A Life in Transition

The image that I seem to have given everybody of my total abstinence from the ‘Net for the last week has been a little misleading. My roommate happened to have a spare computer somewhere in his closet that I’ve been using for the bare essentials. It’s actually a quaint little piece: it has a cute little wind-up key in the front you have to turn three times to get it to boot up. To connect to the internet, I have an empty can I set on the cable moden and a little string I run back to the computer.

I can check my mail and read Schlock Mercenary. The rest is just too much effort.

I also have pretty good internet access from work, and with my new job, I have enough time to additionally check my bank ballance and verify that I am, in fact, more broke than I have been at any other time in my life. I had more disposable funds than this when I was 12. (That wasn’t a joke–I had a nice little outfit going when I was 12.)

Things are, however, looking up for me. My new job is everything that I had hoped and imagined, which is to say, it’s a big hairy mess–but a fun mess. I’m the low rung on the ladder, but I’m mostly in the thick of things, being sent on errors, and generally the only person in my office who gets to meet people from other offices. I make stupid mistakes and correct most of them before they get caught.

As I was getting stuff moved from one cubicle to the other, and getting permissions for all my new responsibilities, I had several opportunities to run in with some of the IS crew. One of them told me he was surprised I had taken the position I took, since there were several positions open in his department that he was sure I was qualified for. I felt this was a very great compliment, considering I had just single-handedly obliterated the entire insides of my own computer.

Speaking of which, my computer is now in the capable hands of my fiance’s father. He’s an old school pro at this sort of thing. He doesn’t cut any corners, righ up to actually unpluging the machine and running a ground wire before doing surgery.

As far as I can tell, though, it was a lost cause in my case. The only thing that seems to be left is the case and a CD player. The motherboard, processor, two hard drives, and the power supply, all toast. I have no idea how this happened. It seems oddly suspicious that they would all go out at once like that. What I do know is that I have no money at my disposal with which to pay for all those computer parts. Valerie’s dad has been most understanding: he has agreed to take care of everything himself and merely take payment out of my hide. It’s the standard contract: seven years of indentured servitude. My only satisfaction is in the sure knowledge that Valerie does not have an older sister.

Life without a computer has been very surreal for me. I come home and find that there is little left to do. I make some dinner, grab a book, read a little, and collapse into bed: a very simple, orderly, ordinary day. Granted, part of that is that I’m still recovering from two months working the night shift, but I think there’s something more to this than the fact that I’ve finally removed that thick blanket from off my window.

Last year, during the height of the war, I had my radio perpetually set to NPR, mostly because it was the only radio station my car could pick up, and I was bored of all my CD’s. But if you eat a food long enough, it begins to find a way into your cravings, and you begin to desire something you never before really hungered for. I knew I had passed some sort of barrier when I was listening to their saturday news-gameshow and answered nearly every question right. As I smiled and nodded to their jibes, I realized I had become a current events junkie. And then, like too many concurrent bowls of strawberry ice cream, the flavor was gone for me. Suddenly I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to just keep listening until all the important events stop happening. It’s their job to go around making sure that something important is happening. Instead, I discovered that even the important things weren’t really all that important.

They’re just events. They keep on happening. Only the cast and setting change.

I think I’ve had the same sort of revelation forced on me by my recent Net hiatus. I had been frantically scrounging around, looking for good new blogs to read, trying to say something important enough to get mentioned on blogs4God, trying to be a big dog, noticing to get noticed, discussing ideas that other people were discussing. Being forced away helped me to realize that all of it is a bit of a vanity. It’s not like they’re saying anything new. All the Evangelicals are saying evangelical things, and all the Catholics are saying Catholic things, and all the Republicans are saying Republican things. All the business sites are just oozing with free prize inside and this radical new concept called transparency. And I’m not any of those things. I don’t suppose I’m necessarily against any of them, but there’s really no need for me to discuss whether Saved! is a movie worth seeing. The only reason I might discuss such a thing is that other people are interested in it. And I like people.

I like people. But attempting to clamor because they’re clammoring is a pretty silly thing. I’m just not a clammerer(…er). I’ve got too much C.S. Lewis in me for that and not enough G.K. Chesterton. I’m fonder of ideas than of finangling.

