Growing up is weird.

Today I find myself at Pepperdine University, at the annual Bible Lectures. My family and I have been coming to the Lectures for over 20 years, with only a couple of breaks. It’s part learning, part Church of Christ family reunion, part vacation.

I graduated from this campus 19 years ago, and there is still a feeling of coming home when I visit. More and more, though, it’s feeling like a house I used to live in, with new residents who have no idea who I am. This year, it’s even more true, since several of the most familiar and dear faces are absent. Some folks are in the process of moving, some are very bogged down with work and family projects, a few have fallen ill at the moment, and others are traveling elsewhere. The first two familiar faces I saw on campus called me by the wrong name, which was a little unsettling. It feels a bit like the place has forgotten me.

On the other hand, there are many friends here, and some acquaintances I have made that I get to talk with once a year, here at the Lectures. Some people recognize my name and face from Worship Forum, and others I have met at the ZOE Group conferences. I’m also here with my wife and kids, and there are several folks from our church here. So it’s not as if I’m feeling lonely or abandoned.

I am a bit reflective, though, about the change in my identity over the years. I used to see myself as so much a part of the Pepperdine community. Now I still am, but only indirectly. I used to be identified as “Garey and Gerry’s son,” and I’m finding more places where they are identified as “Tim’s parents,” instead. I used to be just another member at our church, and now I’m enough of a loud mouth that some think of me as a leader there.

I suppose the point is that I never realized how long growing up was going to take. Wasn’t I supposed to be grown up by 21 or so, or at least by 30? Now I’m 41, almost 42, and am still getting a handle on being an adult.

My son, who is 9, was recently lamenting how much harder is life as a 4th grader is than it was when he was two or three years old, and wishing he could go back. I didn’t want to tell him that it only gets crazier as you get older. He’d probably curl up into a fetal position and start sucking his thumb. I know I sometimes want to.

If I did, though, I would be failing to value the things that God has taught me through my life, and would also not recognize the things that He has done with me over the past 41, almost 42, years. Growing up is His design, and I need to be more thankful for it than I am, sometimes. On balance, all the responsibilities I have to attend to are probably offset by all of the talents I have and skills I have developed by His grace.

Well, by those things, and by outgrowing zits.

How bright is the future?

This week our school district is doing it’s Standardized Testing. Oh, thrill, oh, joy. I’ve got my issues with these things; the performance of the students determines a lot of funding issues for the district, and the individual schools, but the tests results have very little impact on the students themselves. That means that the schools all have to teach the kids to do well on the tests, instead of being able to concentrate on teaching the kids to do their best as individuals. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but where money is involved, guess which one has to take a bit of a back seat?

I believe strongly that a child will learn more and perform better in life (including on tests) if their parents show at least some interest in their education; the more interest and concern and cooperation a parent gives their kids schooling, the more likely the kids are to do well in school and in life. This isn’t an earth-shaking revelation, of course, it’s a pretty commonly-known fact. My point is that I’m not as concerned with my kids performance on these tests, since it doesn’t affect their grades. I am far more concerned with them acquiring the skills it takes to excel in life, including life within academia.

As a somewhat-involved parent, I volunteered to proctor some of the tests. This means that I show up and wander watchfully through the room, making sure kids are filling in the right bubbles, staying on the right pages, not looking around at others work (though the format makes cheating very difficult), and generally staying on track. It involves encouraging smiles, warning looks, and, unfortunately, absolutely no smacking of hands with wooden rulers.

This morning, as I was proctoring in a 5th-grade class, I gave in to the diversion of trying to guess which kids would finish first, and which ones would be falling asleep. It was interesting to see how wrong I was in some respects. I was looking at the kids from the front of the room, and I was suddenly struck by the fact that they were all so focused and intent on their tests. There was very little staring around the room blankly. They were quiet and ready to work, and did a very good job of working their way through the material. Out of 26 kids, only 4 needed a little more than the allotted time to finish.

Then I got to thinking about the potential of these kids, the possibilities that will they will have available to them. Some will be able to take advantage of the opportunities that come their way, and some won’t. Some will work hard, and some won’t. Some will succeed, and some will fail, and some won’t care.

I suddenly found myself praying for them. “Lord, bless these kids with Your presence. Give them opportunities to do great things. Help them to overcome anything that gets in their way. Give them courage for difficult times, and make them generous when times are easy. Send Your people to encourage them and bless them, and help them to see You all around them. Give their parents extra wisdom to guide them in the right direction. I know that some of them are in bad situations now, or will be someday; people will hurt them, people will abuse them, people will push them down. Lord, lift them up and keep them whole, so that they can find their way to You and be healed.”

