2012 Has Come and Gone....

Nollaig Shona Dhaoibh! (Happy Christmas to you all!)

It’s that time of year again. This is likely my last blog for the year, so I might as well make it part Nollag litir (Christmas letter). We’ve loaded the CD player with Christmas CD’s-some 51 of of them. (We decided it was better than letting some commercial station play off the wall Christmas stuff all the time.) Our tree is up, and the Christmas cards are all sent. A candle is in the window, and I have decided to take a few minutes to reflect on the last year. That reflection starts off with a question: Where the heck has 2012 gone?!? I mean, come on! I know I’ve been busy. I didn’t think I was that busy...until I sat down to write this. 

I’ve been writing, working, and singing. A lot of free time has been spent writing books in the Cosantóirí Chronicles series; the first five books are done and in epub format. Book six should be done by the end of the month, if all goes well; then I am editing all six books for iBook format. (There is part of an outline for a potential book seven, but that outline won’t even get finished until the others are edited and in iBook format.) You can check out what they’re about here: http://cosantoiri.wordpress.com. I’m also transcribing some old travels to the digital age; I have a few Hawai’i trips, some visits to Canada, a trip to Ireland, and if I can find them, a missions trip to Mexico. Then I’ll add some band and choir tours, and maybe a little Drum Corps and Barbershop stuff. It’s a long term project.

I also finished all the work for my third doctorate. All I have to do is pay the final bill (which isn't cheap) and they’ll send me the diploma. It’s a Ph.D in interdisciplinary studies; I’m done taking classes for right now. I’m busy both teaching and grading courses for Master’s International School of Divinity, and when I’m not writing on the fiction side I’m busy developing a course on a Celtic View of the Spiritual Disciplines. I am also developing a course on the writings of C.S. Lewis. Both of these should be done early next year if all goes well. C.S. Lewis will be done first; I’m still reading books for the other class-and enjoying them immensely. As a result of the fiction writing and the one course, I’ve been teaching myself Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic). It’s an interesting language-and easier than Japanese, Greek or Hebrew was. For fun and to clear my head I've also picked up the feadóg stáin, or tin whistle. I can play three songs on the thing already, and I've only had it a month or so.

Deena and I have traveled quite a bit this year. She competed with the Pride of Portland Sweet Adeline Chorus in Denver the first week of November; they took eighth in the world. Not too shabby! I taught Music and Performance VP for the Evergreen District’s Western Regional Leadership in Langley, BC a few weeks later. There have been a few trips to see Mom, and we all spent a week with 6,000 of our closest friends at the Barbershop Harmony Society’s International Convention held in Portland over the 4th of July week. We did a little camping, and I even managed to get in my first baseball game at AT&T park. (There’s more travels, but I’m not gonna go there right now.) Then there was this two week period at the beginning of August where it felt like everything stopped for the Summer Olympic games. Don’t tell me some of you weren’t up until midnight-or at least 11:00-watching some of that....

Speaking of activities, I’m still the assistant director for Eugene-Springfield’s “Cascade Chorus,” but resigned as the Music and Performance VP this fall due to health reasons...most of which are stress related.  After the Division IV competition in Medford the quartet I sang in-“It’s About Time”-stopped singing together. It wasn’t due to anyone or anything...we just decided enough was enough. We’re all still good friends and laugh about stuff at chapter meetings. And I’m continuing my work as Director of Education for the Evergreen District of the BHS-for now, at least. I’ve kept busy with our local church, Ebbert Memorial UMC; I’m involved on the Congregational Leadership Team. I also update their website every so often, as time allows. I dropped off the Worship Planning team and the Wednesday night dinner crew for the same reason: stress. I have had to learn I can’t cram eighty hours of work, volunteering, writing, and so forth into a forty hour week and not have it impact my health. Being epileptic does place limits on the output of energy I have, and frankly I don’t have the same energy at nearly 48 as I did at 33. As a result I don’t handle stress as well any more, and so have needed to reduce my stress levels. 

And oh, yes...we’re cleaning up around the place, sorting through stuff, and getting rid of things. That is both of us; I’ve been going through all kinds of stuff a little bit every day-old files in the filing cabinet, stuff in the storage bin, stuff in storage at Deena’s folks. It’s time; I have stuff I want to put up and haven’t been able to. For example, I don’t really need my class notes from TEDS and Moody any more. (I haven’t looked at them in years.) The notes from TEDS got sorted today, for example. I pulled the syllabi and tossed the rest. Yesterday, another piece from my collection of Royal Tara china went up: A china cat. (It sits next to the Waterford crystal panda Deena got for me years ago.)

