Our Sneaky God

God brings us togeth­er with a Stan­ford stu­dent.

God is sneaky. I’m pret­ty sure that’s not in the Bible (unless you read a very loose trans­la­tion), but I’m con­vinced of the fact. He tells us to be wise as ser­pents, and He mod­els that for us.

For exam­ple, today Paula and I shared at a church in Burlingame, CA called Three Cities Assem­bly. The San Fran­cis­co Forty-Nin­ers had a play­off game today, so I was expect­ing the atten­dance to be a lit­tle bit down. Oth­er than that, I was­n’t expect­ing any­thing unusu­al.

God had oth­er plans, though.

After the ser­vice, it’s cus­tom­ary for a mis­sion­ary guest speak­er to be avail­able to shake hands and chat with peo­ple. I met the head of anthro­pol­o­gy for Wycliffe Bible Trans­la­tors after the ser­vice today–that was pret­ty cool. I also met a guy who used to be in a Chi Alpha group led by some friends of mine in Stock­ton, CA. That was also pret­ty cool. It’s not unusu­al to meet very cool peo­ple after the ser­vice.

I also met one of my upstairs neigh­bors, which was pret­ty sur­pris­ing (and cool).

The best was yet to come, how­ev­er.

Towards the end of the good­byes, I met a young man named Charles who was vis­it­ing the church for the first time. Charles is a first-year Stan­ford grad stu­dent, and even though Burlingame is a good 25 miles away from Stan­ford he decid­ed to vis­it the church today because he used to know Pas­tor Hern­don back when they both lived in Las Vegas (Charles was actu­al­ly in Jay’s youth group).

Charles has been try­ing to find a church that can acco­mo­date his crazy stu­dent sched­ule: every third or fourth Sun­day he won’t be able to go to church. Today he learned about Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford and he was able to hear me preach.

I guess he liked what he heard, because he’s plan­ning to join us for wor­ship on cam­pus this Tues­day!

How prov­i­den­tial of God–to bring us to the same church at the same time and arrange a con­nec­tion. He’s sneaky I tell you…

I Hate Being Sick

sick­ness is mis­er­able

For the record, I am offi­cial­ly against being sick. I dis­like it immense­ly.

I have a dull body ache and have become a mucous fac­to­ry. I’ve been feel­ing a lit­tle sick ever since Chi Alpha’s Win­ter Con­fer­ence, but I thought I had kicked it yes­ter­day. Instead I kicked it into high gear.

*sigh*

The Unfinished Task

I just ran across an inter­est­ing site that gives up-to-the-minute esti­mates of the state of world evan­ge­liza­tion. I don’t know how they arrived at their fig­ures, but I find it inter­est­ing: The Unfin­ished Task

International Students at Stanford

Stu­dents from around the world come to study at Stan­ford.

I came across this infor­ma­tion regard­ing inter­na­tion­al stu­dent enroll­ment at Stan­ford. Some of the infor­ma­tion is a year or two out-of-date (which sur­prised me–it seems like this could be dynam­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed from a data­base and be 100% accu­rate at all times).

1/3 of all grad stu­dents are inter­na­tion­al, as are 1/20 of all under­grads. That works out to some­thing like 20–25% of all Stan­ford stu­dents hail from anoth­er coun­try.

The Top Ten For­eign Nations (among grad­u­ate stu­dents)

  • Chi­na
  • Korea
  • India
  • Cana­da
  • Tai­wan
  • France
  • Japan
  • Sin­ga­pore
  • Turkey
  • Mex­i­co

Talk about poten­tial for glob­al impact!

Minor Site Tweak

I get even more Flash-ified.

I just redesigned the site nav­i­ga­tion­al sys­tem using Flash. It should degrade grace­ful­ly (mean­ing that if you can’t run Flash, you should still be able to use the site).

Now that the site nav­i­ga­tion­al sys­tem is in Flash, I can do some pret­ty cool things with it. I’ll try to restrain myself from doing any­thing too obnox­ious (but I’d like to do some cool stuff that still loads quick­ly… feel free to post links to sites that you think use Flash well in the com­ments).

I’m still hop­ing to post some book mus­ings soon. We’ll see…

Whew–one long day

dri­ving to church­es all day long

Yes­ter­day Paula and I got up at 5:30am to dri­ve to a church in Sal­i­da to share with them about our min­istry, and then we drove to Sono­ra to share at that church.

We did­n’t get home until 11:30 at night!

Still, we had a great day. Both the church­es were swell (although very dif­fer­ent).

I’ve been mean­ing to post some reflec­tions on books I’ve read late­ly. Hope­ful­ly I’ll get a chance to do that some­time tonight…

The Wilberforce Forum

The Wilber­force Forum is a col­lec­tion of excel­lent resources for thought­ful Chris­tians.

At present, they have resources in the
* Arts
* Lit­er­a­ture
* Phi­los­o­phy
* Sci­ence & Math
* His­to­ry and Polit­i­cal Sci­ence

They have more dis­ci­plines in the works. Looks like some­thing to book­mark!

Happy New Year!

