The Future of Philip and Work

As many of you know, I am currently working at Toyon Research Corporation as a paid intern through the end of January. Then I'll be in Calcutta, India for four months. So I at least know sort of what my life will be like through mid-June of 2005. However, I don't know is much of anything about my life when I return from Calcutta.

There is a possibility that Toyon will want to hire me on longer term. In fact my boss seems fairly favorable to that idea, except that I can't tell him much about what I'll want when I get back. It looks like I will probably at least work long enough to tackle my college debt, except that I don't know where God may lead me after Calcutta. My boss said he would look into making me an offer of "permanent part-time." I would only work eight or so months of the year, and my benefits would be scaled accordingly. At first I didn't think much of that idea, but it's starting to grow on me. Being able to spend 3-4 months of the year in the mission field or some such thing might be a good balance. I guess I'll wait and see on that one.

Another possible option is Honeywell. Thanks to Rose, I'll be heading down to Torrance this weekend to interview with them. I'm certainly not ready to make a commitment to them either, but for now I'd like to keep my options open.

Thanksgiving Weekend

I had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend. I was blessed with the opportunity to see many wonderful people. I drove down to Pasadena on Wednesday night and visited Greg. I hadn't seen him since the last day of LAUP (August 7th). I got to see his living situation, as well as meet some of the kids that frequent his apartment. While I was there I helped Greg make a batch of lumpy mashed potatoes. I'm sure Greg could have made mashed potatoes on his own, but they probably wouldn't have been lumpy without my help (Sorry about that Greg).

On Thursday afternoon I headed over to Jason's house for Thanksgiving dinner. It was a pretty large gathering of people, as well as a large gathering of food. I really couldn't have hoped for a better feast.

Thursday evening I headed down to Irvine to meet my aunt Mari and cousin Karin. They were down there for Karin's team to play in a soccer tournament. We were meeting at the Marriott in Irvine, where we would stay for Thursday and Friday nights. We discovered that Irvine has at least three Marriott locations within a six block radius. I ended up at one of them, while Mari and Karin ended up at a different one. We discovered this when Mari and I were both in the lobby, but couldn't find each other. Even with cell phones it took us a while to get it all figured out. I can't imagine what sort of nightmare it would have been without each of us having a cell phone.

We spent Friday at the soccer game. The first game ended in a 0-0 tie. It was a lot of fun to see Karin out there playing. She really enjoys playing soccer, and seems to be pretty good at it. Unfortunately, she rolled her ankle toward the end of that game and had to come out. She kept ice on it and taped it up before warming up for the second game. She returned from warm-ups early, and was fighting to hold back tears. She wasn't going to be playing in the second game. I felt really bad for her, and wished that I could somehow fix her ankle. The upside was that I got to sit and talk with her during the game. She shared a lot of stuff about her team with me that I probably never would have known otherwise. This game ended in a high scoring 1-1 tie.

The three of us spent the evening together just relaxing. I really enjoyed getting to spend time with them, something I don't get to do enough of. Karin will be thirteen in January, and it is wonderful to see her growing into a woman. Obviously she isn't all the way there yet, but she isn't the kid she used to be either.

Saturday morning I parted ways with Mari and Karin. I had coffee with Diana (One of the four most amazing women on my LAUP team) before heading out of Irvine. It was so great to see her again. We talked about all sorts of things, and probably could have talked all day. Instead, due to the limitations of reality, we cut it short after two hours.

I traveled to Claremont to visit Lydia and hear about her experience in Calcutta this summer. She wasn't there when I arrived (probably my fault for never giving her an exact time to expect me), so I got to catch up with John (Batman) for a bit. She did return home eventually, so I got to listen about all sorts of stuff from her trip. I won't go into detail about all of the stuff she told me, but it did reinforce for me how difficult my four months in Calcutta will be, as well as how much God will be working in me during my time there.

After that I headed out to Pasadena again. I visited Sergio at Harambee for an hour or two, then visited Nate Leung in Eagle Rock for another three or four hours. Eventually I drove back up to Santa Barbara.