I prayed in this way for a good part of the test, wondering what God would do with each of them. Some of them, I know, will never give themselves to God -- some will never have the chance, and others will run away from God. I don’t know what good my prayers will do, but I just figured it was important to give them whatever I could, aside from the encouraging smiles and warning looks.

If you have a chance, find a school that needs volunteers. Go in and ask if there’s anything you can do for them. They may look at you funny if you don’t have a kid going to that school. They have to be careful, of course. Perhaps, though, you can find a way to be a blessing, anyway. Be persistent in offering your help. And pray for the school, for its students, and its staff. Ask God to let you become a blessing to them, and watch what He does with you.

Gotta get this out of my head

I’m blaming my Uncle Roger for this one...

Camp Food
To the tune of “Bicycle Built For Two”

Camp food, camp food,
The food that makes rats afraid.
I’ll bet tramp food
Would taste more like mom’s homemade.
The hot dogs are boiled for hours,
The milk is so old it sours,
The butter’s lard,
The bread is hard,
And the kitchen is dirty, too.

Someday, someway,
Someone will hear my plea;
Serving camp food
Should be a felony.
I’ll give them my testimony;
I’ll show them the camp’s baloney
As evidence
Of negligence
On the part of the camp’s cook crew.

About 30 years ago (and it still shocks me to realize that I remember stuff that long ago), we found that in an issue of Mad Magazine, not long before we were to go to a church camp. My uncle Roger, who is less than 10 years older than I am, was with us that summer, and we decided that it’d be fun to sing that song at campfire one night. Roger wrote the words down in a notebook he was taking with him. Of course, by the time he’d written it, we’d all sung it through twenty kajillion times, and pretty well had it committed to memory.

As it turned out, the food at camp was pretty good. My mom and several other amazing ladies did a fantastic job of cranking out good food for over a hundred people in a makeshift kitchen in a wilderness campground, and nobody was complaining about it, except for those who didn’t have another notch to let out in their belt! We decided not to sing the song, since it didn’t make sense, and because we realized that we’d have to go to that same kitchen crew for our meals during the rest of the camp!

Roger, however, still had his notebook there, and one time left it at the campfire circle one afternoon. Someone was collecting the items left there and looked through the notebook to try to figure out whose it was. They found Roger’s name, but they also found the words to the song. The next morning at breakfast, Roger got a very special stack of pancakes, with paper from his notebook cooked into them. It never pays to even think about insulting the kitchen crew!

We all had a good laugh, even Roger. I, unfortunately, am still suffering with the words stuck in my head, so I suppose the last laugh is on me.

An update about MacJournal

I mentioned just over a month ago that I’d be trying out MacJournal to edit and manage my blog entries. It was a bit frustrating, as the thing didn’t always upload my entries to blogger.com and publish them correctly.

This afternoon I launched it again, and it notified me that an update was now available, so I downloaded it and tried it out. It seems to be behaving itself much better now. I’m a much happier individual.

The actual interface itself, if you were just using it as a personal journal, is very good, with a list of the entries in your journal, and a calendar showing what dates you write entries on. You can save out any journal entries to RTF, PDF, Word, web pages, plain text, and a couple of iPod-happy formats.

There is also this “full screen” mode, which gives you green text on a black screen (or your own customized color scheme), with nothing else on your Mac showing up. I guess that’s for those of us who are easily distracted by other windows on our screen, like those for any work we’re supposed to be doing. For me, it’s not really compelling, but it’s kinda cool.

I don’t know which feature I like better: being able to write while offline and post later, or being able to see all of my entries contained in a program on my computer, rather than having to go into the archive links on blogger.com. Being able to download all of my existing entries in my blog (or any new ones I make outside of MacJournal) is an extremely handy feature. It’s definitely a better writing tool than the web interface, and much cleaner than writing in Word or TextEdit, then copying it to blogger.com.

I’m establishing my ratings scale here, in terms of hot peppers:
• Bell peppers - not so hot; skip it
• Pepperoncini - mild; worth having sometimes
• Jalapeño - hot; good for anything you’re doing
• Habañero - smokin’; so good it hurts

So I’m calling the current beta (4.0.b4.1) “jalapeño” for now. If the release version maintains its quality, I might even upgrade it to “jalapeño-and-a-half” status!

After a trip to Arizona

My family and I took off for Arizona last Monday, since the kids were out of school for Spring Break. We flew to Phoenix, drove to Sedona, and visited the Grand Canyon. It was a fun trip, though a bit too short to really relax enough to call it a vacation.