Don’t worry. I’m not going to go from here and place some oath on myself to only write a certain way. Studying all these other people has already had the effect of putting too many limiters on what I do and say, while I tried to find some essential standard. What I’ve done is simply to rediscover what I knew before: that I find books far more fascinating than newspapers.

Thoughts on Music

For some unknown reason, lately, I’ve been getting my music fix in an odd way: Some old tune will come into my head and, if I’m lucky, I’ll also get a few lines from the song. In the middle of humming over it, I’ll google my phrase and see if I can learn the song. And that’ll be my song for the next week or so. Invariably it’ll be something relatively obscure. Here are my current favorites:

Be Thou my Vision

Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me save that Thou art.
Thou my best thought by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

Be Thou my Wisdom, and Thou my true Word;
I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;
Thou my great father, I thy true son;
Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one.

Be Thou my battle-shield, sword for my fight
Be though my dignity, Thou my delight
Thou my soul’s shelter, and Thou my high tower
Raise Thou me heav’nward, O Power of my power

Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise,
Thou my inheritance, now and always;
Thou and Thou only, Thou first in my heart
High King of Heaven, my Treasure Thou art.

High King of Heaven, my victory won,
May I reach heaven’s joys, O bright heaven’s son
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my vision, O ruler of all.

And…

Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing

Come, Thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung my flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it, mount of Thy redeeming love.

Here I raise my Ebenezer; here by Thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure, Safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger, interposed his precious blood.

O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love,
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for Thy courts above.

O that day when freed from sinning, I shall see Thy lovely face;
Clothed then in blood washéd linen, how I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace;
Come my Lord, no longer tarry, take my ransomed soul away;
Send Thy angels now to carry me to realms of endless day!

The interesting thing about both of these songs is that they’re both full blown hymns. They’re not even the century-old mini-hymns with cute little choruses. They’re just hymns. You get to sing them once through and then you stop, because it sounds really dorky to go back over the whole thing. Fortunately, they’re both of them long enough that, by the time you get done singing the whole thing, you’re satisfied enough with singing it that you don’t feel the need to repeat. If you want to sing some more, you need to go ahead and move on to the next song.

I’ve heard it said in several places (and it’s not exactly a new complaint) that these older songs are somehow better – usually because they’re deeper, more doctrinal, have more content, or something of that sort – than the new songs that seem to consist entirely of a chorus. The argument seems to be short songs = bad, long songs = good. The irony is that most of these people have their categories backward: the choruses are actually the longer songs because you can repeat them ad infinitum. I’ve been in services where we sang the same chorus for 20 minutes or more. Ideally, a good worship service should have both: the hymns provide a thrilling survey of a set of ideas about God, and then the chorus comes up behind it and digs deep into a single thought.

The real culprit in our services, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t that we sing one kind of song over another, but that the whole service is too short. Even if you have a hymn that has five stanzas, it does you little good when you sing only the first two and then the last one. In the same light, it doesn’t do a lot of good to sing a song designed to repeat if you only sing it through three times. So many times we’re like Joash, only striking the ground three times with our arrows. If the purpose of the worship service is to meet with God, we need to “hit the ground” a few more than three times with our worship. We can’t just follow a form of what we randomly think might be “enough.” We need to pursue this thing until we actually do have an encounter with God, or at least until we’re pretty tired.

Rice Pudding

I bought me some Kraft Rice Pudding Handi-snacks the other day, and I just finished my first one. I’ll tell ya, they ain’t like momma used to make, but they sure to bring back memories.

…mostly memories of my mom complaining that she had to get up at 4 in the morning to make the stuff.

I don’t know what her problem was. She got up at 4 in the morning anyway…

News

I believe that I have two types of readers on this site. One group consists of family and friends who have known me for a while and hardly ever see me. They wish I would generally post more newsy information about what’s going on in my life. The other group consists of people I have met by visiting and commenting on other people’s web sites. These people, to the best of my knowledge, aren’t interested in the Chronicles of Kyle. I assume these people are far more interested in what I have to say. I may be wrong about this. I may be reading my own bias into things, because honestly, I’m mostly only interested in what I have to say. Nevertheless, sometimes I feel that it’s necessary to talk about events instead of ideas. When I do so, it’s my goal to tell things in as amusing a way as possible to avoid boring my readers who, otherwise, don’t really much care. I have no idea how often I’m successful at it. Sometimes life is just… boring.

