Archive for September, 2012

Good resume sending advice


As I begin the process myself of looking for a new ministry position, I have been reading up on the current practices and best advice from the experts on resumes, interviews, and other such job related matters. One resource I use is theladders.com. Their site caters to a more business client base and I don’t use their paid services. But I’ve found a great deal of helpful advice on their site that can be accessed for free.

Today’s post is one such article from theladders.com, which I thought might be helpful for anyone else who is currently looking for work.

Enjoy,

DK



How to Send a Resume by E-mail

Sending your resume by e-mail may sound like the simplest part of the job search, but beware.

By Lisa Vaas

It sounds simple: You learn about a job opening and prepare electronic copies of your resume and cover letter to make your case for an interview.
Not so fast, though: Clicking the “Send” button is may send your document straight to a spam folder for unwanted e-mail. Here’s how to increase the odds your resume will be read by a recruiter or hiring manager.
E-mail attachment pros & cons
The first question about e-mailing your resume is whether to send it as an attachment or just paste it in as text in the e-mail body. Career coaches and hiring professionals don’t agree on this issue. When it comes to attachments, they cite these cons:
  • Attachments take up too much space in the recipient’s inbox
  • Attachments may harbor security threats, such as viruses
  • A hiring company’s security system may block messages with attachments or bar the recipient from opening attachments
  • Overworked hiring professionals may not take the time to open an attachment
Tammy Kabell, a career and resume consultant who runs Career Resume Consulting, said employers are “just as wary of viruses as everyone else, and are hesitant to open unsolicited attachments.” That’s why she recommends “never” sending a resume as an attachment.
Others cite these attachment pros:
  • Word or PDF attachments are more attractively formatted than pasted-in text resumes
  • PDF attachments can’t be tinkered with
The best practice is to do exactly what the company or hiring professional requested or find out what they prefer.
When in doubt, try sending it both ways, said Martin Yate, a career-management trainer and coach as well as the author of the forthcoming “Knock em Dead 2010: The Ultimate Job Search Guide.” He suggests that job seekers consider sending two e-mails: one with the resume pasted in and one with the resume pasted in as well as attached.
Cut and paste
If you plan to paste the resume into an e-mail, Kabell recommended starting the e-mail with a brief introduction of yourself, one that’s “much more succinct than a traditional cover letter. I would recommend two paragraphs of two to three lines each, maximum.”
At the end of the brief introduction, indicate that you’ve pasted in your resume following your signature. If you’ve also attached it, write that you’ve attached your resume and have also pasted it in after your signature.
Then, below your name and contact information, paste your resume. Some tips on formatting the text:
  • Keep each line short – between 45 and 60 characters – in case the recipient can only receive plain-text e-mails and not HTML
  • Use spaces instead of tabs for indenting
  • Instead of bolding text, set off headings with rows of equal signs, and use capitalization to emphasize text:
=======Resume=======
How to evade spam folders
If you are concerned about being caught by the spam filter, there are a number of ways to ensure your e-mail squeaks through:
  • Instead of attaching your resume, paste it into the body of the e-mail.
  • Keep exclamation marks out of the subject line and body of the text, Kabell recommends.
  • Don’t use any words in the document or headline that could be misinterpreted by the spam filters as something inappropriate, said Barbara Safani, owner of Career Solvers, a career.coach and executive recruiting firm.
Write an attention-getting subject header
“A great way to get a hiring professional’s attention with the subject line is to identify an issue or offer a solution,” Kabell said. She cited this example of an attention-grabbing subject header: “Re: reducing operating expenses by 15%” if you’ve in fact done that in the past, or “Re: Obtaining Wal-Mart as a client” if you have a working relationship with a buyer from Wal-Mart.
And finally, make sure you follow up by e-mail or phone to ensure your resume was received and accepted.
2012
09/29
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Spiritual…and immature


Today’s post is a great article that I got in my email recently from Joe McKeever. I read it and was like ‘wow, this is so good! I need to make sure that this doesn’t describe me!’ Hope it makes you think, too. 
Enjoy,
DK

