General – Page 93 – neumatikos

Tinkering…

As you can see, I’ve been doing a little construction instead of writing. One thing at a time, you know. It’s not that Xanga was bad, it was just… constricting. I’ve got a little more room to grow over here, doncha know.

In the mean time, however, I do have some bugs to fix. Not the least of which is the fact that my comments don’t work at all right now. Movable Type has a new version out with vastly updated comments (it was their main feature), but I built the whole website this far on the old version, and I figured I’d better finish of the job that way. Hey, if a man can learn HTML and Custom Style Sheets in a matter of days, he’s got a little bit of momentum behind him, eh?

Nice New Features with Movable Type:

Category-Based Archiving! Numero uno benefitas, eh? Check that list on the side… You want essays? I got essays. You want poems? No problem. You want stories. Them too! Each one is archived all by itself and listed neatly on the left. I haven’t decorated the archive sections yet, but each one of them is also going to have a list of articles on the left-like. If you look up top, the old banner is back up, and now it’s a link to the main index. Of course, you’re on the main index now, so I wouldn’t bother clicking it.
Search Function. It works! I tried it out this morning.
Static Adjunct Web Pages. En Ingles, that means that I can build some pages on the site that aren’t run by the Movable type program, and have them flow seamlessly as part of the site. I have a couple of ideas for this. An About page, with some basic descriptions, um, about. Maybe a wishlist page…As an interim to comments, I may set up a form instead. One came free with the web space rental.
Auto-generated emails. This is a really cool function. I haven’t figured out how to set them up yet, but it looks like I can arrange to have whatever I write automatically emailed directly to my adoring fans. All 25 of them. Pretty special, I think.

Also: I had to manually transfer over all the major articles from Xanga. Mostly this was due to the fact that Movable Type 2.66 doesn’t do cut & paste formatting, so I had to make sure everything was formatted right. Partially, this was a good thing because there was some really bad formatting going on with Xanga. Fonts going goofy everywhere. Some articles double spaced, others not. Yick.

But… copying everything over means mistakes, typos, and other bugs. I’m planning on setting up a separate email for bugs. Just not there yet I am.

That’s enough for now. I’m going to bed.

A couple of items

First: my dearest one wrote a blog last night. You should go read it.

Second, my mom made a funny:

“Winter weather is something to be avoided — if possible by moving to Florida… I’m convinced it came as a result of the fall. “

Third, my mom has recently discovered the internet. She’s been all over the place, browsing movie previews, and reviews, and reading up on her favorite ministers’ daily publications… and forwarding this info to everyone she knows. She even got a Xanga site. The great irony is that, she has no problem sending out mass emails, but she has never—in however many months she’s had this thing—she’s never posted anything. The same goes for my dad. They both got weblogs purely for the sake of posting comments on their own children! I think this is a travesty. My dad can be forgiven on the basis that he really isn’t the broadcasting type (he could post jokes or something, though. My dad likes corny jokes). But my mom—that’s a lady who’s got a lot to say. And she’s saying it. You try having a conversation with her that only lasts 5 minutes. But not on her weblog. I think everybody should go comment on her site and force her to say something. But that’s just me.

And now, the news in brief.

Actually, I’m not in my briefs. I’m in my nice work clothes, ready to go nowhere. I’ve had a job for two days and they already sent me home. We had a record-breaking snow last night. 14 inches. That’s the most in one night that I ever remember (Obviously, I’ve never lived in Montana). I left yesterday at 3. I was supposed to stay till 5 (the call-center must go on, regardless of weather), but the police and the national guard and the secret service were all apparently escorting a bush down by our building and they had to shut the road down from 3-6. I had the option of leaving at either 3:00 or 6:00. Since my trainer had been stuck in the mountains since I started working, I wasn’t exactly accomplishing anything, so I went ahead and left at 3.

Then it showed another 10 inches. So now I have time to write a blog.

Actually, it’s a pretty great story. The day before there was all this “winter weather advisory” stuff going on. I didn’t believe it. You know how the south is. They announce that there’s going to be a few inches of snow and everybody storms the grocery stores, stocking up on milk, water, bread, and frozen TV dinners. No, I’m serious. I always wondered what they were going to do with frozen TV dinners when the power went out. Now I know. What if the power is just fine, but you can’t drive your car?

Anyway, we got this email at work that day saying that, no matter what, even if the rest of the company closed up shop and went home, we’d be there. Because we’re the response center. We have to respond to people who don’t have nice cushy excuses like a foot of snow to keep them from calling in prayer requests and book purchases. The only thing that’s going to stop us is if the power goes out. No problem for me. I don’t think it’s going to snow. So I get up that morning, and fail to make a lunch for myself, knowing that my job is only 15 minutes from my house and I can always come back for food. And I go to work. And it starts snowing just as I hit the roads. And it keeps on snowing. And I get out of morning devotion (I love a job that has morning devotions) and they’ve blocked the back route to my building because somebody might slip on the stairs, because there’s an inch of snow. Wimpy southerners. An inch of snow.

And it keeps on snowing.

Come lunch time, I realize I’m in trouble. I didn’t bring a lunch. My car is covered in 3 inches of snow. Getting the car cleared is not the problem. Getting home through the snow and panicked drivers and back again in less than an hour is the problem. So I am reminded of the cafeteria in our complex, two buildings over. OK. I’ll just eat there. It’ll ruin my budget, but I’m really hungry. And even the best budged cannot stand against the pangs of hunger.

