Linger

November 5, 2009 at 7:28 pm (Blogging)
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The earliest photo taken of the White House

The White House, photographed for the first time in 1846 by John Plumbe during the Polk administration.

It seems to me, that if any place in America would be haunted, it would most certainly be the White House, with all of the tension and stress and decisions made within those walls. 

There must be some sort of supernatural residue still lingering there.  A former resident certainly believes it to be so.

Fright House: Jenna Bush on the ghostly music playing in the presidential home already ‘haunted’ by Abraham Lincoln
by Sara Nelson
for the Daily Mail

The daughter of former President George W Bush has claimed she saw ghosts during her time in the White House.

Jenna Bush Hager told chat show host Jay Leno she had been terrified by spooky events near the fireplace in her bedroom.

The 27-year-old teacher, who now works as an education correspondent for the Today Show said: ‘I heard a ghost. I was asleep, there was a fireplace in my room and all of a sudden I heard 1920s music coming out. 

‘I could feel it, I freaked out and ran into my sister’s room. She was like “Please go back to sleep this is ridiculous”.

‘The next week we were both asleep in my room, the phone had rang and woke us up.

‘We were talking and going back to bed when all of a sudden we heard this opera, coming out of the fireplace.

‘We couldn’t believe it, we both jumped in bed and were asking the people that worked there the next morning “Are we crazy?”

‘We tried to rationalise it, but they said they heard it there all the time.’

Jenna and her family lived at the Washington DC presidential home from 2001 to 2009.

She told how her parents were settling in well back at home in Texas, and that the former president has even been offered a job at a hardware store – but turned it down, feeling he was overqualified.

The former first daughter confessed she had never seen Abraham Lincoln’s ghost – which is said to regularly haunt the White House – but wished she had.

Lincoln’s ghost is widely reported to walk up and down the second floor hallway, knock at doors and stand at certain windows with his hands clasped behind his back.

Indeed Winston Churchill refused to sleep in the former president’s bedroom after reportedly spotting his ghost lurking there.

The British Prime Minister had stepped into the room after a relaxing bath with a cigar and a glass of scotch.

Still naked, the premier is reported to have spied an apparition of Lincoln standing by the fireplace. The pair are said to have started at each other for some time before the ghost faded away.

Former first lady Hilary Clinton has also spoken about the spooky atmosphere in the White House.

The US Secretary of State said: ‘There is something about the house at night that you just feel like you are summoning up the spirits of all the people who have lived there and worked there and walked through the halls there.’

She told the Rosie O’Donnell Show: ‘It’s neat, it can be a little creepy.

‘You know, they think there’s a ghost there. It is a big old house and when the lights are out it is dark and quiet and any movement at all catches your attention.’

Indeed Harry Truman once wrote to his wife: ‘I sit here in this old house, all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway.

‘At 4 o’clock I was awakened by three distinct knocks on my bedroom door. No one there.  [The] place is haunted, sure as shootin’!’

As well as human hauntings, the have been tales of a demon cat prowling the building’s basement.

According to legend, years go by without a sighting of the animal, but when it does appear, national disaster is said to be imminent.

Some witnesses claim the demon cat first appears as a helpless-looking kitten, which grows in size and menace the closer one gets to it.

A White House guard claimed to have seen it a week before the great stock market crash of the 1920s and it was also reportedly seen days before the assassination of JFK.

I’m not sure if Lincoln’s ghost is more frightening, though, than the thought of Churchill fresh from a bath.

Anyway, ghosts are most definitely real.  And while they may not be the unattached spirits or souls of the dead, they are real in the sense that after any great tragedy, or crisis, we allow some sort of residual effect to linger.

A fight.  A death.  Turmoil.  Job loss.  Rebellious kids.  Conversations with harsh words.  Wrecking decisions.   All of these give us remorse, guilt, and we are haunted with the sheer regret of the crisis.  And that residue, sometimes, just won’t leave.

May we have better discernment about the words we say and the actions we choose, or, maybe more importantly, about the words we keep, and the actions we disregard.

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Killed

September 30, 2009 at 2:44 pm (Art, Blogging, Church)
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The Buggles

Self-Made Prophets ...

The Buggles told us the truth.

Video did kill the radio star.  And they added to that death by producing a music video that would be the first aired on MTV.

