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You know everybody’s seen
The way you’ve waged this war against me
You thought that you’d be free
Looking back you lost what you need

These walls that you’ve built up
You knew, they’d all come collapsing around you
And I know
The suffering, it feeds away at your soul

The poison seeping deep within
You drink it down but it comes up again
The lie takes a hold onto
Don’t know where it ends or begins with you

The Suffering by Red

We’ve always loved Red in my house. My wife and I got engaged after a concert of theirs in Chicago back in 2009 and every album seems to just hit at the right time for me. I’ll be sharing some of the new album’s best this week.

Great discussion and suggestion around a topic du jour. Christian, you should not participate in their rituals. Be prepared to answer why you won’t.

Here is some war music to start your weekend.

Subgrid Changes Everything

For the frontenders out there, you’ve likely seen the news. Subgrid has shipped. It came to Firefox back in 2019, to Safari last year, and now Chrome has shipped it. If you haven’t been following, let me catch you up.

Tables

I got my starts in web development back around the turn of the century. Which was not that long ago. Promise. In those *barf* 20+ years, I have seen every major shift in how we lay out websites. When I started, we used tables still. It was gross, but we had no choice.

See the Pen Table Layout by James Finley (@thefinley) on CodePen.

For a table-based layout, you would start with a table to lay out your columns and rows and then nest child tables until you died in a nest of unmanagable code so you could get close to a complex layout. Luckily we never even considered people being on small screens back then.

Floats

At the end of the 1900’s— I just made a lot of people hate me— we got CSS and were told that it was for styling and format, while HTML was for semantics— describing the text and content of our page. Fair, but it had no true layout system. The closest it had was floats, which were really meant to allow you to have text wrap around an image. But we wanted a 6 column layout. So grid systems like 960.gs and Bootstrap were born to allow us to use utility classes to layout pages. Along with that, we entered an era where vertical was problematic— having all your columns match height in a row required very gross tricks. Oh, and clearfixes. Look it up if you need a refresher.

But, our HTML became a lot cleaner as we got to write less code and allow CSS to do it’s thing.

See the Pen Float Layout by James Finley (@thefinley) on CodePen.

Flexbox

For most of the 2000’s we got used to laying out pages using grid systems built on floats. At the end of the 2000’s, we got our next big shift: flex box. And right in time for the Responsive Web movement. Chrome rolled out support in 2010, Safari in 2008, Firefox in 2006. IE got it with version 10 in 2012, which truly opened us up to use it.

See the Pen Flexbox Layout by James Finley (@thefinley) on CodePen.

Flexbox getting solid support and version usage by 2013-2015 meant we could finally easily center things vertically and horizontally for the first time since tables. Over a decade of CSS and no real layout system, no we had one, but we also had grid right on the horizon.

Grid

IE was first to implement Grid in 2015 to the surprise of everyone. This was when Microsoft really started to show signs of caring for web developers and supporting standards with Edge 12. Where flexbox worked well for layout elements out in one dimension— either column or row— grid was a real, true two-dimensional grid system built right into CSS. March 2017 grid shipped in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. All at once within weeks of each other.

See the Pen Grid Layout by James Finley (@thefinley) on CodePen.

Instead of needing complex utility functions that did math, we now could tell a cell in a grid to start at column 1 and span 3 columns. And this has been are last 6 years of web development. I’ve been in this game for 20 years. Grid is a beautiful thing.

But.

Subgrid

The original spec, from my understanding, included something called subgrid and it was dropped from the original release. You see in the demo above of grid, the grid can only be used by direct children of the element with display: grid. For grandchildren, they are out of luck. Remember us nesting tables back in the 1900’s? Yeah, we had to go back to that. You have a six-column layout with a cell taking up four columns of that. You want to have four items inside that each take up one column? Yeah, those items don’t know about the grid, so you have to establish a four-column grid on their parent and use the calc function to mastery to get your gaps to align. Subgrid was supposed to allow you to pass the grid onto the children of a grid cell.

And now we are caught up to the present. Subgrid has shipped. Browser usage stats are going up. The demo below will work in anything after Chrome 117, Safari 16, and Firefox 17. Edge will get it soon, from my understanding.

See the Pen Subgrid Layout by James Finley (@thefinley) on CodePen.

