Catalyst Compassion "Moment": Amazing or Exploitive?

My internet friend Bryan Allain posted a video on his blog this morning of a moment that happened at the recent Catalyst conference in Atlanta. 

I’ll summarize for those of you who don’t have 10 minutes to watch the video: it’s an amazingly touching story.  A young man from Africa is there live, on stage in front of 12,000 people, telling about his childhood growing up in severe poverty, of a sister who died as an infant from malnutrition, and how then in early childhood he was given a place as part of a Compassion International school and was sponsored for over a decade by a man from Canada. The young man is now a student at Moody Bible Institute and sponsoring his own Compassion child.  An amazing story that makes me want to go out and sponsor a Compassion kid right now. 

But then, in an Oprah-esque moment, the conference emcee asked “have you ever met your sponsor?". 

“No”, the young man replied. 

“Would you like to?”

And then they brought out the Canadian man who had sponsored him for all these years.  And in an incredibly moving scene, the young African man just completely (and understandably) broke down.  After a long embrace this young man could do nothing but sit on the floor and sob, completely overcome with emotion and gratitude for this man who had caused such a change in his life.

I was very torn, watching the video at that moment, between on one hand appreciating the emotions of the situation and on the other hand being disgusted by the planned exploitation of this young man’s emotions for the sake of a “moment” at a conference.  The emcee, himself choking up a minute later, said “we script this for me breaking down…” which, of course, means that they did script it expecting that the other two would break down.

So what do you think?  Am I being hard-hearted here?  Or were the producers of the Catalyst conference so sucked into the current reality TV culture that they crossed the line of intentionally manipulating people’s emotions just to create a “moment”?

Phrases that stick with you

Most of what I remember from Rocky & Bullwinkle is cheesy puns (which are AWESOME, by the way), but there is one phrase that has stuck in my vocabulary: “antihistamine money”.  An example of usage:

“Wow, $100?  That’s antihistamine money.”

“Antihistamine money?”

“Not to be sneezed at.”

I remain easily amused.

The Patient Notebook

I keep a notebook at work for scribbling to-dos and other things I need to remember.  I don’t go through notebooks very quickly - my short-term memory is pretty good and I use sticky notes and scrap paper when I’m at my desk, but a notebook is handy for carrying around to meetings. 

Back in February my notebook (a Mead brand 80-sheet 4/5-per-inch “quadrille”) was starting to fill up (read: it was maybe 2/3 full) so when I noticed a spiffy new National brand Computation Notebook was available in the supply cabinet, I grabbed it. 

About that same time I was applying for a new position here at work - a position in line with my long-term career goals, one that I’d been hoping to get for a long time.  I knew the manager of that new group wanted to hire me (I was offered the job!), and I was just hoping the process would work out and I could transfer.  So I set the notebook aside and decided that I would symbolically keep it in reserve until I got the transfer to the new position.

To make a long story short, senior management decided I was too critical in my present role to be allowed to transfer.  Both my boss and the manager trying to hire me assured me that they’d try to make it work out later on, but in March someone else took that position and I stayed where I was.  I was initially neither very patient or very happy about the situation, but what else was there to do?  So I waited.

Patience is one of those things you probably don’t really want to pray for.  The process of learning it isn’t fun. But it’s a valuable lesson to learn. My old Mead notebook got thinner and thinner through the summer, but I stubbornly left the new notebook on the shelf.  Finally at the end of August I had a moment of weakness and carried the new notebook to a meeting, but didn’t need to take any notes.  After the meeting I gathered my resolve and put it back on the shelf.

September 1st rolled around and I got a phone call.  Another job req was opening in that department.  I was welcome to apply again.  I applied.  I re-interviewed.  I waited.  It took nearly the entire month of September to get through the process and see if I would be allowed to transfer this time.  The notebook waited patiently.  Me, not so patiently.  Finally, last Friday, I got the official word: the transfer would be allowed.  And today I got the official phone call confirming that I would take the position, with the transfer effective in two weeks’ time.

When my transfer is complete and I start the new position, the old Mead notebook will find its way to a recycle bin, and the patient National notebook will finally take up the role it’s been waiting for since last spring.  It will be a happy day for both of us.

Bullet points for a Monday Morning #4

  • Blog posting has been a bit slow lately since I typically post during breaks at work and my blog has mysteriously become inaccessible from work.  IT was no help in fixing it.  I’m using Posterous as a sort of go-between - a solution that works but that I’m not fond of.
  • Had a good, full weekend. 
  • Marriage conference Friday night and Saturday morning at church.  Very good.
  • Watched a fun Hawkeye game Saturday night.  They whooped Penn State good.
  • Played on the worship team Sunday morning, lots of fun.
  • Finally got the fascia and soffet on the garage painted.  That’s been on my to-do list since last fall.  It looks a lot better.
  • Found out Friday afternoon that the job transfer I’ve been trying to get for the past 6 months will be approved.  Will post something more officially on it once I go through all the official steps.
  • The upcoming two weeks before the transfer will happen have the potential to drag a good bit.
  • I have two book reviews that I need to get posted here before the publishers demand their books back.  Problem is, I’ve only gotten one of them read so far.  Posting one would be a start, I guess.

