this is not my story

Hello Paul, do you have a contact email? As an absolute minimum, please do not close this avenue of communication! :)

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:30:39 -0700

Hello! Feel free to go to http://paulhazen.net/about, and select the best form of communication for you. The phone number posted there is a google voice number, so it may change if I end up getting too much spam. This particular site (thisisnotmystory) is looking a bit abysmal… I need to update it and spruce it up a bit, sorry about that. But feel free to get in touch.

queue post test

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 03:40:05 -0800

hahahaha!

Some random music I’m listening to.

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:39:31 -0800

Some random music I’m listening to.

Test!

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 03:41:06 -0700

This is a queued post :)

"Would you be able to forgive an adulterous spouse?"

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 03:40:06 -0800

I remember a story that was told to me. Honestly I can’t remember if it’s just a story or someone who told it actually knew someone this happened to…

But “once upon a time” there was a young couple who got engaged, and then married. After years of living with the guilt, the woman came to the man and told him that during their engagement she had been unfaithful and slept with another man. She confessed that the reason she didn’t tell him is that she was afraid that he would not accept her, and would break the engagement. She sat there on the edge of the bed, her husband by her side. She was bawling. He got up, and left.

He drove and drove until he reached a wedding dress place. He went in, and bought a brand new wedding dress. When he came home he found his wife asleep on the bed, fully clothed, dried tears having run down her face and near her head where she was resting.

He woke her up, undressed her gingerly, and dressed her in the new gown. He got down on one knee, and looked into her eyes, declaring that no matter who she was, and no matter what she did, that he chose to see her as Christ sees his people and his church, spotless, blameless, and perfected by grace.

You’re a fool if you don’t anticipate sin and rebellion in a relationship, and you’re not really in love with someone unless you have Christ-like love for them, unconditional love.

I hope that my reaction to adultery would be similar. But I’m a single guy, so what do I know right?

Tech News Worth Reading and Why

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 03:40:06 -0800

Being in the tech industry, and being generally interested in all things tech, I find myself craving more and more tech news each and every second. Okay, maybe not second. But you know how you probably check Facebook every 15 minutes or so at the office? Yeah instead of checking Facebook (or as well as checking Facebook…) I check these news sites more than once a day. I recently had a few people ask me where I get my news, so I figured I’d write a little post about it.

Gizmodo

Gizmodo is the first place I go for news. Probably because it’s not all news. They sprinkle a fair amount of business, random hilarity, really whatever the writers feel like putting there. It makes it feel like there are real people on the other end writing about things. Due to the wide range of topics covered, I tend to scroll quite a bit, and open new tabs for interesting articles.

Fast Company

Fast company is like Gizmodo for the classy, business, design savvy startup guy. It’s less brash, more focused on design, success and innovations in the field of business than anything, but it does a fairly good job of covering new things in the tech field.

Engadget

Engadget…. *sigh* engadget is barely worth checking. They seem to be the slower, come-to-the-same-conclusion kind of guy next to Gizmodo. Sometimes the difference between news coverage on the two is a matter of days. All the same, a decent place to look every once in a while. They do have fairly good comprehensive reviews of new technology that comes to market, and occasionally get coverage of something that Gizmodo somehow missed.

If you’re in the tech industry, I can’t see why you shouldn’t be reading about the latest and greatest cutting edge tech… even if it’s tech that’s not in your particular niche, or has nothing to do with your job.

Chances are, everything somehow effects, or will effect your job sometime soon. The entrance of the iPhone forever changed Apple’s history, Android’s entrance marked the movement of major companies to go Mobile. As Windows Phone is announced, it’s more and more solidified that the future of tech is in Mobile. There’s always something new. Whether it’s just exciting and fascinating to read about, or whether it gives you a greater perspective to the current state of the industry, after a few years of paying attention to this news you can actually begin to see patterns in the industry, and gain an understanding how specific companies act and think in certain situations.

This is my church

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 09:24:28 -0800

This is my church:

I love my church, but I love my God more. When Mars Hill’s walls have crumbled and it’s people have scattered and turned away from Jesus, Jesus will still be King.

Do you know the difference between infer and imply? My family has arguments over it every Christmas.

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 12:36:07 -0800

I think they’re pretty much the same thing.

Hi! I’m new to this whole Tumblr Thing. I’m looking...

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 01:49:00 -0800

Hi! I’m new to this whole Tumblr Thing. I’m looking forward to hearing more from everyone on here, and I can’t wait to start contributing my own work. Here’s what you need to know about me: I love Jesus. I like coffee, technology, and the probably more than occasional cigarette. I’ve been writing for a long time, in journals that often get tossed out or thrown away… or I have the sudden desire to not only start a whole new train of thought, but a new chapter of thought, then I consider the thought to be more like a book, so with only four or five pages filled in with my drivel, I grab another journal and write anew.

