Month: May 2007

8 Random Facts About Me

Will Phillips asked me to make 8 quirky com­ments about myself, so here goes:

  1. When I reheat foods, I like to set the microwave for a prime num­ber of sec­onds (i.e., 17, 23, 37, etc).
  2. I tend to dis­dain “lit­er­ary fic­tion” — I find that the typ­i­cal sci­ence fic­tion or fan­ta­sy nov­el is just as insight­ful and vast­ly more enter­tain­ing.
  3. I write PHP pro­grams to relax.
  4. I hard­ly ever watch TV any­more — I’m pret­ty much exclu­sive­ly devot­ed to watch­ing pro­grams on Net­flix. My wife and I are cur­rent­ly on a Veron­i­ca Mars kick.
  5. I used to hate talk radio, but now I love lis­ten­ing to Den­nis Prager. I find him very stim­u­lat­ing.
  6. I don’t like the New York Times most­ly because it does­n’t car­ry comics. Seri­ous­ly. I want my Get Fuzzy and my Pearls Before Swine!
  7. I don’t eat the meal before I preach. Maybe it’s psy­cho­log­i­cal, but I feel that the food in my bel­ly makes me slow-wit­ted.
  8. The main rea­son I haven’t writ­ten a book is that I feel that there are too many books out there already — the great stuff is get­ting lost in the flood.

So there. 8 things about me you prob­a­bly did­n’t know.

Advice From A Design Expert

Last night at Chi Alpha we inter­viewed George Kem­bel, co-founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Stan­ford d.school about his faith and how it inte­grates with his pro­fes­sion­al life.

It was lots of fun. Dur­ing the inter­view he shared a help­ful metaphor about his cri­sis of faith as a young adult. “It’s like my baby teeth. They had to go so my per­ma­nent teeth could come in. Some­thing sim­i­lar hap­pened with my faith. I need­ed to move from a child’s faith to an adult faith, but what I got in the end was some­thing bet­ter and more endur­ing.”

Any­way, after­wards we were able to talk briefly and I asked him about apply­ing the prin­ci­ples of his pro­fes­sion­al life to min­istry. How would a d.school per­son approach improv­ing the expe­ri­ence of a reg­u­lar or a guest at a min­istry func­tion?

We only talked briefly, but one tid­bit he shared real­ly struck me. “When we’re doing feed­back we find it help­ful to have peo­ple restrict them­selves to three types of state­ments: ‘I like…’, ‘I wish…’, and ‘We should try…’. For exam­ple, ‘I liked it when you talked about x, I wish you had spent more time on that and less on this oth­er point.’ It forces feed­back to be more per­son­al and also push­es it in a con­struc­tive direc­tion.”

I think we’ll exper­i­ment with that and see how it works out for us. It sounds promis­ing.

Any­way, I hope you find his com­ments as inter­est­ing and help­ful as I did.

Kudos Where Kudos Are Due

My pas­tor just got an arti­cle pub­lished in Rick War­ren’s Min­istry Tool­box. Way to go, Scott!