Well, that's the condensed version of my Thanksgiving weekend. It certainly left me with a lot of people to be thankful for. To everyone that I got to see, I really enjoyed that time. You are all such a blessing to me.

Pre-Thanksgiving Post

Have a great Thanksgiving everyone! Don't expect too many posts this weekend. Take a break from the internet (yes, even my blog), and go enjoy some time with your family and friends. The internet will still be here next week (and that's something to be thankful for).

You Say Calcutta, I Say Kolkata

While reading about Calcutta, I keep seeing the words Calcutta and Kolkata used seemingly interchangeably. For quite a while I've just been scratching my head, wondering why there were two spellings for it. I no longer have to wonder! I found an answer in my favorite online encyclopedia. Calcutta was the name given to it while it was controlled by the British. It looks like the official name is now Kolkata, although the rest of the world still seems to use Calcutta.

All City Prayer Meeting

Yesterday evening I attended a prayer meeting for all of the Churches in Santa Barbara. It was really great coming together in prayer with so many Churches. We prayed through Ephesians 3:14-21. It was divided up into sections of a verse or two each, and given to pastors from different Churches. The pastors spoke briefly on their designated passage, just enough to get us started. Then they set us loose to pray in groups of three or so. Interspersed with the prayer were times of worship. It was a wonderful time of coming together in prayer as the body of Christ.

Cheaters Never Win

Last night my home group had a game night. I have to admit that I cheated and lost. I was playing Chutes and Ladders with the four-and-a-half-year-old daughter of a couple in the group. I cheated so that she missed some of the chutes, and I missed the big ladder. In the end, I still almost won, but with some more cheating, I missed the victory ladder, and she slipped in ahead of me.

I had a great time playing some other games too. During a fierce game of Cranium, I had the opportunity to act out "Hormone" for my team. Think about that for a second. How in the world do you act something like that out? Amazingly enough, my team actually figured it out. Later, between turns in a game of Taboo, I was recounting one of my favorite Taboo stories. The very next card that came up was the card I had been telling the story about.

Overall, a very fun evening of games.

Cats are amazing!

In this case, amazingly entertaining. Sasha is in a very playful mood right now, so I gave her a little tape to play with. She grabbed it off the floor with her paw, then realizing it was sticking to her, pulled her paw away as quickly as she could, sending the tape flying across the room. As soon as she saw it move like that, it was her self proclaimed duty as the hunter of the household to go after it. The cycle repeated until the tape got folded over onto itself. Now she has moved on to hunting a dangerous twisty tie.

With any luck, she won't have the energy left to hunt the two mysterious objects that appear every night at the foot of my bed.

I Remember When...

...the Christmas season didn't start until after Thanksgiving.

Today I met someone from Kid's Club over "coffee" (neither of us actually got coffee, but we did meet at Starbucks) to work on organizing the Posadas. Starbucks was already using their Christmas themed merchandise: Christmas cups, cookies, and compact disks.

What does the rush towards Christmas say about Americans? Thanksgiving is about thankfulness for what you have. The secularized, American Christmas is about getting what you want. Americans already spend the whole year wanting stuff, yet we spend very little of the year actually being thankful for what we have. Why can't we slow down and enjoy Thanksgiving before launching into Christmas?

Bugs, Bugs, and More Bugs

About a month ago at work, I was given a project to verify that a bunch of stuff in a massive program was actually doing what it was supposed to be doing. I'm basically done with that project now. My discovery was that there were a few important algorithms with suboptimal behavior. Two were fairly extreme. Even though it was a less desirable outcome for the company, it was a lot more satisfying for me to have my work uncover important bugs than if I'd found out everything worked perfectly already.

My next job: Fix those bugs.

I'm Not Last!

Tonight was the first time in four weeks that I wasn't the last person left at home group, other than the residents of the house. I could look at this as me getting better at not staying there so late, but really I stayed there just as late. Someone else just stayed even later than me. I love my home group!

Incomprehensible

This weekend I started reading The City of Joy. It is one of the assigned books for me to read in preparation for India. It is a really intense book about Calcutta. I'm having a lot of trouble comprehending that the things I'm reading are actually real. More than that, I'm trying to comprehend that in three months, I will be experiencing this in person. Although I'm only a third of the way through it, I will already highly recommend this book to anyone willing to shake up their view of the world.

