My first shot in 25 years

I had a chance to use the shooting range today. It's my first time using live ammo since my dad took me when I was in high school, about 25 years ago. Not bad results, if I say so myself. Might be related to all those video games, not that I've played them in 15 years either, though.

Each hit is circled in red in the photo above, but the first hit is pointed at, too. Four to the chest, one to the head, and 6 to the shoulder. Eleven shots, seven yards, zero misses.

Since I'm moving to Kentucky next month and they allow anyone of age and in good standing to carry a firearm (link), I thought it good to try my hand again.

Leaving a Fortune 100 corporation for a Christian apologetic ministry

God is good. All the time. No matter what happens to me or my family. But it sure is cool when He chooses to bless me. Which happens all the time, but sometimes are more dramatic than others. Recently I had one of those times. Here's the story. (It's clearly not the short version, but it's not the long version either.)

Background

I worked at a Fortune 100 corporation for 19.5 years. I was hired by them right out of college. (My testimony about that experience, and how God was clearly involved, was documented on my website, here.) In the early years of our marriage, my wife and I heard about Ken Ham and his desire to build a $100 million museum dedicated to encouraging people the Bible is full of real history, especially Genesis 1-11. When construction was completed in 2007, we went as soon as we could. We rented an RV and made it part of a wonderful family vacation.

Creation Museum gardens

The way I describe to everyone what the museum is like is to compare it to the 1993 Steven Spielberg movie, Jurassic Park. In that movie, there was a scene when they first arrived on the island. There was a small caravan of Jeeps driving and they suddenly stop. The main characters abruptly stop talking and stare, mouths open. The camera shifts and pans to reveal a humongous dinosaur, eating from the trees.

A scene from Jurassic Park

The John Williams music starts, and the camera pans again across an entire field full of dinosaurs. The emotional set up is just awesome, brilliant even. And the visuals, which are still acceptable today (almost 30 years later) were beyond excellent for their time. That same level of awe and excellence is what the Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky inspires. Only in this case, the awe it inspires is in the Bible, or more specifically in how God has been at work in human and universal history.

That guy, Ken Ham, founded an organization named Answers in Genesis before he built the museum. They are responsible for the museum, which was an instant success. It was so popular, that within the first couple years after it opened they were already thinking about how to take their mission to the next level. Their answer was to build a life-sized replica of Noah's Ark. To do this they would need a lot more land. So they bought some about 45 minutes south of the museum. After raising more funds, they built another $100 million museum, which happens to be the largest wooden structure in the world. This museum is the centerpiece of a larger theme park that is intended to [eventually] deliver a similar experience as Disney World, only with a lot more purpose than simply entertaining.

My family and I were able to visit the Ark the fall after it opened, in 2016. While making the hotel reservations, I asked the receptionist how business was doing since the Ark opened. She said for a month and a half after the grand opening, there was not a room available in 30 miles. There are over 50 hotels in that area.

Ark Encounter opening season (top 2) Creation Museum main entrance (bottom)

Then this last summer (2019) my wife and I took our kids on our 8th visit to the museum and our 2nd visit to the Ark. While there, I found myself thinking "I could see myself moving here to work with these people." But I was thinking in like 10 or 20 years.

One of the top reasons I've always appreciated the Creation Museum, the Ark Encounter, and Answers in Genesis as a whole, is they aren't just a bunch of religious zealots who spout "believe what we believe because we believe it!" The organization is run by a bunch of level headed people who know how to engage PhDs and use science to confirm the Bible. They are very explicit that they start with the Bible because it is truly the recorded word of the living God, and then they discover how science confirms it. They don't start with man's ideas of science (which are always changing) and then fit the Bible on top of that. They start with the Bible and show that all observable reality fits, whether archaeology, astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, logic, math, physics, etc. And they do it in a way that a child can understand.

