Okay, so my wife tagged me to do this random things list on my blog.

Once you’ve been ‘tagged’ you have to write a blog of ten weird/random facts/habits/goals about yourself. At the end choose ten people to be tagged, listing their names and WHY you chose them.

Here’s my list:

1. I once worked at a public television station. They had employees who dressed up like a purple dinosaur. It was a scary place to work.
2. When I was a teenager, the last thing I wanted to be was a Christian, let alone one of those born again ones. Now I’m a pastor.
3. My regular reading list of periodicals is somewhat eclectic. It includes Your Church, Leadership Journal, Relevant Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Time Magazine, and 2600 (The Hacker Quarterly).
4. I have been diagnosed with ADHD, along with Hyperfocus, which is an autistic-spectrum disorder. Results? I twitch. A lot. And I have a hard time communicating my torrential brainstorms to others in a coherent and useful way.
5. My first job was selling cellular phones and other retail electronics at RadioShack. It was awesome.
6. I love books.
7. I’d like to complete an MDiv degree, and some sort of doctorate as well.
8. I tend to be a cynic and and a grump. Mark Driscoll says that Irish people have two emotions, angry and asleep. I see the truth of that statement evidenced in my own life.
9. I wasn’t a great person before I came to Christ (immediately prior to college). Now, since I’m pastoring in my home town, conversations with old acquaintances are often quite uncomfortable, but I still love having them.
10. Having children of my own has changed my understanding of God the Father in amazing, healing ways.

Now… I’m supposed to tag ten more people. But I’m not going to. I’m just going to tag Calvin, Mandy, and Earl, since they are the only regular readers I have!

Okay, so I am a little late on that one, but at least it is within the same week, right?

I’ve never been much of a New Years geek. I’ve never really made resolutions, or seen that big of a difference between December 31 and January 1, but I have to admit that I was looking forward to the New Year this time. The past year was a hard year for me in a number of ways, and the idea of a fresh start has been appealing. I even made some resolutions for the year. Well, not resolutions, really, but ideals to shoot for. Personal benchmarks, if you will.

Most of those goals are personal, however some of them relate to this blog. For starters, I’m (really) planning to post more often, ideally at least once a week. Also, I’d like to move the focus of the blog a little bit, focusing more on ministry, theology, and scholarship, than on personal stuff (though that will always be included, of course).

I also plan to increase the time I spend reading, and that is likely to be shown here through reviews, random quotes, and the like. Diana and I got rid of a lot of books last year (something I really regret), so I am now slowly building my library back up, which you can check out at LibraryThing. One of the benefits of starting over, and having limited funds to do so, is that I’ll get need to be discerning about what I buy, so I’ll spend less time reading fluff.

You may have noticed from a past post that I’m concerned about my health. Improving my health is the closest thing to a traditional resolution that I have this year. You may see posts about that ocassionally. If you aren’t interested, skip them.

I’m looking forward to the coming months, and am trusting God for his faithful provision, and the transforming work of the gospel in the lives of myself and others. Will you join me?

Once again, for the second time in three months, my site has been hacked. This time it wasn’t server-wide, and didn’t have anything to do with my webhost. I made a minor mistake (apparently with major consequences) when I setup this site, and that allowed some ruthless scoundrel to do insalubrious things. You know, like forward the site to a non-English hacker’s forum. Fun stuff.

I think my site was only affected for a day or two, because I’ve been working on it more often recently, and thus noticed it soon after it happened. The databases weren’t corrupted, so I didn’t lose any content, which is excellent. All I had to do was upload a backup file from the last time I made some major user interface changes, and then fix the issues that allowed for the attack in the first place. Not a bad recovery process, really…but boy was I miffed!

Yes, despite rumors to the contrary, I’m still alive and kickin’. Barely.

Summer was awesome, actually. Diana and I moved into a new apartment, I preached a number of sermons including a series in the book of Jonah, and best of all, we found out we are expecting again! (Prayers are welcome, especially considering our history of miscarriage, and the fact that Diana is supposed to be on bed-rest right now because of some issues we’ve encountered…)

August was going to be the big posting month of the summer for me, but it didn’t happen. The server this site was housed on was hacked, my site as well as a number of other church and ministry sites were toasted. It took the web hosting company quite some time to get things going on a new server, relocated to a new data center a couple thousand miles away from the last one. I was frustrated by the wait, but that’s how things go sometimes.  I’ve tried to recreated the posts that were lost between the last backup and the day the site died; I didn’t lose much because I never post!

Maybe it’s God’s way of telling me I’m not cut out to be a blogger, but September is set to be busier than ever. I’d like to post more than I have been (I say this every six months), but I’m not going to sweat it if that doesn’t happen either, mainly because Calvin is the only one who reads this anyway, and he just started his MDiv at Gordon Conwell.

Anyway, I’m still alive, and busy working and ministering in the North Country. Post a comment if you see this and you aren’t Calvin.

Welcome to my new site, LenFlack.com.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve had an active blog, but I’ve decided to purchase a personal domain, hack a new design, and start back up. I’m hoping to improve my writing, reconnect with some old friends, and generally just have an outlet for my ranting and raving…or something!

Those of you who know me know that my passions in life are theology and ministry, culture, and technology, so it is safe to assume that those topics will be common on this site. I’m also crazy about my wife and little boy, and since this is a personal blog, you can be sure they will be mentioned from time to time as well.

As an aside regarding the design of the blog, I have to say this at least once: Internet Explorer is junk. This page displays correctly in Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Internet Explorer breaks it to varying degrees depending upon which version you are using. If you are using Internet Explorer, please get a better browser.

Thanks to all of you who have pestered me to blog once again. I’ve appreciated the encouragement, and hope you will find this blog as enjoyable to read as I will to write it.