So I go outside, and it’s snowing. Pretty hard. Maybe 3 inches of snow already cover the ground. I’m wearing loafers. No problem. I’ll drive my car two buildings over to eat, and then drive back. Of course, I don’t clear off my car or anything. I’m just driving within the complex, not even going on a real street. I just get in the car, turn on the wipers, and go. So I’ve got bad tunnel vision. So what? Nobody else is driving in this stuff. They’ve all gone home already.

I get to the place, which is miraculously still open, have myself an amazing greasy cheeseburger, and head back to my car.

It’s been snowing for half an hour so thick you can’t see through it.

After I find my car, I attempt to get back to my office the same way I left. I turn on the wipers and go. It’s just 2 buildings over. Yeah. If you turn right instead of left. I thought there were only three buildings in our complex, all lined around a little U. Well now I know that there are at least 7. I’m not sure exactly what I did. Well, actually, I do know what I did, but I can’t describe it to you any more than I could do it again. If I turned right, I would have gone back to the main street, which I did not want to do. But apparently I took the wrong left. All I know is that when I went there, it was all over level ground. But when I went back, I suddenly found my self sliding up a hill covered in snow. I couldn’t do it.

I got out of my car, cleared a few windows and looked around. I was on a hill. There was a building far off to port. And I was not in Kansas anymore. I had no idea where I was, or how to get back. I had only driven maybe a tenth of a mile.

So I backed down the steep slope and pulled into the parking lot of the unfamiliar building. I trudged through the snow, up a flight of steps, and walked inside. I was very pleased to see that this building had the same doormat as mine. It meant I wasn’t in wonderland or anything. Then I looked up. The sign said ‘Wells Fargo delivery entrance.” Scratch that. Back in wonderland.

I wandered around to the front of the building, found somebody by the door and said, “Hi. I’m lost. Can you tell me where I am?” It was two ladies, I guess housekeeping, waiting for a ride.

“Well, you’re at Wells Fargo,” they said.

Thanks.

“Where are you trying to get to?”

“Well, I’m trying to get to Billy Graham. Can you tell me the
quickest way to get there on foot?” Great. Now I sound like some
kind of wacko. I’m seeking the great Dalai Lama.

“On foot?”

“Yeah. My car’s a little stuck.”

“Well, you turn left on *&^, and then go across to…

“No wait. Then he’ll be going across a busy intersection…”

Intersection? Now wait. I may be lost, but one thing I know is that there is no busy intersection between me and where I want to go. Then it hits me. Two streets over is the Billy Graham Parkway. Named after Billy Graham, whom I work for. Trust a famous evangelist to put his offices in the vicinity of a street named after him. Not that I blame him. I think the road actually goes on land that used to be his property.

“No no, wait. I mean the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association,
where I work.”

“Well where’s that?”

“Um, buildings one and two?”

“Wow. You really are lost. You’re in building seven.”

“Excuse me, sir. If you’re going to be in this building, I’m going to have to ask you to sign the guestbook.”

I’m lost and I’m going to be late for work and the big guy in the black uniform with a gun wants me to sign his guestbook? There are so many things wrong with this picture. But the housekeeping ladies explained to him what I was doing there and that I was lost and stuff, at which point the security guy insisted that he was the only one who was authorized to give directions to stranded wayfarers. Which is fine by me. I don’t rightly care who directs me as long as I get where I’m supposed to be going. So he says, you head out the way that you came and you find the road and you turn that way, and stay on the road and you’ll come right around to building 1. I think he was more focused on me heading out the way that I came than making sure I got to the right place, since I didn’t really understand which way “that way” was, but I can follow the road just fine.

Except that every road does at least two ways. The right way and the wrong way. I walked back to my car, and then up the way that my car had gotten stuck and kept on going. I figured out pretty quick that I was still lost, since I was suddenly surrounded with trees and farming equipment. But it was snowing thick and I was on a road that was sure to have people on it sooner or later, and I didn’t want to go back to the Guestbook Gestapo. So I trudged.

And I trudged

And eventually I came to a street. The sign said Yorkmont, which is the street that you come down to get to the BGEA every day. Heading one way was a long line of cars heading back to the main road, which is where you come from when you are heading to work. Since all the cars were obviously driving home early from work, I figured I was found enough to know that I, who was going to work should go the opposite way. So I trudged.

And I trudged.

All this is in my brown penny loafers, mind you. I had a good thick coat on, but my shoes were slip-ons, and we’re up to about 5 inches right now.. So I trudged in the street. In the median that had been created by cars driving only in the ruts of previous cars. And I trudged. Finally, a kid my age who was driving my way, stopped and asked me if I wanted a ride. Heck yeah.

So I hop in, and he’s asking me where I’m trying to go, and I’m explaining that I’m totally lost. Finally I said I was trying to get to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (as if he actually will know where that is), and he says, “Well that’s behind us.” I looked up, and sure enough, in front of us is the Farmer’s Market, a landmark which I have never before seen. Once again, I had turned left when I should have turned right. The kid was nice, and offered to turn around and drive me over, but I could tell the nightmare that would be, for him to turn around. There were no driveways on the right side of the road, and turning left meant getting traffic to stop for us. Twice. I thanked him and said not to worry about it. I can trudge much faster when I know where I’m going.

