Ordinary Visionary

Orange Ave. Comes Alive

I've been living in this city for three years and even now I find that it begins to take a different shape and become more familiar to me in different areas over time. Now that I'm working downtown, what was once a blur along the route I'd take to get from Barnes & Noble to Discovery is now the nine-to-five I walk to daily from the garage on Church Street.

When you get out of your car and onto your feet you begin to notice the insignificant details that nobody writes into the scenes of their memories. Over the past week I've noticed that the wind picks up and carries pages of yesterday's news and an occasional leaf southbound every morning around 9am. A few homeless friends sit tucked into corners and on stairs every block or so, a fact that brought me to tears this very cold morning. I just wanted to buy coffee and blankets for them all and sit with them in the heated indoors for an hour or so while they thawed. But I continued on, feeling my frozen tears inching backwards along my face as the wind blew them toward my temples.

I became mindful of the disconnect happening as I crossed from the frigid outdoors into the warm office building I work in… My love and heartache for the homeless seems to reside only within me. I have a really hard time bringing that love to the surface, to a place where it turns into the giving of a blanket or a cup of coffee or a jacket. I find that sometimes I bottle up the good with the bad, or the bad (fear) reaches up and grabs the love before it can create movement.

"And I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. Whatever you forbid on earth will be forbidden in heaven, and whatever you permit on earth will be permitted in heaven." — Matthew 16:19

What if I started looking at my actions as having something to do with the things permitted and forbidden in heaven? Would the weight of such a responsibility then bring my love to move outside my mind?

Job

A few weeks ago I was getting really concerned about my job situation. Seriously. I actually checked Craig's List for job prospects. And after much consideration I decided I wasn't the right fit to be a maid that "must agree to pose for pictures." So I had a little walk and talk with God and told him I was a pretty crappy job hunter and that I was going to need him to weigh in on it.

A few days later I got a phone call from a guy who wanted to find me a job. It was surreal — one day I'm searching the classifieds and the next there's a guy from the industry who is giving me advice on getting hired and calling around setting up interviews for me.

Long story short, I was interviewed over the phone and in person by a witty guy with a British accent who wound up hiring me as a Ruby on Rails developer for PayPerPost. My experience with RoR is rudimentary at best, limited to reading a few articles and setting it up on my Mac as a potential solution for a freelance client I had been working with. But something took because I am PayPerPost's newest (and only female) developer. (That also makes me the newest 'star' of their Web 2.0 reality show, rockstartup.)

A week before my interview with PayPerPost, I took a part time job with STATUS as their Marketing Administrator… Hence the lamentation over a full calendar in my last post.

Thank you so much to those who prayed for my job situation. I went from 0 to 50 (hours per week) in about two weeks!

Unscheduled Moments

I'm sitting in my living room on my La-Z-Boy couch drinking a Jones soda next to a random balloon that says "Happy Birthday Dad!" I haven't gotten to do this for a while, just sit and write or read or pet Chester while he lies curled up in a ball on my red circular pillow.

My calendar has owned me for the past few weeks, so soon after I swore that wouldn't happen when I left Portland. The rhythm of life is so fast here; I feel like I have to schedule trips to the bathroom, much less the downtime I am enjoying right now. Vance actually had to force me to agree to at least 30 minutes of doing nothing that had to be done.

So I went to the park and sat on a bench with Traveling Mercies, which has been sitting on my night stand collecting dust for the past few months. Reading Anne Lamott is like drinking a tall glass of freedom; she never tries to pretty up her testimony to make people believe Jesus is the key to a lifetime of ponies and flowers. And the fact that Family Christian Store sells a book with the F-bomb planted throughout has to make you crack a smile…

After my 30 minutes of freedom I returned to reality and ran into some friends who were laying on a blanket in the grass nearby. I joined them on the blanket, watching a team of birds hang out with a family and eat out of their hands, only to take off like they'd been shot out of a canon and return boomerang style to the place where they'd started. I watched them do this again and again, until I was distracted by two boys wrestling with one another a few feet away.

