Talk About Your Good Days

Yes­ter­day was an astound­ing­ly good day: I got up at 5am to dri­ve to Sacra­men­to for a meet­ing to appoint a new col­lege min­istries direc­tor for our dis­trict. The meet­ing went well, I offered some opin­ions and strong­ly rec­om­mend­ed one of my peers for the posi­tion, and then I recused myself from the meet­ing (it just seemed prop­er since I was tech­ni­cal­ly a can­di­date).

I wait­ed out in the hall­way for what seemed like an hour, and when I was invit­ed back in I was asked to take the helm in an inter­im capac­i­ty while we seek some­one full-time for the posi­tion!

To clar­i­fy: this does­n’t involve Paula and I leav­ing the min­istry at Stan­ford. This is an added thing.

Although I did­n’t seek the posi­tion (and I actu­al­ly mean that–this was­n’t one of those I won’t seek it to make myself a more desir­able can­di­date sort of things), I was very excit­ed to be select­ed. There are more than 500,000 col­lege stu­dents in this zone spread across over 40 size­able cam­pus­es (and many, many small­er ones), and I’ve got some ideas I’m eager to try out.

After that I drove back and dis­cov­ered that our min­istry had received a pledge from a church. Woohoo!

Fol­low­ing that I did some pid­dling work until the work­day end­ed and played my cur­rent video game, Brute Force, and beat a lev­el that was vex­ing me great­ly. Also a cause for cel­e­bra­tion.

Fol­low­ing that I head­ed into down­town Palo Alto to the Stan­ford The­ater to watch The For­bid­den Plan­et and the orig­i­nal Time Machine (two fine movies) with some of our Chi Alpha stu­dents. I just loved watch­ing those won­der­ful films in that cool old the­ater, and I was pret­ty sur­prised to real­ize that Leslie Nielsen was the star of The For­bid­den Plan­et. The whole movie I kept telling myself I’ve seen this guy in some oth­er films but I could­n’t place him. I was shocked at the end cred­its! In fact, I did­n’t even ful­ly con­nect the dots until Lynette Gar­cia said some­thing about it.

Final­ly, I came home and read very briefly from Daniel Boorstin’s engag­ing book The Dis­cov­er­ers. The only com­plaint I have about his book is the giant chip he seems to have on his shoul­der when he talks about reli­gion (any reli­gion). I’m very curi­ous to see if that theme con­tin­ues through the end of the book. Oth­er than that it’s excel­lent (and his com­ments about reli­gions and reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties are insight­ful).

Then I fell asleep–it was 11:00pm!

All in all an excel­lent day.