Actually, I jogged. The “median” wasn’t that deep, only an inch or so, and traffic was moving very slow. I passed maybe 15 cars on my way back. It was maybe a quarter mile before I saw a familiar building. From behind. Across an open snow-covered field. It was either walk around the street way, an extra quarter mile or so, or shoot straight across a field with 5-6 of snow. Heh heh. My feet were already wet anyway.

So clomp clomp clomp to the back of the building, then hedge between building and shrub, around that narrow spot where the only space between the corner of the building and the 2-foot deep fountain is the 6-inch ledge of the holding tank, and on to the previously referred to blocked-off sidewalk. Under the yellow tape and into sweet warmness. My lunch was only an hour and 20 minutes. Pretty good time for getting lost, I think.

But the great irony: Now get this. When I came back in and apologized and told me story (in brief) to people in charge… My team leader. Bless her heart. She told me they had food provided for us, in the bad weather.

Telemarketing for Jesus

OK. I’ll be good. I’ll go ahead and announce that I do indeed have a job. I’m sure a great number of you have listened to the rumors instead of waiting for the press release, but fortunately, in this case, the rumors were mostly true. I’ll start working for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association tomorrow. 8:00 am. Show up early and we’ll walk you over to devotions. Does this mean I’m getting paid to pray? It’s a possibility.

What I’m going to be doing is basically working in a call center for BGEA. Mostly, I think, it’s going to be updating addresses and accepting donations, and setting people up to receive the magazine. But there is supposed to be a bit of praying for people over the phone, leading them in sinner’s prayers, etc. The pay is very reasonable, at a rate to which I formerly referred as measly. But the hours are fewer. It’s officially part-time: between 20 and 30 hours a week, depending on the schedule you get. The manager, when I spoke to him, said that some shifts may be as great as 34 hours or as small as 16. If I get anywhere near 16, I’m going to have to take up a paper route or something, but that’s okay. I made a commitment for a year, and that’s just a little bit under how much longer I plan to stay in Charlotte. What a coinkydink.

Valerie is much more excited about this than me. My joblessness seems to have been really freaking her out. I haven’t been quite so worried. I have this amazing ability to put off fear of my life falling apart, so long as I know I’ve been doing what’s right. So as long as I was looking regularly, and keeping disciplined and busy, I was fine. It was only when I managed to goof off for a day that I got really weirded out. So far as actually getting a job, I knew that was going to happen, because God is gracious.

That’s not to say that I wasn’t very frustrated. I discovered a lot about myself that I didn’t suspect. Like the fact that I had very little self-discipline, especially where it concerns creating and sticking to my own schedule. It was very easy to goof off a whole day. Which then did make me very depressed. But then, my depression was at least partially justified because I had, in fact, made a fool of myself and wasted a day.

So what really got my attention was not that I got a job, but under what circumstances I got a job. It was the first day after I had finally decided to get out the daily planner my parents had given me 6 (count ‘em: 6) years ago and start using it. Monday was the first day that I wrote down for me an agenda, and then followed through with it. Monday was also the day that I finally gave in and followed through with filing for unemployment.

The unemployment thing wouldn’t really be a big deal, except I’m trying to teach this Sunday school. I was trying to find some way to demonstrate for them that God is really involved in our lives, and the official lesson for that day was on prayer. And the official verse was in Ezra 8:21 where Ezra announced that he specifically didn’t request an armed guard from the emperor while his people went across hostile territory back to Jerusalem. Ezra had every right to an armed guard, and he would have gotten it if he had asked for it. But Ezra had told the emperor that God watches out for the people who look to him. So he was ashamed to say, “God will protect us—can we have an armed guard?” And I said to myself. You’re not supposed to do that. That’s like those people who say that God will heal them, so they don’t go to the doctor. You’re supposed to do both. That’d be like me being fully entitled to unemployment insurance (which I am) but insisting instead upon trusting in God to keep me fed.

Now all of this would be fine, but I was trying to demonstrate to these kids that God is real and really watching out for us, just like Ezra was trying to demonstrate for the Persian king. So I announced, with only a little faith, that I was going to put off applying for unemployment until I got down to my last dregs, so I could demonstrate that God would provide. Notice I didn’t say that I wouldn’t apply for unemployment. Just not until the last minute. I wanted to see if God would provide. And I really wanted to demonstrate that God would provide.

Of course, it would be the easiest thing in the world to demonstrate that me getting a job was no miracle. I happen to consider myself one of the most employable people in the world J. But the same could be said for Ezra, that it was no miracle that he got across the entire middle east without being attacked. Maybe his group just wasn’t worth the effort, they were so poor. But it is interesting to note that I got my job offer the very day I applied for unemployment online and set a date to go down to the main office. Which would be today. Which I may still do, on the basis that I might still be entitled to the money I would have received the last 6 weeks or so.

Since I had finally gotten my life organized, yesterday was also the day that I finally did my taxes and discovered that I was due nearly $600. THAT I did on purpose. I’ve heard a lot of arguments on why you should go through this great effort to make sure that you don’t owe them and they don’t owe you. Usually the argument goes that going out of your way to make sure that you get a tax refund is basically using the government for a savings account, and they make an awful bank because they only charge interest, and never pay it. BUT. If I could ensure that over a period of 12 months I would actually save that money in a bank, I wouldn’t want to pay it out in taxes. But I know me. I’m a good saver, but not that good of a saver. There is no way I would have put that additional money in a bank. It would have gone straight into something really frivolous, like an extra bag of fritos on the way out of the grocery store… every week for a year. And even if I had invested it in a savings account somewhere. What kind of return does a bank give you? .05% ? Not much of a difference from nothing, is it? As it is, I now have $600 that I will plop down right back into savings—despite this sudden need I have to upgrade my car stereo.

