Confessions of a Shiftless Mind

I’m getting better…

Actually I am fine. Not sick or anything. Got a new job, and let me tell you, I have never worked so hard in all my life. There is something about 100% commission employment that really gets the motor running in terms of staying focussed. I have to say this is really good for me because for much of my working life I have been… to put a word to it… relatively lazy. I used to do the minimum to get by, and found myself often distracted. This doesn’t happen anymore. And that is great.

But yeah, this means casual blog posts while at work will become few and far between. And since I have for the most part tried to choke up on blogging at home (sorry. Netizens take a back seat to loving my wife and raising my boys), blogging has suffered.

It isn’t that I don’t want to blog, but it will be slowing down. Plus, I think I may be starting to blog for the church plant we are joining. I was looking at the calendar the other day and realize that we are now 6 months out from launching the new church. We wanted to be able to give people an insider’s look at this church coming together, and I an excited to be a pat of it. I’ll post the url when we go live with that.

Wow what a day at work!

I started a new gig in probably the most intense department in the company (outside of those nutjobs who run our servers -pulling 24 hours shifts is not my idea of a good time - good thing I am out of the network admin gig). Our sales people are 100% commission and work their butts off, working every last minute possible to ring up sales, holidays, weekends, long hours, skipping lunch. They’re maniacs. Now I am one of them.

And wouldn’t you know it, they launched a new product today. Of course, my first day on the job and the phones were ringing off the hook. I could hardly breathe in between calls. The downside was it was mostly nickel and dime stuff so I didn’t make the biggest bucks possible, but it was a good proving ground.

Now that I am wrecked by that, I get an email from a friend of mine showing some masses of something other than money: food. It was a slide show of some German bierhaus that sells schnitzel the size of pizza, and drinks in 5 liter(!) glasses! At the end of that was a couple of shots of a massive burger, and my wife said, “That is photoshopped!” So I went on a quest to prove her wrong.

Welcome to a burger blog! Check it out and enjoy their pontifications on culinary delights, and marvel at tales of 100 pound women eating 11 pound burgers!

And once you are done that, check out Super Mario 3, start to finish in 11 minutes. Then DO THE MARIO!

Rather interesting. I got to reading about the Commonwealth of England. I noticed that the formal titles of Queen Elizabeth II actually vary depending on the nation.

Interestingly, only Canada, the UK, and New Zealand officially title her, “Defender of the Faith”. All Commonwealth Realms cal her Queen “by the grace of God” except Papua New Guinea.

I don’t really have any further thoughts on this other than that fact that it is not what I expected to find.

I mean, geez. Knowing how offensive it is now to talk about one’s faith in politics these days, I find it astonishing that officially, Her Majesty is still the “Defender of the Faith” in Canada.

Better get to work, Queenie.

Last week I had the opportunity to dialogue with Phil on some of the larger strategic issues on the roadmap for the church plant. We discussed the first major call for church planting families to join, which took place at Cedar Grove’s AGM. The result was a number of contacts, and we were discussing how to approach integration of these new people into the core.

I was also passed a preliminary draft statement of the vision of the new body - the Community of Hope. It was written well before they even moved to Surrey though, so it needs refinement based on the new situations and the shifting goals and targets that follow from actually interacting with the community.

There has also been some comment raised on the issue of communications and blogging. We should probably get that properly kicked off soon. Perhaps it would be good to launch the blog officially 6 months in advance of the launch. That would set a firm start date of March 9, 2007. I think I will start working on that date.

When I was in Grade 10, we were asked to write a poem for Valentine’s Day. This is what I wrote:

St. Valentine’s Day

That guy
Must not have been much of a saint
If his day is for the celebration of love
or
He must not have been much of a lover
If he was a saint.

My teacher had it put in the annual of best literary works in our school that year.

At 15, I didn’t know the first thing about love. I really didn’t. Kids around me were dating, some were even having sex. But looking back on this poem now, I really didn’t get it. At all.

The sad thing is I know a whole lot of mature men and women who still think like I did at 15. That is really sad.

I have to say now, that I am a saint, that I understand what real love is. It has little to do with what I thought it did at that time. Being a lover does not preclude sainthood. Being a saint I would suggest is probably the simplest path to becoming a good lover.