With that in mind, my mom has been asking about my job. I did get the new admin position at my work. I’m not entirely sure yet what exactly it’s going to entail. The biggest area is going to be “reports,” which basically means taking a bunch of statistics and presenting them in an intuitive manner. We have a program on all our computers that keeps a log of every person’s calls—what phone line they called, how long the call was, how long they worked on the call after they hanged up. Since we are supposed to log into this program when we first get there and only log out once we leave, it also keeps a pretty good record of attendance and tardies. So I’m supposed to keep track of all that data. Additionally, I’ll be in charge of tracking schedules: vacations, emergency time off, and who worked what shift for whom. I think I’m also in charge of the department supplies. I’m the post-it note dealer on the block. I give you free samples, but then I gouge you once you’re addicted to the things.

I’m not sure about this, but I believe the second part of my job is going to be to create a standard practices handbook, so people can look up how to do their jobs. Right now the sum total of our understanding resides in the minds of the two people who were part of this department before they moved it to charlotte. Ever see what happens when 2 people know how to do their jobs, but the 30 people around them really don’t? It ain’t pretty. We do have a few people who’ve been there for over a year, and they pretty much know what they’re doing, but they all have different habits of doing things. Quite a few of them rely more on their experience working in other centers more than they do on our actual policies. We don’t have a record of our policies, so why shouldn’t they?

The great advantage of my new job will be normal working hours. Up until this point, I’ve gotten enough money to live on mostly by making sure I was on call at the drop of a hat. As a result, I’ve been able to keep my hours up nearly around 40 a week on average. I’ve also been getting up at 9:00 at night and going to bed at 2 in the afternoon, missing church services and sleep like crazy. You have no idea how much I now appreciate a nice 8-5. (Although, I suppose Valerie might.)

Other than that, I really can’t tell you much about my new job, except that it starts after the 4th of July. I haven’t started working it yet, so I really don’t know.

In other news, I’m going to a wedding in West Virginia this weekend. I’ll be getting off work at 8:00 am and leaving immediately for all parts north. It’s a 7-8 hour trip, so I expect to get there between 3 and 4 in the afternoon. I then expect to be very sleepy. This is why it is so darned all-important that I get some sleep right now instead of writing a bunch of things on my weblog. (sleep! Macbeth hath murthered sleep! Macbeth shall sleep no more!) If it weren’t for the whole sleep thing, I’d be really excited about getting to see two of my friends getting married. But all I can think about right now is how much frappuccino I’m going to have to consume to avoid causing a major traffic event on I-77 North.

And lastly: my roommate confided in me that he’s having some major difficulties with his job. I completely understand. He’s essentially the lowest paid executive in history. He gets sent all over the world to arrange million dollar deals (this is not an exaggeration) and gets paid essentially the same salary as me. Me, I’d be having a problem with the wages. He’s having trouble with the work.

The long and the short of it is that he’s good at the wheeling and dealing part, but he’s completely lost when they ask him a technical question. He usually ends up being the middle-man between two engineering companies that speak two different languages, who are trying to trade a massive piece of machinery (worth, I assume, millions of dollars). He’s a businessman pinned between two engineers throwing technical jargon at him in two different languages, and they get all snappy when he can’t talk like an engineer.

All this is another way of saying he doesn’t really understand his product very well. When it comes down to it, he just doesn’t like hugely complicated machines. He loves everything about the job, except the product.

So now he doesn’t know quite exactly what to do. He’s working a full 80+ hours a week and he’s still not able to make any headway. He’s gotten very flustered, and feels his efficiency is way low. He doesn’t know if he needs to stick it out, go ahead and ask for a reduction in his responsibilities (very shameful for a Japanese), or start looking for a new job in a different industry. Personally, I’d be asking for a responsibility reduction and start looking immediately for a new industry. I’m not too keen on the idea of trading huge machines to factories either. But that’s me, not him.

I told him I would pray for him, and he was really happy about that. He’s not a Christian, and he essentially has no real religious belief. He’d honestly like to be a Christian, but the whole “God not intervening while his dad died of cancer” thing was a huge blow to his ability to believe. I think this would be an excellent opportunity for God to make a difference in this man’s life. (If He’s so inclined, but I’d be willing to bank on what God’s inclinations were in that respect.) I’m going to pray for him. I’d be grateful if you would pray too.

