Monthy Archive: January 2009
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January 01, 2009

Life : Another Year

Not a great one by most measures for the world as a whole (although the election of Obama might be considered a bright spot – we’ll know for sure in 4 years).

Ignoring the usual kinds of health issue for people our age, Anne and I are doing well. The two “stand out” stories for the year for us were: first that this was the year our church went on sabbatical as a whole. An interesting experience and it did give me more time to step back and rethink my own views about church. The second big story was our move to San Francisco which will certainly color the next few years of our lives.

For me personally, it was a pretty good year. At work I managed to deliver my main project ahead of schedule with more features than originally promised. Spiritually, I continue to feel God is working in my life and I continue to grow closer to Him. I also managed to make a serious dent in my reading backlog.

So what’s in the work for next year?

First Anne and I need to figure out what God wants to us to do for a church here in the city. There’s one we have found that we are comfortable going to; but both of us are getting a sense that it isn’t where God wants us. I have a short list of other churches for us to check out and remain open to finding out about others. And, of course, there’s the option of starting something new of our own.

My second big goal is to lose weight – in fact that’s one of the factors in our decision to move to the city. You tend to do a lot more walking when you live in the city, so exercise becomes a part of daily life as opposed to something you have to schedule time for. So I have been walking home from work most days that I am in the city (1.7 miles). I walk to the theatre when I go to movies (1 mile). On those days when I don’t need the car when I work out of the Mountain View office, I take CalTrain down and walk from the station to the office (1.2 miles) and back. I also tend to take walks for lunch (1.5-2 miles) to explore the city a bit – I keep a map on my office wall to track where I have been and to plan new routes each day. On the other side of the equation, Anne and I have also been much more careful about how much we are spending on food (both groceries and restaurants), so we are also managing our calorie intake.

The result is that I have already lost 20 pounds since we moved to the city and keep losing at a slow but steady pace (the rate of loss is such that I am confident that it is sustainable and that I will be able to keep it all off in the long run). I’d be quite happy if I lost another 55 pounds over 2009 (I need to lose a bit more than that; but I don’t want to push it).

So that’s my year. How’s yours?

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

January 07, 2009

Life : Macworld

I haven't been to a Macworld Expo trade show in quite a while. I haven't been using a Mac professionally since I left Apple over a decade ago, and haven't been using it personally for a few years (although I do own one these days – a hand-me-down from Anne). So, the motivation to go up to the city for the show hasn't been there. I think I have been once in the last decade.

However, this year I don't have much of an excuse – the Moscone Convention Center (where the San Francisco Macworld is held) is less than a mile from either work or home. So I took a long lunch on Tuesday and cruised the trade-show floor. On the way over I realized that not only had I not been to a Macworld in a while; but I hadn't been to a trade show of any kind in a while (while my employer maintains a presence at several shows, there is little value in anyone going other than to work the booth, and so far I have avoided that).

Macworld Expo was mildly interesting for me. I did purchase one item (more on that in a moment); but more than anything I was struck with how little I actually used computers for these days – not just how little I use Macs, but even Windows. Seeing all of the software and hardware that was available, there just wasn't a lot of it I could imagine using. I surf the web a lot, so I need a good browser. I do Email. I compose blog posts (and some occasional creative writing), so I need a fairly basic text editor; but I really don't care about any of the fancy formatting features (it all gets lost when I paste it into my blog). I use a spreadsheet a bit (some budget tracking, a couple of simple databases), although again I only use a fairly minimal set of features. I download, organize, and occasionally clean up pictures from my camera; I don't really modify my pictures much – usually just a bit of color correction and perhaps some exposure compensation.

So other than the browser, I use the basic features of 4 programs. Not much to make me want something new (or even to upgrade to the latest version of the software I have).

