tonyandkirsten.org

Today is caucus day in Minnesota. It’s also primary day in 23 other states. As much as anyone, I’m excited about today and really want to see what happens when the dust has settled. That said, I just read a wonderful piece over on David Kuo’s website that keeps this day in perspective.

The great delusion of the build up to sort-of-interesting Tuesday is that it is SUPREMELY-IMPORTANT Tuesday. It isn’t. It is just a day when the presidential nominating process takes its largest leap forward. It is just a day when primary elections are held from sea to shining sea. It is just [sic] day shaped by politics.

Read more here: http://blog.beliefnet.com/jwalking/2008/02/sortofinteresting-tuesday.html

God is indeed sovereign, no matter who gets the nomination or wins the election. Perhaps just as important is the fact that the American public still holds far more power to affect change than the White House. I find these to be very comforting facts.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to go caucus tonight, and might even stick around to make sure that my unbound delegate will stick to the issues I care about at the next level of the caucus. I’m just not going to get bent out of shape about this whole deal. I’m also going to continue working for change where it really matters — in the lives and hearts of individuals.

I hope you can do the same.

It’s been 9 days, and I haven’t told many people about this yet; it’s just finally starting to seem real. In the last couple of days, however, it’s started to sink in. I’ve asked for some time off work to go visit, and had to tell people why I’m going out of town. It’s real to me now.

Last week, Tuesday in fact, my dad had a minor stroke.

Aparently, he’s doing pretty well. The stroke happened in his sleep and it was on the right side of his brain. As a result, he’s lost some fine motor control on his left side and his speech is slurred. The last report is that he’s still in the hospital and will be for another week or so but that he is starting to make progress at regaining his lost abilities. Mom and Dad are both in good spirits, and this is very good.

Kirsten & I were already planning on making a trip to Iowa to see folks in Ames, but now we’re leaving another day earlier and are going first to Atlantic to see my parents. Please be praying for my parents and family.

-Tony

A little background would probably be helpful on this one. The room we stayed in at Abbott Northwestern was really warm, had no Internet access for patients, and cell phones were not allowed. In between visitors, these ideas were ones that crossed my mind.

It’s worth noting that some of these activities are illegal or unethical — you shouldn’t do illegal or unethical things. It’s also worth noting that I only went through with a fraction of the ideas below.

• Figure out whether or not cell phones really do interfere with the infant security system (as posted).
• Find a way to really interfere with said infant security system.
• Notice that there is a Wi-Fi signal broadcast to your room, with the ESSID: 2WIRE450.
• Upon noticing that the Wi-Fi is WEP protected, ask your nurse for the password.
• When told that the password is only for hospital staff, politely thank the nurse for the information and then ask another staff member until you find one that doesn’t realize that guests aren’t supposed to have the password.
• Impersonate a technician of the “Two Wire” wireless company and ask hospital staff for their site’s password.
• Knowing the WEP is pretty weak security, look up the how-to for running aircrack-ng to crack the WEP key.
• Go through the how-to on cracking WEP.
• After realizing that your Wi-Fi card’s driver needs to be patched to perform and injection attack, notice that there is already a PC in the room, plugged into ethernet.
• Attempt to login to the PC using common passwords.
• Try plugging into the other ethernet jack in the room.
• After finding the second jack dead, decide whether or not a rainbow tables-based attack on the PC will be detected or not.
• Wait until a nurse shuts down said PC for the night, and then plug into that jack with your laptop.
• Post pictures to your website with this ethernet connection.
• Find a way to remove your identification bracelet without breaking the band.
• Find another couple with a good sense of humor.
• Convince said couple to swap bands with you after each shift change, just to keep the staff on their toes.
• Play staff bingo! Just draw up a bingo board with random names in the squares. After meeting a staff member, cross of their name. Normal bingo rules apply. For an easy version, use only female names; to increase the difficulty of the game, add some male names to the mix as desired.
• Play security staff bingo. The rules are similar to staff bingo, but you are restricted to only using the names of security staff that visit your room.
• Play advanced security staff bingo. This game is similar to security staff bingo, but you can’t mark a square unless the security staff member in question escorts you to their office for a conversation about expectations for guests of the hospital.
• Blog.

