Vacation
I've taken the week off, and M and I are going to a Vineyard regional conference in Chicago Tu-Fr. We've been general fans of Vineyard conferences since the late 90s, when I got to tag along with Steve Nick to the national pastors conference in Anaheim (and became a devotee of Don Williams and Dallas Willard), and M began what has since become her yearly pilgrimage to the Chicagoland womens conferences. Good teaching from leading-edge thinkers, great people, and personal ministry of, at times, surprising power. It'll be such fun to hook up with old friends from Chambana/Minneapolis/Chicago/et al. But mostly, I'm going for the ideas, having been in something of a theological wasteland of late. Big-picture teaching on kingdom theology/inaugurated eschatology and Christian community, at once theologically robust and in-the-trenches practical. Particularly looking forward to Don's workshops on addictions, and Rick Olmstead's on developing pastoral leaders.
By way of catch-up... my parents came up from StL for a couple of days last week. It was the first time they've come to visit us in Peoria, and indeed only the 2nd time they've visited us since the wedding, so it was kind of a big deal. It actually went rather well. My mom brought me copies of three of Dale Carnegie's books (!), which I was glad to have - she just took one of his courses and enjoyed it a lot. In return, I bought them a copy of Cloud's Integrity, and we actually had a long and spirited discussion about it, comparing his and Carnegie's approaches to "success." We concluded that, while they address similar relational mechanics (e.g. how to win others' trust), Carnegie is more Machiavellian, "this is how to get people to do what you want," whereas Cloud covers a lot of the same dynamics but situates it in a broader context that might be called spiritual, and which I call part of my Christian discipleship.
At one point I got my laptop out to google something, and they were admiring its new-fangled wireless capability... Mom mentioned that she was interested in getting one, but there's a fair amount of inertia on their part when it comes to adopting new technologies. So I used my Cat employee discount to buy them a nice Dell Inspiron E1505, a wireless router, and such. Spent a painful half hour trying to explain what a wireless router was, and how they could set up a wireless home network. It took us that long to figure out that my dad didn't know that the words "desktop" and "laptop" mean two different things... which was the death knell for that particular conversation, and I said I would just go over and set it up for them when their hardware arrived.
Isn't that something... here's a guy, a world-class researcher, did his PhD in medical physics at UC Berkeley in 1.25 yrs, former Stanford professor, speaks four languages, chaired international congresses on nuclear medicine and MRI... ask him some random obscure question about biochemistry or radiopharmaceuticals and he'll lecture you effortlessly for hours, and yet he doesn't know the difference between a desktop and a laptop. I mean, who doesn't know that? It's illustrative of why we have to keep learning - you can't rest on what you already know, or already did. The world will leave you behind. If you want to maintain competence, if you want to continue to have an impact, you've gotta keep growing.
Hence, this conference.
By way of catch-up... my parents came up from StL for a couple of days last week. It was the first time they've come to visit us in Peoria, and indeed only the 2nd time they've visited us since the wedding, so it was kind of a big deal. It actually went rather well. My mom brought me copies of three of Dale Carnegie's books (!), which I was glad to have - she just took one of his courses and enjoyed it a lot. In return, I bought them a copy of Cloud's Integrity, and we actually had a long and spirited discussion about it, comparing his and Carnegie's approaches to "success." We concluded that, while they address similar relational mechanics (e.g. how to win others' trust), Carnegie is more Machiavellian, "this is how to get people to do what you want," whereas Cloud covers a lot of the same dynamics but situates it in a broader context that might be called spiritual, and which I call part of my Christian discipleship.
At one point I got my laptop out to google something, and they were admiring its new-fangled wireless capability... Mom mentioned that she was interested in getting one, but there's a fair amount of inertia on their part when it comes to adopting new technologies. So I used my Cat employee discount to buy them a nice Dell Inspiron E1505, a wireless router, and such. Spent a painful half hour trying to explain what a wireless router was, and how they could set up a wireless home network. It took us that long to figure out that my dad didn't know that the words "desktop" and "laptop" mean two different things... which was the death knell for that particular conversation, and I said I would just go over and set it up for them when their hardware arrived.
Isn't that something... here's a guy, a world-class researcher, did his PhD in medical physics at UC Berkeley in 1.25 yrs, former Stanford professor, speaks four languages, chaired international congresses on nuclear medicine and MRI... ask him some random obscure question about biochemistry or radiopharmaceuticals and he'll lecture you effortlessly for hours, and yet he doesn't know the difference between a desktop and a laptop. I mean, who doesn't know that? It's illustrative of why we have to keep learning - you can't rest on what you already know, or already did. The world will leave you behind. If you want to maintain competence, if you want to continue to have an impact, you've gotta keep growing.
Hence, this conference.