I believe that the Bible tells us what a Saint is. A Saint is one who has been sanctified or made holy by faith in the blood of Christ - the sacrifice that God made for us that we may be restored to fellowship with Him. It is not one who is so wrapped up in the pursuit of God that he neglects all other spiritual concerns. At 15, I thought that saints were holy men and women who dropped all earthly concerns for heavenly ones. I thought that men and women entangled in love somehow precluded God.

I was wrong. It truly is amazing how a man and wife are representative, with God, in a trinity, a reflection of who God is. How the union of flesh, union of spirit of man, woman and God, creates life. There is something mystical, something unknowable, mysterious, about how when two people keep their eyes on God and love each other with that love that never thinks of the self first, that love and sainthood wrap themselves in each other.

I am so grateful that my wife and I share the same faith. I am so thankful that we have both grown in our walks with God while we have been together. I am amazed that God gives us unity of mind in so many areas, that we might act in concert, without conflict. So many huge decisions we have made in the last year in unity, even when there was so much potential for conflict. I have seen other people’s marriages fly apart under the strain of some of the things we have done. But God is good, and in spite of our failings to keep our eyes on Him, and as I said, love each other selflessly, because that is our goal and our focus, God has blessed us.

It is for these reasons that I want to celebrate this day. For the love that God has for us, for the love that God gave to us to share with each other. For the truth that it is love that holds everything together - husband to wife, parents to children, citizens to community, humanity to humanity. Yeah, I’ll give my wife flowers today. But what can I give my God for the greatest gift?

I was astonished to stumble across this link, via Life in a Shoe. One 20 year veteran wife has 7 pointers for other wives.

I link it here because I have no idea what to do with this. On the one hand, what guy wouldn’t agree with at least most of her points? On the other hand, I love my wife, and she is wonderful, so I don’t think I would ever take these points and say, “learn!” because she is already nothing short of spectacular.

I am going to stop talking now before I get into trouble.

I think I will bring this up with my company’s HR department. It is only fair really, with an aging workforce, to ease the health risks of heart irregularities as much as possible, don’t you think?

UPDATE: With regards to the cold that was setting in yesterday: I am happy to report the situation seems to have stabilized. I am not well yet, but I am not getting sicker. Aside from not sleeping much last night (yet feeling strangely awake this morning), not doing too badly, thank God!

Enjoy. I know I did. Especially Double Dragon, Zelda, and Mortal Kombat!

Urg.

I’ve brought down the thunder…

My wife’s cold is mine now. This kind of sharing of life I didn’t sign up for.

Work sucks when your nose is dripping and your head feels like roughly the size of a medicine ball. Which may explain the aftereffects of cold medications. So that’s where they got the name from!

The question now becomes how much work will I get done before I throw in the towel, head home and whine.

I’ll keep you posted.

The story recently broke that Karla Homolka of mass murder fame, has given birth to a child under a pseudonym in Quebec, and she is getting married in the Carribbean in a month or two.

This news has had mixed reaction - one blogger I noticed had a decidedly negative reaction to this.

This caused me to ask myself what I think of this. She was never convicted of being a mass murderer, but the facts of the case certainly point to deviancy of a certain significance. Even in custody, she was engaged in practices that were to put it mildly, inconsistent.

I think the real question is, can she be forgiven for her past?

According to Canadian law, she has paid her debt to society.

The weirdness of her crimes has given her a notoriety similar to celebrity. This has made it very hard for her to resume a normal life. Clearly she has made attempts to regain a sense of normalcy, by hiding behind pseudonyms. It has worked - she has managed to meet and get engaged with a man in relative privacy.

According to her story, she always desired children. She would not be the first woman who was famous for strange behaviour, to become normalized by having children.

Is it horrible to imagine that a woman capable of such violence and horror could one day raise a child? Should we as a society seek to guarantee the safety of such children by confiscating them or preventing them altogether?

I don’t think so. I have to believe it is possible for people to change. I have seen people trapped in very bad lifestyles make 180 degree turns. Former SS soldiers in Germany have raised normal families. The life of soldiers in pretty much every century before the 20th was absolutely deplorable, filled with rape, murder, and violence of such horror that we cannot fathom it today. Torture was a legitimate career. Yet, we cannot say that all offspring of such people were contaminated by the sins of their parents.

If, in the time since her release she had shown signs of returning to her previous interests and habits, I would be inclined to have the same reaction of condemnation. However, I have to think she is a woman trying to leave her past behind her and start anew. In that, without further proof to the contrary, I wish her the best. May she have learned from her past, and insure it never, NEVER be repeated.