Herbert Humphrey Hill

Neville Francis Hill

Dwight Ulysses Hill

Ulysses Samuel Hill

Declan Dirk Hill

Susan Elizabeth Hill

Brayden Aiden Hill

Crazy Maddog Hill

Hugh Heman Hill

Harold Hector Hill

Hepatitis Alfred Hill

Hepatitis Bartholomew Hill

Bartholomew Maximus Hill

Linus Rox Hill

George Paul Lawrence Hill

Barry Stephen Dwight Hill

Geoff Andrew Hill

Hugh Ulysses Gavin Hill

Lewis Lance Ibrahim Hill

Phil Bill Hill

Zachary Yves Xavier Walter Vernon Ulysses Trent Seth Robert Quinlan Peter Octavius Nathaniel Mark Lester Kevin Joseph Isaac Hill

Phew! I’m glad I got that off my chest!

Spurred by a comment from Tina, I did a little looking into Dinesh’s past.

For the Googlers out there: here is some balance to my recommendation from his Wikipedia page and a critique of him from Campus Progress.

I have no idea if the allegations Tina brings up are true, or if they are whether Dinesh has recanted of his behavior. What I can say, is that if true, the actions she reported are extremely unloving, and I would not approve of them.

I guess as with all things, we must investigate the things we hear as well as the person saying them. Caveat lector!

I’m starting to get settled into a routine here, and man is that refreshing!

Get up, get ready, work, play, dinner, dishes, evening activity, and sleep! The routine is very similar every day.

Amazingly, it seems that there’s a part of my being that really feels relaxed when there is a routine to my life. Many of the decisions are made, I know what I’m supposed to be doing, and I get done the things I need to do. Perhaps even more paradoxical, the regular structure actually allows me to be more flexible with my time!

The structure actually frees me to be creative with my time. Since I know what the typical components are and where they go, it’s really easy to re-arrange those components and still make sure the necessary things get done. Since I have scheduled in an ambiguous “evening activity”, that means I have planned to do something, without necessarily naming that activity until we get there, meaning that there is room for something to just “come-up”.

The structure is really nice since I’m now starting to develop relationships based solely upon reliability of being in the same place at the same time. I am now friends with many people who ride the same bus to and from campus every day. Because we’ve all gotten to know one another, we’ve actually planned events outside of bus riding!

I wanted to share these things in part as just a life update, but also as a thought to share in TJ’s discussion about busy-ness and family culture. So, enjoy!

Tonight at the EPIC teaching, Pat Sokoll gave a great message that could probably be summed up by saying, “God is in charge, you are not. So do what He wants you to do, not the things you think you want to do.” Okay, so that is a great oversimplification. He touched on a variety of subjects including dying to yourself, being a servant and truly being engaged in community (rather than being an American, individualistic Christian). I probably even missed some (or many) points while I was trying to keep Madeline from making too much noise. If you missed it, you should definitely listen to it once it is posted on the EPIC blog. Or listen again even if you heard it once since it was so profound.

So, on to my original reason for writing this post…One subject that Pat touched on was the differences between a technological versus a traditional society. As you might expect, we live in a technological society, while the Bible was written in a traditional society. The technological soceity evolved during and after the industrial revolution, but a lot of the really big changes to society have occured in the past 30-50 years. Sounds like a no-brainer in one sense, but when you look at some of the deeper implications of this, it can be very profound. When I first ran across this concept, it really helped me understand some of what the Bible says about Women’s roles in a way that other ways of explaining things did not.

In his message, Pat mentioned a “19 page booklet” (or something like that) on this topic. I’m not sure what exactly that is, but I can point you in the direction of a great free resource on the subject. The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood has made available on their website a book called “Man and Woman in Christ” by Stephen B. Clark. This book is out of print, so hard copies are only availabe from used book sellers online. This is in html format, so you’ll have to get creative if you want to do anything other than just read it in your web browser.

While the focus of this book is a variety of issues regarding men’s and women’s roles, one of the primary foundations for some of Clark’s points on the subject come from this concept of a technological vs. traditional society. If you want to read just his chapter-long explanation of this, read chapter 18, which is about 35 pages long. The whole book (I think I have read almost the whole thing, if not all of it) is amazing reading — if you do read it, keep in mind that Clark comes from a Catholic background, so some of his thoughts make more sense in that light. But overall, he is right on in what he says about Biblical manhood and womanhood.