And lastly. When it rains it pours. I got home last night from all my errand running, and checked my email, and found a note from a recruiter at American Express Financial Securities. They wanted to schedule an interview with me. All of this on the same day. It feels very weird to go from no interviews at all, to turning down an interview. The really weird part is that the American Express job (in the event that I actually got it) would probably have paid better. But. A bird in hand…

As always,
I have more to say,
but I’ve done enough
for today.

Thought to Ponder

Just a short one today; must get back to studying for exams….

The Sabbath was made for the good of man, man was not made for the Sabbath. –Mark 2:27

God created the Sabbath so that we would be forced to slow down and rest. There are constant references in the Old Testament about keeping the Sabbath day holy and how to accomplish that holiness. In fact, keeping the Sabbath holy was so important that the people were risking death if they worked. It’s so important for us to take a regular time to rest and let our minds and hands take a break from the work that we do six days a week. If we don’t, we run the risk of working ourselves to death in our zeal to accomplish.

Writer’s Speedbump

The other reason I’ve been avoiding posting so often has been that it just takes so long. I sat down around 2:00 to write last night, mostly because I couldn’t sleep and I had been gotten on to for not writing, so why not? I typed out the first thing that came to mind, just some stuff that I’d been thinking about. I typed straight through it. I didn’t edit anything. I didn’t correct anything. I went back and fixed two capitalization problems and a typo. It was 5:30 when I got done.

It’s not that I’m a slow typist, but it takes me that long when I’m trying to say something very clear. I want to pick exactly the right word and exactly the right metaphor.

When I was being home schooled, and working on my writing, my mom handed me a book by a lady—I don’t remember her name, but the book was called, Writing down the bones. I’ve found out since then that it’s pretty much the writer’s textbook everywhere in the world. She only had one premise: that we spend too much time internally editing ourselves to make it sound right. The result is that we never get anything said because we’ve already decided that what we have to say is pretty darn stupid.

Her solution was to encourage people to journal for 20 minutes or so a day. Pure stream of consciousness. The words go into your head and onto the paper. After 20 minutes, if you think you have something in there that’s worth using it, then you can pop out your superior editing skills and chop away until you have a good finished product. Good call, huh? It’s usually best for a sculptor to start out with too much material than with too little. Too little and you end up with all those Grecian statues without heads and arms J

I try. I really do. I did better when I was a kid. And if I completely unplug my brain, sometimes I can manage to write as fast as I’m thinking. But I ain’t too good at it.

Like right now? No problem. I think something and it comes out. All conversational like. But when I’m trying to say something that makes sense… Ew! By the time I get done thinking it through, I forgot how it started. So I end up with a lot of starts and stops as I have to re-process everything I already had down 15 minutes ago. I out-pace my little fingers.

It’s probably a really funny sight. I’m sure I look all studious when it happens. I’ll get to a certain point in my argument and then I’ll make some hyper jump out to left field somewhere. And then I have to figure out how on earth I got from point A to point B. So I get all excited, and I jump up and pace the room, figuring out all the little details of my new idea. Of course, once I’ve figured out all the nuances and implications… I’ve been standing up and pacing instead of writing. So now I have to sit down and type it out. Only I already forgot what it was I thought. So I have to do it all over again.

And that’s my revelation for the day. I’m going to bed now.
KB

The patient has died.

I may be about to go to bed, so don’t hold me to it, but I think I’m going to say something. Something beyond the standard “sorry it’s been 300 years since I posted last.”

I wrote a while ago that my job was in crisis, the medical definition of crisis being the point at which it will be determined if the patient will live or die. As of last Monday, it was official: the patient died.

It was a bad ending. I don’t want to go into a round of finger pointing, partly because I think I have co-workers who read this site, and partly because that’s just rude. Essentially, there was a difference of opinion between my boss(es) and me about how much a person could accomplish in a single day. My estimate was significantly lower than theirs. I tried my best and squeezed what I was told should be a painless 40 hours worth of work into about 45 hours, on average. If work was really really slow, I could get it all done without overtime, but at anything resembling a normal level of work, I couldn’t keep up.

In my mind there were three possibilities for what was wrong: Either the parameters for one person’s work was wrong, or there was some missing technique to getting it done that I couldn’t find out, or the worker was incompetent. I was under the impression that the parameters were wrong, but obviously, my employers decided that the worker was incompetent.

I don’t really have any hard feelings. I was getting pretty close to quitting anyway. How important, really, is a temp job? The thought of spending the next couple of years of my life under the pressure I felt for a measly $12 an hour was becoming less and less appealing.

The trouble is that, with temporary employment, that whole “two weeks notice” thing doesn’t really work. My original contract for that job was for two weeks. If I called in to my agency and said “hey, I don’t like this job any more. Can you get me a new one?” I would be gone the next day. Which would have been really bad for the people at work because I was the only one who knew how to do my job at all, and it had to be done on time every day. If I just up and quit one day, they would have been in some real hot water, and it just wasn’t the Christian thing to do.

So they hired me a replacement, and I trained him, and they let me go. Everybody’s happy. I’m now unemployed, but everybody’s happy.

