More Holiday Happenings

After I posted last night’s entry I was filled with even more memories of the holidays.

  • Home cooking. Home Cajun cooking.
  • Eating at the Steamboat for our anniversary. Tasty beyond belief.
  • Teaching my nephew Rick why you should never lose at Tic-Tac-Toe. Also, reducing niece Rebecca to whining because I wouldn’t “go easy on her” while demonstrating my mad Tic-Tac-Toe skillz to a suitably impressed Rick.
  • Reading Soldier, Ask Not as an adult and realizing the hero is someone other than I thought it was when I first read it as a kid.
  • Being a missionary table host for the students from FSU Chi Alpha when the assigned discussion topic was sexual purity. There was so much boisterous laughter at our table that we got a dirty look from one table and a snide comment from another, “Do you see how that table is laughing over there? They don’t take sex seriously.” To which my reply was, “I find humor in everything I value greatly–laughter is one way of delighting in something precious. Besides, if you can’t laugh at something as ridiculous as sex you are seriously humor-challenged.” In the other table’s defense, however, we were having a disruptively good time.
  • Finding out that many of my former RUi students really enjoyed my sessions and remembered them in surprising detail.
  • Seeing how many Chi Alphas are spreading into the elite schools. One couple I helped disciple is heading to establish a ministry at Cornell and I met another chap heading to Brown (his brilliant support-raising motto: “What can you do for Brown?”). Of America’s extremely prestigious schools, that makes staff-supported chapters at Stanford, Georgetown, MIT, Brown, Yale and Cornell. We’re making major progress on that front.
  • Chatting with Gene Breitenbach about the recent intelligent design court case (he’s a huge fan of the way the case was decided).
  • Realizing how stark the imbalance is between Chi Alpha Xanga users and the more enlightened Chi Alpha WordPress crowd. I may have to post an article on that someday (but only if I want to endure a good-natured web fight, especially since my wife is a Xangan).
  • Dana screaming “Home!” with delight when we stepped back through the door of our apartment.

Holiday Highlights

As always, we spent Christmas in Lousiana. In addition, I got to spend around 14 hours in a car driving from Lafayette, LA to Louisville, KY for The World Missions Summit. Nearly 4,000 college students from Chi Alpha groups across America gathered to consider their role in God’s global plan. And then I got to spend 14 hours driving back again.
Some highlights from the trip:

  • Getting loot for Christmas, including Munchkin.
  • Having Dana decide that daddy was her favorite for a little while.
  • Watching my parents finally get broadband internet service. Also, fixing computers for both my parents and my in-laws.
  • Discovering that Steve Barke has a snore that would cause a dead person to search for ear plugs. Also, purchasing ear plugs.
  • Listening to J. Rufus Fears talk about Winston Churchill for 12 hours. I’ve long admired Churchill based on what little I knew about him–now that I know more I’m astounded. He was among the greatest of all time.
  • Hanging out with Greg for 14 hours in a car.
  • Discovering that there are whole stretches of road in the South which only receive country and/or rap stations.
  • Chatting with Lindsey and Nicholette about their upcoming moves to join us. They’re both such great people–Paula and I can’t wait for them to be here!
  • Meeting Will Phillips. He was every bit as entertaining in person as I had hoped he would be. For some reason he thinks he out-geeks me. Someday I may have to disabuse him of that notion (I contribute to Wikipedia, for crying out loud).
  • Seeing my old bud Randy Jumper again. We were classmates at AGTS and have kept in touch digitally since. Nice to have a face-to-face again.
  • Discovering that Stanford frosh John Sillcox can focus out of each eye separately. Freaky.
  • Way cool worship in the morning. In an odd turn of events, the morning services were consistently 5 to 7 times better than the evening services.
  • Seeing over 650 students make a one-year committment to missions with the option for a lifetime extension. Woohoo! And they weren’t just signing up for the easy places, either. A lot of closed countries are in for a big surprise.
  • Watching the amazing level of panache with which the Ascent (a Chi Alpha staff event) was pulled off. Knowing that Belkas Lehmann and I had planned the whole thing made it extra-special.
  • Getting a free copy of Full Gospel, Fractured Minds. I’m enjoying it so far, and I’ll post a review when I’m done. Big thanks to Jerry Gibson for hooking me up.
  • Randomly walking around Louisville at dark looking for food (which I finally discovered at a gas station).
  • Finally watching The Magnificent Seven.
  • Watching The Fantastic Four and finally realizing that they’re the four elements.
  • Having Dana behave on both flights.