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.” (I Corinthians 13:11)
Yesterday, filling the pulpit for a pastor-less church near my home, I told the congregation, “The best thing that can happen to your new pastor is to discover that the leadership of his new church is made up of mature and godly adults in the faith. He’s going to get some good work done here.”
“And the worst thing that can happen to him–something that will frighten him as badly as anything imaginable–is to learn that the leadership of the church is immature. Getting anything done is going to be slow and difficult and at great risk.”
A friend was telling me about her parents. “I had the misfortune,” she said teasingly, “of being raised by two adults.” That is, as opposed to immature parents who were still working out issues of their own identity and life-purpose. Such a child is blessed indeed.
Every church needs a healthy portion of immature members. After all, new believers start out as spiritual babies with a world of learning and growing ahead. No one is born fully grown.
What your church should never do, however–what no church should do–is to place spiritual babies in positions of leadership. Do that, and the news is all bad. The pastor will grow old before his time, the congregation will be in a constant turmoil from the bickering of these refugees from the church nursery, and the church’s outreach ministries will grind to a halt.
Never elect a spiritual baby to anything. If you must give him or her an assignment, see that they are surrounded by a team of godly and mature members who will keep the ship on course.
What spiritual immaturity looks like:
A spiritual infant looks and acts a lot like human infants. They’re self-centered, cry-babies, impatient, helpless, noisy, and messy.
1) Spiritual infants are self-centered.  They arrive at church thinking, “What can I get out of this?” Then, they sometimes leave saying, “I didn’t get a thing out of that today.” Church is all about them.
2) Spiritual infants are noisy. They cry a lot, particularly when they don’t think their needs are being met.  The church leadership presents a plan for reaching young adults in the community and the senior adults immediately complain that the church plans to abandon them. That’s immaturity on display.
The leadership asks the church to fund a mission project and someone complains that the girls’ bathroom needs remodeling with that money.
The story of the Israelites in the wilderness is one instance of griping and complaining after another. Poor Moses had to babysit hundreds of thousands of God’s infants for a full generation. No wonder pastors admire Moses so much and identify with him so readily.
3) Spiritual infants are messy. Toddlers do not clean up after themselves. That’s someone else’s job.  On Sunday night after everyone has vacated the premises, walk around the church building and you’ll know in a heartbeat whether the congregation is mature or immature.
4) Spiritual infants are impatient. The crying baby cannot be told that the milk is warming and should be ready in a few minutes. He wants what he wants and he wants it five minutes ago.
“Why did you leave that church?” “We were not having our needs met.” Ever heard that? This is the customer/provider approach to Kingdom work. The church is there to provide services which members pay for with their offerings; if the services are inferior, they withhold their money or even leave. Such is the nature of carnal devotion.
5) Spiritual infants are defined by what they cannot do. They cannot cooperate, cannot submit to others, and cannot understand deep things. They are unable to apologize and mean it, and resist sharing.
They cannot see far away. Suggest the church join the local association or send money to missions, and they respond, “Why? What does it do for us?”
6) Spiritual infants are explosive and can “go off” at anything. They were in the hospital and the pastor did not visit them, so they drop out of church. They worked hard on that project and got no recognition from the pulpit so they are ready to quit.
7) Spiritual infants are irresponsible. They’re great at expecting a lot from others and nothing from themselves. They always know who is to blame for all that’s wrong in the church.
It’s the nature of the immature to be childish. It’s the natural order of things for babies to be infantile. We’re not saying otherwise. We love babies.
Babies can love and laugh and add a great deal to any gathering. The biggest huggers in any church and the ones most likely to call out a hearty ‘amen’ to the sermon are the newer members, those “fresh in from the cold.” They add a lot to the church.
But we don’t want to keep our children as toddlers forever. They should grow.
We’re not against spiritual babies; we just say don’t turn over the church to them and that everyone goes through that developmental stage.
But to remain a baby forever is unnatural.
Growing into maturity is the natural order of things. “By this time you ought to be teachers,” the writer of Hebrews said to some unnamed disciples. “But you need to return to the first grade and start over with the basic truths of the kingdom” (Hebrews 5:12; my paraphrase).
We don’t tell our babies to grow. It’s the natural order. If we feed and nurture them, protect and care for them, they will grow.
Spiritual growth is a choice.
We grow spiritually into Christlikeness by the choices we make–whether to read the Bible and pray, to obey the Lord in a particularly difficult situation, to give our tithes when finances are tight, to share our faith when doing so might be uncomfortable, to resist temptation when its pull was so strong.
We choose to grow by making right choices. And, when we make the wrong choices we choose not to grow. We feel lazy on Sunday mornings and decide to sleep in; we are deciding not to grow.  We decide to spend God’s money on ourselves rather than give it in church; we decide not to grow. We go a week without serious attention to the Word of God; we are sentencing ourselves not to grow.
To use Eugene Peterson’s phrase, spiritual growth takes place as a result of “a long obedience in the same direction.”
“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (II Peter 3:18).
Discovered: a human growth hormone for Christians!
Athletes get in trouble for taking HGH, artificially created chemicals designed to speed up the growth of new tissues, bones, and muscle.  The football player weighed 185 pounds a year ago, but now he tops out at 265. Something is bad wrong; look for HGH in his system. This is bad and does serious injury to his longtime health.
However, there is a way for God’s children to speed up the maturity process, to grow at a much faster clip than is normally the case.
But you won’t like it.
It’s called persecution.
When believers are persecuted for the faith, when they are harassed and tormented, and some even killed, when being identified as a follower of Jesus Christ subjects one to all kinds of opposition and humiliation, the Lord’s people decide in a hurry to what extent they believe Him and believe in Him, and how important He is to them.
The faithful who persevere in difficult times grow much faster than those who live in safe societies where serving Christ costs them little or nothing. They have to.
But I wouldn’t want to volunteer for persecution. There are easier ways–not to say more survivable ways!–to grow in the Lord.
2012
09/26
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Did Jesus have a wife?


