A little bit of this, a little bit of that

So I’m never making fun of yoga people again, at least not thinking that it’s something wussy…..holy crap, it’s not just the human pretzel, wrap your arm around your torso and hug yourself, there’s a lot of strength and flexibility things they do. I did my first yoga class ever today and it worked me. I’ll probably go back but I felt like a total klutz.

Verklempt - choked with emotion (German verklemmt = emotionally inhibited in a convulsive way)
(Courtesy urban dictionary)

And Skittles earns the triple word score for the day.

I was reading the Spaz’ blog yesterday and she inspired some follow-on thought. Before I get started, go check out her entry here and then come back.

I believe the western church today has meandered into irrelevancy through a combination of the masturbatory pursuit of the warm fuzzies, self absorbtion, rules and “no trespassing” signs. Our world and culture are full of the conditional: People will like/love you — if you’re thin/attractive/rich. People will be friends with you, meet with you, do stuff with you — if it’s convenient, if you can do something for them. Marrriages will break up over “irreconcilable differences,” men will leave women because they’re not attracted them anymore or “just don’t feel it,” women will leave men because they’ve “fallen out of love.” Why would anyone want to be in a group of people where not only do they have to deal with that, but also have a stack of rules of what they have to do and be in order to be accepted there and by God?

The church has missed the point and have succumbed to the pharisaical pursuit of spiritual police officers who care more about the rule being broken than they do about why the rule exists. The church is supposed to be the place where people not only come to know God, but WANT to know God because they have seen God through how the church loves one another and specifically how it loves them. When Jesus walked the earth, he didn’t congratulate the church leaders for following the rules; he more often than not rebuked them for their insulated self-righteous thoughts and actions. He didn’t seek out the guys at church, he sought out the most likely to not be in church — the poor, the crippled, the prostitutes, the johns — not because he wanted to beat them over the head with what they’ve been doing wrong, but to experience a taste of real relationship, of real love and real acceptance and to give them real inspiration to live.

Most of the time, to enact real, positive change and the motivation to do things better and right is to provide a positive, encouraging environment where the person is inspired to change rather than coerced to change. I have seen this in my own life — when the “I am loved and valued” need is met, I don’t have to focus any energy on meeting that need, I can throw away the things that I was using to ineffectively satisfy the need to be loved, valued, worth something and going somewhere, pull my head up and see the others with needs around me — and what I can provide is to not only tell them, but to show them they are loved and they are valued. I’m not especially good at it yet, I know there are people in my life that would hear that and laugh and think you’ve got the wrong guy, but I don’t care — I know I’ve made mistakes and will make mistakes as I continue to learn, but I also know that I’m way better at that today than I ever have been and that’s what matters. I know I’ve missed the point. I’ve intentionally hardened my heart and walked by those who are asking for help or money, simply because I didn’t want to and didn’t think they were worth it. For years, I went through life treating God like spiritual booty call — get in contact, get what I want and go back home to my regular life, not really interested in any real give-and-take relationship with Him. Unfortunately, when you develop a pattern of treating God that way, you unintentionally can begin treating those whom you really want a relationship with in the same way, hardening my heart to them and not giving them what they really want: me.

I can see where the church has gotten off track is with the whole idea of salvation, why people need to be saved and saved from what. Christ did not come in order to simply persuade people from bad actions into do-goodery, Christ came to give life and give it to the full, not once people die, but right here and right now. What does that mean? I may be far off base, but what I understand it to mean is that as I mentioned above, a full life in Christ gives us relief from the survival struggle, relief from trying to force relational ends to meet, from trying to strive for getting what we need to quench the unmaskable cravings of our souls. The heartbreaking fact is that millions of people will shuffle in and out of church on Sundays and never know the life-changing love of Christ in their lives and will never experience that life here because nobody is willing to draw them in and to embrace them for who they are right now.