One of the exhibits inside the Ark

Change of plans

The day before Thanksgiving, I got an unexpected email. My company leadership was planning ahead. Our customers, through no fault of ours, were going to have a hard year. Another hard year. This meant our company was going to have a hard year. And the fastest way to deal with such difficulty is to lower the salary overhead. But this is a great company, and people weren't fired. As a precaution they offered a program. Anyone who got the invitation to leave would be given a generous incentive package if they permanently left. I got the invitation. I had no desire to leave, and was not compelled to. But I did realize this was a very unique opportunity. I thought to myself, "there's only one place in the world for which I would give up this sweet deal of a job I have here." Of course, I was thinking of Answers in Genesis, builders of the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter. But I wasn't going to take company time to look into it, and filed the email away. After Thanksgiving was done (Sunday evening) I mentioned the invitation to my wife. I didn't tell her what I was thinking about it, I just mentioned it to get her honest response. The only thing she said was "Answers in Genesis?" so we prayed about it (together and out loud).

This wasn't the first time we'd prayed something like this. On numerous occasions in the last decade we've asked God if He wanted to use us in another part of the country by transferring us inside the same company. A good six to twelve months of this same prayer had preceded an offer a little over a decade ago to transfer from one of our factories (where my career had begun) to the corporate office. Since then on numerous occasions we've prayed a similar prayer, and God's response was always "no, you are right where I want you." So, we once again prayed "God, if you want us to go [to Kentucky], then make it easy. If you don't want us to go, then make it not easy." Then I went to the AiG website, browsed their open positions, and applied for the one that looked the most aligned to my experience and skill, which was a project manager position in one of their IT departments.

Exactly 9.9 years earlier, I had my only quasi-professional experience with AiG. I went on a mission trip with them to the Vancouver Olympics. (It was my wife's idea that she would stay home and watch the 3 kids by herself while I go off and do this cool thing with a bunch of cool people.)

Vancouver Olympics mission trip, Jan 2010

The point is, I met a guy there. Not just any guy, but he happened to work in the same town, in the same building, and for that same Fortune 100 corporation as me! We'd never met each other before then, but God used this mission trip to connect us. He runs a local creation science apologetics ministry and has invited to town guest speakers from AiG numerous times in the last decade. I have attended them with one of my kids a few times.

So after applying online, I immediately told this same friend. I told him I was willing to leave the company, had just applied at AiG, and asked if he had any contacts there then I'd appreciate him putting in a good word for me. I knew he must know someone there, because he's invited guest speakers over. Little did I know, he knew their president. He sent a brief, positive recommendation email, and the president forwarded it on with a simple comment to make sure my application was noticed.

By the third or fourth phone call with the hiring manager for that project manager position, he said to me "you're not really a project manager, are you?" Then he asked "have you ever heard of a Business Analyst?" It's been 19 years since I needed a resume. So I rebooted mine that same night after my wife and I prayed about the voluntary separation invitation. In my haste, I'd listed the detail that I earned a Master's degree, but had left out my area of study. I informed him "yes, that's what my Master's degree emphasis was." He said "good, we've been needing that kind of skill for a long time," and he was interested in creating a new position on his team for me to fill.

What?? We all know (hopefully) that God is given credit as being able to work miracles, and otherwise just have an amazing way of timing things. But I don't think we all appreciate how that's not just an academic or theologic ethereal concept. It's real. God isn't in the business of paint by numbers. (If we do this then He's not obligated to do that.) He's much more relational. He cares about each of us individually and wants to be accepted as part of our lives. And even when we acknowledge that God is good all the time, we all hear "no" and "later" a lot, so it's sure fun when He says "yes." Especially on something big.

So the next step was to tell the kids. Before I accepted a career change, I wanted the kids to feel as if they had at least a little say. We had a family meeting and brought the kids up to speed on what was happening and what looked like was about to happen. In short, they were on board. The next day I had to tell my boss I was leaving. I scheduled an informal talk in the café (not in use at the time) and told him there. He took it well, as I suspect he (and all managers) was coached to. In all the stress and hustle of what was going on, I had forgotten that a decade prior, when we both lived in the previous town, we served on the same tech team at the same church (it was a big team at a big church and we never really saw each other). Small world. He of course was sad to see me go, but excited for such a leap of faith I was proposing. The term "bitter sweat" came up, and would be used countless times in the next couple days, weeks, and months.

But there were a lot of details to iron out. Was I for real, applying out of the blue, offering to give up a six-figure salary in a multinational corporation with 60,000 employees with factories in 10 countries to work for a ministry with 600 employees with brick and mortar in only 1 state? Were they for real wanting my specific skills and experiences? I flew out on New Year's day to talk with the hiring manager. I wish I'd gotten a better photo than this:

Interviewing on site

We spent the whole day together and we ended it with dinner with his boss. All went great, we both concluded that we were both for real, and God was clearly at work in both of our lives. That weekend he submitted the paperwork to HR to create the new position for me.