And now that I'm sitting here capturing a few 'insignificant' moments from today on my blog, I can't help but wonder how many of these moments I miss when my calendar is too full to allow me an hour in the park…

Birthday v22.0

I'm off to spend some time with Vance and the family for my birthday, before I start my new job on Monday! Adieu!

Step Into :: Genesis 41-47

A while ago STATUS was slated to have a guest speaker talk about being the 'hands of Christ.' But when the day arrived for her to speak she came down with a cold or a stomach virus or the bird flu (my memory is a little fuzzy on that detail) and the leadership had to throw together an emergency service in a matter of a few hours. What resulted was one of the most amazing, memorable nights I have ever had at STATUS (and that's saying a lot — there have been many).

Everyone was handed a Post-It® note at the door and asked to write their most pressing need on it and stick it to the wall. After we all finished plastering our gear on the walls of the auditorium, we returned to the perimeter to pull down a need we felt we could meet.

Reading over the hundreds of notes, I was made aware for the first time just how badly twentysomethings are consumed with debt. Student loans, car payments, credit card balances that are out of control… There didn't seem to be a single form of debt that wasn't scattered across the sea of yellow stick-ums that night.

When I studied these chapters of Genesis, I was taken back to that night at STATUS, when I stood in front of the wall and, scanning in all directions, my eyes could not escape the pleas for help getting out of debt.

It's no wonder I couldn't even get through the first book of the Bible without the entire nation of Egypt being indebted to the Pharaoh. Their culture was saturated with financial obligation, yet somehow the people were happy to become slaves to Pharaoh as long as they were continually given more (Gen 47:25). And after the provisions were enough to sustain their lives, one-fifth of everything they reaped at harvest time was immediately owed back to the creditors (Gen 47:24). Is this sounding familiar?

This is so much a picture of how debt happens. You go to work with the mindset that your yearly salary is how much you have to spend during a year's time and you begin to base your lifestyle off of that figure. This is exactly what the Egyptians did. And it works out quite well until you have a famine of your own, a period of time when money has to be diverted to an unexpected expense (a homemade milkshake gone bad, for example) or a period of time when you can't seem to find a job no matter which rug you look under.

Joseph knew better, but only because God sent a message through the Pharaoh's dream warning of the impending famine. Rarely do we get such advance notice (and even when we do, who is willing to listen)?

Avoidance of debt starts with living our lives as if we know a famine is upon us. But we quickly realize (or at least I have) that such a mindset is unnatural to us; we are programmed to be extremely short-sighted, moving from one quick fix to the next, and long-term vision hardly has an affect on our everyday habits. We don't have the attention span for it!

Imagine how crazy Joseph's servants must have thought him when they got to the point where the stockpiles could not be counted (Gen 41:49). They must have been itching to sell it off for the immediate return.

The Egyptians obviously lived paycheck to paycheck (erm… harvest to harvest). As soon as the famine began they were at Joseph's doorstep begging for provisions.

I am just now entering the period of my life where I can choose to live within a modest budget and put a bit into the 'storehouses' each pay period, or I can live at maximum capacity and cross my fingers in hopes that a famine won't strike. (Words cannot express how thankful I am that I have that choice to make.) But as God allows my 'storehouses' to increase, I must not forget the other message that this passage of scripture has for us: Joseph's careful preparation resulted in provision for not only himself but for those who were in need.

Step Into :: Bible Walk

A while back, Slate did a series called Blogging The Bible, in which one of their writers read the Bible cover to cover and blogged details of the adventure as he went. David Plotz is no theologian, but he is a clever and thorough writer and, as is the case with most such writers with huge readership, many will imitate what he has done.

I will be one of them.

Don't get me wrong — I won't even come close to the frequency of wry comments and lively commentary (nor will I blog on every chapter of the Bible) but I will be documenting whatever is revealed to me as I go and use that as the framework for my writing this year. I find that as I read the Word, it speaks a new thing to me nearly every time. The content never changes but the world outside of it keeps moving and changing and so the context changes. This is my way of documenting over time the new things revealed to me through the Word. It's cool if you don't want to come along on this journey with me — just filter out any blog posts that fall under the header 'Bible Walk' and subtract a few brownie points from your tally. ;-)

I've already read through the first 40 chapters of Genesis (actually some of 1 Chronicles as well — I'm using a Chronological Bible), but I'm trusting that you can get yourself caught up to speed if you feel so inclined.

discomfort > change

Women's ministries make me terribly uncomfortable. They seem to me to be the popular way of making up for the androcentric nature of the church. But I'll leave that for an offline conversation.