The one program I did purchase at Macworld is "Delicious Library 2" (from Delicious Monster). It is a Book, CD, DVD, etc. cataloging program to help people keep track of their collections. Scan the UPC code for an item (either using the camera built into the Mac or an optional Bluetooth scanner), and it gets the information about it off the web (actually off the Amazon web site using their public interface) and adds it to the database. What's more, you can publish the collection to their server and even access it from an iPhone (useful once I buy an iPhone)

For me, I am forever forgetting what I already own, but hand entering the info on all of the books, CDs, and Movies I own has always put me off creating a database. I had previously looked at Collectorz (a similar PC program); but with them you have separate databases for books, CDs and DVDs, and have to pay for separate programs for each; and it was never worth it. With this, I just scan in the UPCs and the program does the rest. Well worth it.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 13, 2009

Life : Lazy, misc

Yes, I've been lax in posting to this blog regularly. I actually wrote a couple of week's worth of posts when I was on vacation; but when it came time to put them up I just wasn't comfortable with them. My thoughts on the subjects are still in transition, and while what I wrote may have accurately captured by thinking at the moment, my ideas continue to evolve. Since vacation my focus has been elsewhere (mostly on work).

Anne and I did check out another church in SF that we might get involved in. It was interesting enough that we plan to go back next week. Anne has previously made an observation about our church attendance – we have never started going to a church that was more than 5 years old. Whether by God's plan or our preference, we like being a part of building a community, not participating in an established one. This is relevant since the church we had checked out in November and December is well established (the current pastor is the son of the founding pastor), while the one we visited Sunday was planted only a couple years ago.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 19, 2009

Faith : What went wrong?

I've made it a point on my blog to minimize quotes from other people; but now and then I read an essay on someone else's blog and it so resonates with me that I just have to pass it on. The recent post "Gratefully Disillusioned" on Free Believers Network (a site for people who have become disillusioned with the institutional church) falls into that category. Quoth:

I have spent countless hours pondering what went wrong with Christianity in our generation. What happened to our religion to make everything so crazy and off track? How could something centered around authentic relationship with God become so dangerous and hurtful to its participants? More than anything, I've asked myself; why wasn't it working for most people?

I've found that the pattern of growth for those who seem to truly know Him has been pretty much the same. The common thread I see over and over is that every person in relationship with Him must go through a shedding period where all that they have been told and all that they have believed is gently taken from them until they are left with nothing but what is. Each person discovers a contentment in knowing they were wrong all along and the stresses of what they had been told all their lives, whether good or bad, trickle away, leaving their spirit relaxed and satisfied.
. . .

I've come to the conclusion that somewhere in the last 200 years, we felt that we needed to market our relationship as a religion. At some point in time, someone decided that Christianity needed to be packaged and presented in a way that would appeal to the masses. In other words, we purposefully marketed our faith to unbelievers. I am convinced that this is where the dominoes began to tumble.

. . .

Generations later, people are holding onto the promises the sales agent gave them, in spite of the fact that they've never seen the results manifested in their own life. Others finally leave the "faith," drained and disheartened. They didn't get what they wanted from Christianity so they continue searching for a religion that will give it to them. Then we have the people who would have given their heart to God without any marketing at all. It was already in their heart. They came to Him because they wanted Him and nothing else. They would have come without the fancy marketing and boastful claims.

. . .

These are the people who will eventually become Free Believers.

These are the people who will still stick around once the good and the bad of their religion has been stripped away. They never needed promises of power and prosperity to pique their interest. They didn't go into it looking for an escape from normalcy. It was never about avoiding life's hardships or obtaining magical powers. It was relationship that drew them. It was the Spirit of relationship that they first heard and listened to.

The process of stripping the good and the bad of religion is a long and painful one, but I've found that Free Believers love every minute of it. Their faith doesn't shudder for even a second during the process. When the embellished things of God disappear, they find themselves becoming more pleased and pleasured by what they find behind it than most of their institutional friends would ever have been. In fact, they would willingly give up everything they had ever been promised, if it meant they could be one step closer to the heart of the one they love. This stripping away of religion's boasts and promises is truly what separates the sheep from the goats in our generation. The goats become angry and faithless and the sheep become "Gratefully Disillusioned."

Amen!

