Which comes first: committment or vision?

In the midst of a church meeting last night discussing our church’s future plans, a question came up that I imagine we will be wrestling with in future weeks.  I’m not entirely sure what I think the answer is yet, so I’ll post it here to see if any of you have comments.

The question goes something like this: in the context of a church, which comes first?  Do people first have to get “the vision”, and then will respond with committment?  Or rather, do people first need to be committed to serve, and then begin to see the vision of the church ministry?

Still chewing on this one…

Paradise Pens Customer Service: Top Notch

Just thought I’d follow up on my post from last week about my experience with Paradise Pens.

On Tuesday, five days (and only three business days) after making that phone call, I received, via UPS, a replacement fountain pen. It had obviously been opened and tested out to ensure that it was in good shape before sending it to me. Then I noticed the mailing label. While I had bought my original pen in Arlington, VA, they shipped the replacement from their store in Minneapolis at the Mall of America, presumably since it was the closest store to me in Iowa. It impressed me that they would make that extra effort.

Two days later in a separate package I received another envelope with a pre-paid UPS shipping label and a nice handwritten note from the manager of the Arlington store. All I had to do was drop the old pen in the box, apply the label, and drop it off at a local UPS store.

I’ve been using my pen all week and have really been enjoying it. I’m thinking if I ever get another one, I’ll be wanting a fine nib instead of the medium one that this pen has; I like to write in a fairly small script and it’s hard to do with the wider nib. But overall, I am very, very impressed with the customer service I received. I will definitely be visiting Paradise Pens again when I go back to DC in May.

Billboards from God

On my way home from work every day I pass a billboard that frustrates me. It’s a simple message, white text on a black background. It’s designed to look like a written note. The words:

One nation under Me.

--God

Undoubtedly this billboard was purchased by some well-meaning evangelical wanting to make a point about their beliefs that American was a Christian country, should continue to be a Christian country, etc, and remind us about the battle over the Pledge of Allegiance. I don’t want to debate those points at all. Not that I necessarily agree with them exactly, but there are people in my congregation that would wholeheartedly agree with them, and I don’t have time to write a full, thoughtful response to the ideas; nor do I want to offend them by giving a less than thoughtful answer. So let’s leave that particular question alone.

These signs with ‘messages from God’ aren’t something new - they’ve been a staple on billboards for the past several years, and on church signs for many years before that. Even the Life Magazine that came in today’s newspaper had a collection of photos of church signs, including the ever-popular “let’s meet at my house today before the game – God” sign. (As an interesting aside, one church is now using a reverse strategy: messages from Satan.) In general, my attitude is iffy-but-OK with this type of message. Many times they just come across as cheesy (such as the church sign example above), but sometimes they can manage to be thought-provoking instead.

But this particular billboard really bothers me. Why? Because, first of all, it’s not something God ever said. The “One nation, under God” phrase was added to our Pledge of Allegiance by Congress, back in the fifties. I guess it’s become all too common today to put our words in God’s mouth, but this seems pretty flagrant. Second, I’m not sure it’s a message that God would endorse. I don’t think God is worried too much about America becoming a “Christian nation” again. God is much more concerned with people, individuals, coming to Him and being a part of His kingdom. God’s focus is the Church, not the political system or national structure.

My call is that we set our priorities by His priorities. Sure, that’s easy to say, harder to work out. But there are some places where it can be pretty clear. Let’s put our focus on forwarding Christ’s kingdom, not in trying to restore a “Christian nation”. If God wills, our country will come around. If not, well, God knows what He’s doing. My guess it you’re not going to find out about it, though, from a billboard.

A good time was had by all...

This weekend we had very nearly my whole family over to visit.   My sister is still in Panama, but otherwise, my parents and all my brothers came in on Friday and got to stay through Sunday afternoon.

We had massive amounts of food and celebration; fortunately then we were able to send some of the leftovers home with them, otherwise we’d be eating them for a week and there’d still be some to go bad.   There is still a bit of birthday cake hanging around, though…  I’m looking forward to another piece of that carrot cake - yum yum.

Things are staying busy with the family these days - Mom and Dad are busy as usual; Ryan is waiting to hear on his acceptance to Georgetown grad school, Andrew got accepted to George Fox University and will be headed there in the fall…  and not leaving Aaron out: last week he bought a b-e-a-utiful Taylor acoustic guitar.  We had to keep a towel around just to wipe up all the drool.  :-)

I’ll post some pictures once I get them off of the camera.

