Can you spare a nickel? I’m kicking off an experiment to see if I can raise enough money to buy myself a Macbook. But here’s the catch: I’m planning to raise the money entirely in nickels. Doing the math, the roughly $1,600 it will take to buy a Macbook works out to 32,000 nickels. So far I’ve got 6 nickels sitting in a cup on my desk. Hey, it’s a start!

So here’s the deal: I’m shamelessly asking you to toss five cents into my PayPal account. This money will not go to charity or a non-profit of any kind and is most certainly not tax-deductible. It will go straight into my pocket. You’ll get nothing in return for this, but hey, why do you care? It’s only a nickel. And that’s the whole point: I’m not asking for much—just a few seconds of your time and a nickel.

So, what are you waiting for? If you’ve got a PayPal account with a positive balance, please use this button right now to throw a nickel in my change cup:

Thanks!

Update: I’ve blogged about this again since this initial post. To follow my progress, see the following posts.

• “A nickel update” on August 21, 2008
• “More nickels” on September 9, 2008

I’m not sure why, exactly, but I’ve had this hymn on my mind a lot lately.

Lead, Kindly Light

by John Newton

Lead, kindly light, amid th’ encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on;
The night is dark and I am far from home;
Lead Thou me on;
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou
Should lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path; but now
Lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will. Remember not past years!

So long Thy Power hast blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on;
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!

(hat tip: Swirlee)

I’ve been tagged for one o’ them crazy memes. This one involves:

• Grabbing the nearest book.
• Turning to page 123.
• Quoting the fifth sentence on the page.

I’m sitting in the front room near a bookshelf full of books. Strictly speaking, there are four books that are nearly equidistant from me, so I’m going to quote the requested passage from all four of them.

From Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible:

Thus the correspondence was to be first settled by a sensible appearance of the divine glory, which was afterwards to be carried on more silently by the ministry of Moses.

From the Reformed Expository Commentary on Galatians by Philip Graham Ryken:

Even though he did not use these precise words, Paul obviously believed that the Bible is infallible and inerrant from beginning to end.

From Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology:

Because there is some common knowledge of right and wrong, Christians can often find much consensus with non-Christians in matters of civil law, community standards, basic ethics for business and professional activity, and acceptable patterns of conduct in ordinary life.

And the wildcard in the bunch, from Richard Lyman Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling:

The revelation on the millennial gathering brought all the routine activities of everyday life into question.