Wrapping up one chapter

I'm not the only business analyst in the world. It's such a common thing that I was able to find a Master's program in it. But yet, it's still not that common. Further, it's actually more rare for an organization to prioritize having a business analyst than it is to find a business analyst. But finding the right person who's the right fit for the organization can be deceptively tricky. While God chose to "bless our socks off" with the upcoming transition, don't think everything in our lives is fairytale worthy. This blessing only came after a lot of brokenness, and that brokenness emphasizes God's involvement in this whole transition.

In 2013, my wife and our oldest daughter flew with me to China to adopt a little boy.

The lobby of the Garden Hotel in Guangzhou, China 

He turned out to have more challenges than anyone knew. He is non-verbal and didn't cope well with how he spent the first 3 years of his life. (He was raised in an orphanage.)  By early 2020, he has been with us for almost 7 years, and is about 9 and a half years old. But in many ways (certainly not all, and not all the time) he still has the maturity of a 3-year-old. In case you're wondering, it's more difficult than it sounds to raise a human who has the self-discipline of a 3-year-old yet the physical and intellectual skill (resourcefulness) of a 9-year-old. Yes, my wife is a saint.

After he'd been with us for two years (and he was 5) we tried sending him to preschool. While we'd sent all three of our girls to preschool, since my wife homeschooled all four of the kids then, our primary motivation for sending the boy to preschool was to give him reinforcement from other adults how he should behave. Unfortunately, that intention backfired. Perhaps I'll write a blog article going into the detail some time, but it's not the point now. I'll save you the time reading if you trust me that we were very frustrated by not just one school, but three. Each of these three schools had their positives. I'm not a mean brute. In their own way, they were fine. But their arrogance of skill for my special needs son was completely ridiculous, their ability to help was wholly inadequate, and their results were often disaster that my wife and I were stuck doing the damage control on. The insight was we were working with perfectly good people with adequate skill and intelligence to deliver on what we needed, but they had a critical flaw that was too embarrassing to admit. That flaw was they were broke. Organizations that are broke have a difficult time handling people who don't fit the one size fits all paradigm. It's especially offensive to call organizations with multiple million-dollar budgets in the richest nation on earth, "broke." But that was more the problem than the individual teachers and administrators who worked with my son. Their financial situation dictated how much resources they could spend on him, and when that wasn't enough their choice was to admit inadequacy or blame him for being too difficult. Sadly, they always chose the latter, and this conscious choice was the source of our annoyance as much as anything else.

Besides school, my son didn't fit in well at church, either. To make a long story short and avoid criticizing people who have more good than bad, the Sunday before Thanksgiving of 2019 was the first Sunday in 9 years that I'd chosen to try another church. And that same week (3 days later) I got the invitation email to take a voluntary separation. Is that God's timing or what?

The other point is, life is not all peaches and roses, even when wonderful blessings from God are poured out. God often breaks things before He blesses them, and it's in this brokenness that it's most important that we remember God is good all the time, no matter what happens to us. My family's lives were in significant turmoil, so when we prayed that Sunday night after I told my wife about the voluntary separation invitation, it was not just some academic prayer of "God, if you want us to go, then make it easy, and if you don't want us to go, then make it not easy." We were very serious. If God wanted us to stay in this deeply frustrating town longer, then we would. But if it was within His will to let us go try somewhere different, we'd love that.

Great timing

Not all our reasons for leaving were frustrations. There were at least a couple that were just plain great.  For one, all 3 of my girls have been taking Tae Kwon Do for over two years. They've been working hard to earn their black belts. They passed the final test and successfully earned these honors during the window in which I was able to accept the voluntary separation. It took them 27 months to earn their black belts. I had no idea I was going to get the invitation, and the invitation had a limited window of only 3 weeks. By completing this milestone training here (all in one town) makes a very clean break for them.  Praise God for His good timing.

Similarly, my oldest daughter is planning to go to college this fall. There are 3 colleges in the community in which we live. We looked at all 3, hoping one of them would suit her. We also looked at a couple farther away. In November, she decided she liked the one farthest away. We were a little sad she didn't pick one more conveniently closer to home. Then all this happened and we decided we're moving to Kentucky, 6.5 hours away. The university she had chosen (before I even got the voluntary separation invitation) is almost halfway between our old home and our new home. Whoa!

