September 2006

One of the 8 papers I wrote in the past 2 weeks was a reflection exercise for my “Youth at Risk” course on the movie “Kids“. If you haven’t seen this, it’s as close to child pornography as it gets.

People actually wrote letters to our seminary president to not allow our prof. to show it in class. It was shown anyways. It’s shocking to me that they people could act this out for a movie, what’s more shocking is it’s a vivid picture of reality.

Below’s my write up. OR, I just attempted to do my first ever podcast on it. It’s not quite like speaking to a crowd, felt a bit lame speaking to myself. Not sure how other podcasters do it. Anyhow check it out here if you’d like to listen. It’s a bit confessional.

The movie “Kids� exposed me to the wonder and the horror of my own humanity. The youth captured in the film were foul, offensive, jaded, destructive, and all too much like me underneath it all. While their outward practices, language, and behavior I must admit are mostly foreign to me today, there is something within their culture that is more like me than I care to admit.

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Been totally drained, finally settling back into some level of functional normalcy today.

- monday I had classes from 8:30am-9:30pm. Arrived in Ottawa near 2am.
- Woke up at 6am to make it to Montreal for the IMN regional 9am-5pm.
Drove back to Ottawa by 8pm. Crashed after hanging with Andrew & Lisa at midnight.
- Wednesday. Woke up at 6am to make the drive back to Toronto for a 1pm class to do a presentation for preaching class and ended class at 9:30pm last night.

The makers of fire event was great. Shout outs to Niza, Alex, Dean, Patrick, Norm, Jerome, Jim, Joel, Nick, Morine, and Lorenzo. Always great meeting like-hearted people. Great connecting.

Some thoughts from Makers of Fire…
- opaque vs. transparent strategies - not having methods block the message
- Jesus calls us to the primal essence of humanity
- There is no territory excempt from kingdom influence
- Missional reasons for de-planting churches
- The bulk of the work in reclaiming humanity will not be done by paid staff, pastors, or theologians, but by every day people who’s hearts are following Jesus into the culture.
- When you are doing things that are new and innovative, don’t ever be surprised when no one shows up.

A few other thoughts picked up through this week…

- I need to spend some serious time backtracking and reflecting more on what brought me on to the journey of where I am. I think it’ll go a long way in articulating and seeding thoughts on church planting with others.
- We talk about grace quite a bit, but rarely present ourselves as people in need of grace.
- Our culture values youth, without valuing youths themselves
- The price of our families having good things, is often no family at all.
- Young people often ask why, not out of rebellion, but to try to figure out our value systems behind our demands and ‘traditions’
- Treating the discipline of Sabbath as a day off, is a ‘bastard sabbath’ (Eugene Peterson).
- There are traces of beauty everywhere if you stop long enough to look.

I’m heading to Montreal monday night after class for a regional meeting with the IMN team. Last call if anyone from Toronto wants to head down there with me. You can register to here and shave $20 bucks off the at-the-door tuition costs.

Finished 3 papers this week. Plenty more ahead. The weekend’s been just grand. Too bad it’s already over. Peace.

So things didn’t work out this week.

Last week I was reading a book, and it was talking about how “success in God’s eyes is defined by faithfulness”.

I shared this with my wife, and half-jokingly said, only ‘losers’ say this.

The truth is, I do take some solace in this. God looks to the heart and knows our best of intentions. He doesn’t expect us to be able to be able to control every outcome.

Still. I can’t help but feel like this is the motto of those who give up before the battle’s really started.

I’ve got to work on somethings in terms of clarity and execution. And one thing I’ve learned from following Jesus, is that even the things that aren’t your fault, you take ownership of. That’s what He did. That’s what I plan on doing as I continue to stumble forward.

I’m too young right now, to not be failing like crazy.

Grace & Peace to all my fellow leaders who live in the fringes of failure.

After four years of taking part-time classes, I’ve finally taken a much anticipated step of entering full-time studies. It was difficult integrating with the community as strictly a night student because those classes by nature were always over-sized with predominantly other students who worked full-time like I did and were in and out with our other obligations.