Now, other things are dying, but are being killed by the Internet.

A list of what the Internet is killing was published in The Telegraph, and is longer than what I’ve posted here, but these are the ones that got my attention. 

1) The art of polite disagreement
While the inane spats of YouTube commencers may not be representative, the internet has certainly sharpened the tone of debate. The most raucous sections of the blogworld seem incapable of accepting sincerely held differences of opinion; all opponents must have “agendas”.

2) Fear that you are the only person unmoved by a celebrity’s death
Twitter has become a clearing-house for jokes about dead famous people. Tasteless, but an antidote to the “fans in mourning” mawkishness that otherwise predominates.

3) Listening to an album all the way through
The single is one of the unlikely beneficiaries of the internet – a development which can be looked at in two ways. There’s no longer any need to endure eight tracks of filler for a couple of decent tunes, but will “album albums” like Radiohead’s Amnesiac get the widespread hearing they deserve?

5) Punctuality
Before mobile phones, people actually had to keep their appointments and turn up to the pub on time. Texting friends to warn them of your tardiness five minutes before you are due to meet has become one of throwaway rudenesses of the connected age.

12) Letter writing/pen pals
Email is quicker, cheaper and more convenient; receiving a handwritten letter from a friend has become a rare, even nostalgic, pleasure. As a result, formal valedictions like “Yours faithfully” are being replaced by “Best” and “Thanks”.

13) Memory
When almost any fact, no matter how obscure, can be dug up within seconds through Google and Wikipedia, there is less value attached to the “mere” storage and retrieval of knowledge. What becomes important is how you use it – the internet age rewards creativity.

14) Dead time
When was the last time you spent an hour mulling the world out a window, or rereading a favourite book? The internet’s draw on our attention is relentless and increasingly difficult to resist.

15) Photo albums and slide shows
Facebook, Flickr and printing sites like Snapfish are how we share our photos. Earlier this year Kodak announced that it was discontinuing its Kodachrome slide film because of lack of demand.

17) Watching television together
On-demand television, from the iPlayer in Britain to Hulu in the US, allows relatives and colleagues to watch the same programmes at different times, undermining what had been one of the medium’s most attractive cultural appeals – the shared experience. Appointment-to-view television, if it exists at all, seems confined to sport and live reality shows.

18) Authoritative reference works
We still crave reliable information, but generally aren’t willing to pay for it.

27) Knowing telephone numbers off by heart
After typing the digits into your contacts book, you need never look at them again.

29) The mystery of foreign languages
Sites like Babelfish offer instant, good-enough translations of dozens of languages – but kill their beauty and rhythm.

31) Privacy
We may attack governments for the spread of surveillance culture, but users of social media websites make more information about themselves available than Big Brother could ever hoped to obtain by covert means.

50) Your lunchbreak
Did you leave your desk today? Or snaffle a sandwich while sending a few personal emails and checking the price of a week in Istanbul?

Powerful things here.  How true are these for you?

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Should

July 21, 2009 at 10:25 pm (Art)
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Mainstream music is certainly manufactured for immediate success and quick remembrance.

And since the world is contemplating the legacy of Michael Jackson, and in the minutia of musical influence, I found the following article somewhat refreshing.

In my ministry to students, I have found that a brave few are listening to a wide variety of unknown or undiscovered artists — artists who have rejected the mainstream version of creativity, and have launched albums with unique sounds, though maybe only enjoyable by a select few.  Any artist with the courage to break the status quo and find a unique sound with a unique following is worth a listen.  I have a few favorite artists like this myself.

But that certainly proves the point that we like our music, and we like our music our way.  It’s such a powerful, powerful medium, but …

according to this article, it should have been much, much better …

“Five Singers Who Ruined Pop Music”
Tony Scalfani
msnbc.com

David Bowie

Image: David Bowie
Robert E. Klein / AP

Sure, he could sound like John Lennon on one album and Luther Vandross on the next. But that was the problem with David Bowie — in his heyday he seemed more of a theatrical chameleon who tried on personas than an impassioned rock singer. Bowie’s restless experimentalism allowed him to pull off being coolly distant and affected. Sadly, others copped his affectations without his intelligent approach. For a while in the 1980s, it seemed as if nearly every singer drew more from Bowie’s European theater tradition of singing than the tradition of rock singing itself (which came from R&B and gospel sources). Those who succumbed to Bowie-itis included everyone from Ric Ocasek of the Cars to David Byrne of Talking Heads to Robert Palmer to even Cyndi Lauper and Madonna. In short, anytime anyone tries on a vocal persona instead of singing from the heart, they’re channeling the Thin White Duke.