Let me backtrack to the beginning. Discomfort. I may be alone in this, but the places I am most uncomfortable are the places where I am most driven to movement. Meditate on that just a minute.

discomfort → desire for change → change

If I am comfortable and happy with the way things are in some aspect of the church (or really in general) I am least apt to invoke change. So given that women's conferences and women's small groups and other such women-only gatherings give me hives, they also spark a desire for change and movement within me.

This isn't something new. Homeless ministries and mission trips and AIDS research initiatives are birthed from a place of discomfort — someone somewhere gets so bothered by a particular issue that it sparks in them a desire to move and change the lives of those affected by it. My most recent discomfort happens to hit really close to home, in the midst of the community of twentysomethings I am a part of.

Tonight I sat in a room with about 20 other women who are uncomfortable in some way with the current ways we are (or aren't) ministering to the women of STATUS. I realized that I am not the only woman who desires conferences about more than clothes, and speakers who do more to connect with their audience than make jokes about shopping or the latest Danielle Steel novel.

We desire teaching deeply rooted in scripture, about real issues that affect not only our lives but all members of our community. We desire women's conferences that don't look like women's conferences, small groups that wreck lives instead of making us feel better about them. We desire integrity and authenticity and accountability for holding close to the teachings of Jesus.

Today's verse from Galatians 3:28 encapsulates these desires: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Rather than being better women, we simply want to be better living examples of Christ.

If we focus too much on the fact that we are women, then we are flirting with narcissism. It is only when we start to view ourselves as people who desperately want to look more like Christ that we can be sure He is our central focus.¹

The women of STATUS better prepare to have their worlds rocked.

¹ I should clarify that I don't mean to discount altogether the fact that we are trying to minister to women. Our identity in Christ is not separate from our identity as women. He has assigned us our gender for a purpose. But our filter for how we minister to women shouldn't be based on a gender role that is easily swayed by what society tells us about who we are. Rather, we should minister to women through God's lens, growing them first in Christ.

Redeeming Computing

I was doing some research on an unrelated topic and came across this description of a Computer Science program from Calvin College. I'd always wondered what a Computer Science program would look like at a Christian School, whether it would be a "watered down" curriculum for fear of knowing "too much" information that could be used in a dangerous way. But in reality this perspective on computing and our role as computer scientists is so relevant to what is being taught in many upper-level Philosophy courses in secular schools: computers having dominion over humans is a very harmful and present reality.

One of the distinctives of reformed Christianity is its teaching that all aspects of life have been affected by the fall. Genesis 3 shows this clearly when the fall disrupts people's relationships with (i) God, (ii) each other, (iii) their work, and (iv) the world around them.

Another reformed distinctive is that Christians are the agents through whom redemption occurs. The idea is that as Christians, we are obliged to live all aspects of our lives in a way pleasing to Him, including our play, our work, and so on — all aspects of life are subject to Jesus' lordship. By living all facets of our lives consistently with Jesus' teachings, we redeem those facets, and advance His kingdom.

For the Christian computer scientist, one implication of this is that our work in the area of computing is one of the things to be redeemed. Put differently, humanity's fall and God's curse has affected a variety of relationships, including those involving computers. (It is an interesting thought experiment to speculate on how the human-computer relationship might be different if the fall had not occurred.) It is thus important for the Christian computer scientist to consider what aspects of computing are in need of redemption?

Since computers are a part of the creation, and God commanded our ancestors to exercise dominion over the creation (Genesis 1:28), then the proper relationship between people and computers is for people to exercise dominion over computers.

The vast majority of the people I know would describe their relationship with their computer as one of frustration, rather than dominion. Instead of enhancing our productivity and making life simpler, the computer dominates us far more than we dominate it. The reasons for this inversion are numerous: buggy or poorly designed applications, interfaces designed to simplify life for the implementer instead of the end-user, programming languages that seem to be designed with no concern for readability, and so on.