If our son's school situation wasn't clearly headed south (for the third time in three tries), or our daughter had chosen to attend any of the colleges in town, or our church was able to meet my family where we are, then any of these may have caused us to just pass on the invitation. But God has His way of pointing us in new directions we otherwise might think are crazy.

Goodwill

As I've made clear, I wasn't planning to leave my company, nor my many friends whom I'd made over 19.5 years, nor the legacy I'd been building up over that time. I'm the kind of guy that my leadership and my colleagues told me countless times they wished they could clone me. I was the only one who knew how to do certain things. Not a safe scenario to allow in a global corporation. I'd asked my bosses every year for the last 10 years (I've had 4 over that time) to have a contingent or a student who could be my understudy. But the answer was always a flat no, we can't afford that. The party line was "this isn't quantum physics. If you leave we'll hire someone and limp along for a few months, but we'll manage." Unfortunately, the terms of the voluntary separation I accepted specifically denied my department the ability to backfill me. This wasn't my problem, but none-the-less, I worked 80 hours that week between New Year's and my last day of work. (The last day of work was dictated by the terms of the voluntary separation, and not my choice.) I've put in a lot of unpaid overtime over the last few years, but haven't worked an 80 hour week in over a decade (when I was helping my factory upgrade ERPs in 2006). But I did a few weeks ago, because I didn't want to leave my friends stranded without me. I got zero overtime pay for those extra 40 hours I put in (and I knew that before I did it.) This translated to five 12 hour days, plus 10 hours on Saturday and 10 more hours on Sunday. Even in those 80 hours I still didn't get everything done, but my friends, and my legacy, were left in better shape than if I had just up and left. There are plenty of smart, talented people I worked with, and between those left after the volsep, they'll cover just fine. This was a wonderful opportunity for me to get out of their way (as much as they appreciated and relied on me) so leadership can see the other talent in our department. All large organizations have their issues, but as corporations go, the one I left is a great one. I wish them success in their professional mission and in their private endeavors.

A final photo as I left my office on my last day of work

Then there's the salary. My wife and I had committed to giving a full tithe before I'd started my job at this corporation in the spring of 2000. Early on, she was working too, and we tithed both our gross incomes the full 10%. Then when the first kid came, she stopped working, we were down to one income, and we still tithed the full amount, trusting God would make it work. A pastor at church said he and his wife challenged themselves to give another 1% every year. So over the next 5 years, we upped our tithe 1% per year until it got to 15%. It's been over a decade like that now. Within a week of it hitting the bank, I had already given a full 15% of my severance package away to various explicit Christian ministries and missionaries whom we already know and trust, and we will continue to tithe at least 10% with the new job at AiG, even though I will be bringing home less than half as much as I did when I worked for the corporation. Because 90% (or less) with God's blessing is better than 100% without it and, like 15 years ago, we still trust God will make it work. Because God is good, all the time, no matter what happens to me and my family.

Maybe I'll write another post about God's involvement in our housing and other aspects of the transition, later. There's plenty more good stuff to share...

Star wars ep. 3: a better idea (than Lucas had)

Add long time ago in a galaxy far far away...

So in 2005 when episode 3 came out the whole world was wondering what would cause this cute/ handsome/ young Anakin with so much going for him to turn to the dark side and into Darth Vader? We knew from episode 2 that he had a (not so) secret and forbidden love for Padme, and we knew from the original trilogy that he had kids with her, and she didn't survive to episode 4. So there was no question of what had to be accomplished in episode 3, it was just a matter of how.

[Warning, spoiler alert]

So how's Lucas do it? (Or at least, how does it end up after the forces of Hollywood produce it?) Anakin is freed from slavery and raised for ten years by the Jedi, but then turns his back on them because he realizes his girl friend is going to die in labor? Are you KIDDING ME? This from the movie series where Darth Vader cuts off his own son's hand and a day later Luke has a fully functional prosthetic? HELLO? How many of our mothers in the 20th century had cesarean sections to deliver complicated births? I'm sorry, but I walked out of the theater opening weekend in 2005 saying "that was so stupid! What a let down." But I'm the kind of guy who likes to put his money where his mouth is, so here's my better idea.

