disciple, husband, father, college minister
I’ve been meaning to blog this forever, but I kept forgetting. On the first floor of the renovated Old Union is an acrylic sign telling the history of the building.
For the longest time (months) it had a glaring typo (I think it’s been fixed since I took this photo). It really amused me.
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If you have a hard time seeing it, look under the word Union or click on the picture to view it with the error highlighted.
Our College Winter Conference
is this weekend, and I’m in charge. So for the last few days I’ve been bombarded with phone calls or urgent emails relating to some minor crisis about the event. It reached a fever pitch yesterday when I received a message about every ten minutes (or so it seemed).
That’s not a big deal — it’s what you sign on for when you agree to direct a retreat or conference.
However, I also had to preach last night.
Being interrupted every ten minutes does not lend itself to robust sermon preparation. I’m very particular about my sermon preparation routine. I like to research my topic thoroughly, write out what I intend to say word for word, and then rehearse it (at least once, preferably twice). When speaking in the evening, I usually manuscript in the morning and rehearse in the afternoon. That didn’t happen yesterday.
The bottom line is that I walked into last night’s meeting less prepared for a sermon than I have been in years. I felt certain that the message was going to be a flop.
While delivering it, I felt as though I was fumbling for words and rambling incoherently.
But at the end of the evening, one student prayed to receive Christ and another prayed to rededicate herself to Christ.
It was a humbling reminder that it’s not about me and my preparation; it’s about God using broken vessels to achieve His will.
Yesterday we were giving away free homemade chocolate-chip cookies on White Plaza, and we got all sorts of wonderful reactions. My favorite was from a master’s student in engineering who grabbed a cookie and then looked at the poster next to the cookie pile.
It was an advertisement for the upcoming Francis Collins talk watch corvette summer online the man who would be king online download
download barbie of swan lake movie . If the name doesn’t ring a bell, Collins coordinated the Human Genome Project that decoded human DNA. He’s also a follower of Christ.
Anyway, this guy just stared at the poster for about a minute, befuddlement sprawled across his face. He looked at the picture of Collins on the cover of Nature magazine. He read his scientific credentials. And then he read the topic of the lecture again. Then he sort of murmured, “Wait. This can’t be right. This doesn’t make any sense.”
So we explained that yes, Francis Collins really is one of the world’s leading geneticists. And yes, he really does believe in Jesus. And he’s going to be talking about it Stanford.
The student said he’d be there, and I hope he does show up. He seemed quite earnest. There are a lot of students on campus who don’t allow themselves to consider God seriously because they assume that science and faith are by definition opposed to one another. We hope that by showing them a world-class scientist who loves God we can dispel some of that prejudice.
I love this job.
Chi Alpha @ Stanford officer Aaron Polhamus was just awarded a Rhodes Scholarship
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(see page 10 of the document). That means he gets 2 or 3 years to study at Oxford — fully subsidized. The Stanford Daily has a brief write-up
on it which quotes Aaron at some length.
Being a Rhodes Scholar is a big deal — some notable recipients of the award include Bill Clinton, Wesley Clark (the general turned politician), Robert Reich, Daniel Boorstin (the historian), physicist Brian Greene (yeah, the one who writes the cool books about science), George Stephanopoulos, current Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, and scads of congressman and senators. Oh, plus Kris Kristofferson (really).
So congrats, Aaron!
Last night at Chi Alpha’s weekly meeting we had a guest speaker — missionary Mark Orfila. He’s been serving for over a decade in eastern Europe and has been thinking very deeply about American cultural values and how they relate to the Kingdom of God.
He said a lot of very helpful things last night, but I think the most helpful went along these lines (the thoughts are his but the words are mine):
If I had to choose between tolerance and hatred, I’d choose tolerance hands-down.
But we’re not facing a binary choice — we have a whole range of options available to us. And tolerance can’t be the ultimate good in a society for two reasons: one philosophical and one practical. There must be something higher of which tolerance is a special case, because if tolerance is the highest good then you have a real problem — how do you handle the intolerant members of your own society? If you tolerate them, then you allow intolerance to flourish. If you don’t tolerate them, then you promote intolerance yourself. Either way intolerance sneaks into your society. That’s the philosophical approach. But there’s an even bigger practical problem. Who wants to be tolerated? Don’t we all want more than to be put up with? Tolerance is a negative virtue — it’s about what we don’t do to people. I won’t hit you, I won’t insult you, I won’t stigmatize you. It’s a peculiar inverse of the golden rule — tolerance tells us not to do to others what we don’t want done to us. It creates a distance between us and never forces us to cross it.
The problem with tolerance for a Christian is not that it sets the bar too high but that it sets the bar too low. We are called to love one another; in fact, we are even called to love our enemies. And rather than merely respecting the distance between us, we are called to treat them the way we wish they would treat us. Tolerance is a poor substitute for love. If it’s the only offer on the table I’ll take it, but in most situations we should demand more (especially of ourselves).
Thanks for the clear thinking on a crucial subject, Mark.
My fellow web geeks might find this script, php-check download home on the range movie , useful. It recursively scans a directory checking PHP files for syntax errors.
Just copy it somewhere in your path (like /usr/local/bin) and chmod it to 755.
I wrote the script because I edit PHP using Notepad++, so it’s easy for small typos to enter my scripts. I needed a quick way to scan a directory after uploading revised files.
I wrote it in PHP so that those who need it will also know how to customize it.
