The Faithful Skeptic

This morning Sarah is substitute teaching for a man so that he can be with his 35 year-old wife as she has a kidney transplant.  It is a great opportunity for Sarah to spend some time speaking french and to help someone who really needs it.

Yesterday a Hillsboro police office (that I happen to know) was hit by a car while he was doing a traffic stop.  He was taken by life flight to the hospital, but he was sent home the same night.  It is amazing that he survived.

This morning I’d like to offer a little prayer:

We thank God for the opportunity to help their family and for miracle of a new kidney for this woman.  We also pray for the family that is mourning the loss of someone loved and we thank them for their generosity in what must be a horrible time.

God, we also thank you for being with Clint in his accident and the he was able to go home to his family.  We are constantly reminded of the sacredness of the life and how fleeting our time here can be.  But we rejoice in every blessing and also pray for your mercy and your peace for those feeling the painful reminders of the fleeting nature of life.

Lord, hear our prayers.

For those less techie, “metadata” is data about data - meta-blogging is blogging about blogging.

Anyway, I want to try to blog more regularly. There is a lot going on in life, most of it good, thankfully. Last night was Halloween, obviously - but it was the first Halloween where our daughter really got what was going on. She had a blast and we had fun watching her have fun. A great time was had by all.

Well, not really all things.  After taking a break from committee work for the last year and a half, our new pastor has asked me to be on the SPRC.  I’m actually looking forward to it - I’m very glad that he didn’t ask me to be on the Finance Committee.  Because I work in a finance department, people seem to think I’m skilled in all things finance.  What they don’t realize is that what I do is so far removed from the finances of a small church that there’s almost no comparison.  But anyway, I dodged the finance committee bullet for another year.

In my work we’re in the process of implementing some fairly massive changes in the way we do business. We recognize that change is difficult and we’re doing a lot of activities around change management and transition management to help us be successful. One of the consultants we have working us introduced me to the concept of “beginning with an ending.”

She says every change begins with an ending, ends with a beginning. In between is the neutral zone where we have to learn to accept the change. She says that one of the major challenges with change and transitions is that endings, even minor ones, cause grief.

We’ve had a number of beginnings and endings over the last month. Almost a month ago, we learned that Sarah was pregnant. We weren’t expecting it, but it was a good surprise. There was an ending though - an end to our life as parents of two, and a process of getting comfortable with the thought of being a family of five. For me, a lot of that processing was around really routine things - like can we fit three car seats in the back of our car? What will the sleeping arrangements look like in our essentially two bedroom house? How will I manage to take time off work in the midst of this insane project I’m managing?

Then a week later Sarah miscarried.

The fear and uncertainty inherent in that event were compounded by the fact that we were 400 miles from home. The following three weeks have turned into a series of test after test with no satisfying answers. Finally today, the news is likely good. It was only a miscarriage - but given the other options, that’s a relief.

It was a very early miscarriage, but we’re both dealing with the grief of this child we will never meet. Its been a shock coming to grips with another ending before we’d fully processed the last one.  I’ve been surprised at how much it has affected me.  Its easy to tell myself that it was probably for the best, but that rings hollow.  I was in the process of preparing myself to be a father to another child - having that end abruptly has been difficult.  I’m left with questions - was this baby a boy or a girl?  What would they have been like?  Why did he or she die?

But the thing to remember is that we always come back to a beginning.  As a Christian, I have to remember that we have the promise of Easter - that the end is just the beginning.  Our other blessing is the support of our friends and family - thank you.

The biggest problem I see in Iraq is that even if the military deals with al-qaeda, there’s still the massive problem of sectarian violence.  I’m just not sure there’s a good military solution - to some extent, the Shia are determined to wipe out the Sunni.  So here’s the plan:

Step 1: Find a predominantly Sunni state in the middle east.
Step 2: Offer them 20% of Iraq’s oil revenues if they will accept all Sunni that wish to leave Iraq.  They must agree to spend a certain amount (10%?) on integrating those refugees into their society.
Step 3: Open diplomatic relations with Iran.
Step 4:  Make it clear to Iran that they can annex Iraq - under two conditions: 1) Guarantee safe passage to all Sunni refugees that wish to leave.  2) Provide 20% of Iraq’s oil revenues to whomever agrees to accept the Sunnis.
Step 5:  Tell Iran that the US will not interfere in the internal politics of Iran/Iraq provided they do not provide a safe haven to terrorists or continue to fund terrorists in other areas.
Step 6: Give Iran a final message - if any terrorists, connected in any way to Iran, attack the United States we will bomb them back to the stone age, using all weapons at our disposal, up to and including nuclear weapons.  If they attack any other foreign state we will support the right of that nation(s) to take the same action.

What do you think?

One of my favorite blogs is Freakonomics - written by the authors of the book.  They just announced that the blog has moved from http://www.freakonomics.com/ to the New York Times.  The biggest change is that means they no longer offer a full RSS feed.  So if you use a feed reader (like Google Reader) you can’t read all of their posts in the reader.  You have to click through to get the full story.  That’s annoying and it means I’ll likely be unsubscribing (and a lot of others as well, if the comments on their blog are any indication).

There’s a really interesting story in the LA Times about a religion reporter and documents his finding faith then losing it.  It is moving in that you can feel the depth of his convictions and struggles and disturbing to see again the depth of the flaws in the institutions and people of the church. 

I found a link to this article today at The Corner.  There’s a whole list of comments I could make here about the sillyness of this article, but I’ll pass because I’m sure others have done better.  Well, maybe I’ll make one.  To suggest that al Qaeda supports the emerging church movement is pretty ridiculous, in my opinion.  Suggesting they have any interest in an internecine conflict in the American protestant church strains belief.

Moving on.  What I find most interesting is how Frank Pastore paints extremist Islam with such a broad brush.  From what I’ve read (and I’m not an expert by any means), Islam is just as fractured, if not more, as the western Christian church.  Isn’t it interesting to think that al Qaeda probably has this vision of the “unified” Christian west and we think of them as the “unified” Muslim east?  In reality, neither is probably true.  But how much does that worldview shape our response to each other?

It’s been a month since my last post.  I’d like to be able to say that I’ve been really busy, but that’s just not true.  Work is (now) coming out of a lull and I had some time off in there too.

The important update is that we did successfully wean Elliot from breastfeeding.  It was actually pretty easy.  The bad news is that he’s still occasionally waking up at night.  I’m hoping that will settle out soon.

Lately I’ve been playing with myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  I can’t get over just how ugly most myspace pages are.  I like the look and feel of Facebook a lot, but there aren’t many people there I know yet.  The interesting thing is that there are a lot more people from my high school on myspace.  There was a post at apophenia last month where the author mused about class divisions between myspace and Facebook.  She argued that Facebook skewed towards middle/upper class, while myspace skewed lower/middle class.  Not to suggest anything about my classmates, but my high school was somewhat rural.  Anyway - LinkedIn is interesting from a professional perspective, but I’m still not sure how or if it will come in handy.

We’re trying to wean our son from breastfeeding (he’s 18 months).  It’s going pretty well - Sarah had him down to one nighttime feeding and this week we’re stopping that.  Our method (which we used for our daughter at 17 months) was for me to get up in the night with her because I obviously cannot fulfill that need.  I think the transition is easier for our son than it was with our daughter.  But he’s still having issues sleeping through the night at 18 months.  Last night I got about four hours of sleep, but my longest stretch was 2 hours.

The transition is hard, but it’ll be worth it.  It seems like just yesterday he was an infant.