Many Christians make a resolution each year to read through the Bible, and there are a multitude of plans out there to help you do so. And now, thanks to the blessings of technology, there are multiple options as to how you can access these plans. For example, the various ESV Bible Reading Plans can be found daily on the web, subscribed to through an RSS feed, received via email, downloaded as an iCalendar file, viewed daily in a format friendly to your mobile device, or downloaded as a pdf to your computer and printed out. Your choice.

HT: Between Two Worlds

Over at Pajamas Media, political humorist Frank J. Fleming has taken it upon himself to set some New Year’s resolutions for political elites. A couple funny excerpts:

George W. Bush: Keep active after leaving the White House.

I have a recommendation for him: professional dodgeball. The guy has mad reflexes. And to quote my favorite movie Casablanca: “If you can dodge a shoe, you can dodge a ball.”

Barack Obama: Finally have a notable accomplishment.

A year from now, if some wisenheimer like Hannity asks one of Obama’s supporters to name something significant he’s done, Obama is going to make sure they have an answer this time that isn’t campaign-related. If he succeeds, he’ll have a lot to write about for his third memoir.

John McCain: Never again say or do anything that will please conservatives.

If I were going to bet on one of these being kept, it would be this one.

Sarah Palin: Resurrect the woolly mammoth.

Palin has gotten an unfair rap on her intelligence, so to fight that, she plans to contribute to genetic research and successfully implant an elephant with a woolly mammoth embryo. When the mammoth is old enough, she plans to release it into the Alaskan wild and hunt and kill it. It should make an awesome rug.

Hillary Clinton: Become President Obama’s close confidant.

That’s part one of her four-part plan to destroy him.

Big Three Automakers: Sell at least eight cars.

Gotta justify those billions in bailout money.

Read the rest (including resolutions for Dick Cheney, the Democratic Congress and Iraq) here.

Most men do not have close friends. It’s a fact. Many men are acquainted with other men but few of us, if we’re honest, have iron-sharpening relationships (Proverbs 27:17) or a deep camaraderie forged by walking together through life, wrestling with God and fighting the devil. Few of us can lament like David did in the loss of his friend saying, “I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women” (2 Samuel 1:26).

This is a larger cultural problem in America, as Devin Friedman recently wrote in GQ:

[I]t’s hard for men to make new friends, period, as life proceeds and one is no longer 23 years old and no longer has roommates named Jay and Sean and Josh. All new friends come prepackaged. All new friends are couple friends. MattAndChloe, SethAndSusan, ElizabethAndMichael. I can’t say exactly why. I have a theory that men get more bearlike as they age, increasingly taciturn, hairy, prone to long spells of slumber, prone to growly solitary rummaging. The man can get unsocialized as he ages.

And the married man can come to believe there’s a division of labor: The woman forms the social connections, and the man is treated in social situations as if he were just learning to feed himself solid food again after a terrible accident. That’s why the older the man gets, the more isolated he becomes, the more rarefied his world is, the more other humans seem to be accelerating away from him, the more his friendships become dominated by figures so long known that they’re more like comfortable marriages than friendships.

And for most men the church offers little help and socializes the problem. Churches with “men’s ministries” clearly signal that iron-sharpening-iron, pursuant relationships are not a part of men’s culture. Often those men’s gatherings are nothing more than activity-driven programs disconnected from cultivating vulnerability and life sharing.

Added to this is the idol of marriage, as John Piper describes, where young adults are wrongly led to believe that all of their emotional and spiritual needs can be met in their respective spouse instead of the holistic provisions of other relationships in the church that help us experience the provisions of the Triune God. This unrealistic expectation creates a fair amount of disappointment and disillusionment. Since marriage is temporary (Mark 12:25), says Piper, “relationships in Christ are more permanent, and more precious, than relationships in families.”

For men cloaked in idolatry, the mission of his life becomes “the woman” instead of the Kingdom.

Women overrelying on men to meet all of their relational needs is consistent with their curse, as Piper describes—with the constant cell phones calls, manipulating him to be at home with her, using sex or “sickness,” if necessary, and so on. Men overrelying on women begin to be forged in adolescence when women become places of validation, self-perception, and masculine identity that can lead to passivity or abuse. Or worse, men look to work for all of their significance, which feeds our curse.

One young man recently lamented this to me regarding his declining male friendships:

“My wife is not the type to establish social connections, but I am. A lot of times my friend has no idea if he can say yes to getting together and sometimes is stunned that he has to figure it out on his own. Sometimes I end up talking to my buddies’ wives to just arrange a get-together.

“Needless to say, a lot of times the friendship gets weakened because my buddy has been so used to going along with the social agenda set by the wife. It’s hard losing friends because their wife sets the social calendar.

“My situation now is that I’m only able to hang out with guys who are allowed to do stuff without their spouse. It’s funny and sad.”

So what happened? It seems that we have forgotten that friendships among men require regular proximity and activity. Male friendships rely more heavily on doing things together, accomplishing tasks, and overcoming challenges instead of meeting to talk and share “our hearts” over tea or encircled in a church basement. C.S. Lewis masterfully addresses male friendships forged in activity together in his book on the Four Loves.