A few thoughts:

• Arizona drivers like their speed limits low, and like to observe them. It was a bit of a shock to this California driver’s system.
• We rented a GPS navigation unit with the car. Why haven’t I already gotten one of these things? It was way fun. I didn’t need it, as I’m really good with maps and planning out routes already, but how much more fun to program in a location and let the little box give me directions! If I’d been able to connect it with my laptop, it would have been even more fun, but I guess I’ll have to buy my own for that.
• On the drive from Phoenix to Sedona, we stopped by the Montezuma Castle National Monument. My son was really excited, because he’s been studying a lot about Native Americans in school, and the Sinagua of Arizona were new for him.
• Sedona itself reminds me a little of Malibu; touristy, but enough “local gathering places” in the middle of the tourist areas to make it seem less so. Of course, I’ll take the beach over the red rocks anyday.
• The Grand Canyon -- wow. That’s one big hole in the ground. I’ve seen pictures so many times, but a picture really cannot do justice to the size of the place. It’d be fun to have a week or so to see all the places around the rim, and get a chance to hike down in. We had an afternoon to gawk and take pictures, but it was still memorable.
• Why in the heck do overpriced lodging establishments charge so stinking much for wireless internet access while you’re there? The installation and maintenance costs of the connections are so small, there’s no justifiable reason to charge just for that. In fact, adding on the software to manage the pay-to-surf connection only adds to the cost of the system, and adds to the cost of running it. Save some money, folks -- make it free! And if you’re not going to make it free, at least make it possible to use dialup from the rooms!
• The Phoenix airport has consolidated all of their rental car operations into a terminal a couple of miles from the airport. This, I suppose, makes it a little less crowded at the airport, but other than that, I can’t see much of an advantage for the traveler. We had to find the shuttle, ride 10 minutes, then walk into the rental terminal (big enough to be an airport in itself!), and wait in line 45 minutes at the Alamo desk. It was less than welcoming.

The high point of the trip for the kids was the swimming pool at the condo where we were staying. They’d have stayed anywhere there was a pool. The high point for me was the Grand Canyon. A very close second is that we got to make three visits to Cracker Barrel while we were traveling. I’m a fried okra an turnip green addict, and I’m not ashamed to admit it!

Too... much... information

Found this link to an article on The Cure for Information Overload. Good reading; a bit intense, but worth the time.

Enjoy!

My favorite quote for today.

From The Quotations Page today:

“Actions lie louder than words.”
- Carolyn Wells

Trying a new blog tool

I’m checking out the beta version of MacJournal 4, a journal application that supports posting to blogs. I’ve been looking at it for a while, since MacWorld Expo, because this new version not only lets you post, but will also download all the existing entries from a blogger.com blog and let you keep them on your system. That’ll be useful if I ever decide to move off of blogger to some other tool.

I recently came across mention of WordPress, and have been impressed with its feature set. For the hardcore blogger who wants to blog with lots of multimedia, it’s looks like a good tool. And I found out that the hosting service I use for my own website has it available as a plug-in to an existing site. I may do that at some point, even though I don’t think I’ll get to doing multimedia stuff.

Why not, you ask? Why wouldn’t a dyed-in-the-wool technology addict like me want to add podcasting, video blogging, or at least photocasting to my site? Well, frankly, I’m just more comfortable working only in words. Besides that, I’ve got a great face for radio, and a great voice for silent movies. When I started my blog, started out by admitting that, “...the only reason a person blogs is because their ego succumbs to peer pressure.” If I decided that people wanted to see my mug and/or hear my voice, I think even my ego would laugh itself to death.

Anyway, this is my first post using MacJournal. I’m hoping it will make it just that much easier to write, so I’ll post more. ‘Cause my ego is telling me that you all want to hear more of my ramblings.

Mind you, it’s giggling when it says that. It must be watching something amusing on TV.

A good pour...

[DISCLAIMER] I wrote this about four years ago, and sent it to my brother and my friend John. John reminded me of it today, and suggested that I post it. Such a smart boy. Now that I'm spending entirely way too much time studying and writing for another class at church, it seems even more appropriate to bring it out again.[/DISCLAIMER]

Last week, I took my reading for the class I'm teaching with me and went to dinner by myself. I decided to go to Harry's Hoffbrau -- the corned beef was calling my name. By the way, the horseradish sauce they serve there is done by Beaverton Foods (in the Portland, OR, area), and it kicks butt! Good burn, good flavor.

Anyway, I got my tray and went into the back area, then popped over to the bar to get a Guinness. The barkeep was in the middle of pouring two pints for other sots; he'd started a minute or so before, let the glass fill partway, let it settle, then came back to finish the pour. I was quite impressed with his style, and started drooling a bit. As he went to take the pints to the lucky slobs who'd ordered them, the guy who had dished up my corned beef came back behind the bar and said, "Okay, Sam, break time!"

AAARRRRGGHGHH! The chap smiled at me and said, "What can I get you?" I said, "Guinness, please," and prayed that he'd be as good at pouring the mahogany nectar... but, alas... he poured it as if it were just another glass of Bud.

