It’s really not difficult to step outside your comfort zone and do a little something for someone to make a big difference. You can be a positive impact in the world around you, take any opportunity to do.

It suddenly struck me tonight how many people go through their own life and only leave behind small ripples that only ever go so far as a few family and friends. It’s not that everyone has to be Mother Teresa or someone known world wide for their humanitarian efforts, but it just hit me how many people are so limited in their thinking.

Their vision only goes as far as their little world around them. Maybe it’s time to change the title of my blog from My Little World… because it isn’t little anymore. My eyes have been opened to the whole world around me. I feel the heartbeats of the world humming around me everywhere I go. It doesn’t overwhelm me but it does urge me forward to think about where I can leave my fingerprints.

I don’t want to get to 86 and find myself dead and look back upon a fairy empty life where only little ripples disturbed the pond I lived in. I think if we try hard enough we can all create a wave large enough to carry someone else along with it. Isn’t that the point of life, waves that carry others when they sometimes can’t swim themselves?

…It’s like being reborn again. They say when you become a Christian, and you accept Christ into your life that you are born again. I wonder if it happens more than once?

At first you start again, like a baby, you have to learn everything again, undo all the stuff you were taught by the world and re-educate yourself about yourself and the world as God tells it. Then one day it all clicks, you spent long enough wondering what His purpose was for your life, to be told it is to love the Lord your God and love others.

Love God. Love others as yourself. It’s the foundation on which to build your life.

I did a group activity many moons ago which demonstrated that what you say about others is a reflection of yourself. I’ve just about had it reading Facebook statuses from people slagging off others and name calling. It’s truly amazing the insight to people you get through reading the bible that are so spot on. Matthew 7 gives us so many important messages but the first one is this:

¹ “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. ² For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

³ “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? ⁴ How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? ⁵ You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7: 1-5 NIV)

I think this is why the saying is so important to me, because it reminds me that if I talk trash about others, then I am only reflecting my own personality… if I talk good about people, then thats a reflection of who I am also. I would much prefer to be remembered for being a nice person than someone who bad mouthed others.

The ironic thing is, the people who are saying these things are those who not too many years ago were making their own mistakes and still are (as we all do!).

One of the important things I have learnt is this:

A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of. (Luke 6:45 NIV).

It means, when a person talks trash about someone else, what they say comes from their heart. If your heart is in a bad state you’ll speak those things from your lips. If your heart is in a good place, you’ll speak things that reflect that.

Be mindful about what you say, because words hurt. But more so, what you say about others is as reflection of yourself.

Lots of cool and exciting things have been happening lately. Some of you might already know that Steve and I started our own not for profit childrens charity called Opportunity To Do.

It’s a fundraising organisation that provides support for the forgotten children of Uganda in Africa to provide them with trauma counselling to free their lives from the trauma suffered when abducted from the rebel army and forced to become child soldiers or sex slaves for the soldiers.

These children have suffered atrocities our minds can not comprehend. This is not a new problem, its has been happening for the past 20 years. The impact of this war is still being felt by communities all over Uganda. Men, women and children horrifically disfigured, whole families wiped out by murder and the emotional effects of those abducted. Please read this wiki page for more information about the LRA.

It is our aim to help as many of these victims as we can to be restored.

We also provide funding for Australian children towards rehabilition from drug and alcohol abuse and other addictive behaviours. Helping children cope with their past experiences without relying on these life destroying crutches as well as filling them with a sense of self esteem and purpose and most of all unconditional love.

The name Opportunity To Do was gratefully received after lots of prayer and thought about what we wanted to achieve. So many people talk about love but often there is little action to back it up.

“People can’t see what’s in your heart – they can only see what you do”.

The foundational message of OTD is “It is impossible for you to be happy if you don’t get yourself off your mind and start reaching out to help someone else”.

So many suffer from depression and isolation yet if only they would reach out and help someone else, they would find their state of mind transformed dramatically. It is our mission to not only free people from loneliness and depression but to connect them to a ministry that is about doing good for the benefit of others as Jesus does for us. Through this people find themselves being restored too.

Below is taken from our organisational overview.

Core reasons for existence

•    Demonstrate the love of Jesus through action

•    Raise funding to fulfil the Biblical mandate to serve others

•    Provide an opportunity for people to serve others through volunteering and mission trips

Core Bible References

Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth. (1 John 3:18)

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (James 1:27)

Our Vision

To be a well equipped and resourced co-operative organisation reaching out to poor communities through the love of Christ to serve and develop people to become self sufficient and live productive lives.

Our Mission

To the glory of God, in accordance with sound Biblical and community development principles, our mission is primarily to serve and where appropriate to motivate, mobilise, guide, assist and coordinate a combined Christian ministry addressing the needs and aspirations of the poorest of the poor, the most neglected and underprivileged people regardless of their race, gender and cultural or religious background.

If you are interested in assisting connect with me at our Facebook page :)

So this morning I was watching Enjoying Everyday Life, as I have for the past nine years and I thought to myself about how I stumbled upon it one morning at 4am when I had woken up to meditate on God as my then ‘religion’ instructed me to as the ‘vibrations’ of the world were still and you could get a good connection to God… I was suddenly overwhelmed with a desire to turn on the television, so I did and this woman started talking and telling me about a better way to live my life. I still watch her program every day nine years later.

