build your house on top of an old bomb?!?!?

and has dragged on forever.    And call me a Bible geek, but I just thought it was cool when I was reading this article that it talks about the city of Nineveh.   You know, the one that God sent Jonah to preach "REPENT!" too a few thousand years ago?    Only he didn't want to go and end up swallowed by a fish?  Ancient Biblical history meets modern history -- that's just neat.   I mean most cities from those days have since changed their names.  I wonder if this is actually the same one.    Ty?   Michael?   You guys know?

For all of us Californians.   Here's a piece of noteworthy news from yesterday:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKN1530409120080516?rpc=28

Two months without a single post and here I am linking to a post by Greg Boyd again. This time he's talking about a quote by presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.

"Even worse -- much worse -- when Huckabee and other well-intentioned Christians talk this way, they earn the right to be despised by non-Christians, and thus to have the Gospel they claim to represent despised as well. The beauty of God's self-sacrificial love is once again smothered in the ugliness of politics."

Read the whole post here.

Greg Boyd has a really interesting article about a poster of Jesus washing Osama Bin Laden's feet. Check it out: http://gregboyd.blogspot.com/2007/11/washing-osamas-feet.html

This site is pretty cool. It lets you search for and play music on demand. http://songza.com

Hello gentle readers.

If you haven't done so already you should enable Snap Shots on your blog! This is a service provided by my company, Snap.com and is newly available on LiveJournal. To turn it on, go to Journal -> Settings. Under Viewing Options there is a checkbox for "Graphic previews." Click that and you are good to go. Now links external to LJ will have Snap Shots enabled.

In many cases Snap Shots are simple graphical previews of the link destination. Others are much more rich in content. For example:

- Wikipedia articles
- Images from a photo album or photo stream
- Videos from popular video sharing sites
- An mp3 file

Monday night I went to see the Georgian State Dance Company with ty5552. Here's a short video that I took with my cell phone. The quality isn't too great, but oh well.



They are definitely worth seeing live if you get the chance!

A few days ago was the 10 year anniversary of the death of Rich Mullins. Rich was and probably still is one of my favorite Christian artists. I still love his music. I first met him at high-school church camp. Before he got famous he used to come and do music for the high school camp at Rock Lake Christian Assembly in Michigan. He was a great guy and really humble.

Here's an article I ran across about Rich if you want to check it out.

Got some pictures from my grandmother when we were in Michigan this summer and I finally got them scanned in.

4 generations of the Ropp family. Harry Forest Ropp, Harry Raymond Ropp, Harry Lee Ropp, Harry Nathan Ropp, and me (Matthew Scott Ropp):


My family at Christmas when I was 11 months old:


My mom, brother and I:


Just Nathan and I:


Swimming shots:






Playing with trains:


A picture of my dad as a boy:

I ran across this site this morning and found it interesting: blogs4God. It aggregates posts from Christian bloggers and has a digg style interface. I mean, some of Michael's posts (michaeldefazio), at least may be of general interest!

Okay, this is pretty cool, you can IM to this LiveJournal bot (he even has a name, "Frank") and it will post an article to your blog for you... Gotta love technology!

Yeah, well, don't really have anything to say... just have a friend on here whom I enjoy keeping up with. Some day, if I do have anything to say, maybe I'll say it here! ;)