Redeeming creation one byte at a time
Archive for September, 2007
Best…debate…moment…evah.
0You would do yourself an injustice by not watching tim Russert skewer Hillary Clinton at the Democratic Debate. It was phenomenal.
Airports and waiting.
0I love airports.
I think I’ve said this before, but there’s a draw from an engineering aspect and from a sociological aspect. They are places that are engineering marvels that are plugged in to the world, essentially. It’s still a deal to call someone long distance, but if you loose your luggage or need to find out what’s going on in another airport, I’ve seen people at gates call other terminals in other airports in a conversation that goes something like this:
Hi, this is Tim from Atlanta.
Hi, Phil, what’s the wait time for the gate in Dallas? 20 minutes. o.k.
Thanks, see you later Phil.
In a conversation that is akin to that of a co-worker, only they are 1000 miles away from you.
It’s also fun to see planes and people who may have started the day 100 miles away or even 1000 miles away.
It’s also a place of transience. They are incredible places of architecture that are seen for minutes at a time. Beauty that is permanent though yet not. In short I love airports; they’re just fun to be in.
Tonight was one of those occasions. Our church, whose passion it seems, is to adopt has started a bit of a tradition. For those that travel to pick up their children there is always a crowd of a 100 or so that show up to the airport to welcome people back home. Usually it involves cheering and lots of hugs, but tonight was something special.
Some good friends of ours adopted a girl from Guatemala and it’s been a while waiting for this to go through (18 months since the paperwork was finished). Tonight saw it’s completion. They arrived at the B-N airport to a large crowd of people. It was beautiful. After alot of hugs and encouragement we sang the Doxology and got a chance to visit.
I love airports.
Fun songs to open up your bike to.
0So, I got some exercise tonight and got to open up my bicycle and pedal like a madman. The song? Lange featuring Kirsty Hawkshaw – “Sincere for you”; it’s a great freaking song to keep pace to; too fun to just pedal like a madman too 
.
Just thought I’d share .
Half Time.
4I’ve passed a mile marker.
No longer on Likert scale items can I mark the 24-34 demographic. I’m in the next one.
Yikes.
I’ve been wanting to write this one well and it’s been brewing in my head for some time, and never being one to shirk from revealing my heart in my blog I think I finally have want I want to say down. Linford Deitweiler, part of Over the Rhine, wrote at length on turning the odd age of 35 here and I echo alot of what he said.
A friend of mine in insurance gave me the grave news that 35, statistically, is middle aged. Being the ace math genius I multiplied by two and discovered that he may be right…statistically. However, I think Deitweiler makes a point. The even grimmer reality is that today could be my last day on the planet, or tomorrow, or the next.
Craver, wrote a post (I can’t remember the exact link) about balloons and enjoying the moment.
It’s easy to dismiss this birthday as feeling a need to get a convertible, or grow long hair or pitifully seek some vestige of the illusion of youth. On the other hand, it’s not a sentence to throw away my CD collection, buy a van and start listening to Barry Manilow. O.k., so I’ve done one of those things…shutup!
However, I’ve found that this birthday has been really two things for me. It’s freed me to be less concerned about age and more concerned about identity. It may sound like a cop-out, but I’ve never felt more comfortable being me and understanding who I am and really being comfortable with my identity in Christ.
Truthfully, I’ve been dreading this barrier for a little while and it’s almost like ‘The Monster at the end of this book‘. I think that in my mind I was expecting seeing someone entirely different in the mirror in terms of values, goals, etc., a monster if you will. Like Grover, I’ve gotten here and realized that it is little ol me. I’ve realized that somehow God didn’t lie when he said he had my best interests in mind; that somehow I’m about where I want to be, doing about the right things and I’m about the business.
Speaking of, the second thing for this birthday for me has been a reafirmation of God’s will. I have told college students that during transitional phases that God’s will is like walking down a dark path and only being able to see 3 feet in front of their face. That being there is a good thing and that, as Bono said, ‘Uncertainty can be a guiding light’. I feel like right now we’re in one of those places; that I really don’t know what this time next year will look like functionally and that’s totally o.k. with me. The blunt, honest truth is that I’m happy to be doing God’s will for me right at the moment. I’m not sure where the next year is going to take us, but I’m happy to be right here now.
Finally, not in an effort to mix my metaphors, I’m reminded of a half time of a game. The second half is usually where anything can happen, where the game is still pretty much open and where people come out energized and ready to go. Down teams get a second chance, in close games opportunity abounds. Either way, the second half is about playing hard.
Sometimes lessons come late.
2
So, I’m sitting in my bed last night thinking about retirement; I mean really thinking about it. I’d almost say obsessing. Nevermind that I feel like we’ve made good choices and we’re working on getting there (yes, I think way ahead), but I was nevertheless just laying there thinking. This morning, after my 3.5 hours of sleep (yup) I realized something.
This past winter MJ and I attended Urbana 2006; a missions convention put on by InterVarsity (definately a must experience if you ever can do it) and one of the take homes for me was the area of Lordship over my future. Specifically, God really called me to rethink my obsession sometiems over planning the next 5-10 years and figuring out what it’ll look like. There’s healthy planning and then…well. Today, it really hit me the damaging effects of idols and obsessions. Essentially I lost sleep (partly due to work) thinking about this sort of stuff.Lessoned learned.
In other news, a lesson I’m working on with my class is online communication. I’ve assigned sections of Accounting 168 a social networking assignment (e.g. they *have* to blog in my class). I just caught a comment on one of the posts by a student and their friend asked them why they were doing such a silly assignment (or something close to that). I’d done this before on blogger, but bringing into the realm of communication and relationships of the students really has changed the face of the assignment; it hits home that people read and see what you post online. Essentially that’s my goal.
There’s a line in the movie ‘Thirteen Days‘ where one of the characters was chiding a general for shooting at a russian boat and he said ‘you’re communicating with them! You can’t just shoot, we’re communicating’; the idea being that the general was using old-school methods of communication in a new-school arena. Even though we won’t admit it, a huge problem now is the bumping of generations and methods of communication in social networking. Different generations use different mediated forms of communication and we’re at the point where they clash. Younger generations are more open, more willing to share but often indirectly think that things are still only amongst their friends or that online communication doesn’t last forever. On the other end of the spectrum are the baby boomers who are in the ranks of general distrust over mediated communication.
The middle is where I’m shooting for and I’m hoping my students (hi guys!) shoot for as well. That’s the purpose of the assignment; thinking through who/what you’re writing about, thinking through who is going to read it and adjusting accordingly. I have to admit that as I write this, I know of a list of about 10-12 non class people that will *probably read it*, maybe 15 or people from the class of near 30 will read it and that shapes how/what I will say. I also know there’s a group of people that shape their view of me entirely from my blog (not a horrible thing, by the way) and that necessitates that I be truthful about who I am to accurately portray myself to those people as well.
Anyway, it’s an interesting assignment that has some very subtle purposes and very specific goals. .