So… my challenge to you is this. If you are looking for a better way to enjoy everyday life. Set your tv recorder up to tape each weekday at from 4:25 to 5:05am on GEM, Joyce Meyers tv show Enjoying Everyday Life and each morning, before you start the day or head off to work, watch it in full (goes about 20 minutes). And in just two weeks, I’ll bet there starts to be a change in your thinking. If you happen to be outside of Australia you can download them for free through iTunes as well.

What have you got to lose?

Start now by watching this episode to get you going, don’t miss out on a message that could caterpault you from where you are, its the second part but thats ok Watch Now

I had great trouble trying to find a solution to access my Google Bookmarks with FireFox without having to use the web based page. I finally found an add on which works well. It’s called Google Bookmarks for FireFox and creates a drop down menu in the top of the browser to access your bookmarks easily. The only thing I found a pain was it only used a slash / to seperate folders from sub folders and I had previously used a colon : so it meant heading into Google Bookmarks through the browser to update all my subfolder titles. Still, it works well and a handy alternative now that Google kindly stopped allowing the Google Toolbar to be used with FireFox 5.0 or higher.

To install from FireFox go to Tools > Add-ons > Get Add-ons > Google Bookmarks for FireFox (by Suchi Software Solutions) or visit the developers website.

During my escapades with WordPress and various templates we’ve put together and worked with, I’ve discovered an interesting problem with a number of the DHTML menus that are generated from the WordPress categories or pages (using wp_list_categories or wp_list_pages).

If you have a hierarchical page system (which this blog and performs a nice demo site for my plugin!) then it may very well be that the item that forms the top menu item is not actually a page you want people to be able to visit – but WordPress forces all Categories or Pages to be clickable links when they’re returned through wp_list_categories or wp_list_pages.

Take for example the following menu structure;
Home Marketing & Design Company
Web Site Design About Us
E-Commerce Testimonials

It’s highly likely that the menu items Marketing & Design and Company do not need to have pages of their own, but because the DHTML produces a drop down menu, they still need to be clickable links, so that the menu will drop down when you hover over the top.

This is where my plugin comes in. It will alter the destination urls for the top menu items (ie, Marketing & Design and Company) so that instead of going to a page they actually just go to ‘#’ – which most browsers will simply ignore when you click – but still allows the browser to display the drop down menu when you hover over the item.

To install the plugin, first determine if you’re working with categories or pages, and then download the appropriate plugin below. Install it into your WordPress installation in the normal way. Go to your Administration for WordPress, choose Filter Top Menu under the Settings and enter the page/category numbers of the pages/categories that you wish to not have actual pages. It’s that simple!

Filter Top Menu

Who are you?

It’s an interesting question to ask. The answer however depends on who you listen to… do you listen to what the world says you are, or will you listen to the truth about who you are in Gods eyes? After all, He created you.

If you have 41 minutes to watch a TV program then will you spend that 41 minutes instead to learn the truth about who you really are? It just might change your life.

It did mine.

Who are you?

So you bought an eBook and now have this .acsm file but what the heck do you do with it? I had the same problem and here is the solution.

When you start to download a protected Adobe PDF or ePUB a small file with the extension .acsm is first downloaded. This is used by Adobe Digital Editions to send the activation ID to the delivery server which will use that ID to generate an encrypted PDF or ePUB eBook, which is then downloaded to your computer.

Therefore, the .acsm file isn’t the book – it a purchase ticket that allows you to download the book. After you’ve saved it somewhere on your computer, if you haven’t got it already you’ll need a copy of Adobe Digital Editions which is free. Download from http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/. After you’ve installed the program, sign up for an account. That way you verify your ‘ticket’ with your username and password to download it.

Open the .acsm file and the book will appear in Digital Editions. In the Library menu your book will appear either as a list or thumbnail view. There will be a small arrow next to the book title, in the dropdown menu select Item Info, this will show you the path to the book on your computer. You can also bring up the Item Info dialog by pressing Ctrl+I on Windows or Cmd+I on the Mac.

Once you have the path you can then locate the eBook file on your computer. So now you need to get it on to your portable device.

The best program I have found for this is ‘txtr. On your iPhone, iPad or Android download the ‘txtr application. Go to the website http://txtr.com/ and sign up for an account. This will allow you upload your eBook and view it on your device for free. Upload your eBook.

Open the ‘txtr application on your mobile device. Sign in with your ‘txtr username and password. Then sign in with your Adobe Digital Editions username and password. Once you’ve signed in your eBooks from your library will download onto your device and you’ll be able to read protected or unprotected eBooks or PDFs anytime you like and on multiple devices.

Hope this article helps!

I had a heap of trouble updating from an older version of FireFox to the latest one 6.0 with the Google Toolbar not compatable (Thanks Google, yet another great thing you dumped). I originally had installed Chrome thinking I’d be able to have similar options like the Google Toolbar, easy access to Google Bookmarks, Picasa Web Albums, Google Mail etc but oh no… Google wouldn’t want to make it easy to access their other stuff would they? So I updated FireFox and the toolbar wouldn’t work. Anyway – I found a workaround; just install the Compatibility Reporter extension found here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/ – I then told it GTB was OK in the Addon settings and restarted. My previous install of Google Toolbar magically appeared with all my previous settings. *happy dance*