Sam, however, had not left yet. As Bud-boy turned to ring me up, he asked Sam how to use that particular register (apparently a new, second one at the bar). Sam came over to help him, and fortunately for me, saw the freshly-mangled pint that Goofus had profaned, and asked him, "Have you ever poured a Guinness before?"

"Yeah, over in Mountain View," was the reply.

Sam didn't comment, but asked the offender to go get some change before taking over. The little turd oozed away, glad to be of help. I stayed, glad to have my pint of blessing back in the hands of someone who KNEW.

Sam said, "Let me see if I can fix this up." He proceded to pur out most of the top half of the glass -- all foam -- and then slowly to complete a very nice pour of Guinness. I said a tearful "Thank you" to him. He smiled and said, "Remind me never to go over to Mountain View."

Amen, brother. A-men!

Ick. I'm sick.

The day after my last post, I started coming down with a nasty head cold. I'm still feeling lousy. I got it, I believe, from my daughter, who was sick and who is ever one to share anything she has... So I have been congested, feverish, achy, headachy, coughing, sneezing, and generally unable to sleep more than an hour or so at a stretch for four days now. 

Can a geek get a "There, there, poor dear?"

This is, of course, of no great interest to anyone except the poor souls who have to put up with my grouchy self (i.e., my family) and the makers and vendors of cough, cold, and pain remedies, all of whom have no doubt seen a marked bump in their profit, owing to my rabid consumption of their products. There is a corresponding dip in the profits of vendors and distributors of coffee, since I have had absolutely no desire for any since coming down with this mess.

To me, the worst thing about being sick like this is the total inability to concentrate on all the trivial and useless pursuits that usually bring me such joy and hours of diversion. Things like TV, or reading geek news, or doing Sudoku, or reading sci-fi novels. I suppose it is bad enough that I don't feel good enough to do the things I really need to do, but the indignity of not being up to do the things I usually do to avoid productivity is just too much.

Makes me wanna go cry in my NyQuil.

Mops and ministry

I had an interesting experience in ministry today. Well, maybe "interesting" isn't the right word.

I've been spending some time during the week at our church building, studying for the class I'm teaching and doing some administrative stuff for the worship ministry. I was getting ready to update our song database, and pulling some filed song sheets in our workroom, when I noticed a pretty bad smell. Brian, our minister, had mentioned a few minutes earlier that the toilet in the bathroom off of his office had overflowed, and he had spent a few minutes mopping it up. There is also a bathroom off of the workroom. Its toilet had overflowed, as well, and without getting too graphic, let's just say it was yucky.

Obviously, we have a systemic problem, plumbing-wise.

Now, I'm not on staff. I'm not involved in the building & grounds ministry. I don't even need to be at the building, I can take the materials and work elsewhere. But I'd be a real jerk if I didn't do something to clean up the problem, myself. Brian would have done it, but should I expect someone else to clean it up, when I'm capable and available? I'm a part of this church family, and I ought to be willing to pitch in for things like this.

Granted, I hated this part of working in restaurants when I was in high school, and that's one of the main reasons I was motivated to get an education and make a living as far away as possible from a mop.

But Brian's position as our minister doesn't qualify him to do this any more than my status as a sometimes-volunteer. He's got a Bachelor's degree in Bible, a Master's in Religion, and a PhD. in Communications -- that'll earn you a free trip away from mop-land, even more than my Bachelor's degree, if anything will.

But, as I said to him as I was cleaning, "It's all part of full-time ministry."

Because even though I am not a "full-time minister," in terms of employment at our church, my status as Jesus' disciple makes me a full-time minister of reconciliation, and with that job comes a lot of opportunities to serve. Sometimes those opportunities look like teaching, sometimes like leading worship, sometimes like counseling, and sometimes like doing technology stuff around the building. But sometimes, it looks like a mop.

Too many Christians are very willing to let someone else do the dirty work, whether it's plunging toilets, mopping floors, teaching Sunday School, carrying food baskets to a shelter, listening to someone who is asking for help, or reaching out to tell people about God.

Obviously, we have a systemic problem, service-wise.

So, what about you? Have you mopped up anything messy lately? Have you overlooked an opportunity to free someone else from an undesirable task, even though it's not your job?

Just something to think about on a Wednesday.

Et tu(nes), Amazon?

Regarding the story that broke yesterday about Amazon working to develop their own competitor to iTunes, and even an Amazon-branded MP3 player:

Is it just me, or does this count as another "ho-hum" for Apple? Virgin said they were going to do the same thing, and we haven't heard a peep about it since the announcement. The only advantages Amazon might have is that the companies they're planning to partner with have a boatload of titles that people might actually want, and their database technology will probably adapt to the music store task very well. Other than that, it's pretty much going to be just another potential source of stuff to put into iTunes.

