Category: Personal News

We got back in from D.C. last night, and Paula vis­it­ed the doc­tor today. She received con­fir­ma­tion of what we strong­ly sus­pect­ed while on the road–she’s preg­gers!

Based on what we know now (which isn’t a whole lot), the expect­ed deliv­ery date is April 3, 2004.

Per­son­al­ly, I’m hop­ing she deliv­ers a lit­tle ear­ly on April 1st (just so that no one believes me when I call them on my cell phone to deliv­er the good news)… 🙂

We’ll be in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. for Gen­er­al Coun­cil.

This one will actu­al­ly be an impor­tant one–we’re decid­ing on some pret­ty vital inter­nal leg­is­la­tion (how we plant church­es, for exam­ple). Noth­ing should make nation­al news, how­ev­er.

All that to say this: if you send either of us an email, it may be a while before we get back to you. We’re not sure how sol­id our con­nec­tiv­i­ty will be on the road.

I haven’t been updat­ing the site much late­ly because my mom has been vis­it­ing. It was a good visit–we went to some beach­es, ate at some restau­rants, and relaxed.

Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to my father (who stayed back in Louisiana) will be the fact that not only did we eat Dun­ge­ness crabs, but we cooked them our­selves (as good Cajuns ought). Here they are in the bath­tub await­ing their fate!

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.

If I may be per­mit­ted to vent for a moment, I just received the worst treat­ment I’ve ever received from a barbershop–namely the The Hair­cut in the Stan­ford Shop­ping Cen­ter.

Once I sat in the bar­ber’s chair every­thing was out of my control–my hair was not cut as I asked, my head was man­han­dled as though I were a fid­gety three-year-old child, and at the end the pro­tec­tive drape was ripped off my body and an indus­tri­al-strength blow­dri­er was run over me to remove any loose hair.

They nev­er even asked me if I was hap­py with my hair­cut. I had to remain seat­ed and ask if I could look in a mir­ror to see the results!

I still have stray hairs prick­ling my skin as I type this.

Most dis­ap­point­ing…

I’m real­ly get­ting into off-the-wall proverbs.

Two of my favorites:

1) Buf­fa­lo can’t see its own butt. (I’m told it’s from Kenya)
2) Dogs bark at what they can’t under­stand. (Her­a­cli­tus)

Paula and I are head­ing up to Reno to preach this Sun­day. We’ve got a min­is­te­r­i­al meet­ing in Susanville tonight (about 90 min­utes from Reno), so we’re just going to spend the whole week­end up there. I prob­a­bly won’t be able to check my email again until Mon­day.

Side note–we’ve had stu­dents liv­ing with us the last few days. A lot of stu­dents are in-between hous­ing right now, and so we offer our pad to those who are in a home­less zone. Nate left yes­ter­day to go do his sum­mer stud­ies at Prince­ton. Jim­my is leav­ing Sun­day to go do his mil­i­tary ser­vice in Sin­ga­pore.

I guess today is the last time we’ll see Jim­my for a long while. In fact, it’s pos­si­ble that we’ll nev­er see him again. That’s an incred­i­bly sad thought…

On a more upbeat note, Shih-Yang and Andrew will be mov­ing in Sun­day (while we’re still gone). Talk about room­mate flux!

Today I had an inter­est­ing lunch with Andy Carv­er, all-around cool guy and for­mer con­gres­sion­al can­di­date (Lib­er­tar­i­an). He’s work­ing on his Ph.D. in Man­age­ment, Sci­ence, and Engi­neer­ing. He also dri­ves a real­ly nice motor­cy­cle.

Any­way, we had lunch to talk about God. Andy is some­where in the agnos­tic realm (he thinks there’s prob­a­bly some­thing out there, but despairs of know­ing exact­ly what it is–he’s just does­n’t see how you can choose between the major world reli­gions).

We talked for about 2 or 3 hours. We’ll have to get togeth­er again some­time soon, we both seemed to real­ly enjoy our­selves!

Here’s the thumb­nail ver­sion of my half of our dis­cus­sion:

Why choose Chris­tian­i­ty?

1) God exists
2) God is good
3) God has revealed Him­self in Jesus
4) The Bible is God’s trust­wor­thy mes­sage

We spent a lot of time talk­ing about the dif­fer­ent rea­sons I find each tenet plau­si­ble (and have in fact cho­sen to base my life upon them).

At the end, Andy allowed me to pray a sim­ple prayer for him: God, I know you love Andy. Please reveal your­self to him in a way that makes sense to him and is per­sua­sive to him. Bless him in his stud­ies, in his rela­tion­ship with Glo, and in every­thing else he puts his hand to. In Jesus name, Amen. He seemed to gen­uine­ly appre­ci­ate it.

Towards the end of our con­ver­sa­tion I asked his per­mis­sion to make a lit­tle post­ing about our meet­ing. He grant­ed it, and you just fin­ished read­ing the result.

This morn­ing Paula and I went to a simul­cast spon­sored by CCN about Inno­va­tion and Risk-Tak­ing in Lead­er­ship.

The pre­sen­ters were George Bar­na, Lar­ry Osborne, and Mike Slaugh­ter.

It was pret­ty good. Two slight­ly humor­ous sound­bytes stuck with me:

Lar­ry: So what if peo­ple think I’m a fail­ure? I’ve been one before!”

George: Yeah. You got­ta run with your strengths, right?

and then anoth­er com­ment by Mike Slaugh­ter: We have all these eth­i­cal prob­lems with cloning peo­ple, but we seem to have no prob­lem with cloning church­es.

Those both seemed very fun­ny to me at the time… look­ing at them in print I think the first one in par­tic­u­lar needs tone of voice to make it sound right.

Last week­end Paula and I were preach­ing up in McKin­leyville, CA (almost all the way to Ore­gon). On the way, we had a chance to dri­ve through the giant red­wood trees (lit­er­al­ly).

If you’ve nev­er seen the trees before, it’s hard to under­stand how large they are. They get to be over 350 feet tall, over 2,000 years old, and weigh up to 1.7 mil­lion pounds!

We even got some cool shots of us in some tree trunks.

No, we did­n’t try to count the rings…