Psalm 25

Prayer for Guidance and for Deliverance

A Psalm of David.

To thee, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
O my God, in thee I trust,
    let me not be put to shame;
    let not my enemies exult over me.
Yea, let none that wait for thee be put to shame;
    let them be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.

Make me to know thy ways, O Lord;
    teach me thy paths.
Lead me in thy truth, and teach me,
    for thou art the God of my salvation;
    for thee I wait all the day long.

Be mindful of thy mercy, O Lord, and of thy steadfast love,
    for they have been from of old.
Remember not the sins of my youth, or my transgressions;
    according to thy steadfast love remember me,
    for thy goodness’ sake, O Lord!

Good and upright is the Lord;
    therefore he instructs sinners in the way.
He leads the humble in what is right,
    and teaches the humble his way.
10 All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness,
    for those who keep his covenant and his testimonies.

11 For thy name’s sake, O Lord,
    pardon my guilt, for it is great.
12 Who is the man that fears the Lord?
    Him will he instruct in the way that he should choose.
13 He himself shall abide in prosperity,
    and his children shall possess the land.
14 The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him,
    and he makes known to them his covenant.
15 My eyes are ever toward the Lord,
    for he will pluck my feet out of the net.

16 Turn thou to me, and be gracious to me;
    for I am lonely and afflicted.
17 Relieve the troubles of my heart,
    and bring me[a] out of my distresses.
18 Consider my affliction and my trouble,
    and forgive all my sins.

19 Consider how many are my foes,
    and with what violent hatred they hate me.
20 Oh guard my life, and deliver me;
    let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in thee.
21 May integrity and uprightness preserve me,
    for I wait for thee.

22 Redeem Israel, O God,
    out of all his troubles.

Side Project: YouTube Live Stream Scheduler – Part 1

One great thing about computers is that they can be programmed to do things that are repetitive and boring. I try to look around in my life to see what things I can get a computer to do for me, so that I don’t have to do it myself.

Today’s case is scheduling weekly YouTube live streams for my church. Every week someone’s got to schedule the live streams for the upcoming weekend. They look like this:

So you might be thinking, this seems pretty trivial, like it’s just a few clicks to schedule this in YouTube. It can’t take more than 10 minutes. And that’s true, but it’s still straightforward and repetitive. Having to figure out which Sunday is coming up, copying and pasting and ensuring the correct dates and times are replaced in the live stream text, and making sure the scheduled dates and times are correct can become tedious work. And it’s the same procedure week after week: the type of processing that computers love to do.

Sure there are other ways to optimize this process, like batching it to create maybe two or more weeks at a time. However, from a viewer’s perspective it can also be confusing when there are a bunch of upcoming live streams that need to be scrolled through. For the purposes of this project, the optimal frequency is to have one set of upcoming live streams visible at any time, and that means having the computer schedule the next set of live streams once every week.

So let’s get the computer to do this. I’m going to split up this blog post into two parts:

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The virtue of hope

This was originally prepared as a reflection for a youth ministry session at St. Anthony of Padua parish.

“Hope” is a word we use a lot on a daily basis.  We say things like, “I hope you are doing well,” “I hope I get this job”, “I hope the restaurant has gluten-free food,” “I hope the pandemic will end soon.”  We hope for something which is difficult to attain ourselves.  We don’t say “I hope there will be air to breathe tomorrow,” because we expect there to be air.

But what does “hope” mean in the Christian sense?  What is the virtue of hope?  Ordering of one’s live in the ultimate sense towards God, towards final salvation.  Trust in God, extended into the future.

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The virtue of charity or love

This was originally prepared as a reflection for a youth ministry session at St. Anthony of Padua parish.

The word “love” in English is used to mean so many different things these days.  For example, when I say “I love pizza”, does the “love” in that statement equate to a husband saying “I love you” to his wife?

In other languages we find different “types” of love have different words.  For example, in Greek, four main types of love are:

  • storge – familial love, love between parent and child
  • philia – friendship or bonds between people with common values or interests;
  • eros – romantic or intimate love;
  • agape – the kind of love that Christ taught and showed and this is the type of love we will be focusing on today.
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