Here's one of the many passages that really blew my mind. It is a passage talking about the extreme overcrowding of the city.

In a few years the city was to condemn its ten million inhabitants to living on less than twelve square feet of space per person, while the four or five million who squeezed into its slums had sometimes to make do with barely three square feet each.

I really don't know how that's possible. Sure the space gets multiplied out a bit by buildings with more than one floor, but...

There's a lot more in the book that is just beyond what I could have imagined. More and more I'm coming to realize a little bit of how intense my four months in Calcutta are going to be.

And Then There Were Five

Or six depending on how you count.

One of the members of my team for Calcutta decided that she will not be going on the trip. She has instead accepted a full time position with International Justice Mission. So now there are five of us, plus the leader of our team. If you count her, then there will be six of us. If you don't, then there are just five.

Needed: Change of Perspective

It took me 45 minutes to get to work this morning. That's about 3 times what it usually takes to get to work. Eventually I saw that one lane of traffic was blocked off because of an accident. All I could think about was how ridiculous it was that traffic completely stopped because only two of the three lanes were available. The accident caused me to lose half an hour of my morning.

Later in the day, a co-worker mentioned off hand that one person had died in the crash. That caught me off guard. I was so concerned with my 30 wasted minutes, that I didn't even give thought to the people in the accident. I didn't so much as say a quick prayer as I drove by. There are many important things in this world. Life is among them. Half an hour of my time is not.

International Day of Prayer

This Sunday, November 14th is the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. My Church is hosting a prayer meeting that day. I suspect many other Churches are as well. I encourage you to find one and go join with them in prayer this weekend.

Kid's Club IV: Preparation

Kid's club has shifted from their standard program to preparing for a Posadas celebration. I gather that this is a Mexican Christmas tradition (Help me out here Sergio). Anyway, it's a pretty big deal. We're getting the street blocked off. There's going to be a pageant, and then we'll go door to door as a group asking each house if they have room for us. Each house will say no, until we get to the last house, and then they'll let us in and they'll be a big dinner. I'm pretty excited about it. From now on, we'll be preparing for the pageant instead of having teaching times each week. If anyone happens to be in Santa Barbara on December 17th, I'm sure you'd be welcome to come partake in the celebration.

Afterwards, I offered to take a few kids home and was informed that I wasn't actually supposed to do that until I'd filled out some liability paperwork... whoops (See Kid's Club III if you missed it). I gather that some of the leaders there care a lot more about that legal stuff than others.

Birthday Dance

I enjoyed my first ever birthday dance tonight (If you don't know what that is, see the note at the bottom). It was a lot of fun! The place Ian and I went to is on the small side, so there wasn't the huge crowd of a place like Lindy Groove or Memories. I guess the confident (in terms of dancing) women must have rotated through pretty quickly, because I ended up dancing with one woman for quite a while. Eventually one of the other women grabbed me a second time. For my final words on the subject of birthday dances: anyone out there that knows Lindy, and has a birthday coming up (like say... Greg) needs to get out to a Lindy club and enjoy their own birthday dance.

To everyone that dropped me a line on my birthday (or bought me dinner), I really appreciated it. You made me feel special. If you didn't, don't worry about it. It didn't ruin my day (and you're always welcome to buy me dinner some other time). Twenty-three was much better than twenty-two. For those of you that aren't aware of how my birthday went last year, take my word for it that it wasn't the kind that you want to have.


The Note at the Bottom: For a birthday dance, everyone gets in a circle around the birthday boy / girl. They (the birthday boy / girl) start out with one partner, and then new partners cut in over the course of the song. It's the way swing dancers celebrate birthdays.

Praise Report

I got my first fund raising update from Word Made Flesh today. I'm doing quite well so far. I've almost reached my first checkpoint, which occurs on Monday, November 15th. Thank you so much to everyone for your support. God is taking care of getting me to Calcutta!

It's the Cat's Fault!