If they were to come up with their own branded media player app for both Windows and Mac (and really, why even try on the Mac?), I doubt it'll convert anyone from iTunes. Having to re-import your library and playlists would be enough of a deterrent for me.

As for another hardware device, have they learned nothing from watching Sony, the inventor of the personal media player (by way of the Walkman), flounder in the digital music space? If Sony (who used to be coolest-of-the-cool) can't keep up, and Creative (the only other company whose players you can buy just about anywhere) runs a distant second to the iPod, why is introducing another device into the market going to get them anywhere?

Besides that, if you're walking around with an MP3 player bearing the Amazon logo, you're GONNA get razzed. "Did you win that player in a contest? Was it a freebie for buying a bunch of books or something? What's with the logo?" It'll look like a cheap "me-too" product iPods have the cool factor mindshare locked down, which is why they have the market locked down.

To the music-buying public, Amazon is a guy in business-casual attire, ready and willing to sell you CDs and books. Apple is one of those silhouettes in their ads, dancing around with reckless abandon, listening to the beat of their own personal drummer. And the music-buying public thinks that Amazon guy, while he can get you just about anything you can think of asking for, doesn't know what's cool. The silhouette guy can tell you what stuff is cool, and help you show off that you're cool, too. The music-buying public is, by and large, all about being cool.

I don't blame Amazon for jumping into the space, though -- even if they bleed off only a percentage point or two off of Apple/iTunes/iPod, that's still a significant chunk of change. They'll make some money off the deal, perhaps.

Now if it were Google announcing this, it might work up a little sweat in a certain Cupertino executive suite. But then, Apple could just buy Google and solve that problem. Right after they buy Disney.

The Parable of the Lost Sheep, Retold

Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Once he notices that they haven’t been around lately, he stands by the sheep fold, shouting, “Sheep! Here, sheep! Come home, Fluffy, come home!” Then, he looks around, wondering if he’s done something wrong, something to offend the one who wandered off, and he tries to think of what it will take to keep any of the other ninety-nine from leaving.

After a while, he decides that he’ll just have to live with it. If God had meant him to have all one hundred sheep, after all, then God wouldn’t have let that one sheep wander off. Perhaps, the shepherd thinks, he wasn’t given the gifts to lead all one hundred, and he should lower his sights to having only ninety-nine sheep, and accept what God has given him. God bless that lost sheep; he probably just wandered into another fold, where he’ll be taken care of, just fine.

------------------

I think that I'm done with thinking that my church isn't supposed to be very evangelistic, because we don't have anyone really gifted in it. Well, maybe it's better to say that I'm done with thinking that I'm not supposed to be very evangelistic, because I'm not that gifted in it. The parables in Luke 15 tell us that God is willing to go to extreme measures to bring every individual back to him. If we're going to be like Him, shouldn't we follow this example, too?

I'm not saying that giftedness isn't relevant. I'm just saying that ignoring the mission of every Jesus-follower -- to point the way to God -- misses the point of the gifts we have. Our gifts aren't just for encouraging other believers, they are for drawing as many people to God as we can.

I read an illustration last night of the point. At the firehouse, each of the firemen has various duties to do when they're not fighting fires. One cooks, one cleans, another maintains the equipment, another feeds the dalmation... But those duties aren't their job; their job is to fight fires. When fighting fires, they also have their various roles, based on their training.

So it is with us as Jesus-followers; our job is to point the way to God. How we do that is largely influenced by our gifts and skills. What we do the rest of the week (jobs, school, hobbies) is secondary, even though it may take up most of our time.

I've got some re-thinking of my gifts to do. I have been letting myself get away with thinking that because my gifts have more to do with things that happen on Sunday mornings, that my time is best used on that, and not on reaching out to people who need to know God. I need to find out how to apply my gifts to serving others.

So how does a big-mouthed, music-loving, computer geek with aspirations as a writer do this? I'll let you know as it happens.

Thoughts on evangelism

I have been thinking a lot about the topic of evangelism lately, mostly because I am preparing to teach a series of lessons on it at my church. One of the ideas I am struggling to express has to do with the goal of evangelism, or rather, some things that are NOT the goal of evangelism, but that have been mistakenly stated as goals of evangelism. First among them, in my mind, is the myth that we need to “convert people” in order to increase attendance in our churches, and therefore the contributions given. That’s just plain idolatry. Maybe I’ll write about that some other time.

The issue I’m thinking about right now is that we have acted like the goal of evangelism is to earn favor with God. The myth says that the number of souls we “save” is directly proportional to the quality of our faith. It says, “If you’re a really GOOD Christian, you’ll convert a lot of people.” Further, it says, “If you’re not converting people, you must not be a very good Christian.”