Funniest Subject Line In A Spam Email

I just returned to the office after Christmas and The World Missions Summit (details forthcoming) and I’m processing the gazillion emails I had waiting in my inbox. Funniest subject line so far? How A Man Can Do It Like A Lesbian. I actually chuckled as I was hitting the delete key.

Encyclopedia Smackdown

In yet another vindication of Wikipedia, the prestigious science journal Nature just released a fascinating article, Internet encyclopaedias go head to head which did some thorough research and discovered that at least in science, Wikipedia is on par with the Encyclopedia Britannica for accuracy (if not elegance). Disclaimer: I’m a proud Wikipedian (username GlenDavis)

Personality Tests And Their Defects

The Cult of Personality Testing : How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand OurselvesSometime last year I read The Cult of Personality (since retitled to The Cult of Personality Testing). I picked it up on a whim at an offbeat bookstore in Half Moon Bay between two church services.

I loved it and found it utterly persuasive. I’ve had a long-simmering aversion to personality testing (rooted in a bad experience in seminary, observing friends get shafted by the Assemblies of God personality screening system for missionaries, some biting passages about psychology by Richard Feynmann, and being a critical thinker). Something about them always felt wrong (and I could even put parts of my unease into fairly persuasive words), but I never had the facts I needed to understand exactly where the problem lay. This book changed all that.

I mention it because I just read an article by Malcolm Gladwell called Personality Plus that covers the same ground. It’s a great intro to the concepts covered in the book.

So if you’re in the habit of referring to people by their Myers-Briggs type, or if you like to use the terms sanguine and choleric in casual conversation, or if you’ve ever made a decision based on the results of a personality test, READ THIS BOOK (or at least Gladwell’s article).

Lion Rampant

My church went to see The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe this Saturday and we brought guests–3 to 4 times as many outside our church went to see it with us as did church members.

It was magnificent. From a fan’s perspective, it was as faithful to the book as you can expect a movie to be. From a technical perspective, it should say something that I found a beaver in chain mail utterly convincing.

They even made Turkish Delight look appealing, which is truly nasty candy. If that was the most tempting snack available to Brits during the war I’m amazed they were able to hold out against the Luftwaffe. I mean, really. Turkish Delight? The stuff tastes like congealed fat.

I was destined to love the movie as long as it was even close to the book. I was more interested in the reactions of my neighbors: he an atheistic Jewish postdoctoral biology researcher at Stanford and she a not-really-practicing Hindu who works as a business consultant.

They loved it, too.

As we were talking about it afterwards, he commented “The reviews I’ve read are right–it’s definitely got Christian imagery but you have to look for it.”

While I think he downplayed the obviousness of the Christian message (it’s always winter without CHRISTmas–hello?), I think he was on to something.

The movie did dilute some key dialog, but even if the dialog had been unaltered his point would still have merit. The story doesn’t so much tell the Christian message as it prepares one for it. It creates categories and understandings in your mind which serve as placeholders for the gospel. It’s like an extended parable that highlights a few truths:

  • This world is more fantastic than we dare believe.
  • Evil is seductive.
  • Evil need not prevail, either in our lives or in our world.
  • Evil must be fought.
  • We can’t win the fight against evil alone.
  • The one we need help from is our rightful King.
  • Our rightful King is not tame but he is good.

And given Phillp Pullman’s claim that the story was loveless I couldn’t help but marvel as the formerly fear-stricken Edmund—Edmund, who knew well the horrible extent of the Witch’s power—hurled himself at her to prevent the slaughter of Peter and incurred a life-threatening wound as a result. And I could talk of the love of the mother for her children, of the children for their father, of the children for each other, of the children for Aslan, of Aslan for his people, of the professor for his haplessly unloveable housekeeper, and of the children (especially Lucy) for Mr. Tumnus.

No love indeed. Pullman just has it in for Lewis.

Anyway, it’s an outstanding movie. I’ve been to precious few movies which caused the audience to burst into applause at the end. This was one.