Let's see. Just a couple of check-in things right now, I guess.

First of all, school is going well. To be honest, I've had a difficult time getting my writing back in the groove. I'm really hoping that I can end the semester in strength, though. I'm working on my two main papers very early, and the 10-page summary of my thesis shouldn't be too bad now that I actually know where I'm heading with it.

Church is going really well. I'm very much enjoying being back at Praise, even though it is busy as ever! I continue to be confronted with my own shortcomings as a youth and children's pastor, though. I still have a lot to learn, and I may just have to accept the fact that it won't matter how much I learn, I will always be lacking in this area of ministry. However, as I say that, I also have grown in the faith that God is in control. Specifically what I mean by this is that I know that God knows who I am--God is the one who has given me my personality with all its interesting quirks. God made me the introvert that I am. And, while God may sometimes expect me to stretch myself and move outside of where I am comfortable, at the end of the day, I trust that God has not called me to a place where my particular individual traits are not appropriate. In other words, I am comfortable with myself and my shortcomings (while nonetheless continuing to strive to be a better "me") because I know that God made me who I am, and that means that God can use me as I am.

Some fun facts:
1) I finally finished Resident Evil 4 on my Gamecube. This was a great game. I'm really glad that I finished it, though, because now I won't have to feel guilty playing my Gamecube for an hour when I know I should be reading.

2) The farmers are starting to harvest the corn out here. I was driving back from the store yesterday, well past dark, and a farmer was busy harvesting in the combine with his flood-lights blazing. It made me a little sad. I would have loved to be home to help out with our harvest. It made me wonder, though, if I stick around for the next year (as is my current plan), if maybe I could get a job helping some of these local farmers out during harvest or planting season. :-)

3) I had a wonderful time meeting up with my old small group from Seminary this past weekend. I am just amazed by the group of people who I can call friends. They are all just incredible--and the way God is using them and working in their lives makes me a little jealous, but mostly just glad.

Well, I think that's a pretty good update for now. I hope everyone who reads this is doing well, and is preparing for a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday.

Yeah. I'm really not dead. I've certainly been busier than I would like, what with school and especially church work. Unfortunately, I'm not looking for this to change much until mid-December. However, I think I am going to try to be better about giving small updates via the microblag (over there on the right). This way, at least you won't have to worry that I've been transported to some parallel universe, or fell into a giant pit, or was sucked up by a black hole created by the Large Hadron Collider. Because I know that's what you all were worrying about. :-)

The interplay between Calvin and Wesley in one quote by a semi-Barthian missiologist:

Faith can only be appropriately defined as at the same time a divine gift and a human act.

Beautiful.

Well, mid-term reading week is here at PTS. And, naturally, that means that all good procrastinators will once again turn their eyes to their neglected blogs as a way to escape from the mounting pressures of papers that need to be written and books that need to be read.

I count myself as one with those brave procrastinators. And you, gentle readers, will be the benefactors of our stressed disobedience.

So, what have we in store for today? Well, nothing all that exciting, probably. A review of something that has been reviewed many times over. But, I felt it my duty (er...procrastinatorial duty?) to offer my own thoughts on the ASUS Eee PC 901 and the Ubuntu-eee operating system. That's right! You're actually getting two reviews in one...so we'd better get started! Read more »

Now that I'm back to working semi-full-time again (as a youth pastor), I'm realizing just how useful all these new communication tools that we now have can be. A large part of my work involves communicating with the other pastors, as well as the kids and parents.

For example, this past weekend we had our Fall BBQ. Pastor KC was in charge of most of the planning, but he got help from Pastor John (for sports), the parents (for food), and me (for small group time). We all really needed to be on the same page, so we sent a lot of "Reply to All" emails back and forth.

Here's the thing, though. At least on the Linux side of things, we have some great tools that could have made this whole process even easier. We have Pidgin (with Jabber) that we can use for instant messenging, and it even supports chat rooms and file transfers. This would have made several meetings, where we all had to drive the 45 minutes up to church, completely unnecessary. Also, there is the fantastic Abicollab, which is a word processor (think MS Word) that allows for multiple people to edit online, at the same time. So, when I was working on the small group curriculum, instead of sending out email attachments to everyone to get checked and revised, we could have just held a couple of Abicollab sessions to take care of it in one place.

Now, these are just a couple of simple examples from the Linux side of things. I should note that in a cross-platform situation (like the one I have at church), Google offers most of these services with their "Google for your domain." They have GTalk (which actually runs on Jabber), which also supports voice calls; Google Docs, which allows for easy sharing of documents (though not concurrent editing like Abicollab); and, of course, Google Calendar (which allows you to share certain events to the public, or to particular contacts).

The problem is, at least at church, not everyone uses (or knows how to use) these tools. And so, we end up with mammoth email discussions, physical church meetings that take time and gas, and a lot of extra paper flowing around. I'm not really sure what the solution is. Part of the problem is that there are too many standards floating around. Not everyone uses GTalk (or Jabber) for IM. AIM, MS IM, and Yahoo are all still very popular. Not everyone even uses gmail (which would make switching to using the Google services much easier). What I would really like to see is the person in charge of the church website take the time to set up these services specifically for our church. In other words, run our own Jabber server, so that we can have church-only IM. Run our own mail server, so we can have church-only email. Run our own Abicollab server (which is actually really, really easy), so that we could have a centralized place to store church-planning and finalized documents. Hey, why not run our own CalDAV server so that we can have a centralized, easy to edit calendar?

The tools are all here. We just need someone to make them available. Using them is not even that much of a problem anymore. I don't know any of the current pastors who don't know how to use an instant messenger.

So, what do you think? Do you use these types of tools at your work. And if you do, does your employer serve their own, or do they use the large, centralized servers of Google/Yahoo/&c?

Finally got around to posting my Sunday sermon online over at BDWHITE.com. It's over in the "Sermons" section, per usual.

My deliver of the sermon on Sunday was lacking, and the sermon itself is fairly short for the topic (there was quite a bit more that I would have like to have put in). But, I think the text is fairly solid.

I know I'm really behind on writing and blogging and photos right now. School and Church have taken top priority, but I hope to find some room in my schedule for these other activities as well, especially since I enjoy them! Until then, though, hopefully my brief pops in and out will suffice.

I think thesis and dissertation titles would sound much more interesting and infinitely less snooty if, instead of saying what the paper is about, we titled it based upon what we hoped to learn during the process of writing it.

For example, my thesis topic: A Japanese Buddhist Missiological Response to Barth's 'True Religion'

What I want to learn: What is the essence of the gospel, and how do we pass it on without getting in the way?

See what I mean?

Well, I just turned in my thesis proposal. I'm really hoping it gets accepted as-is since I have to have it officially endorsed by the registrar and my adviser by Friday. Yeah...Friday. I would say that its my own fault for getting it in so late. But, really...its not. My adviser was out of town until the beginning of classes, and then he wasn't able to meet with me until last Friday. So, basically, I did all my preliminary research, and wrote up my proposal in the period of 5 days. Yeah. Not too shabby, I think.

Of course...now there's just that one sticking point of not knowing if it will be accepted or not.

Here's hoping!