My only real problem was that, two weeks ago when they brought in my replacement, I knew he was my replacement, they knew he was my replacement, but what I was told was that he was supposed to be my long asked for second person. This completely confused me. They just let somebody go the week previous because we weren’t allowed to have so many temps when business was so slow. I trained for a week, and the next Sunday I got a phone call that my contract had been terminated.

I am simply amazed at the massive lack of trust they communicated to me.

I’m not very good at picking favorites, so I don’t have a favorite bible verse, but one of my favorites is Romans 8:28—
&nbsp

“We know that all things work together for good for those that love God, who have been called according to His purpose.”

Given my uncanny propensity to perceive this whole worlds-realm as a kind of glorified game, my spin on “all things work together for good” comes out something along the lines of “all things work to my advantage,” or “no matter what happens, I win.” I made a friend really angry once, by playing this game—I forget exactly the circumstances, but I had just gotten done explaining that everything always plays into my hand, when she either did something really rotten to me, or she described something really rotten happening to me. I laughed and mildly adjusted the definition of “to my advantage” (that is to say, I turned common sense on its head).

See, the problem is we all think we know what is to our advantage. In fact, I’d bet that most of us put more faith in our knowing what is and what isn’t to our advantage than we put in the goodness of God. So when something truly awful comes along, we reflexively question the goodness of God, when in reality we ought to be questioning whether we know what is really to our advantage.

For instance: Jesus died on the cross. I think most of us can see why the disciples thought that was a bad thing. But I’d also like to think most of us can see how that actually worked out to everybody’s advantage.

So me: I just lost my job. Bad thing. But really, how bad is it? I’m no worse off than I was six months ago. In fact, I’m almost exactly in the same financial position I was in six months ago. Actually, I’m richer by three pairs of pants, two pairs of shoes (really nice ones), new silverware, a trip to my sister’s wedding, and a fish tank. (God forgive me for the fish tank). What’s more, I am now more than ever sure that I do not want a career in the mortgage industry. I’ve never seen a business that was so highly regulated by the government in all my life. Plus, I’ve learned a lot about business management (both good and bad), and the importance of distributed responsibility. I’m now used to working a solid 8-hour shift working on one thing, and despite whatever the news people are saying, the job market is much better now.

Probably the biggest advantage, honestly, is that I feel I’ve gotten a pretty clear sign to wait on the whole seminary thing. If my job hadn’t been so stressful, I might have been able, just barely, to stay in school. But His yoke is easy, and His burden is light.

So I’ve lost my job, and it was a bad break, but I have no doubt that somewhere along the line, this plays directly into my hand. My mom is convinced that God forced me out of my job precisely at this time because he had a better position immediately available for me somewhere else. That sounds good to me, but I’m not quite ready to jump for joy over a job I don’t quite have yet. I know this works out to my advantage, but I can’t guarantee that I know what my advantage is.

Clarification

I just want to clarify. Going to MorningStar didn’t make my dreams any more real. They merely imparted to me, as Frank Herbert would say, “A terrible sense of purpose.” Before, I had plans. Now I am determined to follow through.
My apologies for all the introspection. But, it’s my site, and these are the thoughts that have been interesting me lately.

A quick (not) survey of my schemes.

A Christian Bookstore

This market is so underdeveloped. I have some major problems with nearly every Christian bookstore, chain or otherwise that I have ever encountered. There are three basic categories that I know for Christian media. The first is Theology, by which I mean textbooks. Original texts, Peer-reviewed journals, defining theological treatises, like Calvin’s Institutes. The thick stuff that your average reader doesn’t really want to read.

The second area is Didactic, by which I mean the vast industry I seem to have discovered for producing Sunday-school manuals for the denominations. Teaching aids, lesson plans, daily readers. This area actually ticks me off, because it seems that each denomination has their own specific publishing house that produces their propaganda, er, paraphernalia… oh! whatever, that they use to teach their people. So the vast majority of Christians, at least in the United States, is getting their theology dictated to them by for-profit publishing houses with clear theological slants. Most churches don’t pick and choose. If you’re a Baptist, you buy from Lifeway. If you’re a Methodist, you buy from Cokesbury. Each distributor is completely exclusive of the other irregardless of what may actually be the best teaching available. That strikes me as pretty stupid. Or at least narrow minded.

The third area, Retail (for lack of a better word), is by far the most dynamic. This is where all the books, movies, CD’s T-shirts and whatever else is out there is produced directly for people to just walk in, peruse, and buy. This is where most of our Christian culture comes from: Veggie tales, and Dennis Jernigan; Hank Hannegraff and Rick Joyner. (Yes, I did just use both those names in the same sentence) Ironically, though this is the furthest removed from the “theology” branch of Christian media, in the general public mind is where most of our theology is actually born.

And there are two problems with the way the market is currently being run. First of all, the Theology and Didactic branches of Christian media are usually completely divorced from what vendors sell retail. What’s more, Theology and Didactic materials are further divided by sect. You won’t find much Pentecostal theology at Lifeway, let alone a Pentecostal Sunday-school lesson plan. Secondly, and far more importantly, Christian retail is almost exclusively limited to major distributors. If a Christian CD isn’t distributed by Maranatha, Vineyard, or WorshipTogether.com, you probably won’t find it at your local Christian bookstore. Yet most of the Christian media that is produced is actually indie projects. How many itinerant preachers come to your church and at the end announce, “And be sure and check out my book, which is published by Nelsen Bible Distributors”? No. It was probably published by somebody you never heard of. Especially if the speaker has anything really new to say. Which means that if anything really new happens in the Body of Christ, you won’t find out about it until it’s already over.