Like I said-I’ve been a little busy, maybe too busy. So why am I telling you all this?

Because I haven’t been blogging much of late. And I felt you all deserved a reasonable explanation as to why. Unlike certain other bloggers, I have a little something called a life. And life gets in the way of blogging sometimes. My goal for next year on the blog is roughly fifteen articles; at the very least I’m aiming for one a month. (Heck, even if I only put up ten, that’s twice as many as this year.) Another part of the reason for not blogging: It’s too easy to get into matters political-and I didn’t want to go there. Not this year. Not ever, if I can avoid it.

And so I want to leave you all with this thought. 2012 is over, effectively. Instead of complaining about what is, work to change what you can-and try to make peace with what you can’t. Better yet, to paraphrase Adam Savage: Reject the current reality and substitute your own. No, you can’t become deity, or replace the President. But you should do what you can to make your little corner of the world a better place. That’s part of having a whole new year to play with, after all. And it is also the Christmas message: hope. Hope for a better eternity, hope of new life, in Jesus-who we celebrate the birth of this time of year.

Nollaig Shona agus Athbhliain faoi Mhaise Daoibh! (Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year to you all!) 

Hey, I haven't forgotten about this blog thing!

Wow...been a little bit since I've written anything...here.

That doesn't mean I haven't been writing much, though. Quite the opposite; I've been writing quite a bit. Since I last wrote something here, I took a week's vacation to Portland for the Barbershop Harmony Society's annual International Convention with Deena, Mom and my brother-in-law Dan (and 6000 of my closest friends), led an interfaith service the Sunday of the convention, saw a Giants game at AT&T Park (and then watched Matt Cain's no-hitter on TV), successfully defended my thesis for my third doctorate, led worship (and gave the sermon) in my local church, attended Harmony College NW, performed with the Cascade Chorus in Florence, stayed up way too late for two weeks watching the Olympics, taught a few classes (and graded a boatload more) for Master's International School of Divinity, attended a Yanni concert with Deena...and fed the cats.

There are now four volumes of the Cosantóirí Chronicles in ePub format, and a fifth volume is being written right now. (There may be a sixth volume yet.) I admit to having given up on iBooks; I wanted a broader audience than iPad owners. Each of the completed volumes will be available shortly. These trace the story of the modern-day children of Nuala of Innisfaire-called Cosantóirí, Irish for Those Who Protect-starting with a young man who has some mental abilities...and no idea of the background of any of them.

These are not Christian fiction. They were never intended to be, and they are not geared for tweenagers, young teenagers, or immature adults. There are no werewolves, vampires, or other undead people in them. (There are zombies, but those are cheese-filled yeast buns.) These are written about a world similar to ours today, but not quite so dark: the good guy gets the girl, people still have morals (by and large), communities pull together, friends help friends. 

These are stories of a nature that I like to read. 

Outside of that, I have a few other things that I'm doing, but more on that later. I have a meeting tonight, and have to feed both the cats and myself beforehand-and prep for teaching a class tomorrow and Saturday.

My doctor says I should slow down a little bit. Something about being too busy, and too much stress. I'm writing to relax. Does writing four 400+ page books sound like I need to relax a little more? :)

Enough for now.

Updates, iBooks, and What's New

Yes, I did remember I have a blog. I’ve been busy lately...more on that toward the bottom.

Every so often, I slow down and take part of my work day to run virus checks, malware and spyware checks, battery checks, and updates on the trusty MacBook. I do this during the week in case something goes wrong; I feel like I get better customer service during business hours than on weekends. (Not to mention I was camping this last weekend, and thus, not able to do the updates.) These updates inevitably take the better part of a morning, but always ends up giving me a laptop I can trust to do what I ask of it. 

The other day was one of those days. I’d put it off long enough, but with the update to my checkbook program, I didn’t have an excuse to put it off any longer.

