I've found that social media, Facebook in particular, helps me fellowship better with those I attend church with. We keep up with each other more easily throughout the week, keeping us engaged and informed about each others' lives, prayer needs, etc... When we meet face to face again, it's easier to get into deeper, more meaningful discussions.

I've got a wide variety of music loves, I listened to everything from classical to oldies, to rock, to hip hop to heavy metal. But when we would start our missions, I liked to listen to 'Highway to Hell', 'Highway to the Danger Zone', or 'Roll Out'.

Amen.

All the Churches I've been too (particularly here in ND) are very open to everybody. Nobody has been too concerned with who is or isn't a member. The only time membership really comes into play is as a requirement for leadership positions.

Twit Block is very useful, but flags a lot of very useful people, whom I don't in any way consider spammers. I believe it will become more accurate, but people will need to take the time to mark them as not spam. I currently post a score of 0, but just a few days ago it showed me as several hundred, so there are still kinks being worked out.

After having spent 6 years in the National Guard, including 1 year in Iraq, it seems a lot of people in this thread are confused. Contrary to the media's portrayal, there isn't nearly as much violence as you'd think in Iraq. Does it happen daily? Yes, but not to the extent CNN wants you to believe.

War is different now than a century ago. It is much more diplomatic. Soldiers in Iraq are doing a lot less shooting, and a lot more working WITH the people, and helping them build/rebuild infrastructure. My mission in Iraq was to find road side bombs and get rid of them safely, both for the protection of our own soldiers and Iraqi civilians. We are also only to return fire. Don't shoot unless you're shot at first.

But none of that is the point of your post. Is Chapel the place to talk about this sort of thing? Maybe. If it's a random guy that you sent a care package to, I'm going to have to agree that it isn't. However, in my situation, where I grew up in the Church, they were all praying for me while I was gone, and it was planned in advance that I would share about it Sunday morning, in lieu of the sermon, then I believe it's ok.

God must be involved though. It must be shared how you saw God at work in your time at war. It must be shared how God worked in you. And if you learn the things I learned, you must share all the rich Biblical history that happened there, before it became a muslim country.

I have to strongly disagree on Browser Friendly. From my experience and discussions with others, it seems that most of the people using RSS have a bookmarklet or something similar for adding feeds. Personally, getting stopped at that page makes me reconsider subscribing, and many times I don't.

Yes, even 3 years is a long time. If those are 3 really good years, a farmer faces the potential of hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

It is true that pasture would seem to make more sense than annual crops, but you need some outstanding cattle to make up the difference on what a crop would bring. Even renting out pasture land only brings about $15/acre, less than half of what most tillable ground does. That's a big difference when you have to come up with the money for property tax.

True, but the organic regulations are federal, and farmland in Iowa is a lot different from most of the country. It's an ideal place for row crops, and soybeans help to replenish the ground naturally. Much of the grain belt doesn't have the humidity to help row crops grow like they do in Iowa, leaving them with lower yields.

I'm not sure how they do it in the rest of the country, but with all the restrictions and requirements to be organic (I believe it's 5-10 years without any chemical or fertilizer touching the land), the only viable option farmers here have is land coming out of CRP. And the government doesn't like CRP being tilled up.