I have a plan to fix that. And I could spend the next 3-4 pages explaining all of it. Suffice it to say that I want to create a system of stores that sell every form of Christian media available on a national level, and still manages to focus a good deal of attention on local writing, music, and art. If a book, CD, print, etc. becomes popular enough locally, it will then be distributed on a national level

Oh the plans I have for that… If I hit a high enough level of success, I plan to dabble a little bit in radio and the production end of the stick. Just imagine the potential if we ever hit the international level…

Moving on!

Ministry

I will get that degree. I’m not sure exactly what all I’m going to do with it. But I will get that degree.

Christian Fiction and Poetry

I’ve got a couple of novels, an epic poem, maybe a Christian TV series floating around here somewhere. I could go into detail on some of them, but I won’t do it now.

Bible Translation

This isn’t exactly high on my list. But my major pet peeve with English bibles is that the translators spent years learning to understand the original Greek and Hebrew of the Bible. But they spent about zero time learning the language into which they were translating it. The result has invariably been only half a translation, because the translator knew exactly the meaning of the original word, but didn’t have at his disposal the perfect word out of the 1 million available in the English language. So I’d like to do my own translation of the Bible. You know. In my spare time.

Family

This is at the bottom of my list, but it’s actually the most important. I’m 25 years old and I’ve been preparing for at least 20 to be a husband and father in the best family the world has ever seen. I want the world to be able to beat a path to my door and say “here lives the most wonderful family anyone has ever been a part of in a thousand years.” If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right. I could go on forever about that too, but I don’t want to scare off any interested parties just yet.

Anyway. I expounded in some detail about the bookstore, but on each of these things, I’ve been scheming for quite some while, and could speak with some great depth on all of them.

These are a few of my favorite dreams.

Dreaming big

When I was a kid, my parents used to tease me. (Yeah. It happens.) Normal boys, they would tell me, want to be something when they grow up. You’re supposed to pass through these stages of different kinds of labels where you want to be a fireman, or a policeman. And then you grow up a little and you want to be a pro football player, or an astronaut. And then you grow up a little more, and you want to be a doctor, a lawyer, or a scientist. And then the sorrows and cares of this life rise up and choke the life out of you; you discover that you’re actually pretty good at numbers, and you settle down and become an accountant. Little boys are supposed to be always looking for these pre-packaged niches they can slide into and feel normal and successful at the same time.

And then I’d think to myself, or sometimes I’d say, Yeah, but normal little boys are perfectly content to play with Hot-wheels cars and G.I. Joes. I couldn’t play with toy cars when I was a kid, not really. It was too mundane for me. Yes. Cars. That’s how most people get around in this part of the world. You can go left, or right, or straight forward. If you’re feeling really tricky, you can go backward. We’ve covered that. Nothing new or imaginative here. Let’s move along! What I really liked, though, were those really nifty-cool cars that had doors you could pop open, because then I could pretend that this car had special doors that could fold out into wings, and then they could fly. Now that’s something worth thinking about. Cars that fly. You don’t see that every day. At least most people don’t. I do.

So my mom or my dad would say, “Kyle, what do you want to be when you grow up?” And I’d say, “I don’t know. What I’d really like is this job where I think up these really great ideas and then people get together and make them work. I’d be, you know, an ideas man.” And then my dad or my mom would chuckle (actually, I think it was my dad) and they’d say, “Well, I don’t think they make jobs like that.” And then I’d sort of mentally shrug my shoulders and go back to playing with my flying cars or reading my favorite fairy tales. And that was that. No ambition, really.

Well, sort of. I really did want to be an ideas man. I get these really great schemes.

When I was in, maybe kindergarten or first grade, my house was just across the street from my school. It was a grade school with this HUGE playground, because it used to be the town high school. The town built a new, nicer high school, and turned the old one into a grade school. They took the football stadium, stuck a couple of monkey bars in one end and called it a playground. 100 yards of playground, I guess back in the day they had money, because the wall around our playground was made up of solid red sandstone, about four feet high, all the way around. On one side, though, the wall went up to eight or ten feet, or maybe even higher, because it seamlessly turned into stadium bleachers. There was a low wall sticking out at the bottom, about three feet, and then every foot, foot and a half, it would go up and back, like a series of gigantic steps, all made of red sandstone, topped with cement. It was gorgeous.

It was also old. Old sandstone crumbles. I remember grabbing a friend and pulling him over to the bleachers and taking a stick (or maybe it was just my finger) and scraping along the stones, around the edge of the mortar. The stuff crumbled into powder in my hands. Yep, said my friend, and that red dirt? It’s only found in Oklahoma.

Well, I knew enough about economics, even at the age of six, to know what that means. If it’s rare, it’ll sell. Within days I had an operation going. We were going to harvest some of that red dirt, haul it across state lines, and sell it at exorbitant prices. We’d be the richest first graders in the world. I even had a giant 50 gallon bag (formerly for dog food) to carry it in. I don’t remember exactly what happened to our venture. I probably couldn’t get enough man power together to get anywhere with it. But anyway it fell through. Years later, having moved away from Oklahoma, I have to confess to my embarrassment that red dirt can be found almost anywhere, though perhaps not so often and not so bright. It also doesn’t seem to be much use to anybody.