Whitney Houston

Image: Whitney Houston
Evan Agostini / AP

In the second verse of her second hit single, “Saving All My Love for You,”Whitney Houston pronounces the word “cry” as “cu-ry.” That was just the beginning of her habit of adding extra syllables to words and over-the-top frills to songs — embellishments she seemed to add to show off her voice, not to put the song across better. Yes, Houston was a dazzling singer when she emerged, but younger female singers picked up on the most bombastic elements of her style, thinking that was what you needed to be a great vocalist. So along came Taylor Dayne, Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, Celine Dion and almost any “soulful” female singer who ever made audience’s ears bleed on “American Idol.” A new style of vocalizing emerged, and it even got a name: oversinging. Over the years oversinging has become an unintentional parody of the R&B singing from which it descended. All of the above singers should have gone back and studied Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight, two brilliant artists who knew what you leave out of a song can be as important as what you put in.

Jim Morrison

Jim Morrison
AP file

It makes people uncomfortable when you mention that Morrison often took vocal cues from an old school pop artist like Frank Sinatra. But that seems to be where the late lead singer of the Doors got his croon from. The difference was, Morrison wasn’t wrapping his baritone around jazz standards by Cole Porter or George Gershwin — he was singing rock lyrics with poetic pretensions and more simplistic chords. Even though Morrison could pull this off without sounding idiotic (most of the time), others couldn’t. What followed Morrison was a succession of singers whose bellowing brought to rock music an annoying self-importance it had never had. The main offenders are the obvious ones, like Eddie Vedder, Scott Stapp and Michael Hutchence. But you also have to throw in almost every post-punk singer that emerged from the U.K. and employed a deep voice to sound “profound” (we’re looking at you, Dave Gahan). Traces of Morrison’s pompous leanings can also be heard in singers as wide-ranging as Bono, Chad Kroeger and Bob Geldof.

Paula Abdul

Image: Paul Abdul
Getty Images

Paula Abdul has the opposite problem of Whitney Houston. Where Houston could sing too well for her own good, Abdul could hardly sing at all, and even got sued by R&B singer Yvette Marine, who claimed she shared some of the lead vocals on Abdul’s debut album “Forever Your Girl” (Marine lost the case, but careful headphone listening reveals Abdul’s vocals were bolstered by someone). What Abdul could do well was dance and look good, which was starting to matter more and more on MTV around the time she emerged in 1989. And so the door was opened for anyone who could make Chipmunk-like sounds but looked hot doing so. Britney Spears, P. Diddy, the Pussycat Dolls, Kanye West and Ashlee Simpson have walked through that door and earned millions, as have the other scads of singers who rely on Auto-Tune to carry a tune. The irony of all this, of course, is that Abdul herself could likely never have qualified to be a contestant on “American Idol,” the very show on which she now serves as a talent judge.

Steve Marriott

Marriott was the powerhouse lead vocalist of the super-cool U.K. mod band the Small Faces and arena rockers Humble Pie. As a singer, the guy couldn’t be topped — his power and versatility were amazingand he virtually always sounded engaged (if not possessed). But Marriott was also the first male vocalist in rock to regularly sing in a very high register in a full, non-falsetto voice. According to Jimmy Page, Marriott was the original choice for Led Zeppelin’s lead singer. And here’s where he became a bad influence. Marriott led to Robert Plant, Plant led to Geddy Lee of Rush and Steve Perry of Journey and all of a sudden there were scores of long haired guy singers who picked up on Marriott’s screeching but left out his soulfulness. Zeppelin, Rush, Triumph and (sometimes) Journey are all great to listen to separately, but the cumulative effect of all these wailing voices on the radio back in the day made rock music sound, well, sort of silly. It also probably drove people to punk rock, where the singer sounded more down to Earth.