Party Time

This weekend my parents and brothers will all be coming to visit. (My sister is in Panama doing missions stuff.) The occasion: the first of what will, God willing, be a long lifetime of birthday convergences: Addison has her first birthday on the 13th, and then I celebrate the big three-oh on the 14th. I’m sure we’ll eat far too much food, stay up too late talking, tell lots of bad jokes, and play innumerable rounds of Dutch Blitz or some other equally competitive game.

Good times will be had by all. Best wishes to everyone who reads this and their weekends!

In Praise of Good Customer Service

I’ve complained enough about bad customer service here on the blog (see: the OfficeMax debacle of a couple years ago) that I want to make sure I say something about really good service when it happens.

When I was in DC last week, I hit a shopping mall one night to wander around and pick up something for the girls. While I was in there, I ran across Paradise Pens, a neat little store specializing in, well, pens. They had everything from basic ballpoint to pens costing nearly $2000. I wandered in and struck up a conversation with a very friendly store manager. I mentioned an interest in fountain pens (I’ve often been curious, but never been to a store that sold them), and she took 20 minutes and showed me some different pens, let me try them out, answered my questions. Excellent service. I ended up buying a low-end fountain pen, cost about $40.

When I got back to the hotel and opened the pen, I found one issue: the pen cap, which is supposed to screw onto the pen body, was just a bit oversized. The cap wouldn’t screw on, it just slipped off. Well, that isn’t so good. I used a little bit of tape I had along to shim out the screw so it would hold, but that wasn’t a good long-term solution. And I didn’t have time to get back to the mall to return it.

Finally earlier this week I sent an email to the info address on the Paradise Pen website. After a couple of days I had no response, so I forwarded the email again. Who knows, maybe they are bad at checking email. Finally this afternoon I just decided to call the toll-free number they offered. So far, the service hadn’t been so good, huh?

I called the number, dialed the extension, and the phone was answered by a real person. She said her name was Carrie. I said “hi, my name is Chris Hubbs, and I…” and she started to tell me my story, that I live in Iowa and bought a pen in DC and the cap was too big. I was stunned. “So you got my email, I guess.” Yes, she said, she’d gotten both of them, and was surprised that the store hadn’t gotten back to me yet. I went and checked my email, and found that a message had just arrived from the store. The manager of the DC store was letting me know that they were sending me a new pen and a postage-paid envelope to return the faulty one.

I told Carrie that I had received the email, and that the solution was fine with me. She gave me her name, phone number, and extension, and told me in no uncertain terms that if anything wasn’t to my satisfaction, to call her directly. “I’m the one with the big stick,” she said. Wow, do I appreciate that attitude. I am looking forward to receiving my new pen and getting a chance to really use it. And I will now recommend Paradise Pens to anyone interested in buying a good pen.

Thoughts on Washington DC

Last week I traveled for business to Washington, DC. While my original plans left me little time for sight-seeing, I still managed to take a long evening walk and see the memorials along the National Mall. Then old man winter intervened and pushed my flights around, giving me an unexpected whole day to visit museums. Now, I could give you a step-by-step itinerary of my trip, but it would likely bore you to death. (Now I’ve set myself up to have to write something non-boring. Uh oh.) What I’d rather talk about, though, is the overall experience I had.

This was my first visit to Washington. Ever since I was a kid I’ve been a history and government junkie, so I was excited to get to see some of the places for real that I’d only seen in pictures. I wasn’t disappointed. It’s even more impressive to be there and see them. First, because many of the buildings are massive in a way that a photograph just can’t communicate. (The Supreme Court? Unbelievably immense.) But second, because all the buildings are so close together. You come up from the Metro, and bam! there’s the Library of Congress. Walk past it and bam! there’s the Supreme Court. Then turn the corner and whammo! the Capitol building. And on and on. Amazing.

As I started my journey down the Mall, I felt a little bit sheepish playing tourist; I seemed to be the only tourist around, everyone else was just finishing up work for the day. Still, I had fun snapping pictures and marveling at the architecture. Halfway down the Mall you reach the Washington Monument. Some 500+ feet tall, it’s a massive obelisk that dominates the skyline. I took a few pictures to try to capture the sunset off in the west and the ring of flags that surrounds the monument. I’m sure I didn’t really capture it, though - it’s just too much to take in with a camera lens. (At least, too much for me and my camera lens.) At the Washington Monument I finally saw a few other tourists, all doing the same as me, gazing up at this massive two-tone tower.

I continued my trek westerly across the Mall. From the Washington Monument you have a long walk past the reflecting pool until you reach the Lincoln Memorial. Coming from the east like I did, it isn’t immediately apparent what exactly the reflecting pool reflects. The pool is long, fairly wide, a few feet deep, and made semi-famous as the pool that Forrest Gump wades into at the end of the movie. (I heard two separate tourists that I passed on the walk mention this fact, so it must have been more memorable to them than it was to me.) It was also drained for the winter; there was just a little bit of water in the center of the pool where the snowmelt had run. It was anything but impressive as I walked by it in the winter dusk, but it made a comfortable walking path as I headed toward Lincoln.

