Moving to tumblon!

For the past several months, I have been maintaining two personal blogs, this one, and (without any publicity) my tumblon blog. That time has come to an end, as I will now use the tumblon blog exclusively. Why am I making the switch now?

1. Integration.
• Tumblon is integrated with Elisabeth's developmental milestones.
  
• Tumblon integrates stories and photos (and soon video) in one service.
  
2. Security.
• Tumblon has 3 tiers of security for every milestone, memory and photo: private, friends & family, and public. Now I don't have to be nervous about publishing because I control the content - and I can write for each audience.
  
• Tumblon uses a static url (mine is http://scharf.tumblon.com). Registered friends see all the friends & family content, while unregistered folks see only the public posts.

There are lots of other benefits of tumblon over blogger, but these two are the reason that I'm making the move now. So, reset your feed readers to the new blog, and feel free to email me at leavened (a) gmail.com to request an invitation to see all of our friends & family content there.

For the sake of full disclosure: I am co-founder and community manager of tumblon, and so I'm very excited to share the service with family and friends. We are making many improvements, and adding many new features as we move toward a public beta (very soon), and then a public launch (in a few months). So you will get to see many of those improvements and features over the weeks and months to come. If there's something you think would make tumblon better, you can email me, or use the support email on any of the tumblon pages to let us know how to meet the needs of parents.

UPDATE (Nov 3, 2008): Our public beta is going well, and now includes video!

Art

I love it when friends recommend good children's books. So I was delighted yesterday when my friend, Lauren, recommended Art to me.

Art is a masterful blend of simple text and simple illustration that unfolds the dynamics of artistic expression. Patrick McDonnell has produced a worthy piece of art in Art.

Good literature teaches more than we know

"Good literature teaches more than we know. Example always speaks louder than precept, and books can do more to inspire honor and tenacity of purpose than all the chiding and exhortation in the world" (Honey for a Child's Heart p53)

The challenge for parents is to be well-acquainted with such a corpus of good literature that we can pull out the book, poem or short story to meet the hour.

"The orcs have been here"

Families who share literature together have a rich history and vocabulary with which to communicate depth of feeling, as Gladys Hunt captures well:

"When we went to visit a favorite spot and saw that much of hat we remembered as beautiful had changed, our son said, 'The orcs have been here,' and we didn't need to say more." (Honey for a Child's Heart p76)

That expression alone captures for me the power of literary allusion.

Inconceivably a better condition

If you can persevere through his tortuous sentence structure, John Owen's insight can take your breath away:

"A design in Christ shines out from [the Father], that was lodged there from eternity, to recover things to such an estate as shall be exceedingly to the advantage of his glory, infinitely above what first appeared, and for the putting of sinners into inconceivably a better condition than they were in before the entrance of sin. . . . To save sinners through believing, shall be found to be a far more admirable work than to create the world of nothing." (Communion with the Triune God, p195, 196)

Poetry

For some reason, I never enjoyed poetry as a child (or at least I don't remember enjoying it). So now I find it strange that poetry speaks so deeply to me. Words like these, of James Russell Lowell, stir me deep within:

They are the slaves who fear to speak
For the fallen and the weak;
They are the slaves who will not choose
Hatred, scoffing and abuse,
Rather than in silence shrink
From the truth they needs must think;
They are the slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three.

Hard core hymns

For those who appreciated hymns with brutally honest words, here's another that rattles my cage, called Jesus, I my cross have taken:

Go, then, earthly fame and treasure,
Come disaster, scorn and pain
In Thy service, pain is pleasure,
With Thy favor, loss is gain
I have called Thee Abba Father,
I have stayed my heart on Thee
Storms may howl, and clouds may gather;
All must work for good to me. (igrace)

It takes courage to sing those words: "Go, then, earthly fame and treasure . . ." yet I don't know a better way to wean my heart of those things than to sing words like those in worship.

[The other five verses are just as potent, for those who are interested.]

More tulips

The tulips are fading, but I hadn't yet posted this picture . . .