Don’t wait for me.
Thank you LORD JESUS.
I had a cataract surgery on my right eye on 29 July 2022. 14 years ago I had a similar procedure on the other eye, and so I wondered why the turning and tossing the night before. Was it the milk tea or was it my brain playing all sorts of things that might go wrong as the doctor sticked the knife into my eyeball? In the hours before daybreak, I remembered Lord Jesus sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane because He had to go to the cross the next day. Like me, He too must have been terrified at the prospect of pain and horrors at the hands of people who wanted Him dead. Unlike me, however, my surgeon only had my best interest in sight. Thank you LORD for not giving up. Had it been me in your sandals, I would surely bail out and the human race wouldn’t stand a chance.
Mountain
I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From where does my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.— Psalm 121:1-2
Fear is good.
Fear of spiders and snakes keeps our distance. Fear of strangers teaches our sons and daughters to distrust them. Fear of poverty puts in the work. Fear of the unknown stops us from bashing through a dense forest thinking we would make it to the other side. Fear of parents make us respectable children and wise parents ourselves. Fear of losing causes us to fight back and fear of success incapacitates us, o what irony. Fear of fears welcomes the psychiatrist. Fear breeds skepticism. Fear of law enforcement ensures I don’t get clobbered from behind for money I do not much have and saves the perpetrator from remorse when he sits behind cold iron bars. Fear of the gallows in this country keep the drugs out and society in. Fear of loneliness walks into a scam or debauchery. Fear of Hell keeps the world safe and sound. Too much fear is indeed fearful.
Above all, fear of Death begs the question for Eternal Life to which only JESUS is the answer.
REXKL
Moving off SSG
Not since I discovered a $1 web hosting had I gone back to good old PHP to whip up a custom-made CMS for this personal blog. This borne from the tedium of Zola’ing, git versioning, and FTP’ing each single post each single time, tasks which could only be done on a non-portable computing machine. The claustrophobic me foresaw and flinched at the idea of hundreds of flat files fattening up the content directory and concluded all blog posts should be stashed into a clandestine SQL binary. The result: a PHP solution living in the ubiquitous web browser. So here we were, a not really new website re-assembled in an old school way.
One last thing, for keepsake:
# One HTACCESS to rule them all,
# One HTACCESS to find them,
# One HTACCESS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
RewriteEngine On
# Force HTTPS and www.
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(?:www\.)?(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ https://www.%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,NE,R=301]
# Route all requests thru index.php.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .* index.php [L,QSA]
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]
# Fallback pages for common errors.
ErrorDocument 403 /void.html
ErrorDocument 404 /void.html
ErrorDocument 500 /kaboom.html