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 21, 2009

Life : Mortality

I discovered in a conversation I had with Anne last week that something I had meant to be text in some of my posts last year had somehow slipped into the subtext and away from view. This short essay is to make explicit what I had meant to say and somehow missed.

Simply this: I'm getting old, and I am becoming increasingly aware of my mortality.

That's what was really behind several of most posts last year about sorting through my life and trying to decide what I will actually get around to doing. I really thought I had said this in those posts; but I want back and looked at them after I talked with Anne, and she was right.

I will turn 50 this year, and while I expect I have a few decades left, the "deadline" for finishing anything I want to do in this life is starting to come into view, and I am seriously evaluating how I invest myself based on that recognition. What really is of value for me to do in my remaining years? What do I want to make sure I get done before this life is over?

To give a sense of how seriously I take this, I have even found myself questioning spending so much time reading. What value is there is stuffing more information and ideas into my head if that's where it stays? If I don't have some plan to make good use of what I have learned over the last 50 years, what's the point of learning more over the next 50? That's one reason I have been thinking about writing more – not just this blog; but ordering my life so I start writing some of the books I have always wanted to do.

Taking the sabbatical at church has also made clear to me how important it is for me to have some consistent outlet for my faith. While the growth of my personal relationship with God is of value beyond this life and therefore always a worthwhile investment, I am getting more and more aware of how important it is for me to pass on what I have learned (and am still learning). The question is – what means does God have planned for me to do that?

Of course, you don't have to be 50 to start thinking this way; but it sure has helped me focus my attention.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 26, 2009

Books , Faith : Reconsidering McLaren

Brian D. McLaren is one of the most influential (and in many circles, the most polarizing) Christian authors around these days. He is one of the original leaders of the “emergent church” movement and his statements are why other people have distanced themselves from that cause (or at least that name). Everyone seemed to have an opinion on him, and those opinions vary greatly.

With that as background, last year I decided to make up my own mind, and so read McLaren’s trilogy of novels “A New Kind of Christian”, “The Story We Find Ourselves In”, and “The Last Word and the Word after That”. These “novels” are essentially a collection of dialogs between fictional characters about the real meaning of Christianity with just enough plot thrown in to keep it interesting. The main character is a pastor who is going through a bit of a crisis who meets a High School teacher with some very different views on the faith.

Having read the books, I could see what all of the fuss was about. The books raise questions about almost every aspect of Christianity. While McLaren was clearly trying to present a kind of post-modern deconstruction of the faith, there is a line between “deconstruction” and “destruction” and it was not always obvious to me which side McLaren was walking on. While some of the questions he raised struck me as appropriate and necessary (I’m revisiting a couple of ideas in my own theology after reading the books); as a total package I came away thinking that McLaren went too far and that people could be left adrift after having their firm anchors cut by his “deconstruction”.

Yet, I kept running into people I respect who said good things about McLaren. People who would not agree that some of the things I saw questioned in his novels were up for debate.

So I decided to give McLaren another shot, and read this past weekend his “A Generous Orthodoxy”, which gives a fairly clear outline of what he actually believes (as opposed to what he questions). Based on that book, I can at least see why people like him; and in fact there are only a few things he says that I disagree with. Most of the book is an analysis of various Christian traditions (the subtitle of the book is “Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished”). For each tradition, he comments on the good things he has learned from each while making brief acknowledgement of their failings. The net effect is a kind of piecemeal Christianity made up of the best aspects of all traditions.

And for all except a couple of chapters, the resulting picture is not unlike what I believe. Even when I disagree, I acknowledge that it might just be that I disagree with the way he describes what he believes, and not actually with what he believes (or perhaps not). The only place that seriously concerned me was the couple of pages he spent explaining why he will not explain what he believes in one point of doctrine. I came away from that section thinking “he doth protest too much”.

So, what’s my view of McLaren now? I would still not recommend to novels to anyone; but I certainly would recommend “A Generous Orthodoxy” to any mature Christian, and I will likely read more of his non-fiction books myself.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)