This time I’m just going to word-vomit, write for the sake of writing, and see what comes out. I figure over time, things will improve, I’ll cease to write nonsense.

To change the subject and tone a bit…. I want my blog to be about Jesus. Not always talking about him, not always tying every story somehow back to him… but I don’t want to write, I don’t want to speak, and I don’t want to act towards anything without him. So I’m gonna take a crack at what blogging for the glory of Jesus looks like. We’ll see what happens.

Every year we make a gingerbread house at the Hazen Home. Every...

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 01:42:39 -0800

Every year we make a gingerbread house at the Hazen Home. Every New Years Eve…. we blow it up with some new home-made explosive. This year we are using thermite. Here’s a small taste of what’s to come.

seattle :)

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 01:40:00 -0800

I love living in Seattle. I don’t know if it’s the persistent drizzle and frequent rainstorms, that sound of tires on wet concrete, the fresh air, the coffee. I just don’t know.

I’ve lived on the east side my whole life, and moving to Seattle has been like a breath of fresh air. I don’t yet know if I’m to attribute this to my youth, and my desire to be around such energy, or if when I’m old and gray I’ll want to be in the heart of such activity. Time will tell.

The ave is like nowhere on earth. Drug dealers, students, professors, homeless, dogs, red cross people with their annoying clip-boards, foreigners chatting away in their language, groups of people standing around smoking, everyone seems to have a cup of coffee. Bustling with diversity. But not that crappy kind of diversity people talk about in the academic sense “look, we’re all different, and we can get along!” None of that. The fact that everyone around you seems to be completely different. Nobody is the same, and it’s so clear. I’m not excited because I’m excited for diversity and some kind of new age “common ground”. But I am head-over-heals FASCINATED that God creates so many different people, and that each one has a unique story that upon first glance seems so different from your own.

And yet, it’s a city that breaks my heart. There is so much creativity here, so much life and exuberance, and yet it is so empty and lonely. Nobody talks on the buses, nobody seems to be friendly on the ave, eye contact is avoided. (How different would the world be if for the rest of your life you looked everyone you passed in the eye with a smile on your face?)

But I can hear the knocks on the door, the mighty yet feeble door of Seattle. I can hear thunderous knocks…

BOOM

Jesus is at the door, and he wants in. The door is opening a crack, I can’t wait for it to be swung open with full force to glorious light. This city will never recover from the unceasing, unmerited, overflowing love of Christ. It will be transformed.

"It is a thousand pities that the word “child” has so few words that rhyme with it..."

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 01:26:28 -0800

“

It is a thousand pities that the word “child” has so few words that rhyme with it appropriate for a hymn. But for this paucity of launguage we might have been spared the couplet that hundreds of thousands must have learned in their childhood:

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child.

But perhaps it was not the stingencies of verse-making that led the writer to apply the word “mild” to Jesus Christ, for here it is in another children’s hymn and this time at the beginning of the line:

Christian children all must be
Mild, obedient, good as He.

Why “mild”? Of all the epithets that could be applied to Christ this seems one of the least apropriate. For what does “mild”, as applied to a person, conjure up to our minds? Surely a picture of someone who wouldn’t say “boo” to the proverbial goose; someone who would let sleeping dogs lie and avoid trouble wherever possible; someone of a placid temperament who is almost a stranger to the passions of red-blooded humanity; someone who is a bit of a nonentity, both uninspired and uninspiring.

This word “mild” is apparently deliberately used to describe a man who did not hesitate to challenge and expose the hypocrisies of the religious people of His day: a man who had such “personality” that He walked unscathed through a murderous crowd; a man so far from being a nonentity that He was regarded by the authorities as a public danger; a man who could be moved to violent anger by shameless explitation or by smug compacent orthodxy; a man of such courage that He deliberately walked to what He knew would mean death, despite the earnest pleas of well-meaning friends! Mild! What a word to use for a personality whose challenge and strange attractiveness ninteen centuries have by no means exhausted. Jesus Christ might well be called “meek,” in the sense of being selfless and humble and utterly devoted to what He considered right, whatever the personal cost; but “mild,” never!

Yet it is this fatal combination fo “meek and mild” which has been so often, and is even now, applied to Him. We can hardly be surprised if children feel fairly soon that they have outgrown the “tender Shepherd” and find their heroes elsewhere.

”

- J.B. Phillips in Your God is Too Small