I don't care how the writers or director want to accomplish the story flow, but here are the highlights of what _I_ would have made sure was accomplished/ revealed in episode 3.

1. Before he was senator, as part of a bribe or even premeditated assassination/ betrayal of his predecessor, Mr Palpatine has a short visit to Tatooine. There he gets distracted by a girl, has a one night stand, and rather than be dull and simply kill her, he figures out how to sell her into slavery to cover his tracks. But he's already a Sith, so he uses his skill with the Force to wipe her memory of the night. Time gets short to fulfill his real reason for being there and he forgets to check if he created an offspring. And he never bothered to learn her last name.

2. Jedi are formidable in man-to-man combat, but when they're passengers on a starship they're as vulnerable as any man. Palpatine should have found out about Anakin and Padme and manipulated/ lied to Anakin to make him think the Jedi were going to harm Padme or somehow separate them. Simultaneously he should have found a reason to get the Jedi to all go on a ship somewhere, all except Anakin. Palpatine should have attempted to kill Padme but either make it happen over time or simply half fail and only mortally wound her so she could still deliver her babies. He'd have to do it in such a way that he never got close enough to notice she was pregnant and in such a way so as to blame it on the Jedi. (Perhaps she has an 'accident' and falls, and had Anakin been there he'd have able to rescue her but he was off on some menial mission for Yoda and Palpatine made sure Anakin was thinking of Padme when she fell so he'd know about it but be just too far away to get there and he'd feel helpless like when his mother died. Then Palpatine could send Anakin in a small ship with big weapons to "hunt down and destroy the Jedi" in revenge, as Obiwan said in episode 4. By taking out their ship he'd take care of them all at once, and Obiwan and Yoda could have some embarrassing reason they weren't on the ship (unbeknownst to Anakin and Palpatine). This would be superior to the Jedi being betrayed and overcome by mundane clones.

Of course if you're familiar with the Oedepus story, you can see what a twist this plot line would cause. Think about episode 6 and Palpatine and Vader trying to kill Luke and go after Leia and Luke convincing Vader to instead kill Palpatine. Talk about a messed up family. Sadly, that's actually fairly believable in today's world.

3. Then there's the whole deal of "Master Sifodeous" creating the clone army for the Republic and conveniently dying a little later. Yoda and Windu seem familiar with him in Episode 2, if Lucas had filled the rest of us in in episode 3 on who he was and why he did such a thing then that's called suspense or a cliff hanger. But when he didn't, that's called a gaping plot whole. It would be fitting if Sifodeous was Palpatine's Jedi Master (instructor). And then there's that lame comment from Mace Windu to Yoda about the Jedi's ability to use the Force deminishing. What?? Another unexplained plot whole that my better idea is to just leave out (of episode 2), I see no way to salvage that idea.

Do you think my idea is better than what you saw in the theater? I'd like to know.

Memories from Nanjing

We started the process of adoption in January of 2012. We might have finished a year later but Christmas slowed down the USA portion and Chinese New Year slowed down the Chinese portion. In January 2013, at one point I set a countdown timer on my phone, hoping we'd travel and be back by March 1. We didn't leave before then, but coincidentally we got notified of our Consulate appointment on March 1, which was the very last thing we needed before buying airline tickets.

We had no lines in O'Hare.

It was a nice flight from Chicago to Beijing except a bumpy, quezy landing. Pickle was a great traveller. You and mommy had noise canceling headphones, daddy just used the provided ones. The plane had 9 seats across and we sat comfortably in economy plus, with one window, middle, and aisle seat. I brought a splitter so two people could listen to the same movie at once. Pickle watched Madagascar 3 with mommy then Wreck it Ralph with daddy. She played Bejeweled 2 a lot in between movies. Mommy had Finding Nemo going and fell asleep, Pickle half watched, listened, and played Bejeweled. Later after a nap mommy watched the first three of the four Pirates of the Caribbean movies and daddy watched the remake of Total Recall.

We had no lines in the Beijing airport layover either.

Smooth transition to hotel, though guide wasn't there at first and substitute showed up delayed by someone double parked and then traffic. If we weren't experienced we'd have been worried, but we're experienced. Our guide, Savor (pronounced See-va) was great, giving us recommendations and schedules.

