Jeff Mikels | …helping people find life in Christ.

An Open Letter to My Christian Friends About COVID

Dear friend, I know we share deeply divided opinions on all things COVID, but I want you to know that I’ve been trying really hard to see things from your perspective. I’ve been working to learn all I can about how you see the world, and I think I do understand you. I don’t blame […]

Real Talk: A Series of Letters to My Friends

Over the past two (really six) years, I have seen among my Christian friends, church members and family members an unhealthy, illogical, and hypocritical allegiance to unbiblical and un-Christlike matters. Both as a pastor and friend, I have tried at times to address these unbiblical allegiances. However, as I have done so, many of my […]

Does God Turn His Face Away?

One of the most misunderstood parts of the crucifixion story shows up at the very end of Matthew’s account: From noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land. About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why […]

Please, Church, Reject Trump (Transcript)

Today, I posted a video to my YouTube Channel imploring Christians to stand in opposition to Trump even if you choose to vote for him as the “lesser of two evils.” Here is the full transcript of my video. Good Morning Church! In today’s video, I’m calling on Christians to give up on Donald Trump. […]

Why I Voted for Trump and Why I Won’t Do it Again

I’m posting this on my personal blog. The viewpoint I share here is not necessarily the viewpoint of the church I serve as pastor nor is it a topic of my messages on Sunday mornings. Perhaps you like the Trump presidency. Perhaps you hate it. Your opinion matters, and the comment section below is open […]

On the Textual Reliability of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35

Before I talk about the issues with 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, I want to give a brief bit of information on the overall reliability of the text of the Bible. One of the fundamental truths about the text of the Bible is that we don’t have a 100% complete copy of the original text. However, a […]

Flat/Round Earth Experiments

Apparently, something like 200,000 people in the USA believe the Earth is flat. I’m personally quite bothered by this, but rather than rant on and on about Flat Earth theory, I decided I would just simply put down here absolute definitive methods for how a person who is skeptical of all scientific authorities can prove […]

ffmpeg compilation script for Ubuntu

Ubuntu doesn’t provide the latest ffmpeg or include the modules I use all the time, so I wrote a little script to automatically compile and install my own version: #!/bin/sh # https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/CompilationGuide/Ubuntu # SERVER COMPILATION SKIPS ffplay AND A X11 DEPENDENCIES echo ‘THIS SCRIPT USES SUDO, SO IT MIGHT ASK FOR YOUR PASSWORD’ sudo apt-get […]

WordPress Development Behind the Scenes

After doing some research into how to develop a WordPress site in a “staging” area behind the scenes before going public, I have finally stumbled upon an elegant and simple solution: Using a plugin like simply-static, convert all wordpress-generated data to static html files. Tell nginx to try those files first (unless there is a logged-in […]

Is it Discrimination to Discriminate against Discriminators?

My church office received an email today that called me out for what was printed in the local newspaper reporting on my involvement in the City Council meeting last Monday. A woman named Kathy wrote this: Dear Pastor Mikels, Reading the newspaper Tuesday morning, I felt quite sad to read about your objections to our community protecting […]

My Statement to the Lafayette City Council on Gender Identity

Last night, the Lafayette City Council met to consider putting an amendment into the Lafayette Human Relations Ordinance. Some time ago, the city codified a “Human Relations Ordinance” to fight against discrimination in our town. It created a Human Relations Commission tasked with the job of investigating cases of discrimination in our city and offering […]

Solving MMS Problems on Cricket Wireless

I have an android phone running on the Cricket Wireless network. I followed all their recommended settings, but I still had a major problem. The phone would not send or receive MMS messages when I was connected to Wi-Fi. Well, my solution was found on reddit, but I will just give you the quick summary […]

PG-13: Benefits of Eliminating Pornography

The views expressed in this video are not my own, but the scientific research is fascinating nonetheless. The video is not explicit, but it is not appropriate for children unless you use it as a teaching tool. As a pastor, I hear the stories all the time. One more guy is hooked on Internet […]

The Ethics of Superintelligence

Today, during my lunch, I watched a very interesting TED presentation from Nick Bostrom regarding machine intelligence and the difficult questions surrounding it. What I didn’t realize at the time was that Bostrom is a Philosopher more than an engineer. As a result, his talk ended up being about the ethical questions brought on by the […]

Bash // Create or Attach to Screen Session on Login

I use GNU Screen for everything I do in Linux… perhaps you do too, but perhaps you are annoyed that every time you log in to a terminal session on your Linux machine, you have to go through the one extra step of reconnecting to your screen session or checking to see if one is […]