In the past twenty-four hours, I've spent about twelve hours sleeping. About three of those hours were because Sasha (Ian's adorable cat) decided she wanted to cuddle up with me, encouraging me to stay in bed longer in the morning, and take another nap instead of reading in the afternoon. As far as I'm concerned, it was time well spent.

Beach Volleyball

I got to play beach volleyball with people from Church this morning. They play regularly, so were much better than me. I still had a great time though. My team was really good about keeping me involved by giving me advice and setting up balls for me to hit. It was such a boost to my confidence when I got a good hit in, or a series of serves that resulted in a catch-up run. Weather permitting, I'll go play again next weekend!

Is Seven Weeks a Bad Hide and Seek Time When You're the Seeker?

Ok, I need to qualify this a bit. First, I wasn't seeking so much as assuming it didn't exist. Second, it wasn't hiding so much as sitting next to the fridge in the kitchen at work. However, it did take me seven weeks of working at Toyon before I noticed that we had filtered water.

Kid's Club III

I got to Kid's Club a bit late today. They were just finishing up their game, and about to start singing when I arrived. The first song was "A la la la, la la la le lujah." The kids started liking it progressively more with each verse:

1. Shake a friend's hand.
2. Scratch a friend's back.
3. Give a high five.
4. Pinch a friend's cheek.
5. Give a small poke.
6. Mess up a friend's hair.

I may have the verses in the wrong order, but that was the basic idea. The kids really loved it, even the older ones that usually don't like "little kid songs."

Instead of a talk this week, they played a quiz game. They were in two teams, each with a designated "leader" (adult). The leader's job was really to be a score keeper, in the form of "chubby bunny." One team was considerably better than the other, and won 4 - 8.

The real eye opener this week was that I got to take two boys home afterwards. It answered my question about how poor people manage to live in Santa Barbara. The first kid lived in what looked to be a very small, over crowded apartment building. The second one lived in a run down trailer park. I'd never been in a trailer park before, and although I never even got out of my truck, there was a clear separation from the rest of Santa Barbara - rich, affluent Santa Barbara. I am once again stunned at how blind I can be to poverty in America, while living so close to it.

Home Group #7

Last night at home group we studied Matthew 26:47-68; 27:11-26. There were a lot of things that struck me, but I'll restrict myself to the one that hit me closest to home.

Peter had just told Jesus that he would follow Him absolutely, even to death. He's very stubborn about following through on that. When the soldiers come to take Jesus away, Peter is right there to give His own life protecting Jesus. Peter draws his sword and attacks against overwhelming odds. He is truly putting his heart into it. Then the response comes, not from the enemy soldiers, but from Jesus, "Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword." That rebuke must have really hurt. It was an absolutely correct rebuke, but it led to Peter losing some of his passion. Just a short time later you see an entirely different Peter deny Jesus three times. He no longer has the conviction to stand with Jesus to his own death.

Here's why this really hit home for me. Towards the end of LAUP I was confronted with the fact that when I had tried to help a specific team member, I really hadn't been all that helpful. In fact, I had hurt them substancially through my actions. It would have been one thing for me to realize I was ineffective, but it was entirely another thing to realize I had caused harm while pouring myself out trying to help. My response was the same as Peter's: I gave up. I believed the lie that it was better to stop trying to love, because at least then I wouldn't hurt anyone. Fortunately I was able to confess this to my team (eventually) and receive God's healing.

Seeing that Peter fell into the same trap helped me come to a greater understanding of my own failures, as well as receive more healing. God is good.

Congratulations!

Drew, one of the members of my home group (Reason #2) has been clean of drugs and alcohol for nine months as of today. Praise God!

Not the Way to Live

I was talking to my boss this morning. He didn't come into work this weekend. If you read my last post, then you know that neither did I. The difference is that this was the first time he's taken a day off in about three weeks. On top of that, he was working 12+ hour days. That's getting pretty extreme, even by my standards as a Mudder. I'm not condemning him for doing that. If anything, I'll condemn our American standard that makes it "ok" to work those sorts of hours. I really hope that I never end up putting myself though that just to meet some deadline at work. If something is going to be keeping me that busy, it better be God.