The three of us went to the Purple Mountain Park Plumb Festival on Sunday. It was pretty, but difficult to find where we wanted to go without being able to read anything. The concierge got us a taxi and we ended up walking a slightly wrong way (west rather than north) but we asked someone where we were and found our way to Ming's Tomb. The weather was nice but colder than expected and by that time Pickle was pretty cold so we went back to the hotel. Later we had Pizza Hut for dinner. They actually had cheese and peperoni pizzas on the menu. (That's normal in the USA of course but we've been to Pizza Huts in China and Taiwan before that didn't.)

Monday morning we went to some city office and Coco and Sung had Daniel waiting for us at the front steps.

Afterwards we returned to the hotel and took a little walk. We sort of went looking for Walmart but it was farther than we wanted to walk. We got my favorite picture by the river (not that you can tell it was taken by a river). We ate lunch at McDonald's and found out you love spoons and have no interest in even the smallest pieces of french fries or chicken chunks. The rest of us ate McDonald's chicken mcnuggets for four lunches this week.

We went to a mall only one block away with an orange wall facing the street. We went for lunch (we found a McDonald's there) and to look for shoes for the boy. The orphanage had given you to us with good clothes but we figured we'd return them since we have plenty. The only shoe store we found that had kid shoes was a Crocks store. Your big sister also got a Hello Kitty pair. They were $60 each pair. Ouch, but only shoes we could find on short notice and limited mobility. Pickle was such a good traveller and big sister that we were happy to treat her, though we used up our cash on hand and I went back to the hotel to get more. We went back for dinner at Subway and the fountains were all little up. These were some of my other favorite photos from the trip.

While Savor took someone else to their orphanage far away, Nancy took us to ours on Thursday. Nancy is the same lady who helped last June. We got lots of pictures of where you spent all your time and we were happy to see what kind of food you were used to since you weren't eating much of what we offered you. You're used to an Oatmeally consistency congy/rice/veggie/meat mashup. It was also nice to meet the nanny who took care of you the most. She was very nice.

Thursday night when I sat on the couch to feed the boy his bottle I crossed my leg and he did the same :)

Friday night we flew to Guangzhou and had a half hour drive to the hotel. Many of the buildings were covered in lights. I wonder if it's like how corporations in the USA have lots of land but that's impossible (impractical) in China so they deck out their buildings instead. Just a guess.

Are you sure you're American?

A friend at work asked me this at the end of lunch on Friday. She's a Muslim girl who I've had the privilege of eating and talking with a few times over the last half year or so. We work in the same building. We disagree on a few things, but that doesn't limit our ability to be friends (in a cursory sense). For example, months ago, Israel came up, and she said she suspected she disagreed with me so strongly that we better not discuss it, so we skipped that topic. Just this last Friday she said she'd gone home to the Middle East over the Christmas holiday (since our company gives us a whole week off thanks to the union and old-school-Midwest influences). She said that, while there, she had met with an old friend and debated her heavily against the merits of homeschooling.

Her reasons were standard. She didn't use the word specifically, but I told her that her arguments are typically summed up in my experience by one word: socialization. I explained my wife and my reasons for homeschooling our kids (perhaps that'll make a good, separate, post sometime) and by the time I was done I had convinced her that the world is a very different place than when we grew up and homeschooling is a good idea. When I explained all of our reasons, she was so surprised how much she agreed with me that was when she asked "are you sure you're an American?"  I took that as a great compliment, and she confirmed that was how she meant it.  I guess she's only heard about the stupid things Americans say and do (and from her perspective, she probably has reason to associate American stupidity and Christian stupidity together) and I hate to admit, but there are a lot of stupid things we all do.

That goes both ways though. Most Americans think everyone in the Middle East is a friend of what we call terrorists (or worse, they may actually be a terrorist), but that's just an erroneous assumption. See this article from a Saudi journalist.  We all have a lot of learning to do, and I hope in the moment we can remember to give each other grace.

My experience in a (four) Chinese hospitals

(This was written on Tuesday, June 26, on my last day in the hosipital, but couldn't be posted until I returned home.)

On Thursday, June 21, I was in Beijing, China.  I had been in China for almost two weeks.  My friend checked me into the nearest hospital ER (emergency room) a few minutes past midnight.  Praise God the doctor on duty for the night shift could speak English (this was a local hospital, not a big one) and the cardiac specialist could also speak English.  I went in because my stomach was feeling really bad.