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Isaac

February 20, 2009 at 2:47 pm (Culture)
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Terminator 2

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

A future filled with fully automated autonomous robots may not be just the stuff of entertainment.  Read this, from the Times Online:

Military’s Killer Robots Must Learn Warrior Code
by Leo Lewis

Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.

The stark warning – which includes discussion of a Terminator-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters – is issued in a hefty report funded by and prepared for the US Navy’s high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research.

The report, the first serious work of its kind on military robot ethics, envisages a fast-approaching era where robots are smart enough to make battlefield decisions that are at present the preserve of humans. Eventually, it notes, robots could come to display significant cognitive advantages over Homo sapiens soldiers.

“There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do,” Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, said. “Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to a time when . . . programs could be written and understood by a single person.” The reality, Dr Lin said, was that modern programs included millions of lines of code and were written by teams of programmers, none of whom knew the entire program: accordingly, no individual could accurately predict how the various portions of large programs would interact without extensive testing in the field – an option that may either be unavailable or deliberately sidestepped by the designers of fighting robots.

The solution, he suggests, is to mix rules-based programming with a period of “learning” the rights and wrongs of warfare.

A rich variety of scenarios outlining the ethical, legal, social and political issues posed as robot technology improves are covered in the report. How do we protect our robot armies against terrorist hackers or software malfunction? Who is to blame if a robot goes berserk in a crowd of civilians – the robot, its programmer or the US president? Should the robots have a “suicide switch” and should they be programmed to preserve their lives?

The report, compiled by the Ethics and Emerging Technology department of California State Polytechnic University and obtained by The Times, strongly warns the US military against complacency or shortcuts as military robot designers engage in the “rush to market” and the pace of advances in artificial intelligence is increased.

Any sense of haste among designers may have been heightened by a US congressional mandate that by 2010 a third of all operational “deep-strike” aircraft must be unmanned, and that by 2015 one third of all ground combat vehicles must be unmanned.

“A rush to market increases the risk for inadequate design or programming. Worse, without a sustained and significant effort to build in ethical controls in autonomous systems . . . there is little hope that the early generations of such systems and robots will be adequate, making mistakes that may cost human lives,” the report noted.

A simple ethical code along the lines of the “Three Laws of Robotics” postulated in 1950 by Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, will not be sufficient to ensure the ethical behaviour of autonomous military machines.

“We are going to need a code,” Dr Lin said. “These things are military, and they can’t be pacifists, so we have to think in terms of battlefield ethics. We are going to need a warrior code.”

__________

Robots in rebellion?  Unmanned warcraft?

What sort of a future are we in for? 

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Chain

September 22, 2008 at 5:29 pm (Culture)
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You would think that social networking is a brand new thing.

The phrase, social networking, is new, but maybe not the concept.  But if you say the phrase out loud, and you may want to do so right now, it makes you feel good, almost like you know more than you’re supposed to know.

It is also the phrase most used to describe the Facebook phenomenon.  A recent article reported that Facebook is the number one social network website in the world.  In just a span of twelve months, Facebook added 75 million unique monthly visitors (from 40 million in April, 2007, to 115 million in April, 2008).  Of those 75 million unique visitors, 62 million were from places other than the United States of America.

MySpace, in the same time span, has not grown enough to even chart it’s progress.

Facebook began as a toy for college students, almost a tongue-in-cheek graduation from MySpace.  But, as you may know dear reader, your friend list, if you are on Facebook, includes people outside of that demographic.  It’s rate of growth has outpaced other social networking sites.

And the reasons for its success are almost immediate.  If you have your own Facebook account, you will notice a few things.  One, you were probably asked to join a network, which, according to Facebook, most people do.  Another, is that you are asked a slate of questions about yourself, and you almost feel compelled to answer them accordingly. 

In it’s purest form, Facebook is almost about vanity.  You are telling your own private world, in online terms, what you value, who you like, and even your current mood.  And you are given complete control.  No one in the real world can force anything here. 

Because, as I’ve written before, millions of lives are now lived on computer screens.
__________

I have a theory. 

Facebook has made relationships cool again.  We have taken a phrase, social networking, and made it sound almost technological, and very much inventive, though, at its core, social networking is just a new way to describe relationships.  And Facebook has given us a place to invest in relationships.