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it assumes we can do anything to earn more favor with God. From what I read in the Bible (without going into a lot of proof-texting here), God doesn’t love any of us better than any others; He loves all persons equally, even those who don’t put their faith in Him. The point of following God isn’t to “get in good” with him, but to be made over into His likeness, through Christ’s atoning sacrifice, and transformation by the Holy Spirit. Being saved isn’t about the process of becoming good enough to get into Heaven, but of becoming like God enough to display His Kingdom here on earth.

Obedience, then, is not what we do to keep God happy. It’s what we do to keep ourselves on track with His transformation of our lives and our characters to match His own. So, evangelism, like anything else we do in His name, doesn’t make us any better; it’s one of the things we do to allow transformation in us. If we hold back from doing anything that pleases God, we hold back some part of our lives that needs His touch to make it more complete. By not obeying, whether it be in evangelism or anything else, we miss out on opportunities to be made better than we are.

Some people are good at evangelism – they’re gifted for it. Others of us, like myself, aren’t particularly gifted for it. That doesn’t excuse us from our need to work at it, to try our best, and to submit our lack of giftedness to God, so that He can work through our weakness to achieve His goals.

When it gets down to it, evangelism isn’t that hard. We just have to let people know that God cares about them, and wants them to be His. What goes on from there is God’s doing. There are things we can do to prepare ourselves to express God’s truths to them. I intend to learn more about those things in the coming months. Maybe I’ll write about them as I learn them.

Rambling thoughs on a Thursday evening

My dad, Garey Castle, is a real smart guy. He is a voracious reader, a great teacher, and very capable at lots of different things. When he graduated from college, he had a degree in math with a minor in physics, and had audited enough classes to have racked up minors in Bible and Music, as well. Of course, it took him ten years to finish, but considering that he got married and had became a father by the age of 22, that's not too surprising. He worked hard to make enough to support his family and finish school, all the while learning as much as he could.

He has never stopped learning, really. Despite having some kind of reading disability (a mild dyslexia, I think), he studied constantly when he was preaching, and even more when he completed his MA in Religion -- when he was in his 40's. I can remember so many times seeing him reading some thick, dusty tome, listening to classical music, looking so much at home and in his element. I learned to love books, myself, growing up in his home.

Dad spent much of his working life as a mathematical engineer/computer programmer/satelite analyst. He also spent a lot of time as a preacher. Even now, retired in San Diego, he studies and teaches at his church. A lot of folks have learned so much about Bible history and church history from my dad.

I learned a lot about how to teach from watching Dad. He always seems to be at ease when he's teaching, and it seems to come from a strong knowledge of his subject and a respect for the people he's teaching. (Obviously, some students are easier to respect than others!) When people ask questions he didn't know the answer to, he's not afraid to say that he doesn't know; he can usually point them in the right direction for answers, anyway, and usually from a book he's got in his own respectable library.

(Mom's no slouch as a teacher, either, but I'm talking about Dad right now!)

Dad recently wrote an article for his church's bulletin about giving. Briefly reviewing the way that people gave to God in the Old Testament, he makes the statement, "It seems that the average Israelite family was commanded to give somewhere between 35% and 50% to the Lord on an ongoing basis." Beyond the "tithe" that so many evangelical Christians pound on, there were other regular offerings required under the Law of Moses. The sum total of it boggles the mind for we 21st-century Americans... until, maybe, we total up how much we pay in various taxes.

Dad's article goes on to talk about the expectation that we Christians will give to God's work today. The institution of the church, for all of its flaws and weaknesses, is the primary channel for giving for us. I firmly believe that it is vital that I and my family give to our church -- and not only for the sake of the church's finances, either. We give because... because we have been given a LOT! Our giving to our church, though, is not the sum total of what is modeled for us in the New Testament. Our example is Jesus, who gave up everything. That's more than challenging, it's brutally difficult for us in our culture. We are trying to learn what it means to live in surrender, but it's easy to lose track of that when we're trying to plan for our future. We'll probably never get it down perfectly. Thank God for his infinite grace!

When it gets down to it, I learned about giving the same way I learned about teaching -- by watching my parents. For my parents, giving is just part of living for God. We were never rich growing up, and sometimes things were really tight; but if someone needed something, my parents were never afraid to give to a need, even if it meant going without for a while. As a kid, that was dreadfully inconvenient for me, but I guess the message got through.

What does all this have to do with the price of papayas in Peoria? I don't know. I'm trying to understand how I can give more of myself to God's service. By "give," I don't just mean money. I mean of my time and my talents. Are there people around me who could benefit from something I have to give? I'm sure there are, but I'm trying to figure out how to connect and find a place to serve.

