Speed Dating Tuesday

Lcshih’s post inspired me to give this a try.  Let’s do the math: 20 dates in 2 hours works out to 6 minutes per date, minus overhead.  Say 4 minutes of actual conversation.

Looks like Maye and some other Highrockers are going also.

Can anyone think of good ways of working the evangelistic angle?  I think the questions “Do you believe in God?” or “Do you go to church?” are too confrontational and loaded with baggage.  I’ll have Highrock business cards printed out beforehand, but need a good intro to hand them out.

10 books on my to-read list

I finished organizing my bookshelf and picked off 10 books that have been moved to my bedroom nightstand table:

Gig: Americans talk about their jobs | Since re-reading Po Bronson’s book, I’ve been interested in how we find our ideal careers.  And why don’t we talk about this more in church?  When I have more time, I am going to organize a lecture series or panel discussions on careers.

All About Love: New Visions (Bell Hooks) | I read this last year, but it was beyond my understanding.  Hoping to have matured some and get more out of it the second time around.

Wyrms (Orson Scott Card) | Card is one of my favorite fiction writers, and I haven’t read much fiction lately.  I bought this used off ebay, read the first few pages, and liked it enough to put it on the list.

20:21 Vision (Bill Emmott) | I started this recent world history primer a few months ago when cesareborgia recommended it.  Then I read through half the book in preparation for a Harvard panel discussion on U.S. foreign policy.  Now I need more motivation to finish the book.  It’s good, but not very relevant to my current priorities.

Natural Church Development (Christian Schwartz) | Another book I read last year, but this year it’s assigned reading for Highrock overseers, so I’m going to go through it again when I have a spare two hours.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Small Group Ministry (Donahue and Robinson) | Daveswaim gave me the book to read a few pages on church integration, and now I feel I should skim the rest of it before returning.

Kokoro (Soseki) | From Edwin’s collection of books he didn’t want when he moved.  I tried a few pages and liked it.

The Dilbert Future (Scott Adams) | Sometimes humor is the best way to get to the truth.  Trends that will shape our working world, unfortunately.

Created for Community (Stanley Grenz) | More assigned Highrock overseer reading.  It’s supposed to be a good overview of Christian theology, and how it supports the idea of community.  Heavy on the Bible references, so it’s slow reading for me.

On Writing Well (William Zinsser) | I used to think I was a half-decent writer until I happened to open this book to a random page and read:

The Exclamation Point. Don’t use it unless you must to achieve a certain effect.  It has a gushy aura–the breathless excitement of a debutante commenting on an event that was exciting only to her: “Daddy says I must have had too much champagne!”  “But honestly, I could have danced all night!”

Weekend Update

Spent the whole weekend working on loft stuff.  Early Saturday morning I dragged my new designer friend Julie to the new IKEA in New Haven.  I borrowed pickley’s SUV to do it, and filled it with all kinds of stuff during a 3.5 hour shopping marathon.  We spent almost as much time in the store as we did on the road.  The rest of the day was filled with assembling furniture, hanging lights, and organizing books.  I worked straight through the night and missed the Highrock Art House event. 

Also, I worked so hard on so little food (no time to eat) that I got sick again.  Or maybe it’s the same sick that came back with a vengeance.  I have many theories on colds, one of them being that it’s a constant battle between your body’s defenses and the cold’s… offense?  When you weaken your body by overworking it or not feeding it, then your defenses are lowered and the cold gains ground (body?).

During breaks I played Puerto Rico online.  So far I haven’t met any players as good as lcshih, so I usually win.

Today I finished the book organizing and started installing bookshelf lights:

Working with the lights reminds me of food preparation.  First I cut off the tails, then I pry open the shell…  I need a sous chef.

Breaking Stovepipes*

It seems like any group of people tends to self-organize into smaller manageable clusters.  In many schools and churches, groups become exclusive and become cliques.  At Highrock, our young adult pastor Joseph Kim has promoted an anti-clique culture, resulting in a lot of open-invitation events for the whole community.  On the email lists and forums calendar, you can find open events almost every day of the week.  Instant social life for new Bostonians!

This large-group fellowship focus reverses the normal pattern of entrenched old-timers in the center and newcomers at the fringes.  It places newcomers at the center, with warm welcomes and showers of attention.  Ironically it makes some old-timers feel left out after the honeymoon period, since they are left to fend for themselves and keep up with the torrent of people coming and leaving.