Whence Worship?

I should be asleep right now. Yesterday I was up for an elapsed time of about 30 hours with only an hour and a half intermission before I went to work. But I left my phone on by accident, and my church’s automatic message called and woke me up. Now I’m having trouble sleeping.

But while I was tossing and turning, a thought came to me: why is it that, on the web, Christianity is so much less available than, say, pornography? I someone finds themselves with a longing, he’s more likely to find a satiation for his physical desires than for his spiritual desires. Why is that?

The first answer that I came up with is that pornography’s easier. For that, all you have to do is take off your clothes and move around a little. A true expression of Christianity requires us to unclothe our souls.

Most of Christianity that’s easily expressionable comes in a corporate setting. Even preaching and teaching, which usually involves one person communicating with a group, works best when the response of the group happens… as a group. A mass of comments on a weblog, or a long list of forwarded emails is usually little recompense for being able to look to your neighbor and see in her face that the message is having an impact.

But if preaching and teaching on the web is less than satisfying, how much less the act of worship? It’s one thing to visit a worship music resource, or a prayer list. It’s quite something else for you to actually encounter something online that immediately inspires you to look to the living God. Let off the fact that it’s hard to find; it’s difficult to do. C. S. Lewis only wrote 7 Chronicles of Narnia. How many other written works directly inspire us to worship, instead of merely telling us how to do it, or worse, merely making a record of the fact that someone else has worshiped?

Morning Person

Valerie says I wasn’t built for the night shift. How little does she know!

About two o’clock yesterday afternoon, I gave up. I was trying to go online to look for wedding presents for my friends Tom and Christy. I clicked on the Bed Bath and Beyond link about 5 times and it never went through. My email was crashing every 10 minutes, and the last email I sent to Valerie went to her 13 separate times. I had something evil possessing my computer.

I knew what it was. It weren’t a virus, per se. It was that even new mutation they call “adware.” Personally, I can’t tell much functional difference between the two. It’s sort of like saying you’re a Japanese Shinto instead of a European Pagan. Both viruses and adware are evil little programs that fiddle with my computer when I don’t want them to. The only difference is that, for some reason, my Norton anti-virus protects me from one, but not the other.

I hear they’re taking steps to remedy that problem, but in the mean time, I have a computer that is worthless in a lot of ways. I can write whatever I want, but I can’t give it to anybody without hitting the “print” key.

So there was only one solution: I had to reformat and start anew.

I wasn’t really worried. I’m good at this. It’s actually pretty good for your computer, since it gets rid of all the stupid programs you’ve installed but since forgotten about. You just have to make sure you back up all the stuff you don’t intend to forget about.

I did all these things. Then I put the CD in the slot and restarted. The Windows installation screen came up… I told it to create a new directory, format, etc. It did all those things, and then started to install windows.

Then it stopped.

It gave a little error message that said “incorrect function” and then listed some obscure file deep within the bowels of the windows installation CD.

I repeated this process four times, to no avail. Then I started calling people. I called half of Valerie’s family (since half of them are computer techs anyway), and then I called home. Valerie’s dad, the lynchpin of computer installation expertise, was asleep, so my dad won out with the number to Microsoft installation support. After two hours of kibitzing about encountering a new problem never before seen during installation, the answer was revealed:

There were smudges on the CD.

I finished the installation around 7:30 pm. And then I crashed.

I woke up this morning around 4:30, angry at an overly authoritarian itinerant church worker I had encountered in a dream. (He was a good guy, but yelling at the kids is not the answer. Actually, he yelled at me too, for not paying attention. I won’t be working with him for a while… these crazy dreams!)

By 5:30 I was on the track, running my morning mile, grinning at the smells of wild mint and evergreen, glad to be getting up in the morning.

Valerie says I’m a morning person. How little does she know!

Thought to Ponder

I found yesterday’s Oswald Chambers daily to be a good reminder:

“Lovest thou me….feed my sheep.” – John 21:16

Jesus did not say – Make converts to your way of thinking, but look after My sheep, see that they get nourished in the knowledge of Me. We count as service what we do in the way of Christian work; Jesus Christ calls service what we are to Him, not what we do for Him. Discipleship is based on devotion to Jesus Christ, not on adherence to a belief or creed. “If any man comes to me and hate not…, he cannot be my disciple.” There is no argument and no compulsion, but simply – If you would be My disciple, you must be devoted to Me. A man touched by the Spirit of God suddenly says – “Now I see who Jesus is,” and that is the source of devotion.

