Alan's blog

I'm not exactly sure where my brain was this morning. While Don Staples was giving us some reminders, I was consciously going through the congregation and telling myself people's names, just to see if I remembered. Then, everyone is standing and greeting and hubbub was louder and longer than normal. You see, we had a mission from Don to find people we didn't know and introduce ourselves. In the midst of this, I was also thinking about Mother's Day and to whom I could wish a Happy One to.

That's when Kevin Brooks stopped by the sound booth and greeted Michelle and me. And then those words just flew out of my mouth before I could stop them, "Happy Mother's Day, Kevin!"

Somethings you just can't take back. They're already out there.

If your spouse gets up early to make muffins for friends, and you happen to notice that the batter looks exactly like a nasty diaper you changed the evening prior at Young Lives, you should probably just keep that thought to yourself.

And!... If you add a hyperbole that it even smells like the nasty diaper? ... Well, that is a really, really Bad Thing to Say. For some of you, this may fall under the classification of Common Sense. Too bad it didn't for me.

I think I'm feeling a little depressed tonight. Perhaps it's actually post partum depression, or some strange male non-birth variant of it. You see, Michelle volunteered us for doing a week of full-time child care for our good friends while they attended a wedding in New Zealand. Their children are 6yrs and 7mo. Now, I'm pretty used to child and baby care in general. I tried to be a pretty hands-on Dad, starting with infancy. I've never had a problem holding, soothing, and playing with infants and children of lots of ages. I've done the MOPS nursery for four years, which is as long as I worked at Cinnabon, BTW. For kids a little older, I was a Kid's Club leader. And now I'm teaching 2nd grade Sunday school, which still makes me do a mental double-take when I think about that.

So, for the past week I've had four young girls in the house, along with Amalija and Michelle. (For a little bonding, I do still have Toby, the 60lb black lab. He is a great friend, but only partially qualifies for maleness. Frankly, he's always even peed like a girl. Poor guy.) But all the feminity didn't bother me. That's not it.

I got to spend a good deal of time with the baby, and that is why I'm a little mopey right now. She started out not really wanting me near her last Monday, but that changed during the week. And this afternoon, I had to give her back in the middle of an hour-long nap, sleeping on my chest. For all the fussing and crying they do, it's all drowned out by the whispers of sleepy, shallow breathing, and the smell of a head that only a baby's head can smell like.

I'm going to miss having that little baby around full-time, but at least she's only right next door. I think I will get a little more sleep each night. And that's a good thing.

I really looked forward to Sunday a few weeks ago when Gregg spoke about environmentalism in his Sunday sermon. I'm no dyed-in-the-wool environmental whacko, but I would call it a hobby of mine. Everything that Gregg said, I had no issue with. Well, except that one about hybrid vehicles, which I have yet to make up my mind on whether they have a less negative cummulative effect on the earth. But, I digress...

A couple days before that Sunday, I was catching up on my daily verse calendar at work and came upon one which spoke to me very clearly about how our love for the earth and creation will be judged.

I love the way this translation mixes the words faith, cheat, honesty, responibility, trust, wealth, and riches. There are dozens of verses throughout the OT starting with Genesis and in the NT which speak to how God desires us to love and respect the earth and all His creations, and to use the resources of his creation wisely. Luke reminds us in just that one last sentence that if we do not make honest efforts to retain the vibrant diversity of His creation, then we will not be allowed to enjoy and taste the true Fruits of Heaven. It's pretty heavy stuff.

For my part, I will continue to try to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. In that order. Buy less stuff, find new uses for the stuff I have, and make sure my recycling bin is overflowing every two weeks while the trash can only has one bag in the bottom.

Every part of the earth, including us humans, are interrelated. All of the complex systems from ions passing between cellular membranes to the weather patterns in the skies above us move and change in a symbiotic and unbreakable relationship. We are seriously straining that relationship and nature is starting to show us how the butterfly effect really works. There are a multitude of resources on our little blue planet, but each of them is finite. It certainly seems that we cannot continue to consume them in the same way, at the same rate, forever. What is coming around the next corner, I do not know, but according to what God has to say about it, I don't have a choice if I am to remain in His favor.

I came across what looks to be a cool image processing application recently called Hydra. The idea is that many cameras are incapable of capturing, in a single shot, the high dynamic range of scenes like a sunset with foreground elements which are dark, or a dim forest with sunstreaks and highlights. Our eyes adjust quickly as we scan a scene in front of us. But a camera must try to capture the sutble dark areas at the same time as not allowing the bright areas to be blown out, which doesn't work out too well in many cases.

Hydra takes the approach of using two pictures of the same scene and merging them together. One picture should use the appropriate settings to capture the highlights (dark areas will be almost black) and the other to capture the lowlights (bright areas will be blown out near white). It then uses some complicated algorithm to merge to two pictures together.

Now, I'd love to give this application a try with my compact digital camera, but, alas, it only runs on Leopard. I wonder if one my photog friends who have access to a Mac running the latest OS to give it a try and let me know how this program works for you.

This Wednesday, the same African Children's Choir which came through Newberg in 2006, performed their final concert at the Faith Center in Eugene. Because we had hosted three girls and the director, at the time it was Prossie, we just had to watch them one final time, eager to greet Dora, Stella and Esther one more time before they return to Uganda for their schooling and their "real" lives.

The concert was once again, and amazing sight and sound and a wonderful way to spend the evening singing praises. During the performance, we noticed that the choir was smaller and saw that neither Stella nor Dora were there. Afterwards, when speaking with Henry, we found out that because they were older girls, they had just left the choir on December 29 for North Carolina to be in what is called the Base Choir and the Journey of Hope. I had a small lump of sadness in my throat that I would probably not see the two of them again.