Now we can truly lay out pages where everything sits in one grid. Blocks on the page can be logically and semantically separated while not making layout complicated and can still internally rely on one grid.

See the Pen Complex Subgrid Layout by James Finley (@thefinley) on CodePen.

Each of these major eras of web layout have changed the way we think, the amount of code we write, and what designers are able to design. During the float era having three equal height columns was a PITA. Vertically centering something was too. Grid allows some truly complicated layouts that we are still not scratching the surface on, but in many ways it was hampered by the lack of subgrid support for the last six years. Subgrid changes everything once again and I am more than excited for this new era in web layout design.

When the enemy says I’m done, I’ll lift my praises
When my world come crashing down, I’ll lift my praises high
‘Til the darkness turns to dawn, I’ll lift my praises
I choose to worship, I choose You now

Sometimes the dark is darker than dark. But as Psalm 139 reminds us, “even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.” The darkness cannot steal my song. Nothing can. Storms, floods, armies, and persecution can try but none of it can take my song. Why? Because it comes from the Lord. The Lord that is over all. So, as Chris Llewellyn beautifully writes, “I build my alter right here and now. In the midst of the darkest night it won’t burn out.”

I needed this song today. Maybe you do to.

The phrase means different things to different people. By and large, it has been the way of the West of centuries. Put a different way, most areas of disagreement do not constitute separation.

We deal with this in the church all the time, where Albert Mohler divides theological arguments into three tiers. First tier issues being orthodoxy and worth saying “you are not a Christian” over. These are matters of heresy. Second tier issues are matters that divide denominations, such as paedobaptism. We agree that we are both Christians, but we might not be able to go to the same church together. Third tier are the, what I call, long-beard issues. These are topics that are fun to discuss and debate, but have no affect on our salvation.

I say this to say that we need to think about what hills are worth dying on and realize that the majority of hills are not worth such acts.

This leads us back to the phrase: agree to disagree. When we agree to disagree on a specific topic, sometimes that looks like leaving the topic lay, knowing there is disagreement and being okay with it. There are other topics to discuss, after all. Other times we respectfully continue conversation around the topic because of a mutual desire to understand people we disagree with.

But the truth of the matter is that the existence of agreeing to disagree means that there are topics we cannot agree to disagree on. See first tier topics. For a Christian, this doesn’t mean that you hate— or show any less love for— the person you disagree with, it just means the disagreement is on a topic important enough to cut certain ties— in the context of these disagreements, the tie is the church, this individual is not allowed to lead or participate in certain ways in one’s church and could see church discipline, for instance. For instance, sometimes a disagreement can be on a topic important enough to prevent an individual from being around your children.

These are healthy things to do, but one has to weigh the importance of topics. As a Christian, we have to weigh these things against the Bible and our duties therein.

As a Christian, we are to go and spread the Gospel. To do that, you will be encountering people that disagree with you on the topics that are of most importance to you as a Christian every single day. If I cut ties with everyone that believed that children with Down Syndrome should be rooted out in the womb and murdered, I would be cutting ties with a lot of people that need Jesus. This ends in me being Amish, sequestered to a hundred acres in Arkansas with no Internet, no phone, and no contact with the outside world. Just me, my woodshop, and lots of laughing kids. Actually, that sounds great. But my Lord commands that I engage with the world.

But that is the Christian worldview. Lovingly living alongside men and women that disagree with us is part of the plan. It’s how we spread the Gospel. The worldview that is spreading through the West like wildfire is almost Darwinian: destroy those that you disagree with. Why would you continue to love someone that disagrees with you? You don’t need that kind of negativity in your life. And the result is that the bar for what is worth destroying a relationship, or possible relationship, is much lower for many. What used to clearly fall into “you are Jewish and I am Christian, but we can still be friends,” now lands in “you are Christian and I am trans, so we cannot be friends and I’ll call your manager on Monday to demand that they fire you.”

This is a worldview difference that is stark as we enter into an era of post-Christian society. Where a couple decades ago the atheists followed Christian principles, the new atheists most certainly do not. For many of them, not only are they not okay with agreeing to disagree on their topics, they will chase you down and harass you until you agree. That will come in the way of threats of violence against you, threats against your job, threats to destroy your reputation, threats to go after your children, and worse.