The guidebooks all describe the Lincoln Memorial as the most popular of the memorials on the Mall. This was evidenced to me as I walked toward it that night - the frequent camera flashes reflecting off the inner walls of the memorial lit it up beyond the already-bright normal lighting. When I reached the Memorial, there was no shortage of tourists, even though it was nearly seven pm. Adults, small children, families, a school group, all in awe of the massive man of marble. And then I turned around.

As magnificent as the Lincoln Memorial is, what really captured me (and many of the others) was the view back across the Mall. So that’s why they have a reflecting pool: from the Lincoln Memorial you can see the whole Washington Monument reflected. Even in the snowmelt a patchy reflection lit the Mall. Far in the distance the Capitol was lit up brightly. What an amazing scene.

Now why do I keep bringing up the number of tourists there? Wouldn’t I have preferred there were fewer so there would be less crowding? Well, crowding wasn’t really an issue. But what got to me was this: even in these contentious political days, a diverse group of visitors could all stop for a few minutes and share the wonder. We could all appreciate the beauty and truth of Lincoln’s words engraved in the wall of the memorial. We could all feel thankful for past leaders like George Washington. We could all stop and feel the love of a free country, this country, our country. Amazing.

Rich Mullins summed up my feelings toward my country so well in his song Land of my Sojurn:

Nobody tells you when you get born here How much you’ll come to love it And how you’ll never belong here So I’ll call you my country But I’ll be longing for my home And I wish that I could take you there with me…

Getting back on track

It’s been a disorienting past ten days  or so; last weekend (10 days ago) we had the big storm, which meant church was canceled, which always really throws me off.  Then last week I was on travel, only in the office for a few hours on Friday.  So by Saturday night I had no real idea what day it was…  fortunately Becky reminded me that we would be going to church the next morning.

We had a bit of a backwards morning at church music-wise.  David Green, normally our bass player, was leading music from the piano.  He asked me to play bass with him.  So I hacked my way through it, and I think we managed OK.  A learning experience for both of us.

Now it’s Monday morning and I can look forward to a regular week at the office.   There are times I’m less than excited about coming in to work, but this week it’ll just be nice to have things back to normal.

Off to the market to buy a fat pig...

…home again, home again, jiggety jig.

I always seem to forget the beginning of that rhyme, but I quote the end of it often enough.  I made it home last night from Washington (via Minneapolis) thanks to the skill of the Northwest Airlines pilots who drove our DC-9 through snow and 30 knot landing winds to get us to Cedar Rapids.  Still, it was a late night - got home about 12:30, and many thanks go out to Daniel Garner for graciously agreeing to pick me up at the airport so Becky could stay home with the girls.

When I get a chance to stop and think, I’m sure there are a couple more blog posts to be written about this trip, but for now I’m just glad to be home.

Visiting Uncle Sam

This week is time for my first business trip in a while, and yesterday found me heading out of Cedar Rapids for Washington, DC.  While here I’ll be participating on an industry committee that will be developing guidance for Synthetic Vision and Enhanced Vision Systems for aircraft.   While I’m not in meetings, I’m hoping to do some sightseeing, since this is my first visit to Washington.  Most of the museums and stuff are closed after 5 pm, but at least I’ll be able to walk the Mall and see the memorials and such.

My flight made it in to Reagan National airport on time and I rode the Metro up to my hotel.  As I was nearing the hotel, I was thinking it looked a little dark…  when I reached the hotel lobby, I found out that the power was out for this and a few nearby blocks, and would be out until midnight.  Sigh.  They checked me in with pencil and paper, and sent me with a couple of glowsticks to my room.   I dropped off my stuff and then went down and asked for directions to a restaurant that would still have power.  I ended up at Pizzeria Paradiso, where I had a very tasty “Atomica” pizza and read a book for a while.  Then I walked back to the hotel, sat in my room in the dark, and had just enough laptop battery left to watch a couple of hours of Battlestar Galactica.  As BSG was wrapping up, the lights came back on, so I was able to really check out the room (very nice!), iron some clothes, and head for bed.

The combination of a late night and an unfamiliar bed made this morning come a little bit too soon, but the complimentary breakfast was tasty.  In a few minutes I’ll be headed out to walk the five blocks over to RTCA for the meeting.  It’s supposed to be up to 50 here today, so it should be nice for walking after we’re done today.  I’ll take lots of pictures, but won’t have any way to upload them until I get home…  so keep coming back here and eventually you’ll see some!