My Thank You
My time here on ubfriends is growing short, at least for the near future. More and more of my time is being sown in other interests. I am in the midst of my third spiritual leadership cohort and loving every minute of it! I will never forget ubfriends, and will stay in the conversations here somehow. Since I won’t be able to post or comment here as regularly as normal, I want to share a thought of gratitude that has surfaced in my mind this week.
The thought is merely this: thank you. Thank you ubf and my shepherds for the following three things. Your ministry needs big-time help, to be sure, and my recovery from undue religious influence is not over. But I have reached the point where I can say thank you and leave it at that.
15,000+ hours
I deeply appreciate the time spent reading, discussing and sharing about the bible. That is not a lifestyle for everyone, but I enjoyed that aspect.
A suitable helper
I do not condone faith-arranged-marriage, and have much work to do now that my wife and I realized we are actually married after 20 years, but I do highly appreciate the suitable helper teaching from Genesis. This is a correct exegesis of those passages as far as I am concerned.
Being there in tragedy
My father’s passing away in 1989 was tragic. I am glad many people at ubf were there for me.
Grace and peace,
BrianK.
Thank you Brian for everything you have done. You changed my life in ways you most certainly understand. May you continue to grow in your walk with the Lord each and every day. Awake dreamers! Let Christ’s light shine on you!
Brian, I am so glad to hear of your new ventures and adventures, and also sad that I will miss interacting with you as often as we have. I am also thankful for ubfriends, for without it we would likely never have become friends. As you know, you’re always welcome to visit and stay if ever you come to Chicago.
brian, thank you for being brave enough to have helped start the ball rolling in the battle to speak truth in order to seek change for the better (in the world & religion): it shows belief that better is possible if only enough will muster up & do it;
rest assured my wife & i will be among those helping hold the flag of truth on the hill which God will reclaim for his glory as the battle rages all around..
i heard an african american woman preacher/social activist from the westside of chicago speak at a martin luther king,jr celebration at mt sinai hospital system where i work: her point was that martin had a voice & chose to use it; she has a voice & chooses to use it; we each have a voice & must choose to use it;
an african american asst pastor of a neighborhood church near the hospital used his voice right there: he brought a men’s singing grp for the event, comprised of previously drug addicted/homeless/jobless men whom his church had helped/was helping have a new beginning (HALLELUJAH!);
his voice said something like this (paraphrasing for brevity): ‘mt sinai i thank you very much for inviting us to celebrate martin luther with you, & what i’m about to say is not to make you feel guilty, but so that you can see martin’s voice made a difference: if i needed medical treatment right here right now you would be happy to provide it to me, but when i was 9 yrs old a long time ago, my dad, a working man, became ill & came to this hospital (mt sinai & nearby st anthony hospital & was denied treatment at both places & died, so yes progress has been made & can continue to be made..’
so yes voices for truth/right matter in any issue of any concern, & do make a difference in the longrun, so let’s increasingly be those voices..!
I am grateful to know you, Brian, and look forward to hearing from you still. Thank you for all you’ve done and are doing. We’d love to see you in PA.
Thank you for these thoughts everyone. Mark, HALLELUJAH indeed!
:)
Brian, my thanks to you as well. This site has been true to it’s name for me. It’s great to hear of your new ventures.
Cheers, Brian and thank you for all that you’ve done through this site. The sense of closure that you expressed is something that I’m seeking for myself as well.
Please continue to comment from time to time :) I appreciate your views and Inputs
I have finally subscribed to the site. I have read many of the articles and insightful posts. I hope to make some contributions at some point. There are great dialogs that have been started here. As a former ubf member, a lot of the grievances are all too real. I just finished reading Dr. Joe’s Bibleman article. Unfortunately, it brings to mind many of the practices I witnessed for the better part of a decade. Anyway, thanks to all of you contributors
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If you have enough thoughts together for an article, please consider submitting it to us: http://www.ubfriends.org/submissions/ Grace and peace.
Brian, I would like to extend a hearty “thank you” for the awesome work you have done to maintain this website and extend its functionality.
I especially like the “Who’s Online” feature. It’s heartening to see how, even in a span of 24 hours, so many people around the world are checking in and reading, even though they don’t comment. The graphics remind me of the world maps in ubf centers with pushpins or stars indicating where ubf missionaries are located.
I have a question: Are all of the red dots bonafide human readers? Or are some of them web crawlers?
Thanks Joe. The plugin has an option to exclude “bots”. I’m not certain what this app considers a “bot”, but normally that means the app is excluding web crawlers and the like.
So the red dots are rather accurate as far as being human readers. One thing that might skew the numbers a bit high would be the “sploggers”. These are automation programs that sometimes pass as human.
One thing that is 100% accurate is the members count. If someone is logged in, that is accurately represented.
One thing to note: The dots in America, Canada and Mexico are very likely to be all human readers. Some of the outliers, especially in countries where there are no ubf chapters, is likely to be some sort of automated app that got around the “bot” exclusion.
The maps are consistent though, and line up decently with Google analytics. The visitor map here nearly mimics the ubf chapter map. In other words, wherever there is a ubf “house church”, this blog is read. And there should be no surprise that South Korea is always in the top 10 countries of visitors :)
When I am online in State College, Pennsylvania, my location often appears as Carlisle, Reyoldsville, or some other location 100 or more miles away. This makes me wonder whether a dot in some remote location of the world (for example, in Fiji) might actually represent someone who is physically located in a nearby country (maybe Australia)? We do have some readers Down Under.
Yea, the geo location is problematic. My location is rather exact, pinpointed down to distinguishing between my work computer and my home computer.
So when I read these visitor numbers, I just take half of the number. If the maps say 200 people, I just consider that only 100 were actual unique visits. Even with this generous estimate, the point remains: A lot of people come here daily to read what we say, and more often than not their location matches a ubf chapter location.
All this visitor counting seems more of an art to me, since the internet providers have no legal way to pinpoint personal details precisely, as far as I know.
Here is the app I installed which may give more details: Visitor Maps