Some of those reading this have seen this form of disagreement either personally or close friends. Others think I am being sensational and hyperbolic. I assure you I am not. All those types of threats I mentioned in the last paragraph I have experienced personally in the last year.

Please Christian, be aware that persecution is coming in the States. If your job hasn’t been threatened yet, it will be sooner or later. You will get a call from HR and be told to defend yourself against baseless claims. If your children haven’t been used as collateral to get your obedience yet, they will be sooner or later. Hold to your faith and show grace in these situations. Look to the martyrs of old. Don’t waiver in your faith or your testimony.

Understand, Christian, that we are dealing with worldview differences so often now that it is becoming normal. Try to be peaceable in all things and know that many in our modern world have no intent on doing anything of the such. You are now the counterculture.

On Dragons and Darkness

Note: I wrote the following in June of last year in my journal. Many words were written in that journal that will not be published. Some were too personal, some too dark. But the following I believe should see the light of day.


Overwhelmed. It is a word that has consumed my life as of late. And I have been struggling to grasp it all. The darkness of the world caught up to me.

For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.

Ephesians 6:12 (RSV)

Our world. Seems like a whirlwind over the past couple decades. I started to see the slope when I entered college. And the world has slid. And slid. And slid. And those of us that go the opposite direction of the cliff are called crazy. But I am quick to point out to those baffled by the illogic of it all that we are arguing with the Dead. How can we expect them to reason?

Our battle? It is with the rulers of the darkness.

And that darkness. Until Christ returns that darkness is here to stay. And while light pushes back darkness, while the Church spreads the Light, at times it can feel that we are outnumbered. That we are outmatched.

But so was Gideon. And that was the point.

For we are not alone in the darkness. We are not to rely on ourselves in the darkness. We are with Christ and He with us.

In this present darkness, I have been thinking about monsters. Dragons, titans, fearsome beasts out to do nothing but destroy. It is hard to not look out into the night and wonder what is looking back. Knowing that our war is against the rulers of the darkness, I look out and know they look back. I shudder and hold to my torch.

Neil Gaiman wrote what he thought was a quote from GK Chesterton in saying:

Fairy tales are more than true;
not because they tell us that dragons exist,
but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

This was a bit of an oversummarization of GK1, but it gets to his point. As children we know that our world is scary. We do not have to be taught this. We know, just beyond the edge of the veil of darkness, monsters creep, waiting to devour us. We know the importance of light and staying by it, maybe if for no other reason but to be able to see what comes. Fairy tales teach us that we have a Savior fearless and ready to grab his sword, ready to ride into the darkness and return with the head of a dragon.

Yes, there are dragons just beyond sight, lurking, ready to ambush you. Flaming tongues ready to burn you alive. But behind you stands a Slayer of Dragons. His Sword sharp, His wit sharper. While our mortal frames are frail, we are given strength to battle monsters of an unseen realm.

So here I am. Overwhelmed by the darkness. The coals of my fire casting low flickers of light against the trees. Though my encampment is surrounded by the enemy, though the dragons lurk, I am safe in Christ. He sits by, sword at the ready. And in Him, I can persevere.

Footnotes

  1. GK Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles
    “The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it—because it is a fact. Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”

This young man is singing our song. I’m ready to go home.

Son, we’re on the brink of the next world war
And I don’t think nobody’s prayin’ no more
And I ain’t sayin I know it for sure
I’m just down on my knees

Beggin’, Lord, take me home
I just wanna go home
I don’t know which road to go
It’s been so long
I just know I didn’t used to wake up feelin’ this way
Cussin’ myself every damn day
People have really gone and lost their way
They all just do what the TVs say
And I wanna go home

Revival or civil war is looming. The dragons are creeping in closer and closer. The darkness wants nothing less than total victory. To snuff out the light. ”[P]ray for resolution, for resolve, for repentance, and for restoration.”

Our nation is running towards revival or civil war.

The hatred is crackling, the energy is raising, and everything is on edge. Either lightning strikes, the fire ignites, and people start killing each other or God drops us to our knees and a massive revival resets us. Very little can calm down the animosity that we are seeing.

Very little can reunite us.

I pray that God plans the prior.