Conference prep

Today I got up way too early (by my standards) and caught the shuttle to the convention center in downtown Kansas City. I arrived, found my way to where the bookstore people were setting up, and looked around for some idea as to what to do next. My whole prayer room team was supposed to be helping set up the bookstore, but aside from Tasha K. and Bethany (who work for the bookstore anyway), I only saw one or two other people from my PR team. I probably could've slept in and arrived later...that bugs me that almost no one else showed up. I mean, I was happy to help out, but I expected the others to show up. In fairness, they are all probably going to be busier than me during the conference or were doing something else, but bottom line: if you give your word that you're going to do something, you should do it.

Enough complaining. Back to our exciting narrative. I spotted Kristen the Bookstore Guru, whom I know through work, and made a beeline for her. She said I could help set up the CD displays. For several hours I stacked CDs artistically and occasionally chatted with the others around me. It was actually really fun. I was able to indulge my perfectionist tendencies and my creativity at the same time. The morning flew by.

We broke for lunch (tasteless pizza). I sucked down a Dr. Pepper, but all that CD stacking had made me really thirsty. So I went over to someone I know at the bookstore (got ambushed by a mini-Sliker on the way, and reminded about alumni T-shirts by Mary the OTI Administrative Goddess) and begged for a bottle of water. Drank it in about a minute. I am still dehydrated, though. I can feel it. For I did not stop working for the bookstore when the CDs were all stacked and arranged neatly. No, my friends, I graduated to...wait for it...folding shirts. Sweatshirts, T-shirts, track jackets, hoodies—I used to wonder if I could ever make it in a sweatshop. Now I am sure that I couldn't last for long. You know that little place right in the center of your back that aches when you bend over for too long? Yeah.

I will say that the company was excellent and the taskmasters fair; all of the volunteers had cheerful attitudes and a servant's heart. But I was relieved to finish folding around 3:00. It's been a long time since I worked at a job where I had to stand for several hours. I have to say I don't miss it.

Anyway...I went out and waited for the shuttle. At the wrong pick-up/drop-off point. They changed where the shuttles arrive without telling us; I was lucky to catch one of the last shuttles. Finally made it home. I am looking forward to an evening of putting up my feet. I don't have much to do tomorrow; I am doing prophecy teams two or three days during the conference. I am also running the master CDs from the afternoon seminars over to duplication. Otherwise...nada. I think I need to pick up some service hours somewhere.

P.S. Check it out; Dave Sliker is blogging. He already has some interesting things to say. "What?" you may say. "Who is this oddly-named man?" Well...he's...I mean...the seriously hardcore knowledge of the Bible...and the hilarious facial expressions...it's Sliker, okay? I really can't say much more than that. Go read him.

Merry Hanukah

Dear Diary,

Today I went to the dentist, and then I had brunch with my family, and then we opened presents, and then it began to snow because my youngest sister has been praying for snow and endlessly singing "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" for like the whole last millennium, and then my dad and us three sisters went outside to catch snowflakes on our tongues, and then we had a four-way snowball fight, actually it would have been six-way but the dogs aren't very good at throwing, and then we built a snowman which was really a Babylonian NFL linebacker Dumbo-eared armless alien poodle with a penguin on its shoulder, and then my dad and I and my older young sister skinned and shredded and mixed and fried a bunch of potatoes, and then we stuffed ourselves on latkes, GLORIOUS LATKES, and I think today was the best Christmas/Hanukah ever in all the recorded history of the world, and even of the recorded history of all the other alternate dimensions and parallel realities that I don't believe in but am referencing for poetic license.

No, but seriously. Today really was fun. Even the dentist's appointment was all right, because I didn't actually see the dentist; I went to see Pam the Amazingly Awesome Dental Hygienist, who's been cleaning my choppers since I was ten or eleven. We had fun chatting and she complimented me on my teeth. *blush* Why thank you, ma'am.

I enjoyed spending the day with my family, which was really the only thing I wanted for Christmas. I also ate like a bazillion latkes, which was really the only thing I wanted for Hanukah. (We have not played Xtreme Dreidel yet. Perhaps later.) I was thinking about going over to the Christian bookstore where my brother works to catch a short concert by Ginny Owens, but I'm pretty happy where I am. Even if we are watching the Vikings/Packers game. I am not a football fan; my sisters and my dad are. The guys who eventually marry my sisters will be blessed among men on Earth, because both girls love to watch football.

I consider myself pretty blessed as well. My family rocks. Even though my brother put that ornament featuring a picture of my dorky fourth-grade self on our tree.

Our Freakin' Sweet Snowman, for Whom We Used Most of the Snow in the Yard.

This is our mutant snowman. Snowthing, rather. We aren't actually sure what it is. But the dogs liked running between its two massive legs.



One of the proud architects (me).