The "Left Behind" influence on the Religious Right

It’s been a common observation over the past several years that one of the practical results of a “Left Behind”, dispensational view of the end times is a lack of care for the environment in general - heck, if it’s all gonna burn anyway, why should I care?  But the other day it struck me that there is another connection that I haven’t heard commented on - a connection between the rise of dispensational end times views and the rise of Republicanism within the evangelical church. 

Now, let’s be fair to Tim LaHaye - just because his “Left Behind” books became so popular this past decade doesn’t mean that he dreamed the whole “left behind” scenario up.  Think back to Hal Lindsey’s Late, Great Planet Earth, published in 1970, which became the non-fiction bestseller of the 70’s.  While we were politically tired out and frustrated by Vietnam, Watergate, and Carter’s “malaise”, Lindsey also got us thinking about premillenial, dispensational end times.  And a primary component of that movement, even though it’s not often stated that way: fear.

Fear was, and still is, a huge motivator in that paradigm.  Fear of the coming one-world government.  Fear of The Antichrist.  Fear of “the mark”.  Fear that somehow we won’t make God’s “cut” and that we’ll be left behind. Fear of the beheadings. Come on, folks, remember A Thief In The Night?  What other bad 1970’s zombie film would ever get shown in high school church youth groups?

Then came 1980 and Ronald Reagan proclaimed that government was the problem, not the solution.  And the Late, Great adherents heard that and figured that any political movement that took us further away from that scary impending one-world government was a good thing.  And now for the past 30 years the Republican party, and, indeed, the entire Republican platform, has been considered the default “right” position for evangelical Christians in America.

Now, this is no sort of comprehensive analysis, but it’s an interesting topic to think through. 

Finally, a set of disclaimers so that I don’t get kicked out of every group I’ve ever belonged to:

  • I like and admire a whole lot of what I know about and experienced of President Reagan.
  • I’m not sure where I stand on the whole end-times thing.  I used to buy into the whole “Left Behind” scenario - let’s face it, that’s what I grew up in.  Today I’m not so sure. Left Behind doesn’t seem plausible, but I’m not entirely convinced by the amillenial position, either. 
  • Obviously not everyone that holds to the premillenial view hates the environment and/or is primarily motivated by fear
  • Obviously the Republican party holds some views that are good.  The Democrat party does, too.
  • I have some non-dispensational libertarian friends who are gonna tell me I’m completely off base on this one.

I suppose there was a time I thought staying up all night was cool...

…but right now isn’t it. After getting, by Becky’s measurement, 11 inches of rain in the past 48 hours, our basement once again began taking on water. Looks like I should’ve bumped that sump pump higher up the priority list. Once again I am thankful for neighbors on both sides who are willing to loan out their Shop Vacs. I am happy this year to have one shop vac that has a garden hose attachment so I don’t have to carry it out to dump it.

It’s currently 1:45 on Friday morning or so, and the Shop Vacs have been running continuously since around 4:20 Thursday afternoon. The water is slowing down some now, I’m only having to go down and do some sopping up of puddles about every thirty minutes. The rest of the time I can just sit here and listen to the shop vacs run. You are never so ready for silence as you are after listening to three shop vacs run continuously for nine hours. Except for maybe after ten or eleven hours. :-)

So far I’ve listened to a couple of podcasts, watched two episodes of Arrested Development on Hulu, started a book, and annoyed anyone who was on Twitter to listen to my posts. If the water gets down to where I only need to check on it every hour, I’m going to try to take some naps. Until then I guess I’ll just hang out and drink another Diet Pepsi. I had already planned to take Friday off of work; I didn’t plan to spend it this way, though. There’ll be plenty of cleanup to do tomorrow.

Getting rid of the Dish: the Philosophical Post

So a couple of weeks ago I talked about the nerd side of getting rid of the dish. I’m still playing around with the configuration some, but I think I’m getting close to having a good usable solution. Becky keeps telling me “just teach me how to use it once it’s all working”, so I guess I should try to get to that point sooner rather than later.

But the other side of this is the why - why get rid of the Dish? Was it really just the $60/month we were spending? (We bought enough new hardware it’ll take us several months to break even.) Or is there more to it?