I don't know how I'll make time for that. Someone told me recently, though, that when you are put into a situation where you have to take care of someone else's needs, you learn a lot about slowing down, and removing yourself from all the busyness we usually find ourselves in. Ironic, isn't it? When you have to drop everything to serve others, you find that everything you've dropped is probably going to be fine without you, and you without it.

Lord, help me figure that one out.

Question of the day

If you write a blog, and nobody reads it, is it still considered a waste of bandwidth?

Another fad turns to dust

For those of you who think "spinners" are cool, you are now officially wrong. I just saw them on an otherwise unadorned Ford Taurus.

Another great ZOE Conference

Nina and I were able to go to the ZOE Group Worship Conference in Nashville again this year. It was an incredible experience! Besides the thrill of worshipping in song with over a thousand others, and the blessed times of fellowship and sharing with friends from all over the country, and the meals we enjoy at Cracker Barrel, we were challenged by the missional theme this year.

What is "missional?" It's a current church buzz-word, to be sure, but the people who use it are, by and large, trying to get us to wake up and be the people of God, instead of just being the people who support a church. It's about "going into all the world," instead of waiting for people to come to our church buildings and special events. It's recapturing the Great Commission of Jesus as our own mission, recognizing that we need to be doing Jesus' business in the world -- reaching out with hands to help, listening to people's stories, and pointing the way to the Great Physician. It's not about making more church-goers, but making disciples, apprentices of Jesus. While most of our churches claim to be doing this, we spend way too much time and energy on operational and logistical issues of running a congregation than we do getting out to touch the people who are hurting. You don't need a program, project, or even a "ministry" to do it on your own, but we can't seem to do anything without organizing a committee, or hiring a minister to do it for us.

Leonard Sweet challenged us to give our churches an "MRI scan" -- changing to being Missional instead of attractional, Relational instead of propositional, and Incarnational instead of colonial. I'm not going to describe all of that here, but it describes a major change in the way churches work. It's going to be a hard change for most of us to make.

Larry James of Central Dallas Ministries convicted us about how we avoid dealing with the poor, treating them as if their status is a disease instead of an opportunity to learn what's really important in life. He said that when we look at the poor, all we see is their need, because of our materialism. We don't see their assets, and we completely ignore their dreams. Poor people are the most generous, both with their money and their time.

Mike Cope's biggest contribution to my thinking and faith this weekend was a quote he borrowed from a book called "Unveiling Glory" -- "Living like Jesus is not something we do to get salvation -- it IS our salvation." And his retelling of the Sermon on the Mount is one of the best things I've ever heard in a sermon.

Randy Harris got one of my biggest "AMEN"'s this weekend. He said, "People need to stop complaining about new things in church making them 'uncomfortable.' Where do we get the idea that we're supposed to be comfortable in church? We're standing in the presence of the living God! That ought to make anyone at least a little uneasy!"

Jeff Walling portrayed Matthew instead of just preaching. He told us about the messy Messiah we follow, about the disgrace that Jesus lived in all his life. We've romanticized Jesus' story; he was born in scandal, he died in scandalous fashion, and for his whole ministry he was unpopular and laughed at by the "polite folks" of his time. It was the underprivileged and outcast that he surrounded himself with -- the very people we do so little for today. Very convicting.

Brandon Scott Thomas and the ZOE singers gave it their all in leading worship, as usual. Randy Gill and the praise team from Woodmont Hills also gave it up during the leadership conference. They were able to include some instrumental praise in various sessions, which really added to the whole experience.

Michael Card gave a short concert on Saturday afternoon, and it was such a thrill to be able to meet him. His music has been very special to me for 20 years, and he has such a great servant heart.

And it was great to spend time with our extended family of friends: Owen Burgess and his daughter Becca, Dan Dalzell, Chris Lockhart, Rob and Clarissa Cox, Gary Bruce, and Shane Coffman. I also got to meet and re-meet in person several folks from the blog world and Worshipforum: Dwight and Jeanna Powell, Andrew Batiselli, Wes Bedwell, Bret Morris, Mitch Fewell, Eric Livingston, Chris Helterbrand, and so many others. What a blessing.

And so now, I return to my everyday life, but a little more focused on being less everyday about it, and more intentional in looking around to see where people need the touch of Jesus. I'm sure that will be a gradual change for me, but I can't see turning my back on it now. I'll let you know how it goes...

What we leave behind

I've been thinking about the things that we pass on to our children. Not so much the neuroses, dysfunction, and bad habits, though those are arguably the most significant contibutions we make to their lives. No, I'm thinking about the heirlooms we pass on. When I was in high school, I got a Hawaiian shirt from my dad which he got when he was in college. That shirt (now departed and much-lamented) got me hooked. Now I wear Hawaiian shirts often -- probably too often for my long-suffering wife, the half of this marriage with all the fashion sense. My son has also acquired the habit. (See above, under neuroses.)