Today we have substituted creedal belief for personal belief, and that is why so many are devoted to causes and so few devoted to Jesus Christ. People do not want to be devoted to Jesus, but only to the cause He started. Jesus is the source of deep offense to the educated mind of today that does not want him in any other way than as a comrade. The lord’s first obedience was to the will of his father not to the needs of men. The saving of men was the natural outcome of his obedience to his father. If I am devoted to the cause of humanity only I will soon be exhausted and come to the place where my love will faulter, but if I love Jesus Christ personally and passionately I can serve humanity though men treat me as a doormat. The secret of a disciples life is devotion to Jesus Christ and the characteristics of the life is it’s unobtrusiveness. It is like a corn of wheat, which falls into the ground and dies, but presently it will spring up and alter the whole landscape.

Speaking with Great Authority

…On Things You Know Nothing About.

I know. Nobody would ever accuse me of the above tendency. But I have been known to on occasion. I have to. It’s the only thing I’m good at 🙂

The problem is I have ideas, and I want to aggressively pursue those ideas, to test them to see if they are right. The only way I know how to do this is to state them clearly and as loudly as I can and see if anybody argues with me.

Of course I’m wrong–somewhere. But for the most part I think I’m right. I have to. How could I walk around thinking I was wrong all the time? If I discovered where it was that I was wrong, I’d change my mind, and then I’d be right!

All sophistry aside, Tim Bednar has an excellent article up discussing this tendency, which we seem to have in common. It’s pretty good. You should read it.

Reflection

My seminary correspondence work arrived today—for which I’m very glad. Life has been very… boring for me lately. I’ve been in a kind of isolated spot, what with working weird hours and having all my loved ones away from me. I wasn’t getting lonely, but it seemed that, of the important things, the things to which I really want to apply myself, none of them were available to me.

At the same time, somehow, things have been happening suddenly very fast. Things I need to think about, that is, not things I need to do. Tom’s getting married and I need to be there so I can be best man at his wedding. My work is going through a major transition: in the next few weeks I will almost undoubtedly be promoted to a full time position. Out of the 9 full time positions available, some 11 people were applying. Pretty good odds. But one of the full time positions available is not like the others. It’s an administrative job, which I’d really like to have. I think it would be more fun and more fulfilling, as well as a job where I’d be much more useful. There are about 5 other people who are thinking similar things. But even if I don’t get a full time position, all of our schedules rotate in July, and I have to pick a new shift. So in less than two weeks, my work life is going to undergo a major revolution, and I don’t even know what kind of change it’ll be.

Add to this the fact that my pastor at church has started teaching some things that I’m not so sure I agree with, and I’ve been having some heady debates with Zac over epistemology. And then my seminary stuff arrives. So I spent about an hour and a half cleaning my room while listening to the most expensive CD I’ve ever owned (the entire class, lectures, curriculum, coursework and everything is on a single CD, and the class costs $500). After about an hour and a half, my brain shut down. I turned off the lights and went back to bed, and I spent a good hour in that half-awake slumber where you milk through everything that’s been coming at your mind and try to curdle it into something stable (my apologies for the unwholesome metaphor).

As I was finally coming around, I realized what it was that was really bothering me. “Lord,” I said, “I feel so distant from you.” And he spoke back to me, so very clearly: “That’s because you’ve been trying to meet me with your mind.”

It crystallized for me then. That’s exactly what I had been trying to do. And it’s exactly wrong-headed. “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The thing we do with our mind is secondary; that is, it’s what we do after we have met with God. St. Augustine had his whole life changed, then he wrote the confession.

To take from a completely different source, this is exactly what Wordsworth talked about in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads that launched off the romantic poetry movement. The quote is “…poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” Attempting to write poetry without having any powerful feelings usually results in pretty insipid poetry.

But in the face of conflation, I was attempting to worship God in truth, with only a nod to that whole spirit thing. It wasn’t working. But the beautiful thing is, in response to my question, he dropped an answer directly into my mind. He came to where I was to give me a way out.

That, my friends, is why I love him.

I’m going to work now. If you pray, please pray for me that I will continue to meet with him, for everything else flows from that.