Here's our Christmas newsletter!
Let me make one thing perfectly clear. The Three Virtues are also the Three Blind Mice, and dearest friends. They wore Farmer's Wife Annual Marathon runner placards on their backs that made the connection:
Vicky, of course, carried a large plastic knife to the party, and I took a broadcast seeder as my costume.
For some reason, I find myself re-reading books I'd enjoyed decades ago. Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon is a plausible, but disturbing portrait of two things: the American culture of the late 1950s, and the probable consequences of a nuclear war. I was surprised at how well this book still holds one's interest with believable characters in an unthinkable situation. The cultural motifs reminded me of the world I grew up in -- and of the world I grew up dreading.
In some ways, our nation is far less innocent than it was a half-century ago. Yet we also have been liberated from the realistic fear of instant annihilation. I am praying that a sense of gratitude will eventually begin to bring us to our senses, and incline us to expect even more wonderful things from the God who spared us, despite our national sins.
Soviet Communism is dead, except on university campuses with their speech codes. At this point, two major rivals contend on the global stage with the Christian gospel: Islam, and secular humanism. Still, "the wall came down" so suddenly, and so quietly. Will we see other major societal transformations over the next few decades that will result in a much better world?
__________________________
In other news, today is the first day for traditional public schools. See The Story of Two Buses. I like the last paragraph:
Ruhsuz beden nasil ölüyse, eylemsiz iman da ölüdür.Ruh is, I believe, a cognate with the Hebrew word for spirit. That's what it means, anyhow. As a body (beden) sans spirit is dead, even so faith sans works is dead.
Yalnız hiç kuşku duymadan, imanla istesin. Çünkü kuşku duyan kisi rüzgarın sürükleyip savurduğu deniz dalgasına benzer. Tüm yaşamında böyle deüişken, karasız olan adam Rab'den bir şey alacaüın, ummasşn.Key words this morning -- kuşku duyan.
A lot of the fun of learning any new language is seeing the ways other folks dress up their thoughts. I recently printed out a few chapters from a server service manual in Turkish, as a masochistic exercise in seeing, once, again, how little I’ve been able to learn in several years of study. But, there are compensations. New words to relish.
Such as, Mikroişlemci. Let’s take that one apart. I’m sure you recognize the prefix, Mikro. İşlem is the Turkish word for work, labor. The agent ending, -ci, means someone who works. Put it all together, and you get a teeny worker – a microprocessor.
Güç is a word frequently encountered in the New Testament. It’s what the disciples were endowed with on the day of Pentecost – force. Power. Might. Kaynak is another good NT word. It’s what Jesus sat beside in the Samaritan city. It’s what bubbles up within those who trust in Him – a well, a spring. Put the words together – güç kayağı – and you have something whose output is measured in watts. A power supply.
Let’s take apart one more expression, just for fun – çalışırken değiştirilebilir sabit disk sürücüsü. This will be a somewhat longer voyage, but come along, and you’ll agree the payoff made the trip worth while. The first word, çalışırken combines the root of the verb “to work,” çalışmak , with the “meanwhile” ending, -ırken. Next, değiştirilebilir means “something that is able to be changed. The –ebil-/-abıl- infix conveys the concept of capability. Sabit means fixed or established.
Ok, let’s go to the end of the sentence and work back. Sürücüsü is derived, first of all, from the word for herd or flock, sürü. Next we find the agent ending again, -cü. Someone whose business is flocks. Finally, we have the possessive ending –sü. (The Turks have a really crazy “belts and suspenders” way of conveying possession, since both the thing possessing and the thing possessed have case endings!) A sürücüsü is, obviously, a shepherd, a driver, a director. The word just before is probably the only one you recognized – disk. Put it all together and we have – a “while-working, able to be changed, stable disk herder.” Or, as we would say in English – a hot-swap hard drive.