The news has blown up recently over a little bit of paper that apparently has Jesus referring to a ‘wife’ but, what’s the truth about Jesus and his marital status? Well, the great folks at http://www.gotquestions.org have gotten on top this issue, and I want to share it with you.

Enjoy!

DK


Question: “Was Jesus Christ married? Did Jesus have a wife?”

Answer: The recent discovery and translation of the fourth-century “Jesus’ wife papyrus” has reopened the discussion as to whether Jesus had a wife / was married. The “Jesus’ wife papyus” says, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …’” This discovery is interesting in that it is the first Gnostic writing to explicitly state that Jesus had a wife. While a couple of the Gnostic gospels mention Jesus having a close relationship with Mary Magdalene, none of them specifically state that Jesus was married to her or to anyone else. Ultimately, it does not matter what the “Jesus’ wife papyrus” or Gnostic gospels say. They have no authority. They have all been proven to be forgeries invented to create a Gnostic view of Jesus.

If Jesus had been married, the Bible would have told us so, or there would be some unambiguous statement to that fact. Scripture would not be completely silent on such an important issue. The Bible mentions Jesus’ mother, adoptive father, half-brothers, and half-sisters. Why would it neglect to mention the fact that Jesus had a wife? Those who believe/teach that Jesus was married are doing so in an attempt to “humanize” Him, to make Him more ordinary, more like everyone else. People simply do not want to believe that Jesus was God in the flesh (John 1:1, 14; 10:30). So, they invent and believe myths about Jesus being married, having children, and being an ordinary human being.

A secondary question would be, “Could Jesus Christ have been married?” There is nothing sinful about being married. There is nothing sinful about having sexual relations in marriage. So, yes, Jesus could have been married and still be the sinless Lamb of God and Savior of the world. At the same time, there is no biblical reason for Jesus to marry. That is not the point in this debate. Those who believe Jesus was married do not believe that He was sinless, or that He was the Messiah. Getting married and having children is not why God sent Jesus. Mark 10:45 tells us why Jesus came, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Do you want to learn about the true “wife” of Jesus? If so, please read our article on “What does it mean that the church is the bride of Christ?“
2012
09/21
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Eat that bacon, in Jesus’ Name!


So, after several days of again looking at the topic of homosexuality from different angles, I think it is time to transition away. One of my favorite questions in regards to the Old Testament has to do with pork. Specifically, why did God forbid his people to eat bacon…and ribs…and chops? Some people, like my wife, might even ask it this way: 
How could a good God withold bacon from those He loves?

HAHA, ok, that’s not exactly a serious question, yet in some ways it is. Some people struggle with if it’s ok to eat pork today, if it wasn’t good enough for God’s people. The question, I believe, is legit. So, we go back one more time to my favorite question answering website, http://www.gotquestions.org, and look at why you couldn’t eat pork under O.T. Law.

This, truely, enjoy!

DK


Question: “Why did the Old Testament Law command against the eating of pork?”

Answer: Many of the prohibitions and requirements in the Old Testament seem pointless to the modern Western mind. A case in point is the ban on eating pork (Leviticus 11:7). After all, to most people, a good pork loin served with apples and nuts makes for a very fine meal! Understanding the purpose of the Mosaic Law, generally, and the cultural view of swine in particular is essential to appreciating the dietary restriction on pork.

The Law given to the Israelites had a number of important purposes. Following God’s prescribed actions was not to be a simple ritual; rather, obedience to the Law expressed a strong internal faith in God and healthy fear of Him. Deuteronomy 30 records the blessings God would grant Israel if they followed Him and the curses He would enact if they did not. These blessings and curses were an integral part of the covenant between God and Israel, so the Law was the basis of a conditional covenant. Also, the Law stood as a unique sign of the privilege granted to Israel, setting them apart from their pagan neighbors.

The whole world in Moses’ time was idolatrous, with each nation believing in many deities. The forbidding of certain foods such as pork clearly distinguished between what would later be termed “Jew” and “Gentile.” The dietary restrictions further indicated that Israel was a separate nation, a chosen people, and this helped the Israelites to break free from idolatry—a sin they struggled with (see Exodus 32).

Under the Old Testament Law, even touching the meat of swine made one ritually unclean (Deuteronomy 14:8). This detail further insulated the Israelites from pagan practices. The Canaanites kept herds of swine and sacrificed them to idols. The connection between swine and pagan worship became so strong that the prophet Isaiah equated the sacrificial offering of pig’s blood with murder—both are called “abominations” (Isaiah 66:3).

Then there are the hygienic concerns related to the Law’s dietary restrictions. It is well known today that pork carries any number of diseases, and the meat requires stricter cooking techniques than other meats such as beef or poultry. In Moses’ day, there was no knowledge of microscopic pathogens, and the cultural norm was to eat raw or under-cooked meat (Leviticus 19:26). Of course, eating under-cooked pork would have posed a significant health threat to Israel, but God providentially protected them through the Mosaic Law. “If you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the LORD, who heals you” (Exodus 15:26).

Recommended Resource: Eat This and Live by Don Colbert, M.D..

2012
09/15
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