I hurried through my “Believing God” Bible study workbook assignments this week to get to #5 — the section dealing with what happens when God does not come through with a miracle we ask Him for. (This week’s lessons are related to the theme of “God can do what He says He can do” — and the author’s primary focus is miracles.)

I had been looking forward with great anticipation with this section, but as it turns out it didn’t really answer the questions that often plague me related to this. Her examples seemed to deal mostly with sickness and death — types of miracles that people ask for and they either happen or they don’t happen. They are also usually things that we as people have very little control over. There is nothing we can literally “do” about a sick friend or relative. It really is prayer, and prayer only.

My struggles and doubts in this area are honestly related to ministry — more specifically, to the faith goals or requests we put before God. And, at least in my mind, it seems so much more complicated. These faith-goal miracles we ask God for range from, on a small scale, believing God to see a certain Lifegroup grow in size…to on a larger level believing God for a certain attendance level at the Rock or for a certain number of people to get saved or attend a conference.

These type of miracles (or maybe just “requests of God” would be a better term for this category) feel a lot different to me because they are not finite in the number of ways they can be answered. They are not necessarily “yes or no” questions. And we do play an active part in seeing these goals realized. For example. if we were to ask God to see 200 people attend the Rock on a certain Friday night and 175 show up, God still worked — some people did show up, and maybe even a few more than usual. But our “faith goal” was not realized.

I honestly find myself terribly disappointed and even hurt (emotionally) in these situations on a regular basis. We are constantly asking God for very amazing things, and somehow it often (maybe even usually) seems like God does only a small part of the amazing thing we ask for. I find myself wondering if we did our part correctly or if we even asked for the right thing in the first place.

Sometimes in the past I have let my disappointment and doubt turn to cynicism and small faith and mistrust of the people who suggested the goal if it wasn’t one I was a part of creating. Lots of un-achieved faith-goals over the years put forth by various people at all levels left me feeling very tired by the whole process. In recent months I have tried to turn the corner on that and allow myself to have fresh faith again, even if it means facing this internal pain and disappointment time and time again.

Now, I know that we are not supposed to put our hope in things like ministry success, or in whether or not our requests to God have been answered in the way we expected. Our hope is to be in the glory that awaits us in heaven. Our hope is to be in the Lord! Yet for me it is still really hard to put my all into asking over and over again, only to have God rarely answer by meeting or exceeding the faith goal that was set out.

What am I missing? How does a person on one hand, consistently ask God to do great things in a ministry context (not limiting the size or scope of miracle or results He may want to accomplish through a given ministry or church body or team or Lifegroup)…while yet being absolutely content if God often answers that He would rather do only small things through you or your church or your group at the moment. And besides, how would you know if it was partly your fault (because you asked for the wrong thing or did the wrong thing or were too lazy or whatever) that God didn’t choose to come through on the request you made of Him?

Please let me know if you have any great insights on this.

This summer’s message series at Stonebrook is about Psalms, so I have been reading it a bit the past few days.  I was looking at Psalm 7 (in NIV), and enjoyed this verbal imagery:

14 He who is pregnant with evil
and conceives trouble gives birth to disillusionment.
15 He who digs a hole and scoops it out
falls into the pit he has made.
16 The trouble he causes recoils on himself;
his violence comes down on his own head.

Then I read it in The Message, and it reads as follows:

14 Look at that guy!
He had sex with sin,
he’s pregnant with evil.
Oh, look! He’s having
the baby — a Lie-Baby!
15-16 See that man shoveling day after day,
digging, then concealing, his man-trap
down that lonely stretch of road?
Go back and look again — you’ll see him in it headfirst,
legs waving in the breeze.
That’s what happens:
mischief backfires;
violence boomerangs.

You can’t get much clearer than that on the consequences of wicked, sinful behavior!

An essay by Danny Hillis from 01995

Some people say that they feel the future is slipping away from them. To me, the future is a big tractor-trailer slamming on its brakes in front of me just as I pull into its slip stream. I am about to crash into it.
….

This is a marvelous essay. I suggest you read it. All of it.

The Millennium Clock