The western church has to wake up and start the change or it will die of either old age or asphyxiation. Culture change is a must to rid the old attitudes of “this is how it must be because this is how it has always been,” “those people don’t belong here” and “someone is in my spot.” I feel like there are many in the “christian right” who try to legislate morality rather than changing the hearts of those with whom they believe are trying to solve their problems immorally. Unfortunately, because of the rigidity of many in the church, the church cannot adapt itself into relevancy because they are uncomfortable with change. Let me speak clearly: If one is a true Christ follower, change is inevitable and welcomed — change may be painful, but living with the friction of cruft in our lives only slows us down from where we want to be. I’m inviting change…I know it will be hard, I know there will be tears and I know that there will be a bit of temper tantrums thrown down….but it’s better than who I was and where I was, it’s going to take me to a new sense of passion, of joy and of destiny and I’m excited to be different than I was 2 minutes ago, yesterday, last week and definitely last year.

Who’s with me?

I still have no idea how it really happened, it was crazy. I was making up 2 batches of Nachos, one with chicken, one without. Put them both under the broiler for a few minutes to melt the cheese, opened it up and lo and behold, it was on FIRE. Not your smoldering little bic, mind you….a real jump out of the oven door my biscuit’s a burnin’ fire in my nachos (not the kind you can get in what-happens-in-stays-in vegas, fortunately). The roommate wanted to take it out, but I figured that there’s nothing IN the oven that’s flammable, so let’s deal with it there. Unfortunately it wouldn’t starve, so we had to resort to pouring a saucepan full of water into it to put it out. I guess that’s one way to celebrate the new years… and I was glad I had another pan of the good stuff.

Ah yes, technology….the panacea of our generation. Technology has usually been billed as that which will make our lives easier, allow us to be more productive. The reality of it is that these days, with some exceptions, technology tends to put us into a rigid box, not that adapts to us, but requires us to be socialized to it…which in essense defeats the ‘makes our life easier’ clause.

I’ve run into a few examples of this…I’ve got 2 from my favorite online bill application from AT&T. The first that got me was when entering a credit card, their application notes underneath: “Please, no dashes or spaces”. Honestly, that’s retarded and lazy, not to mention makes it difficult on the end-user. Without putting dashes or spaces (or having to remove them by hand when ready to submit) it makes it extremely difficult to verify I’ve entered the correct numbers and thus will _increase_ the possibility of multiple page reloads because a user has entered an invalid card number. It’s odd to me this request, because I know from experience that it’s fairly straightforward to remove said characters easily, both on the client side and on the server side, so it’s absurd to put that burden on the end user.

The second is similar….when entering an amount to pay via credit card, I entered the amount to pay….say 47 with no decimal place or following digits. When submitting, the ATT application whined that I did not put in a decimal. Again, I know from experience that it only takes 3-4 lines of relatively simplistic code to do so for the user on the client side.

I have the same question about the ATMs….why is it that when withdrawing cash I have to smack the zero key two extra times ? The ATM doesn’t give change (and never has)…why not simply put the logic into the software to do that? I know it’s not a space issue….with the advent of color touch screens, many banks have invested in very pretty interfaces that can’t be small in size. Why not just ask for the whole dollar amounts? It adds a small amount of testing, but you’re making enough off of investing my money and charging me fees for how you don’t like me using it that I’d love for you to put a couple hours towards making it easier for me.

So to continue the rant…how about Arco? Years ago, they added their PayPoint system to be able to pay for gas at the island rather than having to go into the store or to build cash and credit-accepting machines into every pump. But for the life of me, I don’t understand why I have to do it in _their_ order rather than mine. For instance, walk up to a pay point and it has 2 options: pay for gas, get receipt. If you walk up and stick in your card, the software throws an error: select pump, THEN insert card when prompted. Why? If I walk up and stick my card into the machine, I doubt I’m going to be interested in getting a receipt. Simply ask me which pump number and if the order _really_ matters, then just hang onto my card info and ask for the proper details in the right order. Same if I walk up and start feeding money into the machine. Its easy enough to flag with a receipt should you choose to cancel or flag with the operator in the store.

Some of us computer geeks have decently paying jobs because many of our friends want to not worry about the details with computers and software…they’re just trying to do what they need to do and these days, it requires a computer. Let’s try to make life easier on them (and at the same time on our fellow computer geeks who have to support our errors) and try to put real thought into what we do rather than just get ‘er done.