[php]
#!/usr/bin/php
?php
// php-check version 1.0
// recursively scans a directory for .php files and runs php ‑l on
// them (php ‑l checks for PHP syntax errors)
// revisions at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/archives/2007/10/31/scanning-a-directory-for-php-errors/
if (php_sapi_name()!=‘cli’) {
die(“This utility can only be run from the command line.\n”);
}
$counter=0;
$errors=false;
function scan_dir($dir) {
$counter=0;
$dh=opendir($dir);
while ($file=readdir($dh)) {
if ($file==’.’ || $file==’..’) continue;
if (is_dir($dir.’/’.$file)) {
$counter+=scan_dir($dir.’/’.$file);
} else {
if (substr($file, strlen($file) — 4) == ‘.php’) {
$counter++;
$output=shell_exec(“/usr/bin/php ‑l $dir/$file 2>&1”);
if (substr($output,0,2)!=‘No’) { // skips the “No syntax errors in …” message
$errors=true;
echo $output;
}
}
}
}
return $counter;
}
if ($argc!=2) {
die(“Usage: php-check dirname (usually php-check .)\n”);
}
if (!is_dir($argv[1])) {
die(“Argument must be a directory. The most common usage is php-check .\n”);
}
$counter=scan_dir($argv[1]);
echo “$counter files checked\n”;
exit($errors);
?>
[/php]
This is a quick and dirty script — there are probably some bugs in it. User beware.
If you find it helpful, you might also want to check out scripts like PHP CodeSniffer
We just felt our first earthquake!
It only took us 5 years living in the Bay Area.
Apparently it was this one mystery alaska movie download .
I recently submitted a question to the Freakonomics guys for an interview with the MythBusters.
They picked my question as the first one!
Here’s my question and their answer:
Me: Could you describe the brainstorming process that goes into an episode? How far in advance do you begin planning? Who sits in during those meetings?
ADAM: The usual crowd at a brainstorming session is me, Jamie, Alice Dallow (our producer), and whichever researcher is doing the segment we’re working on — either Dennis Kwon or Eric Haven. We also have an on-the-ground executive producer during an official “story meeting.†We usually have one or maybe two of them before shooting a myth, but discussions about stories can happen all over the place, and at any time.
Often, we’ll ask for certain parameters as far as locations or materials, and as we discover what’s possible or not possible, we’ll hone it down to what we’re actually going to do. The show’s researchers are fantastic about finding the weirdest of things and experts, and Alice is brilliant at keeping us on track. The discussions can be like herding cats — there’s a ribald, funny atmosphere, and we’ll range very far from the topic at hand.
Planning can take anywhere from a month to a day or two, depending on the schedule. We’ve had critical locations fall through at the last minute, and needed to turn 180 degrees on a few hours’ notice. We’ll also flag difficult stories as far in advance as we think necessary. Some things, like getting permission to film at Giants Stadium for the Jimmy Hoffa story, have taken the better part of a year to work out.
Then there’s the discussions that Jamie and I have. We’ll often take a difficult problem home, think about it overnight, and maybe discuss the problems we see in it while driving to a location. We also play devil’s advocate with each other — if one of us has a good idea, the other will poke as many holes in it as possible, and in this way we try our best to shake out any problems before we hit them.
JAMIE: This is, believe it or not, the most fun we have on the show. There is no underestimating the thrill of a big catastrophe or explosion; but if you really want to know what gets us going, it’s the brainstorming. Once a topic has passed muster, some basic research has been done by our research team, and we are down to nutting it out, Adam and I swing into action — sort of. Usually we go home first and think about it overnight, and then come in bursting with ideas. We set up in front of a dry erase board, and lay out any solutions we came up with by ourselves.
Amazingly, as much as we are of different temperaments, we quickly spot the best solutions and chip in to flesh the approach out. It becomes like playing Ping-Pong with ideas. Sometimes it gets so intense that there is no time to complete sentences; it becomes a bunch of gesticulations, some pieces of words or phrases, and then, when we come out on the other end, the approach is fleshed out. We call it the “MythBusters Mindmeld.†To anyone listening, it is gibberish, but it allows us to plow through a huge amount of designing in no time (which is what we have a lot of on the show).
At a Chi Alpha conference in St. Louis I just heard Dick Schroeder use an interesting phrase to compliment someone — “he puts ‘us’ before ‘me’.” Here are some off-the-cuff and unpolished thoughts inspired by that phrase:
“Us before me.” What a beautiful phrase to describe servant leadership.
“Us” puts the leadership into servanthood: “us before me” leads to the overall good of the group whereas “you before me” can lead to the detriment of the group.
To be clear, the Bible does command us to “in humility consider others better than ourselves” (Philippians 2:3). Doesn’t this lead directly to “you before me”?
Yes. It does. But the practical question for me as a leader is how to be self-sacrificial in a way that honors my obligations to those I am serving. And I have learned that there is a healthy way to prioritize others and a destructive way to prioritize others.
To serve as fully as possible there is a certain amount of self-maintenance that must take place. Boundaries must be established and maintained. Recreation and sabbaticals must be incorporated. Growth and learning have to take place.
All of these things are self-serving. They require us to say no to others and yes to ourselves. At times, we wind up saying “me before you today because I want to be able to serve you tomorrow”.
But at the same time, all of these things flow from a mature understanding of “you before me” — putting our followers’ long-term good above their short-term desires. For an organization, a leader who says “us before me” builds strength. A leader who naively/hyperspiritually says “you before me” leads the organization to implosion (and likely to high leadership turnover).
Clearly, there is the potential for “us before me” to become a pretext for putting “me before you.” The antidote is to keep expanding our definition of “us”. Whenever we begin to suspect that our “us” is too comfortable, we need to redefine the group we are serving in a larger way, and continue to put “us before me.”
And so a big thanks to Dick Schroeder for giving me my new favorite phrase: “us before me”. It will probably be my favorite for at least a week. 😉
A hearty congratulations to the stalwart warriors of the Cardinal football team. Defeating the Trojans on their home turf with some of our key players sidelined is no mean feat.
May this be a token of things to come.