Conversation is not the relational glue for men that it is for women. For most men, conversation flows out of regular activity (playing video games, watching sports, playing music, repairing a roof, fighting for social causes, and so on). The more men are disconnected from living life together, organically and dynamically, the more isolated they become and the fewer friends they have. We live in a world of post-college-aged, married and single men plugged into church programs, folding chairs, with great jobs, who may be great fathers, who are Biblically literate, who are theologically sharp, with fantastic lawns, with balanced checkbooks, in small groups, attending informational Bible studies, on softball teams, doing penance accountability groups, and who are completely friendless.

Most men, unsharpened and lacking deep camaraderie in life and Kingdom mission, function through the motions of life only to finish the race with no one poetically lamenting, “I grieve for you, my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women.”

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Ever wish you had a little extra time during the day? Well, tonight you will get a little extra time–a second to be precise.

Peter Whibberley, a senior research scientist at Britain’s National Physical Laboratory, said the Earth’s erratic rotation meant an extra second needed to be added.

“The difference between atomic time and Earth time has now built up to the point where it needs to be corrected, so this New Year’s Eve we will experience a rare 61 second minute at the very end of 2008 and revelers… will have an extra second to celebrate.”

OK, so it’s not much, but I guess we have to take what we can get.

Do we have any idea how pivotal we Christians are in the rescue of our nation from destruction?

Exhibit A: Proverbs 15:29: “The Lord is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayers of the righteous.”

That Proverb tells me that although God is the Creator and sustainer of all men, he pays attention to unbelievers only from a distance, while his main focus is on believers’ actions. He is watching intently to see what we will do, not so much what the new president and Congress and other high profile types will do. The newspapers in heaven always have completely different headlines from ours. They read like this: “New prayer meeting starts up in Washington, Michigan”; “Thirty people added to house prayer circle in Glenside, Pa.”; “Increase in fervor in Providence, R.I., Wednesday night service.”

Exhibit B: Genesis 18: “Then Abraham approached him and said: ‘Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it?”

It was a time like ours, the time of Sodom and Gomorrah. God’s angel of death was on the way to the place with his arm lifted for destruction. A human being stayed the arm of the Lord, even talked Him down to ten righteous people: “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it” (verse 32).

What a responsibility and what a privilege we have, to be standing in the gap, at such a time as this, between the wrath of God and the citizens of the United States of America.

One classic New Year’s tradition continues tonight as Dick Clark gears up to host his 36th New Year’s Eve show–with a little help from Ryan Seacrest, of course. The 79-year-old Clark, who suffered a stroke four years ago, says while he’s not able to be as actively involved as he used to be, “I am one of the fortunate ones who survived and have been minimally impaired, so I’m just thankful I’m still able to enjoy this once-a-year treat of bringing in the New Year.”

The night will also feature Former President Bill Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tapped to push the ceremonial button that drops the Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball.

Good morning!

Today’s quote is from a Greek playwright: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

It may be one of the most audacious political moves of the year: Scandal-ridden Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich defied his party today and appointed former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris to replace President-elect Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate. The announcement stunned Senate Democrats, who released a statement saying they will not seat anyone appointed by Blagojevich.

It is truly regrettable that despite warning from all 50 Democratic senators and public officials throughout Illinois, Gov. Blagojevich would take the imprudent step of appointing someone to the United States Senate who would serve under a shadow and be plagued by questions of impropriety. We say this without prejudice toward Roland Burris’s ability, and we respect his years of public service. But this is not about Mr. Burris; it is about the integrity of a governor accused of attempting to sell this United States Senate seat. Under these circumstances, anyone appointed by Gov. Blagojevich cannot be an effective representative of the people of Illinois and, as we have said, will not be seated by the Democratic Caucus.

It’s one thing for an African American columnist to write a column entitled “Obama the Magic Negro,” as David Ehrenstein did in the L.A. Times in 2007, commenting that Barack Obama wasn’t really “black,” just pandering to a black image so whites could ease their guilty consciences.

It’s another thing for a white candidate running to chair the Republican National Committee to make a Christmas mix for his buddies with a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro,” set to the music of “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and then dismiss concerns about racism by saying it was “light-hearted,” as the candidate Chip Saltsman did this holiday. Part of the song, which aired on Rush Limbaugh’s show, goes,

See, real black men, like Snoop Dogg, or me, or Farrakhan, have talked the talk, and walked the walk, not come in late and won.

Some say Barack’s articulate, bright, and clean…but when you vote for President watch out and don’t be fooled. Don’t vote the Magic Negro in…

The press got all over it. The current chair of the GOP up for reelection, Mike Duncan, said he was “appalled” by the song, saying it was not appropriate. What is surprising is that several GOP chairs across the country, with a couple exceptions, told reporters that they didn’t see a problem with the song.

The Alabama GOP chair said it “didn’t bother me one bit.”

The Maine GOP chair: “I had to ask, ‘boy, what’s the big deal here?’ because there wasn’t any.”

These responses are not surprising if you consider the Republican party’s failure among minorities in this year’s election – but you would also think that this election might have taught the GOP elite a thing or two about race. Though many minorities are on the GOP side of certain values issues like marriage, they are for other reasons (see “Barack the Magic Negro” above) alienated from the party.

Saltsman also included songs on the mix titled “The Star Spanglish Banner” and “Ivory and Ebony.”