Thus, there are a number of ways that the Christian computer scientist can work to redeem computing: One way is to refuse to cut corners, and only design computing systems that are robust, and whose hardware and/or software is as reliable and impervious to crashes as possible. Leaving the testing and finding of errors to one's end-users is a deplorable practice that only raises a users frustration level.

Another way is for the Christian computer scientist to build systems whose interfaces are as intuitive as possible for the end-user, and so allow as many people as possible to achieve mastery of the computer. When 80% of Americans cannot program their VCRs, new human-computer interfaces are needed that empower such people, instead of expanding the gap between the techno-literate and the techno-illiterate. In this respect, Christians can also be redemptive by supporting companies who design reliable software and whose interface considers the end-user; and by refusing to support companies that do not.

In this age of networking, computers must interact not only with humans, but with one another, and so the computer-computer relationship is another area in which relationships can be improved. The development of fault-tolerant network protocols, tools and/or protocols that enable communication throughout a heterogeneous network, tools that simplify network management, and interfaces that make the vast amount of information available easier to access are just a few of the needs.

These are just a few of the areas where the computer scientist who is a Christian can work to redeem computing.

In summary, one task of the Christian computer scientist is to bring healing anywhere that pain exists in the endeavor of computing.

Link: Computing at Calvin College.

objective

I have a passion for movement and a consuming desire to be constantly transformed by the renewal of my mind.¹ I desire nothing more than to become God's tool for Kingdom growth and community harvest.

Keep. Me. Accountable. To. This.

¹Romans 12:2

update :: job

For the few who aren't up to speed, I left my internship at Gestalt in December before my trip to Portland. I left there with the intention of working full-time on the "webify" ConCensus project I've been dabbling in less than part time for about six months, but when things tightened up on their end I had to put that project on hold. At the same time, a job I had lined up to start in March as Director of Technology at a local marketing startup fell through.

Well shucks (and a few other choice words).

Fast forward a few weeks into the new year and find me in the middle of a really cool sequence of events that I can only hope is taking me somewhere amazing. I have been résumé beautifying, interviewing, and getting mom lectures on all things business since the new year rolled around and although a full-time job hasn't been secured just yet I did find a part-time gig that I am crazy passionate about to buy some time.

I am both humbled and proud to be the newest STATUS employee, doing Communications Administration (web and newsletter stuff, some design here and there, and promotions for STATUS-wide events). I get to sit in a little room with ridiculous green paint on the walls and fluffy couches while I use my Mac for all of its creative goodness. Score.

I appreciate all of you who've kept my sanity in your prayers during these weeks of occupational craziness. I hope to have more good news to report soon.

update :: blog

First, there was Think Different. It was a blog about my life when my life was Apple. It was my geek outlet, my space for feminist rants and insular philosophies. After a rough semester and a couple of minor surgeries, Think Different went on hiatus only to be 'Resurrected' this past Good Friday. Now, 'Resurrected' is becoming the blog (and current home page) for my personal website, OrdinaryVisionary.com.

My passion for writing couldn't fit within the framework of a Christian blog. Every word I spoke had to run through a sieve in my mind before I would allow it to appear at Resurrected. I was protective of you, but you didn't need or ask for protection. The fact that you're here at all probably means you're interested in what's on my mind, not what I think you want me to say. Censorship be gone!¹

Rather than a pile of mini-sermons penned (typed, really) by hands of relatively limited experience, Ordinary Visionary is going to become a space where I can be more authentically me: a twentysomething woman from Florida trying to figure out what it means to live simply, be inspired, and create movement in this time and place. I am sure to step on a soap box on occasion, but I will no sooner jump up there than be knocked back down by the admission of just how difficult it is to live by the standard that is Christ.

But that's for a later post. Welcome to Ordinary Visionary. Please pardon my dust, etc.

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¹Don't get too worried. I'm not going to go crazy now that I've let go of the reins a little. I just need to be able to write what's on my mind, whether it has immediate application in my spiritual life or not. I still won't be writing about my very personal life, so if you're here for the latest gossip you might try looking elsewhere. You know, that other website. The one with the juicy gossip on it.