I’ll admit I didn’t come to it in quite this direction; my push to switch things up was driven a lot by the desire to have an HD DVR option. But as I sat with my Dish remote in hand and flipped through the channels, I came to the realization that out of the 150 channels available for our viewing, we’d never watched most of them. Most of them had programming that we couldn’t care about in the least. For the most part we spent our tv-watching time tuned to one of our local network stations. The exceptions: ESPN for sports, Nick and Disney for some kids programming. Oh, and a backlog of Food Channel shows on the DVR that never really went away. So we talked about it, and we agreed there were other ways we could access the sorts of programming we really wanted to watch, and that we’d be OK with missing the rest of it. So we cut the cord.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit there are things I’m gonna miss. Monday Night Football on ESPN, for example. And the Cubs games on WGN. (OK, maybe it’s good for my mental health to miss those…) But on the whole it’s been a positive thing. What we’ve eliminated is the mindless noise at night. We had a bad habit of just turning the TV on as we headed towards bed, watching the Cubs if they were on, but often just pulling up Sportscenter on ESPN and ignoring it while we read books and such before going to sleep. Without ESPN available, we’ve either had to decide to watch something we specifically wanted to enjoy (we’re catching up on 30 Rock) - or we just leave it off. And that’s been a very good thing.

Back before we first got a Tivo, I wondered (a lot) whether the Tivo would be a good thing, or whether it would just cause us to watch more TV. It ended up being the former; the Tivo allowed us to watch the shows we wanted, when we wanted, without having to schedule our lives around the start times. (Oh, and we got 20% of our TV-watching lives back in skipped commercials.)

Before we got rid of the Dish, I wondered if we’d just hate it and miss the programming. But I’m pretty much believing now that we will make do just fine, and it will be an improvement overall in how we spend our time and allow ourselves to be entertained distracted.

Now, believe me, there are a couple of internet-based options that I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on. If MLB.tv can ever get rid of their silly blackout restrictions (there are six teams that Iowans can’t watch. most blacked-out state in the country!), I’d subscribe in a heartbeat, and that’d let me watch Cubs games again. And I’d really love to get ESPN360.com, but that’d require me to switch internet service providers… and I’m not real keen on that idea, either. Ah well. I should just take the sage advice given by Bob the Tomato after he catches Larry the Cucumber overly engrossed in a TV show: “maybe you should read a book.” Yeah.

Not being able to do it all

Kevin DeYoung just nails it in a post today. Titled “On Mission, Changing the World, and Not Being Able to Do It All”, DeYoung challenges and encourages those of us who have the inclination to try to do it all, and who end up finding themselves age 30, cynical, and burned out. A few highlights:

I understand there are lazy people out there (and believe me I can be lazy too sometimes). I understand there are lots of Christians in our churches sitting around doing nothing and they need to be challenged not to waste their life (seriously, I love that book and think Piper motivates for radical Christianity in the right way)…

…We need to be challenged, but in ways we can actually obey, not pummeled into law-induced submission until we finally feel completely rotten about most everything in life and admit we aren’t doing enough for the poor, the lost, the children, the elderly, the least of these, the…you fill in the blank. Is the goal of Christianity really to leave everyone feeling like terrible a parent, spouse, friend, or neighbor all the time?

I believe there will always be more indwelling sin in my life and I believe that I will never do a good deed perfectly. But I don’t believe God gives us impossible demands in which we should always feel like failures….

When the pastor preaches on generosity the goal should not be to make every last person feel like a miserable, miserly wretch. Because unless you live in some Godforsaken locale, there are probably people in your church who practice generosity…. Sometimes, by God grace, we do get it right. The problem with “do more” Christianity is that no one is ever allowed to get it right. And the problem, ironically enough, with never allowing anyone to get it right, is that fewer people feel like getting it right really matters.

No doubt some Christians need to be shaken out of their lethargy. I try to do that every Sunday morning and evening. But there are also a whole bunch of Christians who need to be set free from their performance-minded, law-keeping, world-changing, participate-with-God-in-recreating-the-cosmos shackles. I promise you, some of the best people in your churches are getting tired. They don’t need another rah-rah pep talk. They don’t need to hear more statistics and more stories Sunday after Sunday about how bad everything is in the world. They need to hear about Christ’s death and resurrection. They need to hear how we are justified by faith apart from works of the law. They need to hear the old, old story once more. Because the secret of the gospel is that we actually do more when we hear less about all we need to do for God and hear more about all that God has already done for us.

Go read the whole thing. It’s worth it. Really.

Taking Reproof Seriously

Nearly a week ago I wrote a piece here wrestling with some concerns I’ve had about Sunday morning worship. That post went past with relatively few comments, but this morning I had a conversation with a brother from Stonebridge who, without regard to the content of my concerns, asked why I hadn’t just come to folks at church directly with my thoughts before publishing them on my blog. Furthermore, he let me know that there were feelings hurt by what I wrote.

