some of the songs in case you are not familiar with them.

Larry approached the stage slowly. He had difficulty climbing the stairs and looked like he was not comfortable physically. (Larry suffered a major heart attack a number of years ago and has had health struggles ever since.) He joked about how he played a concert here 35 years ago and never got invited back – until now!

He talked briefly about Christian persecution in other lands and then began with his song “Peace Pollution Revolution.”

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Larry Norman in concert; Saturday, 8/4/2007
Calvary Baptist Church; New York City

Larry Norman is one of my favorite singer/songwriters. I first heard his music through my older sister, Sharon, back when I was a teen. If you are not familiar with Larry or his music you can read more about him at his official bio or at his Wikipedia entry. I will post some personal notes here, and then post a write-up of the concert tomorrow.

I saw Larry in concert several times in the 1970’s and 1980’s, but the last time I saw him live was in 1990. So when I heard he was coming to New York City, I was very excited. I live in Agawam, MA which is about three hours away, but certainly close enough for a Larry concert!

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On Saturday, 8/4/2007, we (Rose and I, and our three boys) took a family trip to New York City. Our main reason for going was to see Larry Norman in concert on Saturday night. But we had never been to the city before, so we decided to spend a day in the city together before the concert. I didn’t know what I would think of New York, but I really liked the city and had a great time.

Saturday morning we made the three hour drive from our home in Agawam, MA to New York City. We arrived in Manhattan around 11:00 a.m. and drove down the Hudson Parkway to the south end. There we drove past the site of the World Trade Center. It was very sobering to go past the site of this great tragedy and to remember the events that took place here in 2001.

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Yesterday I was really tired preaching. No, not tired of preaching, just tired while preaching.

I was working off of about three hours of sleep after getting back from an all day trip to New York City with the family. It was a great trip with a lot of fun experiences capped off by a Larry Norman concert in the evening. But we didn’t get home until close to 2:30 a.m., which is very late for us as a family.

Anyways, I have never preached on so little sleep before, so I was wondering what might happen. I was hoping I wouldn’t fall asleep in the middle of my own sermon.

The funny thing was that I had a feeling that I was preaching too long. This was a Communion Sunday, which meant we would need an additional ten minutes at the end of the service to celebrate Communion together. I don’t like to look at the clock while I am preaching, and I usually have a pretty good sense of the time. I felt the sermon was dragging on forever, so I began to edit on my feet. I preach from a manuscript, so at first I clipped a sentence or two here, then a paragraph, eventually whole sections!

Finally, I got to the end of the message, called for the deacons to come forward to serve Communion, and looked at the clock. Our service runs from 10:00 to 11:00, and I fully expected the clock to read 11:05 or even 11:10. The time was . . . only 10:53!

So as it turns out, I actually preach shorter on less sleep. I wonder if this means I will start getting middle-of-the-night crank phone calls from people in the church to keep me up late Saturday nights?

Related posts:

• I Am Tired of Preaching
• Family Trip to New York
• Larry Norman Concert in New York City (1)
• Larry Norman Concert in New York City (2)
• Clock Watching at Grace Community Church
• 5 things to say if you’re caught sleeping at work
• Go Soox!

Welcome Blogging Expertise readers!

Yes, it’s true. I just won 5th prize in the Clever Blogging T-Shirt contest put on by Sarah Lewis over at Blogging Expertise. I feel like Ralphie’s dad in A Christmas Story: “It’s not just a lamp. It’s a Major Award. I won it!”

My winning t-shirt slogan was this: “Don‘t stop me now, I‘m on a blog roll.” You can check out the other winning entries here. My prize?

Ray will receive Organic Body Wash, Organic Lip Balm and Organic Insect Repellent. (Provided by Tennille Chambers’ Organic Lifestyle Income Opportunity.)

Hmmm, I think I will put these on the same shelf as the Cherry Blossom Shower Gel. 🙂

Thank you, Sarah, for running such a fun contest and for providing such an excellent blog for your readers! And thank you, Tennille, for the great prizes!