And I guess we need that.  The cultural swing of America has gone from small towns to a scattering of friends across this continent, and has placed us in isolated areas, away from family, and away from longtime friends.  The Internet was, for a time, the savior of relationships, with email being the hottest ticket in town.  But that became cumbersome.  So cell phones became the rage.  But rates were too high.  So text messaging followed next in this evolutionary tale.  But we wanted to say more.  So MySpace happened.  But MySpace is a public page, and maybe we don’t want everyone to see what we have to say, and the need for control developed.  So there was a need, and the development of Facebook filled that need.  But it also provided competition for MySpace among those who use each one.  One psychologist even cited research that both users MySpace and Facebook could be seen through socio-economic lenses.

So even relationships, lived online, are now divided among class lines.  Interesting, isn’t it? 

In the end, though, Facebook offered privacy, and controlled access.  And most people seem to like that.  So Facebook is the student who has become the teacher. 

But what holds Facebook together, and makes it work so well, is the accountability that ensures that these relationships survive.

The information in any given profile is checked every time new access is granted to your profile by adding these friends.  And, in turn, whenever you are given access to someones profile, by the unique privilege of being their friend, you can check their information.  And you will ask about something that doesn’t play well.  And you will be asked about something that someone else disputes.  Facebook would not be the most dominant social networking site in the world if accountability wasn’t so accessible, or so necessary.  It is what makes any relationship work.
__________

It would seem, though the lens of technology, that humanity craves a chain of people, where we find ourselves connected somewhere. 

But, of course, it isn’t the first to offer such a place.

The greatest social networking site on the planet is in the lobby of any church.  Try it this Sunday and see.

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Write

September 12, 2008 at 2:49 pm (Church, Opinions)
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it’s how the kids do it these days.

and it’s a brand of communication i swore i would never do.

and yet, i do.  i love the english language.  i love the nuances of the language, and i love the way words are put together.  words are powerful, and they are powerful when they are spoken, and they are powerful when they are written.  and since i do both, and do both frequently, i figured that i would never demote the english language to such frivolousness as writing without capital letters.

and then i found facebook.  and since i direct a rather large student ministry, and since most of my students live their lives on facebook, i go where the kids are.  and that’s where they are.  and this is how they communicate.

captions for photographs are written without capital letters.  status updates are written without capital letters.  favorite movies.  favorite songs.  interests.  all of these things are written without ever pressing the shift key on the keyboard. 

and that poor little shift key.  once so important.  once used to start a new thought, or a new sentence, and now it has been left behind, ostracized.  and it is lonely.  now, in this new found mode of communication, where words are never capitalized, the shift key may be used only when SOMEONE IS VERY ANGRY.  and then again, it could be overlooked for the simpler caps lock key. 

writing without capital letters, really, is a way to communicate an attitude.  using all lower caps indicates that what you are saying is not very serious, or that your current mood is one of normalcy.  and it is different than the structured world in which we live, where homework must be written in proper english, and where reports and presentations must be written in strictly professional ways.  it really is a sort of rebellion, and so we decide that with friends and family, and our facebook crowd, we’ll only communicate in the ways we believe we talk, and surely the words we say are never capitalized.  and surely, talk of sports and relationships and movies don’t need such heavy restrictions, such as the usage of capital letters – we can just save all of that for when it is absolutely necessary.

so the little shift key is overlooked. 

but really, how much effort do we expend to press the shift key, anyway? 

wait.  i just used the shift key there.  so it needs to be used when you place a question mark at the end of your sentence.  so, we have found another use.  and an important use.  (even though you need it for parentheses, and apostrophes, in my common experience, neither are used much, and pale in use to the all powerful question mark.)  the shift key’s primary purpose, in this cyber-communication world, then, is it’s need for questions.

and there a lot of questions in this lived-online world.  it’s the normal, back and forth conversation, that usually involves statements and questions.  and when you mostly talk through your keyboard, face-to-face contact becomes tough, and awkward, so we just stick to talking with words that omit all capital letters.

because life is lived on the screens of millions of computers.
__________

we are now seeing the emergence of a new, common, vernacular language.  it is the underground language of the people.  it is the way to communicate to a great amount of people in this particular culture, so much so that if you enter this world, and use that little shift key, you’ll be seen as someone who doesn’t belong, or who doesn’t understand.  and whether you do understand or not is really irrelevant.  it’s that your appearance says otherwise.  and in an attention-deficit world, every edge you have to be relevant you take.  and if that means forsaking the beloved english language for teenage typing, then it must be done. 

because in an online world, appearance is less about clothes, and more about words. 

because words are powerful.  even how you type them.

