I’ll Tell You What…

Oftentimes, I will put myself in Paul’s shoes and try to experience the personal struggles that he faces throughout his ministry. I consider the situation that he’s in and wonder what I would do or how I would react if I were in the same situation. Sometimes I’m the hero that Paul was but sometimes I get so caught up in my past failures that I see myself doing the opposite of Paul.

In this chapter we find Paul in Ephesus. I don’t know what he said or how he did it but verse 1 tells us “he found several believers.” (Acts 19:1) I doubt these people were holding up signs proclaiming the end was near or standing in the market place screaming the Good News of Christ. No, I’m sure these people were either Jews or Jewish converts who were members of the local synagogue. Paul usually went to the Jews first whenever he entered a new town.

Where he found these particular Jews we’ll never know but his encounter with them changed their lives. They were believers in Jesus but didn’t have the whole picture because they only knew about John’s baptism. When Paul told them about the Holy Spirit they were puzzled. “We don’t know what you mean. We haven’t heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” (Acts 19:2) Boy, were they in for a surprise! After their Baptism in the name of Jesus, “when Paul laid his hands them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in other tongues and prophesied.” (Acts 19:6)

This was only the start of change for the people of Ephesus. After Paul’s encounter with the men earlier he went to the synagogue to preach the Good News. Many believed Paul but there were some that did not. There must have been some lines drawn in the sand because Paul left the synagogue, along with the believers, and began preaching daily in the lecture halls of Tyrannus. Paul did this for 2 years. That’s a long time to lecture on a daily basis but when you’re fueled by the love of God for a lost world anything is possible.

It’s also noteworthy to mention that God gave Paul unusual miraculous abilities. The scripture says that “even when handkerchiefs or cloths that had touched his skin were placed on sick people, they were healed of their diseases, and any evil spirits within them came out.” (Acts 19:12) As far as I can tell this particular kind of miracle is unique in scripture.

I saw this word used somewhere today and thought it was a strange one. The context in which it was used escapes me at the moment but I think it was used to describe something, eg, that is a meme. Anyway, I looked up the definition and it’s really quite cool.

WordNet over at princeton defines it this way:

meme — (a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one generation to another by nongenetic means (as by imitation); “memes are the cultural counterpart of genes”)

How cool is that?

Some other noteworthy definitions floating around the internet:

• Nanotechnology Now
  

  Meme: An idea that replicates through a society as it is propagated through person-to-person interaction, both direct and indirect. Memetics is a field of study that focuses on memes’ role in the evolution of a culture.

• Levity.com
  

  A term coined by Richard Dawkins, who defines it as “a unit of cultural inheritance, hypothesized as analogous to the particulate gene and as naturally selected by virtue of its ‘phenotypic’ consequences on its own survival and replication in the cultural environment.”

• Silicon Beach Westnet
  

  As defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene(1976): “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” In this sense, chain letter components are memes.

• Access eGovernment
  

  Contagious ideas. Term is used to explain viral marketing.

First off, let me say that in no way do I lay claim to this piece of code. It was written by a friend at work whom I regard as one of the best Perl programmers around. The Perl code in my previous post was crude but it was a whole lot faster than using the regular expression engine. I asked my buddy at work if he could optimize it and this is what he came up with.

#!/usr/bin/perl

$i += tr/1/1/ and 
$i == $_ and 
print "$_ == $i\n" until ++$_ and 
$_ eq 2000000

This code averages 2.3 seconds! Amazing. I added the cr/lf for readability.