It also pushes the clique problem out to a larger scale.  Instead of groups within the young adults, the whole fellowship becomes a group that has a hard time interacting with the college students and families.  In some ways it makes sense — different lifestyles, schedules, geography, and commitments.  But we lose out on a lot of the richness that comes from intergenerational interaction.

We’ve tried to put people from different lifestage groups on the same Soul Food team, but it’s tough.  Families tend to leave church earlier than young adults, and college students all come at the same time and leave together to catch the same T back to campus.  And while it’s nice to meet new and different people while cooking and serving together, it hasn’t been the best avenue for building deep and lasting relationships.

Maybe regional groups are the answer.  I’ve heard good things about SoCha, the South of Charles small group.  But geography — the very basis of regional groups — works against us here.  About 80% of young adults live in Cambridge and Somerville.  Only 10% of families do.

In the end, we may not be able to break these boundaries with a programmatic approach.  The best we can do is make introductions and set a vision for an open community where all types of friendships can develop.  Then it’s up to the individuals to put in the work and partake of the benefits.

* The term “stovepipe” refers to what happens when people from different divisions in the same company refuse to interact.

Loft Update

Wow, it’s been 21 days since I last posted about my kitchen!  Well, in that time I’ve mostly done boring things like unpack boxes.  But I did decide on track pendant accent lighting for the kitchen counter, and I finally installed those this week and adjusted the lengths tonight.

For digital photo buffs: the picture shows the limitation of conventional CCD digital cameras, which have at most a 10-bit dynamic range tonemapped into 8 bits, log space.  Result: clear edges in the pendant lights, but dark colors and muddy details in the rest of the picture.  Now if I could only figure out how to realistically tonemap the output of our 16-bit sensor into a standard 8-bit display in realtime…

Unlike Mike, Part II

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) is coming to town tomorrow.  At Soul Food, someone warned me not to carry a briefcase, since it’s liable to get inspected.  Traffic will be a nightmare in the city.  Fortunately all of my meetings this coming week are in or north of Cambridge.

The DNC also gets me thinking about my one vote: the paradox between the futility and impotence of casting a single vote vs. the civic duty of doing it anyway, because if no one voted…  In such situations, I tend to look for an OOB (Out Of the Box) solution that will have greater impact.  For instance, I might try to campaign hard for one candidate on this xanga site.  Or I could make a pact: “I don’t vote for my candidate and you don’t vote for yours, so it evens out.”  And do it with a hundred of my opponents.  [evil grin]  But no matter how I slice it, I don’t see how I can influence more than at most a few hundred votes.

I would have to be Michael Moore to influence a significant number of votes.  Ever wonder just how significant?  It’s hard to measure, but we can pull a McKinsey and estimate with rough numbers:  As of this week, Fahrenheit 9/11 grossed $103M.  Say an average of $7 per ticket, averaging in matinees and high-price (NYC) and low-price (Midwest) theaters.  That’s about 15M tickets sold.  Say 1M of those were repeat viewers, so 14M unique viewers.  If a net 1-in-7 viewers turned against Bush, that’s 2M potential voters, or about 1% of the eligible voter population, 2% of the actual voter population.  That’s enough to swing a vote.  But… I’m not like Mike.

I also have a hard time believing that one candidate is absolutely better than the other.  Currently I slightly favor Kerry, but that could change next week with a skeleton-in-the-closet news revelation.  Currently — with 20/100 hindsight — I also think that the war in Iraq was unjustified.  But maybe Bush’s best advisors did see a significant possibility of WMD development and felt it necessary to flex on potential terrorists.  Not what I would have done, but who knows if it was the best course of action in the end?

So it comes down to casting a vote that won’t change anything, for something or someone I’m not sure I believe in.  But in the end I’ll vote regardless.  Because individual vote is the backbone of democracy, and that’s the best system we have.  Already power is concentrated in the hands of the rich and entrenched.  All we have to dislodge them or at least keep them honest is to be informed and vote.  That’s an option given to everyone, and your name doesn’t have to rhyme with Ike.

Slow-Onset Cold

Why is it that sometimes colds hit you like a blinding fastball?  I mean, you’re sitting there watching TV, a tickle starts in your throat, you try to cough, and WHAMMO! you sneeze out a pint of mucus?