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Calling

May 22, 2008 at 11:44 pm (Church, Culture, Purpose, Theology)
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It was midnight.  Little sleep.  College life.  A long distance relationship.  Uncertainity.

I awoke, really, with a realization.  A small little voice.  A leaning, really, to change my eventual career choice to ministry. 

It felt natural.  It really did.  Almost like, if I had not listened to that voice, I would have spent a few years running from, and searching for, that home-sweet-home feeling.

A change in my undergraduate major meant the addition of an extra semester at a university that was a little pricey.  Just a minor bump in the road.  Minor.  And my wife, not once, ever doubted that the voice I heard was the voice for her and the family we would eventually be given.

Within that year, I was again called, this time on the phone, to come preach at a small church not an hour’s drive away.  A weekend job turned into my first job after college.  My wife and I moved to the small town, into the parsonage, and began what, to this day, was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.  That a church filled with old souls would listen to the words and teaching of a twenty-something is still tough to grasp, and only explained as though God gave them a generous amount of patience. 

The next call was a printed publication, an advertisement from a church with the need of a youth minister.  From the very first conversation, my wife and I both knew we would be moving.  God was working and leaning again, and his voice spoke through the five members of a search committee.  We moved, and I began a journey that is still quite the ride.

I received some papers this week, a list of some early lessons I wrote for our leaders of our student small groups.  They were deep, and naive, and green.  But God seemingly blessed those words, those thoughts.  And though those words were written for different leaders and different students, I attend the continued evolution of those groups now, on Wednesday nights, and though I take no credit at all for what I see, the exprience is beyond words.  Lots of students.  Lots of energy.  Lots of passionate leaders with a great ability to take the words in the lessons I now write and maneuver them, mold them, into a discussion that is always just right for the students they are teaching.

I go to my office during the week, and marvel at times that I have not lost any passion for student ministry.  I’ve been given the slightest of gifts that have kept me one step ahead of the cultural pace that feeds on the energy of teenagers.  God has guided my hands, my eyes, my thoughts, to find and seek ideas for programs, material for our curriculum, and the technological learning to accomodate the eyes and the time of a teenager.  I feel as though I am the one that has learned the most, and the journey I take with God is still one of humility.  I do not know what I am doing, even to this day, but expect God to direct where we can and want to be. 

He gave me access, early in my years here, to teach at the private school associated with our church.  He used those years, those rough and tough years, to teach me more things, newer things, about the broader base of student ministries.  He now allows me to teach at the local college, where my classes are always filled with high school students taking collegiate courses.  Teaching on the collegiate level has given me vision into the emerging and future world of the students involved in our ministry, and has also introduced me to the most current and successful teaching models for a classroom filled with teenagers and older adults in varying demographics.  It has also allowed me to be a current voice in the wider environment in our neighboring cities.  I am known as their teacher at college, and the youth minister at the church where their friends attend.  The doors that have opened for me in those classroom experiences are invaluable.

All of this is amazing to me.  All of it.  I am at a unique point (probably because of a two week break) where reflection is the order of the day.  And I am thankful to look back, after almost ten years in student ministry, and see the guiding, and most certainly, the providential hand of God. 

I had a thought, when I was a teenager, involved in the youth ministry of my church, that one day, maybe, I would be given the opportunity to lead and teach students.  Those thoughts still haunt my mind, for they were thoughts born of a certain teenage selfishness that plagues all of us during those years.  I ran from those thoughts early into college, with ideas of making my career in other things.  But God called.  And I had no choice but to listen.  My ministry path would lead from preaching, where I thought God may have obviously gifted me, to a ministry that needed the use of other gifts, ones I believed I did not have, and have spent the better part of the past decade learning. 

I am truly grateful for this path.  I realize the gifts I have are only for the moment I need them.  And there are times, like now, that I believe I could do this for the rest of my life.  I make mistakes, for everyone on a learning path is bound to stumble, but God has given me a church, again, with an abundance of patience.  They allow me and trust me with what I believe to be the most pressing ministry in any church.  It is a thing of God.  It truly is.