I’m just starting to scratch the surface of the community here. I know I’m forgetting people, but shout outs to Sharon, Grace, Troy, Adam, Carolyn, Bernard, Amy, Yuling, Morgan, Peter, Jake, Jeremy, Joel, Brian, Natalie, James, Ivan, Anita, Leo, Selwyn, and Jason. I’m glad we were able to connect, if even for a moment.

On a more disappointing note. My first attempt at starting a church planting and kingdom advancing student network completely flopped.

I’m going to need to process this some more, learn from it, and try again.

On the brighter side, my classes have been phenomenal so far. I’m taking five this term (some thing that’s ridiculous, but with the baby on the way, I’d like to get as much as I can done to lighten the load later). My classes are:

Practice & Theology of Ministry
Youth at Risk
Old Testament Theology & History
Preaching
Leadership Development

I’ve been hammering away at the more academic core and language classes all these years so I can finally take some of these more practical sessions that I’ve been waiting for. Content for all of them look fantastic and the profs are excellent as well.

Leaving my job this summer I have to admit I teared up a bit. It was a life I loved, that I know I will never be returning to. At the same time, I felt that God had poured something new, something extra, into my spirit as I made the transition. Walking through the halls of school now, I still shudder at the tremendous blessing and privilege of having the hand of God guiding my life.

Who is this King of Glory, that pursues me with His love…

A while back, I was corresponding with Jack Popjes (With Wycliffe Canada, who spent a bulk of his life as a missionary in Brazil), and discussing my future. He asked me a fantastic question that I ask myself every year.

Where would you honestly put yourself right now on a scale from 1 to 10. With one being the lowest risk and the most comfort, and ten being maximum risk, pain and possible reward. And why?

If you’ve been using skype for free long distance this year, check out Hullo. It’s much like the Avaya, which I use to use at work. You type the number via the client, it calls you locally, then calls your other party locally, and the conferences you together, phone to phone, for free!

For those of you who followed me into the land of zooomr, a bulk uploading tool just got released for it. Check out juploadr here.

Calgoo lets you take your google calendar offline.

For those of you who are wondering how to keep site stats on voxtropolis. You can paste html code from different stat providers into the ‘text’ sidebar widget when you hit ‘look and feel’. I just started using statcounter.

And to top it all of, it looks like Jesus is back and living in Miami.

*Update. I just made my first ‘portal’ on Zooomr. It’s a neat little new feature that allows you in a sense to place a picture within a picture. Click below to see one of me getting slapped and a portal into the split second reaction afterwards.

With the time off and in an attempt to get ahead of school before the baby comes, i’ve devoured several books the past few weeks.

Working the Angles - Eugene Peterson
Confessions of a Reformission Rev. - Mark Driscoll
Getting to Yes - Roger Fisher
The Story we find ourselves in - Brian McLaren
From Paradise to the Promised Land - T. Desmond Alexander
Being Leaders - Aubrey Malphurs
Biblical Preaching by Haddon Robinson
Preaching to a postmodern world by Graham Macpherson Johnston

Anyone else read these before? I often feel quite affirmed in my own thoughts after reading books, but wrapping up this latest set, I feel like I know less than when I started and more challenged than ever.

Here’s two more short lightsaber videos.

One is a practice duel, which is pretty funny right at the end if you know chinese.

The second is another lame one of Yvz defending herself against my saber as she lays on the couch.

Finally here’s a large video you can download if you wish that I just stumbled on. Some university kids ambushed and nerfed me at our church’s Summer Sojourn gathering. (My portion’s around the middle of the clip).

Update: two of the videos that include Yvz have been made private (she’s a bit embarassed… yet i’m so proud of her!). I can add you to my youtube friends list if you want to check’em out!

I just got back today from visiting Ottawa for the past week. I was beginning to develop migraines from having zero internet access. Anyhow, it was a fabulous time of family and friends.

One of the highlights was fiddling around with my brother in-law’s lightsabers. They are so very cool. Here’s my first ever youtube video. A short video of me rescuing my pregnant wife, it’s so very very lame.

I can’t figure out how to embed it, but check it out here.