Rimba Family Blog

World population reached 7 billion on Monday, October 2011.
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As quoted in: Wall Street Journal Online

Steve Jobs, who stepped down as CEO of Apple Wednesday after having been on medical leave, reflected on his life, career and mortality in a well-known commencement address at Stanford University in 2005.

Here, read the text of of that address:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

One of the nation’s most prominent Christian ministries has decided to take Christ out of its name – a move that has generated cries of political correctness from within the evangelical community.

Campus Crusade for Christ International announced this week that it will change the name of its U.S. Operations to “Cru” in early 2012.

“We felt like our name was getting in the way of accomplishing our mission,” said Steve Sellers, the vice president for Campus Crusade, noting that the ministry will still be committed to “proclaiming Christ around the world.”

Sellers said researchers found that 9 percent of Christians and 20 percent of non-Christians were alienated by the name Campus Crusade for Christ.

jecroix: are you kidding? You drop the name of Christ for the sake of just 9 percent of Christians and 20% of non-Christians who were alienated by the name of Christ in Campus Crusade for Christ? How about the 80% of non-Christians and 91% of Christians who are not alienated by the name of Christ? Do you not care about them?
The law of the harvest says we give priority to reach the responsive people groups while continuing to sow in the alienated ones.
What will happen to a company who change her company name because 20% of her prospects find her name offensive and forget about the 80% of her prospects who is quite happy or neutral to her present company name? It is wasting valuable company resources on things that does not matter. It will affect the company’s profit. It will achieve less than what can be achieved without the name change.

If they want to drop anything from their name, I think they need to drop the word “Crusade” from their name. It is offensive to many muslims in the world. It reminds them of the atrocities conducted by those who professed to act in the name of Christ, but actually did things that Christ would never agree and actually hate. If they want their names to be less offensive to many non-Christians, they should have dropped the word “Crusade” and become “Campus for Christ International”.

The organization was founded in 1951 by Bill and Vonette Bright and today has 25,000 staff members serving in 191 countries. Bright died in 2003, but his widow offered support for the name change in a video posted online.

“When Bill Bright started the organization, he told his wife that someday they would have to change the name,” Sellers said. “As early as the late ’70s and ’80s he was looking at making the name change.”

Sellers said several factors were involved in the name change – including overseas sensitivities.

“Our name was becoming more and more of a hindrance,” he told Fox News Radio. He specifically mentioned the word crusade.

“It’s reverted back to some of its meaning related to the Middle Ages – forcing Christianity on different parts of the world,” he said.

As for removing Christ from their name, the Campus Crusade for Christ website states:

“We were not trying to eliminate the word Christ from our name. We were looking for a name that would most effectively serve our mission and help us take the gospel to the world. Our mission has not changed. Cru enables us to have discussions about Christ with people who might initially be turned off by a more overtly Christian name. We believe that our interaction and our communication with the world will be what ultimately honors and glorifies Christ.”

But that decision has created controversy within the evangelical Christian community – some taking to social networking sites and the organization’s website to voice their displeasure.

“Take Christ out, and you become just another crusade,” one critic wrote on the Campus Crusade website. “How repulsive can you get?” Another person wrote, “We are both appalled that you think you have to remove the name Christ from your name.”

“It is sad that an organization like Campus Crusade at least appears to have allowed themselves to be taken by the politically correct environment instead of acting counter culturally as Christ’s followers are called to do,” said Richard Hornsby, of Kansas City. “For an institution like Crusade to appear to cave to the same cultural pressure that leads school principals to harass or try to ban Christian groups from meeting on campus is incredibly sad. We expect the ACLU to intimidate small towns and schools by threatening to sue them. We don’t expect long-standing pillars of the Christian community to fold like this.”

Hornsby was actively involved with Campus Crusade at The Ohio State University when he was a college student. He said he was surprised by the name change.

“I immediately thought of Paul’s letter to the Romans, ‘I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ,’” he said. “It may be that CCCI has good intentions behind the change, but on its face, this decision to drop ‘Christ’ seems like an attempt to hide or mask the core identity of the group.”

But Sellers defended the removal of Christ’s name from the title – and denied that political correctness was involved.

“It has nothing to do with political correctness,” he said. “It has everything to do with how we can be effective at what God has called us to do.”

“Most churches don’t have Christ in their name,” he said. “Hardly any other Christian organization has Christ in their name. People are making an issue out of something that isn’t the intent at all.”

Sellers said it is “more important that the organization is effective at proclaiming Jesus than it is important to have the name of Jesus in the name of the organization.”

And he stressed that the mission of the organization has not changed.

“We are an evangelistic organization that is committed and has been committed and will be committed to proclaiming Christ around the world,” he said.

The new name, Cru, has long been used as a nickname for the organization on university campuses. Other than that, Sellers said Cru does not have a definition.

“Much like lots of brand names they don’t necessarily have meaning in and of themselves,” he said. “It is a name we intend to give meaning so that when people hear it they know that it’s a caring group of Christians who are passionate about lifting up the name of Jesus.”

Read more: Campus Ministry drops Christ from name

1. Many flights are too expensive for all but rich people.

2. All but David is going to attend the party.

“all but” means “all except” when it is followed by nouns.

3. I’ve all but finished the book.

“all but” means “almost” when it is followed by verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and probably “all but nouns”

Source: The use of all but discussion in usingenglish.com

Read more: Husband Celebrates Miracle as ‘Brain Dead’ Wife Wakes Up in Hospital

Survey Says: 7.5 Million Kids on Facebook Are at Risk. Read more

Benny Hinn and Paula White was caught holding hands out of a hotel in Rome

Televangelist Benny Hinn and Paula White, the Pastor of Without Walls International church in Florida USA, was caught holding hands while going out of a hotel and strolling around in Rome, Italy.

Both confessed that they became close to each other ever since Paula White did a TV program at Benny Hinn’s This is Your Day, but both claimed that there is nothing inappropriate in their friendship.

Paula was divorced from her husband, Randy, in 2007.
Benny Hinn is still married to Suzanne Hinn, although the latter has filed a divorce against Benny in February 2010.

Is it appropriate for Paula White who professes to be a minister of the gospel to walk holding hands with Benny Hinn while he is still married to Suzanne?

Is it appropriate for Benny Hinn who is still married to Suzanne to go out of a hotel in Rome while holding hands with another woman like Paula White?

You make the call.

The Lord Jesus said:”“You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery. But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
(Mt 5:27-28 NIV)

Source:

Charisma Magazine Online
Christian Today Online

I am saddened to learn that Benny Hinn’s wife of 30 years has filed for a divorce from the Televangelist. His wife, Suzanne, cites irreconcilable differences as the reason for her action.

Read more: Benny Hinn’s wife filed for divorce

South Africa’s megachurch pastor, Ray McCauley, to divorce for a second times. In 2000, he divorced his wife of 24 years, Lyndie. Less than a year later, he married Zelda, a former model who has had divorce a couple of times. Now, after nine years of marriage, Zelda files to divorce McCauley. McCauley reaps what he sows.

The word of God reminds us that

“Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” (Mark 11:11-12 RSV)

Read more: South African pastor Ray McCauley to divorce AGAIN

Jesus said:”For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Mt.6:21 NIV.

Now, time is one of our most important treasure. So, where we spend our time the most, there our heart will be also.

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed.? Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” Luke10:41-42 NIV.

What was Mary doing?

“Mary, … sat at the Lord’s feet  listening to what He [Jesus} said.” Luke 10:39 NIV