Now, before you all snicker at me and remind me that “I thought Macs don’t have a lot of issues”, you need to understand: I work online, opening things that my students send me. Sometimes as many as 40 of these things daily. And bless their hearts, a fair number of them would be horrified to find out that there’s a nasty bit of code-a virus-attached to their homework, a little gift they don’t even know they have. While that code doesn’t affect the MacBook, it can reside on it-and then get sent to others with a Windows based computer. With as many students as I deal with, that could translate to a large number of computers that could be infected pretty quickly...plus some of the school’s units.

Add to that all the e-mail I get from barbershoppers, friends, loved ones and so forth-some of whom have admitted they don’t know much about computer viruses, much less computers-and you can see why I carry malware, spyware and anti-virus programs. It’s more to protect everyone else than myself.

Those all got updated because the operating system was updated. That means I am now running Mac OS X 10.7.4, otherwise known as Lion. That little chore-updating just the op system-took me the better part of two hours. Most of that is because I had to download Lion from the App Store...the download alone ran nearly an hour. I went and got some tea while it downloaded, came home and installed everything. 

I like it well enough...though I have had to make a few adjustments to my workflow. The two most obvious changes are Mission Control-the replacement for a switching program called Spaces-and another program I like better, called Launchpad. Launchpad lets me find my applications a lot faster. Mission Control-now that I’ve tweaked a few things-will actually be an improvement over Spaces. It’ll take me a few days to get used to the new op system, but it will be worth it as the MacBook seems to be running cooler and a little faster.

I still have one program to update, but that will have wait until my next paycheck. Fortunately, the programs I use the most were the latest versions, so I didn’t have to upgrade those.

The nice thing about all this updating is that I don’t have to patch everything every week. The downside is when I have do have to update, it can take some time and money. But it’s well spent in that I have a MacBook that can run rings around a Windows 7 computer, even now. 

The added benefit-and the one I’ve been the most wanting to play with-is a little gem called iBooks Author. A few of you know that in addition to writing a dissertation over the last year, I’ve also been writing some fiction on the side. It’s more science-fictionish than Christian, for various reasons. The main thing here is that I now have the ability to create both an iBook and an EPUB version of my books. I’m working on the iBook formatting for book one now; editing is taking some adjustments. Font changes, text size, and a few other tweaks that can happen now that I can see what a finished product will hopefully look like. It should remain about 300 pages in length, if all goes well. The EPUB version will have to be re-edited, and may end up about 350 pages plus. 

More about this little project when the first book is ready to go. I have three volumes completed that need to move into the final formatting, and am still writing a forth volume as well.  

Enough for now. 

On Ash Wednesday, Facebook's Timeline, and Life

Ash Wednesday was not that long ago as I write this. I did something that evening I haven’t done in quite a while: I went to an Ash Wednesday service. (Yes, I took ashes.) To me, this is a time of reflection on my own mortality and sinfulness. 

This also coincides with Facebook’s impending rollout of their timeline. So I’ve been adding stuff to my timeline, and I’ve been struck with a new sense of my mortality, if nothing else. It’s been easy to look at my life in small chunks; with the short-term memory problems I’ve had since long before high-school, that’s easy. But to start adding things like the beginning and ending of schools, my marriage (now twenty years strong), a little employment, some travels, and few events that helped shape who I am today...and one thing occurred to me.

Despite myself, my failings, my feelings, and my sheer stubbornness...I’ve spent my entire adult life either chasing God, or being chased by God. (And in a few cases, both.) Bible school, seminary, church work, my current ministry with Master’s International School of Divinity (coming up on twelve years there). Starting with high school, going back to church. Going on a mission trip. Then a year plus later, leaving church for a time (for reasons I won’t publish). Getting my business straight with Jesus in 1984. Surviving with my faith strengthened after my Navy time. Surviving re-entry to college and the civilian world. Dealing with God’s call on my life. Surviving Bible college, for all that. Surviving my first ministry position (and learning from my mistakes there). 

But to see all that, in a linear form also reminded me of a lot of good things. Life hasn’t all been in survival or crisis mode. Deena and I have traveled a lot together. We’ve been to Ireland, the Grand Canyon, Canada...and all over the US. (I’m not going to put in all our travels-but some highlights will be added.) We’ve seen a lot, learned a lot, laughed a lot. You have to laugh a lot on long car trips with your spouse or you can get cranky in the middle of Kansas. Or Nebraska. Or Iowa, Wyoming, Georgia...you get the idea.