A few days prior, on Sunday night, I was in Jiamusi (very northern China) and my friend took me out that night after we checked into our hotel.  There was a street fair going on (kind of like an annual town party up and down a few blocks of the street).  We walked around and my friend bought some local food being cooked on the street.  It looked like an omelet wrapped in a lasagna type noodle and put in a cup.  We watched him cook it, then my friend gave it to me.  I said something like "yeah right" and he said it's a Jiamusi unique food and I should try it because it's very good.  He had bought one for me and him, and we had watched it get cooked, so I said I'd try it.  Then we took two steps over and he wanted another (what I would call) exotic food that looked like a squawker of little squid tentacles.  We watched it get cooked and then when he asked for two I knew what was coming next.  Again he said this was unique in all of China and it's good so I should try it.  The first thing I thought was I have no drink.  If this is revolting, I'm stuck with it.  But he insisted and had bought it already and we watched it get cooked, so I accepted it.  I sampled both and that night I woke up in the middle of the night with diarrhea.  I took a pill of antibiotics that the company nurse had given me a few weeks prior and instructed me to take if I got traveler's diarrhea.  The diarrhea didn't return and I took the pills twice a day for two days.  That left me with two pills left which I saved for the trip home, which was the upcoming Saturday.  However on Wednesday (the day I stopped taking the pills) I started feeling bad in the mid afternoon.  I took a nap from 6-11pm and woke up at 11 with a really bad feeling in my stomach.  Specifically the top of my stomach, like I needed to throw up but for some reason couldn't.  It felt so bad that I was honestly concerned for my life.  Oddly, it wasn't "painful" like you might think, it just felt really really "bad," as unspecific as I'm sure that sounds.  It was midnight where I was but back home it was noon, and my company nurse would be online.  So I instant messaged with her and she suggested I start the last dose of that medicine, and I did.  But it was going to take up to a couple hours to take effect and I'd obviously need more to last me until Sunday, and I was feeling really bad, so I asked my friend to take me to the hospital.

By the time the hospital had taken their blood test and gotten the results, the antibiotics had kicked in and my stomach felt almost fine again.  But the blood tests were very alarming to the doctors.  They thought I had in process or had just had an acute myocardial infarction.  I had no idea what that was, and I felt fine so all I wanted was more antibiotics to make it through the rest of the week and I figured I'd check with the doctor when I returned home.  But while waiting for another test to come back I looked up the definition of this problem they said I had on my free Merriam Webster's Dictionary on my phone and it only had two words.  That was all it needed to say.  It means "heart attack," so though I felt fine, I decided it was too risky to ignore their concerns and let them do what they thought needed to be done.  The staff took an ECG (electro cardio gram) and were even more concerned.  The blood test showed that three enzymes were up ridiculously high.  (Later, a friend from home whom I called said this was evidence that my heard muscles were dying.)  They had me take some aspirin and after the first two (with no water) the doctor said I should chew the next three.  Not fun.  I almost gagged and threw it all up.  But I appreciate his attempt to keep me alive.  I asked them to write down in English what statistics they had seen that worried them so much and called my mom, since she's a retired registered nurse.  I gave her the stats and she was of course concerned.  My colleagues who were with me were trying to get a hold of my doctor in the USA but weren't successful for various reasons.  This hospital wasn't prepared to do anything further and I was transferred to an international hospital later in the morning (probably about the time most of us were waking up).  But when they found out I was there because there was a strong chance I had had a heart attack, they immediately sent me to a specialty hospital.

At the specialty hospital they did more tests and were sure I needed an angiogram.  (This is where they make an incision in your groin and stick a fiber optic camera up one of your arteries all the way to your heart and take a look from the inside.)  It was hours between when I arrived and when I went in for surgery.  I got the feeling later that financial details were being worked out but I didn't care, I wasn't in a hurry to go in and I didn't want to know what it would cost.  So I laid there almost flat on a bed for many hours.  Fortunately for me I had I think 4 coworkers there who cared about my health.  This was my first experience in a Chinese public hospital.  Really my first experience in any public hospital.  I was in a room with seven other people with curtains dividing the room (sort of).  I had to use the restroom and instead of being brought a wheel chair they brought a custom shaped bucket and said I should go in that.  Yeah right.  Perhaps it's standard to do that worldwide when you're stuck in a hospital bed for fear of any biological movement to exceed an invisible threshold and kill you, but I've never done it and wasn't excited to try.  So one of my colleagues got me a portable potty and I was allowed to get off the bed to sit on the potty four inches away from the bed.  This guy helped me go potty (including holding the curtains so I had a semblance of privacy) and then literally carried the mess away for me.  What a friend!