Student ministry is my calling.  My passion.  Moments teaching students, messaging students, meeting students, seeing students, are moments that are given by God.  And how thankful I am that He is most patient.  He is still, even after all these years, still working on me, preparing me for the next day, the next moment, and the next season, giving me what I need, when I need it.  It is truly, truly, a calling.

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Changing

April 16, 2008 at 3:41 pm (Church, Thinking)
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I teach in a state-of-the-art classroom.

I began the semester, however, teaching in a temporary classroom, without any computer, without internet access, and without any projection. The classroom was in a trailer at the back of the campus where I teach two different history courses on the collegiate level.  The only teaching medium the room offered was a chalk board.

The beginning of the semester was difficult without the assistance of what now seems to be needed technology.  In some ways, I felt the course would become primitive to the current collegiate standards of teaching today, and I was not satisfied at all with the arrangement.

Intimacy, however, was one advantage in the classroom. The student tables were in close proxemity to each other, and I stood in the front of the class, very, very close to the students at the front. I turned what I believed to be a disaster into a blessing, changing my teaching style to flow without the crutch of media presentations. And so the course began with intimate teaching and great discussions.

After spring break, my class was moved to the newest building on campus, which houses some of the most advanced classrooms in the country.

My first introduction to the classroom was the entrance, with lights that were activated by sheer motion. The lectern was a stalwart piece of furniture, with two screens. One was for the desktop computer, the other was a touchscreen for all of the technological aids the classroom offered. It controlled projection, the computer itself, as well as a laptop, a DVD player and a VHS player, and the document camera that also was equipped to the lectern. A flat panel television serves as a personal monitor for the instructor. There are also cameras in the room, and microphones placed at various intervals in the ceiling tiles, which serve for recording purposes, if the instructor so chooses to record the lecture to stream online at a latter date.

The only thing that is missing is a chalk board.

That chalk board became the focus of my course this semester. I was able to write and talk and move across the front of the room, as well as field questions and prompt discussions. But the new room, with all of its advances, is without the one thing that has driven education for the better part of a century. 

The room communicates to me, and to the students, that the teaching medium will change, or has changed already, and the presentation offered by the instructor must be different than what has been offered in the past.

That frightens me.

Overnight, I was asked, inadvertently, to change to an entirely different teaching style, one that is more technogically interactive, and one (dare I say) more impersonal.  I feel like the methods that were successful in the first part of the course are now, in a broad brush stroke, irerelevant.  I can adapt, and will, but the shock to me was great. 

The course now feels different.  Same students.  Same material.  Same instructor.  Different room.   And now, with only three meetings before the end of the semester, I feel like I need to prove, if to no one but myself, that the final three meetings can, and will be as beneficial and interactive as the first few, blending the succesful elements of teaching during this semester with these incredible advances. 
__________

I must admit that I see change in a different way now.  My generation looks at the previous generation, and is tempted to say that their familiar ways of communication are antiquated.  And those methods may be antiquated, from our persepctive.  But now, I am part of a ”previous generation,” teaching high school and first year college students, and their modes of communication are familiar to them, but new to me. 

Change is needed to communicate effectively.  Colleges are expecting instructors and professors to rethink how they communicate material to their students.  And instructors who fail to adapt will no longer be given students to teach.  Or students will refuse to listen. 

To be fair, too, when we look at change from religious perspectives, change generally refers only to communication mediums.  Vibrant members of any church want to see truth presented in ways that are easily digested.  And a casual look at the social climate of any given era mentioned in the bible will show that communication mediums changed with the era. 

Moses stood on top of a mountain, and, when discussing important matters, only communicated with the leaders of each tribe.  Judges sat beneath trees, or in common places to decide matters.  Kings used more noble approaches to communication, with edicts and mediators when speaking to their enemies.  Prophets walked through the streets, in very brash ways, to communicate lean and tough messages.  Jesus used personal approaches, with stories and object lessons.  Paul went to synagogues and, in some instances, to very secular, even hostile environments.

Mediums of communication changed.  But the message remained static. 

And maybe that is the point.  The message should always remain static.  But if the medium does not change, the static message may never be heard.

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