Please observe the "heroic jaw" my dad molded. Also note the cute little penguin/puffin thing on its shoulder, courtesy of my sisters and me.

"I'll be home for Christmas Hanukah"

I lit the Hanukkah candles last night. Good times. I'm not sure when we will play dreidel...probably on Thursday, when we will also consume many plates of latkes. We're doing our Christmas stuff on Thursday as well, since my brother is leaving on Friday to go spend Christmas with his girlfriend.

So here I am in sunny, warm Minnesota. I mean, Minnesota. We have no snow at all on the ground. Completely bare. Feh, I say.

I made the trip from KC to the Twin Cities in a little over seven hours. I didn't speed; there just wasn't any traffic, and I only stopped twice. I dropped my stuff off at the house, said hello to Rebecca, who's sick, and then drove over to my other sister's band concert. Shannon did very well. This is her last year, which makes her quite happy. I wonder if she will want to keep the saxophone after she is done. I'm not sure what I would do with it, though...goodness knows I'd have to seriously woodshed before I could ever play in public again.

Anyway, I am enjoying being home with my family. My parents and I sat up and talked last night. They asked lots of questions about what I do at Forerunner Books. I gave them a copy of Pursuit of the Holy. Hope they enjoy it. (I'm hoping my mom will point out any copyediting errors I missed. I'm also hoping I didn't miss many. :-D)

Off to do some holiday shopping. Yes, I am a procrastinator. It's my specialty.

I coulda used that nine dollars. For, I don't know, buying another copy of the Lord of the Rings.

You should know, dear readers, that I am a sucker for science fiction and fantasy films. So the other day I went with Wombat1 and Killer to see Eragon. In my defense, I thought the movie would be better than the book.

It was not. Killer almost fell asleep and Wombat1 almost cried. Me...well, I want my money back. Heck, even the previews were more entertaining than the film. What did I get for my $9 ticket?

1. An hour and a half of no character development
2. Unending sappy gazes between Our Hero, Luke Skywalker Rand al'Thor Eragon, and the Love Interest, Arwen Princess Leia Arya
3. Sage advice from Gandalf Yoda Obi-Wan Kenobi Our Hero's Wise Old Mentor
4. A complete lack of elves, dwarves, and Orcs Urgals in a fantasy film
   
5. Galbatorix, the Completely Not Intimidating Arch-villain whose name sounds like toilet cleaner
6. The Myrddral Ringwraiths Not Scary Evil Henchmen
7. Et cetera
   

*tries to think of something positive to say* Um....the dragon was cool. That's about it.

It's not just the movie that was bad. (Be aware I am ranting by this point, O valued readers.) I don't have much time for reading anymore; the most I read these days is the Bible and the stuff I'm editing at work. But I took my precious free time to power through Eragon before seeing the movie. The book is 500 pages. It didn't take me long to get through it, however; the plot is not that complex. In fact, Eragon is really just amateur fantasy with a cool picture of a dragon on the cover.

The author is Christopher Paolini, a homeschooled phenom who started writing Eragon when he was fifteen. His parents' publishing house published it when he was nineteen, Random House picked it up, its popularity increased for some odd reason, and now we are blessed with the movie I almost clawed out my eyes in last night. I applaud Mr. Paolini for his efforts, but he needed some seasoning and constructive criticism before being published. And whoever wrote the screenplay should be shot.

Don't see this movie, and avoid the book. You may enjoy Eragon if you've never seen Star Wars or the Lord of the Rings films, or if you've never read Tolkien, Joseph Campbell, the Wheel of Time, Dragonriders of Pern, Earthsea, or Dune (really, any sort of fantasy/mythology at all). As you probably gathered already, Paolini liberally rips off each of these. But why bother reading a pale imitation when you can go straight to the sources?

P.S. If you did read Eragon and its sequel and enjoyed it, go here. I actually didn't think the books were too bad until I was forced to confront my beliefs.

How did I not know...

...that the prophet Jeremiah was the son of Hilkiah? Hilkiah was the high priest during the reign of King Josiah (one of the righteous kings of Judah). As 2 Kings 22–23 relates, he found the long-ignored Book of the Law in the temple and helped restore true worship in Judah.

Jeremiah 1:1–3 says that Jeremiah started prophesying during the thirteenth year of Josiah's reign, which was before his father found the Book of the Law. He was probably a young man, maybe just barely entering manhood. When Jeremiah said to the L-rd, "Ah, L-rd G-d! Behold, I cannot speak, for I am a youth" (Jeremiah 1:6), I wonder if he was afraid of how his father would react. I mean, take a look at the first prophecy Jeremiah speaks in 1:14–19. That's heavy stuff for the young son of the high priest to be saying, especially when there wasn't revival and repentance in the land yet.

I don't know. I found it interesting. I gotta get back to work.

Tis' the season...