We followed Henry down to the choir's "green room" to see Esther after the children had had time to change, eat and relax a little. The sadness melted as Michelle came around the corner and Esther's face lit up when she recognized Michelle and the girls. We all gave her hugs and talked with her on the floor for a few minutes. Part of the time, she played with Michelle's necklace and seemed to like it very much. We told her how we remember her so well and what a special time it was to have her in our home. During the concert, when the kids tell the audience their name and what they want to be when they grow up, Esther has always said, "A missionary." She's the only child who says that, and Michelle told her, as she did when she was in Newberg, that Esther is already a missionary, spreading God's love with her singing and dancing.

Our experience with this choir is now complete, but the memories will warm our hearts and give us joy forever. Michelle and I look forward to other African Children's Choirs coming through our area, and we would host more children at the drop of a hat. For reasons that we feel only God can explain yet, we feel a tug across the ocean towards Africa. We are open to challenges from God to follow that tug, whether that means touring with a choir, or spending time as missionaries overseas at some point, or, most likely, something we don't know about and can't imagine yet. That just seems to be the way God works, doesn't it?

The recent shocking developments in Kenya, which have affected veterans of the African Children's Choir, strongly emphasize the need to continue and enhance a strong Christian influence there. There are so many broken people and places in this world who need our prayers.

I got pretty excited last night when Michelle told me she'd heard and seen that the African Children's Choir will be back in Oregon this month (December). And not just because it's the AFC in general, but because it is the same choir which came to Newberg last November when we were graced to care for Dora, Stella and Esther in our home for two days.

Their tour ends on January 9, 2008 in Eugene. Before that, they will be close by in Aloha on December 23rd and Salem on December 27th, as well as other cities in Oregon between now and then. I am filled with emotion thinking about seeing them sing for their last couple of performances before they travel back to their homeland. On many days I've lifted up prayers for these children in the past year as they have traveled around the US. I must thank God again, now, for bringing back their shining faces and beautiful voices to fill my heart with joy.

I'm a late-blooming fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Hobbit books (and movies), but I'm happy about the announcement today that Peter Jackson is now officially slated to executive produce (2?) films based on The Hobbit. I wonder, though, how his not directing or writing will affect the vision and quality of the film, currently due in 2010, and a "bridge" movie set between The Hobbit and FotR in 2011.

The subject of genetic engineering caught my attention this morning after yesterday's publicity over successful cloning of a Red Fluorescent cat (video). (Below is a text story.)

After pondering it over a hot shower, I've decided I don't like this. But at the same time I wonder how much of our mucking around with genes, gene replacement therapy, and genetic engineering is still really part of God's plan for humans and the animals we test on. I believe that part of God's Creation as truthfully told in Genesis also included the basic mechanics of nature, physics, and mathematics which govern the movement of bodies. That also includes the mechanics of purposeful, natural genetic mutation which has given rise to changes in species of plants animals which we have been able to document. I'm not saying that Man was not created as we appear today, but even we have experienced mutations which gives rise to the multitude of different appearances of people from different countries or regions of our planet.

But I really cringe at stories like these fluorescent cats. We don't know what we're messing with. Just look at Africanized honey bees which are invading North America now. They started as an experiment in Brazil to see if an African subspecies of bee would do better in pollinating crops. However, the bees got loose, mated with the European-origin bees in Brazil and created the hybrid we call the Africanized bee, or killer bee. And now look what's happening with this new species taking over the US. (I should note that the experiment in Brazil has now yielded re-domesticated Africanized bees which are doing well and are preferred over the original honeybee.)

A lot of "us" just don't know what, or Who, we're messing with. And we cannot foresee all the outcomes and consequences.

As the Christmas season is upon us, I have been thinking about, and have been reminded by words of wisdom from others, that our consumptive ways are damaging to us personally and interpersonally, and to the earth. NFC has shared with the congregation this year, a vision of a less-commercialized Christmas. It is very similar to messages I've heard in the past. My version of this is "buy less stuff for people who don't really need it, and give more to those who truly have the need." It's the right thing to do. And, as Dr. Laura would say, You can tell it's the right thing to do because it's the difficult thing to do.

Thinking about less commercialization naturally leads me to think about less consumption. We all know about the stuff we have around the house that we really could do without. How did we get all this stuff and why? And why do we keep needing to buy stuff to replace stuff that is still working? Well, it's called the Economy, and it's creating a nasty dissonance in my head. I've heard about and understand this idea called "planned obsolescence," where certain components and devices (things) are made to break after a certain time so that I have to go get a new one, or updates to software on our computers makes it impossible to work with older things so we have to buy a new thing. Now I hear about "perceived obsolescence" and I get irritated. That's really what is driving our 1st world economies today: being made to think that we need to go buy a new thing because the first version of the thing looks different or doesn't have some new feature.

I was introduced to website today called The Story of Stuff.

It has brought a lot of what I already know about into sharper focus. I was floored by some of the things I learned. As with anything, however, there are extremes in this video which can be debated, but the core of the storyline remains true. It's almost depressing to listen and understand the truths being told there.

Of course, there are people trying to change the way things work, and some of these may be a way for us to get out of the cycle of consumption that we're in. I firmly believe in our call to be good stewards of the earth, which must be balanced with our going forth an multiplying. We need to use our God-given talents to find ways to continue to live on our planet without actually destroying it.

I've done a lot of thinking about this. What will it take to move me to action? How about you?