I have something that I plan on giving to both of my children, when the time is right. It's something my mom gave me the day she dropped me off at the beginning of my freshman year of college. Several sheets of paper from a small notebook, handwritten with "Mother Castle's Washing Instructions." I keep them in a letter-sized envelope, and for several years had them tacked above my desk. Now I have them tucked away for safe keeping.

By the time I started college, I had already become mostly familiar with the job of doing laundry. It went like this: take stuff out of the already-sorted laundry baskets (or piles, depending on how things were going) and put it into the washer, then follow it through the dryer to the baskets for folding. (I've already blogged about "glumphing," so I won't belabor it here.) I usually tried to ignore the folding part, but didn't often get away with it.

Now that I was leaving for college, I had to add one more element to all of this: sorting my own laundry. >gulp< I didn't have much that was red, as I recall, so I wasn't too worried about ending up with pink socks. But I did want to keep from turning my white t-shirts from turning a dull grey after being washed with items of clothing in various colors. So my mom wrote out her advice on the matter.

Some gems:
"If you have anything new that is a bright color, wash it only with things you want to turn that color. Especially note -- red things must be washed several times before they stop turning things pink, and even after that I wouldn't trust it with your unders."

"Each group [that you have sorted] must be washed separately -- don't sort them and then wash them together, that would be dumb."

"Load machine 3/4 full loosely -- don't cram it in the machine, that just lets the washer make mud and spread it on all the clothes."

"Never pour bleach right on the clothes -- you're a good kid, but you don't need holy clothes."

On doing an extra rinse for whites that look grey: "You can pay the extra to wash them twice in the washer (once on cold, then the usual way), or you could rinse them by hand -- I guarantee your hands won't melt."

"If possible do not dry anything on 'hot' -- unless (a) the dryer doesn't really mean 'hot' or (b) the clothes are all cotton or (c) you're in a hurry and you don't care that your clothes will come out small enough to fit your little brother and so wrinkled that Goodwill won't take them."

And at the end: "P.S. Do not try to wait and bring all your dirty clothes home at Thanksgiving."

Wouldn't you agree that wisdom such as this needs to be shared?

I have started instructing my son, John, on how to handle the laundry. He's up to loading the sorted laundry, putting in the detergent and fabric softener, starting the load, glumphing, and putting the clean, unfolded laundry in a place that I will trip over it, so it'll eventually get folded. I will make him a fresh copy of "Mother Castle's Washing Instructions," possibly retitling it "Granny Gerry's Washing Instructions" for him, and set him to the task of sorting.

Now, if I can get him to fold and put away the landry, that'd be great. I still try to ignore it.

I'm back!

Okay, I haven't actually been anywhere, I just haven't had the wherewithall to post for two months. Not much to say, I guess.

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Like the rest of the world, I'm still stunned at the destruction and loss in New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast. Words fail me. Words fail me even more at the posturing and political hay being made by anyone who can convene a press conference. I'd be happier with the President if some of his visits with people who have lost everything were less publicized. I guess you can't do much about that; if he's out there, everyone's going to want to know what he's doing. Wouldn't it be nice if he, the governors of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama would take their entourages do some shelter and lend a hand PHYSICALLY, and NOT hold a press conference? A lot of people are frustrated that they can't get into some of those areas and DO something to help. Here are people who can call up a helicopter or caravan of Hummers, and get in there, and they're spending more time on camera than passing out MREs.

And of course, it's all [insert your least favorite political figure or group here]'s fault.

I'm befuddled by the people who are making the rescue and recovery a racial issue. Yes, it is true that most of the folks that we saw on the news who were in danger and needing help were African-American. It is true that of all the poor people in this country, a disproportional number of them are African-American. This is the result of many factors; I'm not a sociologist, I can't list all the factors, but it's obvious that we're a far cry from "getting over" the racism that was part of the fabric of the culture during the founding of our country.

But to say that the response to the disaster was tainted by racism is pretty hard for me to accept. The slow response was horribly, shockingly unacceptable, but I don't think it had anything to do with bigotry. It's just another opportunity for people with an agenda to get their faces on TV.

Consider this: the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) needs an incredible number of people to respond to sudden emergencies. When there's not an emergency, the need far fewer people working for them. How do they go from "normal" mode to "emeregency" mode? How do they mobilize people into an area where the infrastructure has been wiped out, and where the number of people needing help is staggering? I think it probably could have happened faster, but I'm still amazed that they can get anything going in such a chaotic situation.

I am praying that God will be apparent to the people who are having to evaluate their lives and figure out what they are going to do. I'm praying that they will look away from what they've lost and toward what they can gain by faith in God. I'm praying that they find hope, not just relief from their losses.