Oct 1, 2003

Dusting off the keyboard
It's been a long time since I've been here, where I've felt like I've had any thoughts worth the effort of logging, and now out of nowhere there's a torrent. Perhaps over the summer I've been falling into that place of being comfortable, dealing with machines at work and avoiding people and all the complications that lie with them, their fallacies and unpredictabilities.
But dealing with people forces you to think outside of the paradigm of what make sense. Thoughts become more abstract and hence one needs to think broader. Maybe from there the trickle of creativity begins to flow. On Sunday I met a kid at church, maybe 9 years old. He was drawing the charge diagram of some high speed solid state device which I did not understand. It could have been a bunch of junk, but as he stuttered to describe the few commercial applications and the roadblocks in the fabrication process, even the EE PhD students were weirded out. But although not autistic, this kid certainly still had difficulty in communicating at the level of "normal" people. There's something intriguing about people and the way we think, feel and act.

I went to the YAF ministry team meeting today. I realized I've quietly passed my two year mark down here. When I first moved down, I had the strong desire to be an observer, to absorb the environment, to understand what was going on. I don't feel comfortable jumping into some place new and leading the charge into the unknown. But today I had that familiar feeling, sitting in a long, drawn out vision meeting. I've moved from being an observer at a church, watching the clergy as they perform there practiced routines as they lead the rest of us in ordered worship, to the place amidst the so-called leaders and recognizing that they are, at the same time, only human, struggling to meet that desire to serve in our need to worship.

It's that feeling of crossing the line from feeling awkward or incapable and afraid to break the system, in case we should appear brash over to the position that we know that we can serve despite our imperfection. The knowledge that although human, there is still love in the group and our failures will be met without the judgement we fear. Maybe some will describe the feeling as being called. It's an echo of the feeling I had when I finally quit avoiding CCF and looked inside, and saw, instead of the confident leadership I was expecting, a humble and not altogether capable committee that had the heart to reach out to people and glorify God. I've missed that.

I've also started on the internship program at PBC. It's been somewhat odd to return to doing homework and writing essays, but the process has been also invigorating. We'll see where it goes.

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