We had a good conversation, one with which I’ve been wrestling for the rest of the day. And while I don’t feel like this was a situation where someone had wronged me and I should’ve been following Matthew 18, in hindsight (don’t you hate that word, hindsight? just its presence indicates that something was screwed up) I can understand that there could be folks who were hurt by what came across, despite my best intentions, as public criticism of them and their service at church.

With all that in mind, I want to say just a few more things, and hope that they can settle the topic for now.

First: if my earlier post caused you hurt in any way, I apologize and ask for your forgiveness.

Second: I tried to say it in my earlier post, and I’ll try to say it again here and hope that it comes through clearly: none of the criticism I was bringing was directed at any person. I certainly have enough experiences doing unprofitable things in church on which I can look back regretfully. I am fortunate that I have had people who noted those, corrected me in a spirit of love, and then encouraged me to get out there again. I want the same for Stonebridge, but I obviously handled the lines of communication poorly.

Finally: I’ve only been at Stonebridge for less than a year, and have had precious little opportunity to get to know any of you, so I’ll say something that in better circumstances hopefully wouldn’t need said: the last thing I desire is to cause disunity within the Body. My only desire is that God be more glorified in each one of us, individually, and in all of us, corporately, with each passing day.

I earnestly yearn to chew on these topics with you in the days to come.

Getting rid of the Dish: The Nerd Post

So we’re getting rid of our Dish. We’ve had cable or satellite TV pretty much ever since we moved into town seven years ago, but now we’re cutting the cable. Now, we’re not giving up television altogether; we’re just switching to a setup that will let us record and playback over-the-air TV, and giving up the paid stuff. There are a couple of sides to this, so I’ll make it a couple of posts. This is the nerd post. You have been forewarned.

The Goal The Dish DVR we are replacing allowed us to record shows and watch them on either of our two TV locations, one downstairs in the family room, the other our little 13" standard-def TV in our bedroom. We don’t watch the upstairs one that much, but it is very handy to keep around for times when the girls want to watch a show, and for in the mornings when they’re awake but we want to sleep in some. :-) We didn’t have HD through Dish Network; I really wanted HD. Oh, and I’d really like to still be able to watch some Cubs games. That’s about it.

What We Ended Up With: Downstairs

To go with the 42" Vizio LCD TV downstairs we invested in a relatively-inexpensive tower PC. It’s got a dual-core Pentium processor, 4GB of RAM (I know, I know, the 32-bit OS won’t use all 4, but that was the stock configuration), a 1TB hard drive, and lots of room to expand. It came with Windows Vista Basic (ick); I upgraded it to Windows 7 RC, and have preordered a regular Win 7 license for it. Add a Windows Media Center remote, and it works pretty smoothly. A little noisier than I’d like, but tolerable. This machine is our primary recording unit.

For an OTA tuner, I got a HDHomeRun networked tuner. If there’s one piece of this system that I’m most happy with, it’s the HDHomeRun. It’s got dual tuners in it. Basically, you plug in your OTA antenna and your ethernet to the back of the tuner, and you’re done. There’s a small piece of software to install, but then Windows Media Center (and EyeTV on the Mac) pick it up with no trouble whatsoever. (Supposedly XBMC in Windows will handle the HDHomeRun, too, but I haven’t been able to get it to work.)

The final component downstairs is an old tower (I forget the specs) running Ubuntu. I mostly use it as a place to save backups; there is just north of 1TB of disk space in it. I’ve also got some recorded TV stored on it which gets served up to the other computers on the network.

What We Ended Up With: Upstairs

Our little friend the Mac Mini moved upstairs. To go with it, I found a Dell 22" 1920x1080 LCD display on sale cheap. While we do have EyeTV installed, and could record from upstairs, the limited HDD space on the Mini (100GB) has me recording downstairs instead. (Yeah, I could do some fun AppleScripting to move files to a different machine once they are done recording… but that’s more work than I wanted right now.) The Mini is running XBMC for playback, and in the event we want to watch something live upstairs, we switch over to EyeTV. Not as elegant as I’d like, but it works pretty well.

What We Ended Up With: The Headaches

The biggest challenge in this setup is that I’m the idiot who’s running three different OSs among my three computers. Oh, and also running a beta OS on the Windows box. So Windows 7 Media Center records OTA TV into a new file format (.wtv). WTV files aren’t yet supported by the FFmpeg codec, which means XBMC won’t play them. Fortunately, W7 provides a WTV-to-DVRMS converter, and FFmpeg does support DVRMS. So, I’ve got a little nightly batch file that runs to convert all of the day’s WTV recordings to DVRMS and file them off in appropriate directories in the shared library area.

Sooner or later the available toolset will catch up with the Windows 7 WTV format, at which point things like commercial skipping and direct playback in XBMC will be available, smoothing things out a bit. For now, though, we’ve got a workable solution that records the shows we want to watch and lets us watch them in either of our two desired locations, and the ability to get rid of a monthly bill from Dish for a bunch of channels we never watch.