Well, that’s not the cold I have now.  For the past three days people have been telling me I sound congested.  I thought it was just allergies or lack of sleep.  But today I can’t taste anything, and my nose is running like a leaky faucet.  I think I’ll go home early and try to tackle it with a home remedy of Vitamin C megadoses, zinc, and computer games.  Any other ideas?

Random ramblings, since I don’t have time to write a real post:

• On the prayer experiment.  I tried praying specifically the “wrong” way yesterday (unrepentant, full of rebellion, asking for selfish things) and went 0 for 3.  If I get enough data points, I can plot correlation graphs for cesareborgia’s enjoyment.
  
• On a lark, I jokingly asked altoz to pray for a parking space while driving to Summer Swing (Rowe’s Wharf), and we got one.  Saved 17 bucks.  Maybe God loves him more than me.
  
• Besides the prayer experiments and dating theology, my mind is scattered between work, church issues, loft revovations (finally installed track lights in the kitchen), more evidence for/against the War in Iraq that people are emailing me, and whether it’s ok to call your political opponents “girly-men.”
  
• I have a bunch of thoughts on responses to my Theology of Dating post, but I need to sort them out first.  For now, I have to say that ambiguity is good in the beginning of a relationship, but it should shrink as the relationship grows deeper.  By marriage, there shouldn’t be ambiguity, and especially not with friends of the opposite sex!  Because you never want to have the following conversation:

• Husband: Are you turned on by my wife?
  
• Your answer: Yes, I totally lust after her.
  
• Husband: [punches you in the face]
  OR
  
• Husband: Are you turned on by my wife?
  
• Your answer: No, I find her totally unappealing.
  
• Husband: [punches you in the face]
  

Since altoz and eyeman recently wrote about answered prayers, I thought I’d give it a try.  Generally these days I pray about dry and abstract stuff like world peace and church unity  But both last night and this morning I prayed for there to be no people in line at the Comcast office when I went to return my old cable modem.  I spent some time drifting in and out of sleep trying to figure out if my motives were right (I think so) and if I could accept a No answer (I could).  And when I went to Comcast, there was no line.  Strange.

My skeptical rational side wants to dismiss it as a coincidence, but I also want to think up other prayers I can try over the next few days.  Anyone else have recent experiences with answered or unanswered prayers?

A New Theology of Dating: I am not just your “brother.”

I’ve met a number of Christian men and women whose dating theology is:

God is idealistic about love, and we should be too.

These Christians typically come from conservative churches where men and women are not friends (and sometimes prohibited from interacting).  They read Josh Harris and Elisabeth Elliot, not realizing that those books are at best aimed for teenagers.

The problem with any strict idealism is that it doesn’t account for messy reality.  In the case of dating, idealism means there are two categories of male-female relationships:

A: brother and sister (strictly platonic)

B: on the path to holy matrimony

This system represses girls.  They are taught not to flirt.  Because that would just cause guys in camp A to stumble, and there’s no need to flirt to attract the type-B guy.  When he knows, he’ll know.  And girls have to turn down dates with any guys who don’t fit her idea of who she’ll marry.

This system emasculates guys.  Since girls don’t flirt with them, guys get no positive encouragement about their own sexual desirability.  And since asking out is such a serious matter (a date means you’re on path B and better think about how many kids you want), guys can’t ask out girls until they are sure enough.  And girls can’t say yes until they’re sure enough.

Result: low self-esteem, very few couples, sparse or absent male-female friendships, and anemic spiritual growth in the area of handling romantic relationships.

It’s hard for me to believe this is what God intended for men and women.

It’s true that God is idealistic.  But he doesn’t express that idealism by neatly categorizing into A and B.  Instead, he expresses it through a real Christ who came to live and die among us, despite our messiness, our smells, our sins.  He had messy relationships too, although any romantic ones weren’t documented.

Here is my plea.  Men and women should be friends, and sometimes more, and sometimes less.  People can’t be neatly categorized — why should relationships?  Messiness is a part of life.  Certainly at various points, things need to be clarified and commitments made.  But before then, I’m in favor of flirting and affirming each others’ desirability.  And having ambiguous relationships that evolve and leave room for hope, faith, grace, open communication, mistakes, and forgiveness.

Unfortunately, many Christians will choose to stay in their idealistic fairy-tale land.  So the princess lies asleep in the guarded castle, waiting for her prince to come set her free.  And occasionally this happens, because the men who live in fairy-tale land don their armor (the breastplate of righteousness, etc…) and sally forth.  Some of these men make it, but most are eaten by the dragon.