When I was 13, I was on a swimming team, first though my local YMCA, and then through my high school. It was a different town—my family moved a lot. However, there seemed to be a vast shortage of Olympic sized swimming pools to practice in. The Y had one, and the Goodyear plant had one, but most pools in town were for recreational swimming, not for swimming laps. The only really good pools were to found on the neighboring army base. They had about 4 of them, all 100 meters long. Beautiful swimming pools—that couldn’t be used without a direct military connection. I saw a scarcity, and I jumped on it. I broke the news to my mom: I was going to build a series of Olympic-size swimming pools all across town. By virtue of their superior size and quality, all the teens would come to my pools and everybody would be rich. My mom’s only response was that I’d better wait to see if we were even still here in a few months. In two months we moved.

Understand, these weren’t “what do you want to do with your life” ideas. They were just schemes. Little schemes. The summer before my senior year in high school, I calmly stepped into my parents’ bedroom one night and explained to them my plan to drop out of school, get my GED, and open a new Christian bookstore to pay my way through college. I was completely bewildered that they insisted I complete my schooling. None of these ideas had the ring to me of “I want to be a…” They were projects I wanted to do not be.

Somehow MorningStar changed all that. I’m 19 and suddenly I decide I want to move across the country and attend a school that gives no solid guarantee of exactly how they are going to benefit you. For some reason my parents decided they no longer had the right or need to be my calm voice of reason. So I come lolloping over the mountains, thinking I’ve got the world in my pocket, ready for who knows what. I know I didn’t know what.

And the first thing that I really learned at MorningStar is that I am unimpressive. I just don’t have the star power. I mean, I’m a good talker, when I’ve got something to say, but I stink at jumping on somebody else’s bandwagon. I’m a relatively good writer, but that’s a mediocre skill in a land where hardly anybody really reads. There were a lot of other people there who were a lot more frighteningly beautiful than me, and every one of them was trying to lead somebody somewhere. I had a lot of places I wanted to go as well, but every one of my schemes required some preparation, and a lot of followers, and there weren’t followers left. Or if there were, they didn’t really have the time to sit through any proper preparation. So I decided to be a follower. And I discovered that I’m a terrible follower. Everybody was going the wrong direction.

Then somewhere, in the midst of all that, somebody had the audacity to imply strongly that there was something that I couldn’t do. It wasn’t even at my church. It was my then friend’s dad. I announced one day at his house that I was tired of living off my six dollars an hour at the grocery store, and that I was going to get me a job in a skyscraper, making $10 an hour. He kind of looked at me, rolled his eyes a little, and made a sort of hmph-ing sound. The ever classic snort of derision. And something inside me snapped. If there’s one thing that can get my goat, it’s even the slightest implication that I can’t. I can do anything I set myself to, and don’t you forget it. Within a month, I had a job in a skyscraper, making $10 an hour. I also had no friend, but that’s a different story and will be told at a different time.

Since then I’ve been saving up my schemes, and I have determined in my heart that I will not let one of them fall to the ground. Which is why I pray, Dear Lord, let me live to be 300. I’m going to need every minute of that time.

What am I going to be? I’m going to be me—and I’m going to fly.

News

The problem with writing these thingys so far apart is that, by the time I get around to writing one, so much has happened, I don’t know where to start. It’s 2:00 in the morning. For whatever reason, I can’t sleep. I’m supposed to teach a Sunday school lesson tomorrow, except my lesson plans are at the assistant teacher’s house. Oops. I also have a Christmas cantata tomorrow night, including a solo, except I’m recovering from what seems to have been a cross between a sinus infection and a killer cold, and my voice is all shot to bits. You should have heard my attempts at singing at Saturday’s performance. Scratch that. You shouldn’t have heard my attempts at singing. You’d have thought, “why’d they give that guy the solo?”

I guess the biggest item, really, on my personal “current events” list is that I am not currently enrolled in seminary at this present time. Maybe a month or so ago I posted something along about my absolute surety that rest was an important thing. I was terribly behind in my studies then, but I was confident that I could apply myself and easily catch up. Funny thing about applying yourself. It only happens if you have enough time. I could tell amazing stories, but I won’t just yet. Suffice it to say that my requirements at work and my commitments at church were more than sufficient without the added burden of trying to plunge myself immediately into the pursuit of another degree.

It’s a really great story, at the end of it, though. I was going to the final class with a sinking suspicion I wasn’t going to be able to complete everything in time, and I was planning to have a nice chat with the professor to find out what my options were. I get to the school, and there’s nobody there. Not even a mouse. I pound on some doors until I find one that’s open and barge in on the painters who are making a mad dash to finish the fresco before the chapel’s grand opening. I wander around aimlessly, looking for an administrator who can tell me what’s going on.

It turns out that all the classes for the semester have already finished. The very last class (my class) met last week. I read the calendar wrong. The fourth weekend of the month does not necessarily fall directly behind the fourth Thursday of the month, particularly when the fourth Thursday of the month is Thanksgiving Day. My final exam was due in 3 days. I had missed the class where they discussed the information covered in the final exam… by a week.

I emailed my professor and asked him if there was any hope. He referred me to the dean. By this point another week had past, in which I worked nearly a 50 hour week. Did I study just in case I had a chance? I don’t think so. I wrote the dean and essentially said (in much more flowery words) “Look, man. Even if you gave me an extension, it’ll be two or three months before I can even start to turn things in.” The dean writes me back and says, “Here is a one time offer. I will allow you to withdraw from the course even though it is too late…This must happen by the first of next week.”