...to pull out Ye Olde Dreidel and have some good ol' Jewish gambling fun.

Seriously, I love playing dreidel. It's a pretty simple game: we each get a certain number of chocolate gelt (coins) to gamble with, and we all put a certain number in the "pot." The dreidel (a wooden top) has four sides, each with a Hebrew letter on it: gimel, he, nun, and shin. Each person takes a turn spinning the dreidel. If the dreidel lands on gimel, you get all the gelt in the pot. The letter he (or hei) means you get half of the pot. Nun means you don't get anything, and shin means you have to put in a coin. If you lose all of your gelt, you're out of the game. (Originally the game was developed as a cover for reading the Torah during Greek rule—when Greek soldiers were spotted approaching gatherings of Jews, they would hide the Torah scrolls, pull dreidels out of their pockets, and look like they were having harmless fun instead of engaging in illegal activity.)

Like I said, dreidel is simple but entertaining. My siblings and I get all intense about it long after the Hanukah candles have burned down:

"What?! This is the third time in a row that I got shin!"

"Come on, come on, gimel, gimel, gimelgimelgimel—darn it!!"

"All the gelt is mine, bwa ha ha!!!"

We don't play regular dreidel, though. We might play one or two rounds with the normal rules to reacquaint ourselves with the game...but we like to mix things up. And so, for the first time, I present to the Gentile world:

Xtreme Dreidel.

The first thing we do in Xtreme Dreidel is to attempt to spin the dreidel upside down on the little dowel rod. The game semi-pauses as upside-down dreidels skitter off the table and bounce into far corners of the kitchen ("not under the stove NOT UNDER THE—whew"). After we recover our dreidels and re-master this skill, we move on to spinning two dreidels at the same time: one upside down and the other right side up, or both upside down. All four of us try to keep our dreidels spinning upside down for the same length of time; we spin the dreidels on hands, heads, knees, and other odd surfaces; we spin off the table and onto the floor; we change the rules for the pot and steal each other's gelt; we have head-to-head spinning contests in which each contestant tries to knock the other's dreidel off the table...

After a while the game degenerates into a free-for-all of wobbly, colliding dreidels and culminates in the glorious Restoration of Gelt. This is the ritual of returning everyone's original amount of gelt, no matter who won the game. After all of that excitement and dreidel spinning, all we want is to eat our portion of gelt and quietly ponder whether the coins covered in gold foil taste any different than the coins covered in silver foil.

I'm looking forward to playing when I go home in a few weeks. Maybe I should buy a dreidel of my own and take it to the Onething Conference...have some fun in between sessions. That's a great plan: get thousands of youth to come to Kansas City on the pretext of learning about Jesus, and then sucker them into a life of gambling and addiction to chocolate.

But at least they'll learn some Hebrew. :-D

P.S. This is pretty funny. I hope the guy's next stop is Kansas City.

Sunday, 10:00 a.m.

The Onething Interns have been doing an intercession set every Sunday at 10:00 a.m. My internship was stuck in the Multipurpose room all by ourselves with a crappy sound system and not enough room to pace. This internship actually get to be up on stage in the prayer room, keeping the fire burning on the altar. (Yes, I am a little jealous of this internship, in more ways than one.)

The interns make up the majority of people in the room, since most are (a) at the Sunday morning church service or (b) sleeping in. The prayer room needs all the warm bodies it can get; Sunday 10:00 a.m. sets are not well-attended. I've been coming for a couple of weeks partly for that reason. But mostly I've come because I enjoy seeing the interns running the prayer room. They have really good worship teams, better than the ones we had during my internship. (Although that could be that they sound good because the PR has a much better sound system than the Multipurpose room. I'm not bitter.) I love to hear the interns praying and the team antiphonalizing the prayers, love to see them pacing, praying in small groups, standing on the life line. They have really run hard the last six months.

Today is their last set. They have been praying hard for the Onething Conference at the end of December and have also been praying for the next Onething internship. I love their dedication and their heart. I'm going to miss seeing them around. But wait, what am I saying? Almost the entire internship is coming back for school in a month or joining staff. Still, I'm sure it's a sad moment for some. This next week will be their last. They'll graduate next Sunday, and everything will change.

And then, three weeks later, the next batch of young adults will arrive and the cycle will begin all over again. It's weird to watch it from the outside. But I love being around interns. I will come to the next internship's Sunday 10:00 a.m. sets too. To any IHOPers who read this blog and who do not go to the morning service: come support the prayer room and support the interns.

I am typing on a dinosaur

Today I noticed my computer has slowed down again. I had reinstalled the OS a few months ago and the computer ran fine for a while—loaded up everything right quick at startup and didn't freeze as often. But no OS reinstall can hide the fact that my computer's age is starting to show. I think I am going to need a new laptop within a year or so.