Woohoo–we’re back!

salt2002.jpgWe just got back from Chi Alpha’s Win­ter Con­fer­ence yes­ter­day. Wow!

It’s hard to sum­ma­rize a mul­ti-day con­fer­ence in a such a brief post­ing, so I’ll con­tent myself with observ­ing that the wor­ship and the teach­ing were both top-notch, and the camp­ground itself was stun­ning­ly beau­ti­ful. The over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of stu­dents that we talked with were hav­ing sig­nif­i­cant spir­i­tu­al expe­ri­ences. It was very cool.

Also, I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to teach a work­shop called “Rea­son­able Answers to Hon­est Ques­tions” (in which we talked very frankly about han­dling doubts and intel­lec­tu­al chal­lenges to the faith) and I was also able to facil­i­tate a sem­i­nar called “the Idea Exchange” (in which we just shared neat ideas from one cam­pus to anoth­er).

Although the dri­ve back was near­ly eight hours and we were quite tired, we decid­ed to have a joint New Year’s cel­e­bra­tion. We met in one of the stu­den­t’s apart­ments and had a jol­ly old time!

P.S. Expect web­site updates to return to their usu­al fre­quen­cy (once or twice a week).

A Student’s Guide To Liberal Learning

I just read a mar­velous essay by James Schall (a priest and pro­fes­sor at George­town) called A Stu­den­t’s Guide to Lib­er­al Learn­ing (link found from the author’s home­page, which I ran across cour­tesy of the Clare­mont Insti­tute). It’s sim­ply out­stand­ing (although I found the style a lit­tle odd at times).

Schall argues that stu­dents must take respon­si­bil­i­ty for their own learn­ing. Two pas­sages serve as a decent intro­duc­tion:

When a stu­dent arrives at a uni­ver­si­ty, espe­cial­ly a pres­tige [sic] one, he will prob­a­bly think that what he is about to study will be the best that he can pos­si­bly come by. He nat­u­ral­ly expects that what he is get­ting is, in fact, his “mon­ey’s worth”, as they say.… This par­tic­u­lar essay is not writ­ten for stu­dents who have no prob­lems with the sys­tem or who, even less, do not want to find any. They will nev­er know the dif­fer­ence. They will nev­er doubt that what they are being taught is any­thing but the high qual­i­ty stuff that it is tout­ed to be in the brochures and media or, appar­ent­ly, con­firmed by the high cost of their tuition. Often how­ev­er, from one’s reli­gious or philo­soph­i­cal back­ground, from one’s fam­i­ly, per­haps from a friend or a teacher or from some­thing that one chanced to read or see, a young man or woman will be at least alert and, hope­ful­ly, begin to sus­pect that all is not well in acad­e­mia, or in the cul­ture, or, for that mat­ter, in one’s own soul.

and also

E. F. Schu­mach­er, in his great book, A Guide for the Per­plexed, tells of going to Oxford as a young man, that is, of going to what was thought to be the great­est uni­ver­si­ty of his time. He dis­cov­ered that what was taught and dis­cussed there bore lit­tle mean­ing and truth to him. Schu­mach­er was forced to look else­where for some sem­blance of an edu­ca­tion that dealt with the high­est things, that took seri­ous­ly what the great philo­soph­i­cal and reli­gious minds real­ly were talk­ing about, issues that he already felt press­ing in his own soul but were nev­er addressed in the great uni­ver­si­ty.

And one last obser­va­tion which I found par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing: In spite of most of what a stu­dent will read on the top­ic, rev­e­la­tion seeks rea­son, is addressed to mind and fos­ters it. The Bible sim­ply has pro­found things to tell us, things we clear­ly ought to know. We now have stu­dents in class, more­over, even those who have gone to church or syn­a­gogue all their lives, who have not the faintest accu­rate idea about what is said in Scrip­ture, a work that almost every gen­er­a­tion before this era has read care­ful­ly either to under­stand or to dis­pute or to live by.

If you find Schal­l’s essay help­ful, you might also want to read my ear­li­er post­ing on Becom­ing Wise In Col­lege.

the rush continues

just an update on our hol­i­days, and an request to pray for our stu­dents at SALT

There’s been a pauci­ty of post­ings late­ly, and so I thought I should explain: we’ve been on our annu­al Christ­mas vis­it to Louisiana, so it’s been very dif­fi­cult to get sig­nif­i­cant inter­net time.

Actu­al­ly, I prob­a­bly won’t post again until next year. We got in last night and in less than two hours we’ll be on the road again!

We’ve got to turn around and head down to the Chi Alpha Win­ter Con­fer­ence (called SALT) held near LA. Looks like the car will be receiv­ing anoth­er 1,000 miles or so…

We have around 10 peo­ple head­ing down to SALT. SALT is usu­al­ly a very sig­nif­i­cant time in stu­dents’ lives: peo­ple are trans­formed, filled with the Holy Spir­it, receive spe­cif­ic voca­tion­al guid­ance, and are gen­er­al­ly touched by God in some pret­ty sig­nif­i­cant ways. Please pray for our time there!

See you next year.