It also reinforced that I don’t always understand today’s culture. I don’t watch a lot of TV; if I’m not singing barbershop somewhere or doing something online, I’m probably reading something. What TV I do watch tends to be oddball stuff: some news; hockey or other sports (like Canadian football); Food Network or Weather Channel (remember the days when you could actually get a weather forecast there?), on occasion the Discovery Channel, PBS and National Geographic. Movies? I think the last movie I saw in a theatre was The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. The last movie I watched the video for? The live-action Speed Racer. (I can hear you all now: Geek!) Modern music? My poor iPod must feel like it’s stuck in a time warp. A lot of stuff from the 70’s and 80’s, and a lot of that is what we used to call “Contemporary Christian Music.” There’s also a boatload of Southern Gospel and Praise and Worship...much of which is from the late 80’s and the 90’s. (Yes, there’s a lot of barbershop-both quartets and choruses-on it as well, as well as some Celtic and Hawai’ian.) 

But what struck me the most was the pursuit of the Holy. My entire adult life has been spent studying the Bible, learning about how God and Jesus work in our lives, learning theology from several different angles. I remember the kind of person I was prior to 1984, prior to that time when Jesus grabbed me and shook me and said “Follow Me!” I told him I accepted His gift, and would go where He sent me and do what He asked. I’ve never regretted it. (I’ve questioned my sanity and His sense of humor at times, but never once regretted it.) It took three years of His prevenient grace before I got the hint, and some reminders-gentle and otherwise-along the way. 

Earlier on, I mentioned both my mortality and my own sinfulness. He died for me and my sins, and He died for you and yours. That’s what Ash Wednesday’s about, really. I’ll be spending a little less time online, and a little more time thinking about being a better Christian. Spending a little more time in the Bible, and in prayer, and some quiet time where it’s just me and my thoughts. 

The best news of all: He rose again. That’s why we celebrate Easter.

Enough for now.

On "Simple Church"

“Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers” (Attributed to Harry S. Truman).

I may not be a leader in the conventional sense, but I am a reader. Sometimes too much so; I dislike getting rid of any of my books and so about 60% of my library resides in cedar-plastic tubs in a 10x10 climate controlled (read: inside access) storage bin. While I wait for my dissertation for what will be my third doctorate-this one a Ph.D-to move forward (the writing’s done, and I’m waiting for permission to send in the rough draft for review), I’m reading. Books on prayer and contemplation, preaching, some Wesleyan theology, and some books on leadership and church development. 

Just finished one today called “Change the World: Recovering the Message and Mission of Jesus”, and am about 40% done with a book called “Simple Church.” “Change the World”, by Mike Slaughter, basically is about the concept of getting out from the walls of one’s church and doing ministry, especially to those who have little. “For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me” (Matthew 26:11, NRSV) is still true; Slaughter’s book essentially asks the question “What if Church was a verb instead of a noun?” (Part of the Rethink Church question, for all you Methodists out there), and “Which is better: Expanding your facilities or your impact?” Good questions-but before you read his book, read Simple Church. 

No, really. I mean it.

Simple Church-for those of you reading this that either know me, are or have been one of my students-focuses on one thought that I’ve said, taught and harped on for years on end: The Church Universal is programming their people to death! The concept of Simple Church (as I’ve read to this point) is that it’s not enough to have programs, unless they are part of a streamlined growth and disciple-making process. You can do more with less-and probably should be. A great companion book to this is Easum’s “Sacred Cows Make Gourmet Burgers.” This book stresses that sometimes, you need to get rid of certain ministries that have been there since dirt was new (hence the ‘sacred cow’)-to make Ministry happen. (Catch the difference?) I’m reading it in conjunction with the other two books. In fact, Simple Church states that...well...The Church is programming their people to death, and they are burning out instead of growing deeper in their faith. Too many churches have too many programs that don’t do anything but make one feel like a hamster. You know, running on the holy habitrail wheel, never getting outside the walls of the church to meet, much less minister to others...and having a faith as a result that’s an inch deep. Jesus didn’t call us to make church members, but to “...make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20a, NRSV). It’s challenging reading...but I find I am resonating with it. You might find the same thing. So I challenge you to read these books as well. 

Who knows? Maybe you’ll find their message resonates with you, too.

Enough for now.