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.