I bought my laptop three and a half years ago, which makes it a dinosaur by computing standards. It's kinda old and slow; it doesn't have enough processing power or memory to satisfy me. I would like to get a new laptop within the next year. If I can restrain my gear lust and keep my spec requirements reasonable—currently the best I've been able to do is $700-ish, but my inner tech geek wants to pimp out my laptop so bad— I will have enough money. On the other hand, I know I am going to need a new car in the next few years, and I would rather save up for that. Wait...no, I want both. :-P

I think I am going to ask the L-rd for a computer. He doesn't have to give me one just because I ask for it, but He likes to bless His kids. Guess we'll see what happens.

Sometimes I wonder how all of those poor intercessory missionaries I see every day in the prayer room can afford Macbooks. Maybe they bought their Macs before they became poor intercessory missionaries. Or maybe buying the Macs caused the poorness...?

Weakness and pride

The sermon at church today was about weakness and pride. I have been thinking about that a lot lately, so I figured I'd better write down my thoughts in order to get them sorted out. (Read Mike's notes; they're really good.) I'm not sure how coherent this post will be, but I think many will be able to identify with my struggles...here goes...

Right, so the Sermon on the Mount is all about weakness. I've heard teachings on the Sermon and I understand the basics of the "Sermon on the Mount lifestyle," a.k.a. the "fasted" lifestyle: prayer, fasting, tithing, serving, and blessing our enemies. This lifestyle is about sacrificing our time, energy, food, wealth, and reputation. We are encouraged to give up the things that make us strong so that we can receive strength from G-d to live righteous lives. Pretty simple.

So why do I find it so hard to grasp the concept of weakness and live it out? The past few days, I found myself thinking, "Be weak? What does that really mean? When I am weak, I'm selfish and self-centered. I'm manipulative. I spend my time on worthless things. I focus my thoughts on things that are harmful to my spirit. I have a horrible attitude about prayer and I couldn't fast if my life depended on it. Those are my true weaknesses. Why is G-d asking for that from me?"

Then there's the side of me that hates even appearing weak. I am the kind of person who often makes defensive excuses whenever someone catches one of my (many) mistakes, trying to minimize my embarrassment. Afterward I realize how silly I sounded and how I just should have said, "Sorry, my bad," and left it at that. But in the moment I can only think of saving face. My pride makes it so hard to fast my reputation.

I also hate being weak in things compared to other people. This afternoon, I played some multiplayer Halo for the first time in a year. I've always been horrible at multiplayer FPS games. But compared to the other players, I stunk so badly today that I couldn't even laugh goodnaturedly at myself. I hated appearing so incompetent. That brought up the old longing to be one of those cool chicks who are good at video games. Correction: to be one of those cool chicks who are good at stuff, period. I started thinking about how bad I am at certain things compared to other people—social interaction, praying on the mic, playing music or singing, consistently fasting food, etc.—and wishing that I had been created with those gifts instead of having to work a lot harder at them than other people do. But questioning the way G-d made me is some serious prideful thinking.

Bottom line: I don't want to be weak. I want to be strong. I want to be someone who's got it together, who's respected by her peers, who has a vision for her life, who does things right more often than not, who people seek out for advice and friendship.

Those desires are not bad. I want to be a better person, someone of character and worth. We all desire that. What's wrong is the way we think about it. We come at the issue from the angle of pride. I think everyone who lives the fasted lifestyle is at some point afraid of what they will look like if they let go of everything that's propping them up. I have been valuing my props and my reputation more than G-d's plan for me. I haven't been trusting that He'll catch me when I throw away my crutches to reveal the broken bones in me. It's the conflict of earthly vs. eternal wisdom that Paul talked about in 1 Corinthians 1.

The Sermon on the Mount is eternal wisdom—wisdom that's actually meant for strengthening me, not solely to bare the ugly side of me. Yes, fasting and everything tends to bring up what's usually buried beneath the civilized demeanor and full stomach. But that's not the point of the fasted lifestyle. The real point is to give up my pride. I have to sacrifice my reputation, even if it's only in my head. And I have to remember that I am under the law of grace, as Paul said in Romans; I accept what I'm really like when everything is stripped away, but I don't let that weakness reign in me. Instead, I invite God to come in and strengthen me where I'm weak. Which is everywhere. Well, more room for Him, then.

Did this post make sense? I don't even know. Feedback would be welcome.

I read 1 Peter this morning. Peter was writing to persecuted Jewish Christians. In 1 Pet. 2:9, he said, "But you [Jews] are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people..." That reminded me of something amusing I saw recently:

• How odd
  Of God
  To choose
  The Jews

-- William Norman Ewer

• But not so odd
  As those who choose
  A Jewish God,
  But spurn the Jews

-- Retort attributed to Cecil Browne

• Not odd
  Of God
  The goyim
  Annoyim.

-- Retort attributed to Leo Rosten