Believe me. I hopped on it. Little miracles are miracles too.

Now that that whole mess is over, I really have to start asking questions. Presumably, my decision to enroll in seminary at this particular time was a poor one. 1500 additional dollars of debt without a single academic credit to show for it has got to say at least that. I’m not going to say, “Oh no, that was the will and plan of God!” My other option is to say that keeping my job was the bad idea, and I just have some real problems with that. At 25 a man has got to stand up and take responsibility for his own finances. I just can’t let the debt mount any higher.

So was I supposed to go to seminary? Am I supposed to go to seminary? Was my encounter months ago with the living God nothing more than the fermentation of an addled brain? I can’t say that it was. I mean, I really can’t. the only thing in this world that I really know that I can hold on to. If I unravel them, then everything is an addlement of the brain. What is my purpose, that God has not given me? What is my nature that God has not defined for me? Everything that I am has come from an encounter with the living God. Take that relationship away, and it isn’t just that my life changes, I simply cease to be. Descarte said “I think therefore I am,” but he was wrong. Nothing can exist, except in relation to something Other, to Someone wholly different, and unchanging. Without a proper frame of reference, everything falls apart, the center cannot hold.

Sorry about sliding into philosophy there.

My only hope for now is to say that “I see Him, but not yet.” God has begun so many good works in me, and I must trust that he will be faithful to complete them all.

I’ll tell ya why

In the last month or so, quite a few people have pestered me, people back home saying, “why don’t he write?” Yesterday, it reached a new peak. I was bluntly informed that I had an extra day off and that I ought to put it to good use. What on earth was I doing?

My response is simply this: The good Lord ordained that, one day out of every seven, you should rest. Furthermore, He insisted that every seventh year be a year of rest. Even beyond that, he said that every fiftieth year should contain an additional year of no work whatsoever. This means that fully 14% of each year should be spent doing no work. Beyond that, out of every fifty years of your life, a little more than ¼ of it should be spent accomplishing absolutely nothing whatsoever. And that’s not including getting enough sleep at night.

God is very serious about this. Jeremiah said that the Babylonian captivity would last 70 years to make up for the period of 450 years or so previously where nobody took a break. That is to say, God is serious about this resting thing, even if we aren’t. And if you don’t rest of your own accord, He’ll find a way to make you rest, and you probably won’t like it. I prefer to take the “fall on the rock and be broken” method, rather than waiting ‘till the rock falls on me.

All that to say, what have I been doing the last few months? Well, the first part I was being run ragged by work and school and church all demanding more from me that I was fully prepared to give. The second part was spent recovering therefrom.

First the news: I finished my application, including the marvelously abridged 2-page spiritual autobiography, which will be posted as soon as a get a round tuit that lets me do some tweaking for the web. I got accepted to school (miraculously, since it was within days of the first session of the last possible classes I could enroll to).

I also got inducted to teaching the jr. and sr. high Sunday school at church. I want to say induced, but nobody will let me. Either way, as Dr. McCoy says, “They drafted me.” I didn’t really want to, but then I prayed about it and got told to go ahead, and it has been quite the roller coaster ride ever since. I gave up on using the official (kind of stupid) Sunday school lesson book after about the 3rd week. I think it was the lesson that included “the only true prophets of God are 100% accurate all the time. Everybody else is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, attempting to drag your soul to hell,” that pushed me over the edge. I can quote scriptures that disprove that. I read the lesson 30 minutes before I was supposed to teach, and said, “I can’t say that. I don’t even believe that!” So I gave them the world’s shortest evangelism message ever taught instead. I had their attention for a full 30 minutes (still my greatest record yet). Since then, I’ve been making my own lessons up, and I’ve been much more successful. I haven’t quite got the hang of teaching yet—one day I’ll aim too high, the next, too low, the third day I manage to hit the left fielder who is actually standing behind me—but I’m getting there.

At work, we’ve gone through probably three crises since I last wrote. Business has bottomed out for the mortgage industry… people have been fired, people who probably should have been fired haven’t been… I almost got hired (but then people who probably should have been fired weren’t)… My boss had jury duty and I had to manage the whole dang office while she was gone (all this while not actually being hired, mind you). So, lots of over time (which is good), and little rest (which is bad), and no real job (which is really really annoying).

So I finally came to this quiet open place and I said “I’m sorry. This sheep is munching right here until the shepherd moves me on. My experience has been, consistently, that when I try to accomplish something out of a sense of impending doom, the work is shoddy, half-done, and generally worthless. However, if I am already rested, I find that it is already within me to accomplish something, and the work gets done with surprising ease. That is to say, almost always, it’s better to go ahead and rest before attempting to meet that line.

Yesterday was a great boon to me. It allowed me to finally get caught up on my rest, so that today I’m finally ready to accomplish something. I know this because at work today, around three o’clock, my entire Sunday school lesson popped into my head. (Hopefully you’ll see that tomorrow, since the news here is already getting kind of long.) Already, sitting in my place of rest, I can see another line looming on the horizon: I have two 6-page informal papers due in two weeks, and I haven’t done anything but the preliminary reading. But, I know my deliverer is coming (yes, my deliverer draweth nigh…), and He will be sure to carry me, as long as I lean on Him.

Blessings everybody! (and don’t complain so much. Gee…)
KB