I went into surgery at exactly noon, and they finished about 12:45.  They were expecting to find 95% or more blockage, but praise God they found 0% blockage.  I was awake during the procedure and only had local anesthetics because the doctor wanted me awake so I could tell him if I felt any pain where it wasn't expected.  Not the most comfortable activity of my life, but the local anesthesia was essentially effective and there was no significant pain.  After the surgery I spent the next six hours laying in a hospital bed (which is very normal for angiogram recovery).  It was a room with seven other beds, though the one next to me wasn't filled while I was there, and the beds were separated by a curtain like the previous room.  While in bed I just couldn't win.  It was a firm mattress (if you call it a mattress) and when I was flat on my back, my spine hurt (as it has for years whenever I lay like that).  So I got the doctor to agree to my laying with head and feet slightly elevated, which made my spine feel fine.  But then I just couldn't lay there any longer without going crazy and after a couple hours asked if I returned the bed to a flat position if I could lay on my side.  It took a couple times asking before he thought it was safe, but eventually he did.  Then that got old and I returned to the somewhat laying position.  I spent an hour or two like that and felt fine this time, but then realized both my wrists had gotten completely stuck in a bent position, presumably from laying the same way for so long (though that has never happened before and I've laid in the same position for longer).  It took a full hour of gently urging back to a straight position before they were normal again.  My fingers worked during this time, but my wrist was unable to obey movement commands.  I asked one of my colleagues to ask the nurse (who didn't speak English) for a washcloth soaked in hot water to help the restoration of my wrists.

After the six hours were up they suspected I'd want to change hospitals.  A doctor from the International SOS (a global healthcare coordination company my company works with) arrived and offered if I wanted to go to a more "western" style hospital in town or if I wanted to be "air ambulanced" to a hospital in Hong Kong.  I figured if I was going to fly, I'm flying home, so across town would be fine.  They decided that since the next day (Friday) was a holiday that traffic would be worse than normal in Beijing, so I should be transferred to the next hospital ASAP, even though the city's rush hour still wasn't over at the time (7pm).

So an ambulance showed up shortly after my 6 hours in bed were up and took me to the fourth and final hospital of my adventure.  It was interesting going to so many hospitals.  You can probably tell by the style of my writing in this post that I'm a factual and logical kind of guy.  So as I was being carried on stretchers (both ambulance and hospital kind) I couldn't help but notice what it was like to actually be the one on one of these things, just like I see on TV (especially since my wife likes to watch murder mystery TV shows).

I was admitted to the ER, and requested to use the restroom immediately.  I felt like I was going to explode.  They let me go and then I figured out the fun way that by taking anti-diarrhea medicine I was now constipated.  Great.  So they helped me back to a private room in the ER and asked me the usual questions of the day (do you smoke, do you drink, do you do drugs, do you or your family members have any history of heart disease).  Whenever I'd say "no" to both the smoking and drinking questions all the nurses would raise their eyebrows in surprise and go "huh?" and often they'd say "you are a good man."  My colleagues were there with me, I think five of them.  The staff decided I didn't need the ER services and quickly upgraded me to the ICU (intensive care unit).  They did the usual tests (blood sample, blood pressure, pulse, ECG, oxygen ratio, and heart ultrasound) and we called it a night.  By the time all these were done it was 11:00pm, 24 hours since I had last woken up.

Considering what seemed to be going on, my experience of the day was very nice.  All the doctors who've seen me have spoken English, my colleagues in country here have done a fantastic job of keeping me company and watching over me in my many times of need.  My boss back home in the USA has assured me to worry about nothing and she'll take care of everything.  People from the ISOS company have offered options, advice, and help coordinating anything I'd like, though my local colleagues have been taking care of enough for me.  (By the way, the term "local" isn't exactly right, because they all live and work 2 hours away in TEDA (tianjin economic development area, but they came to Beijing to help me).  The nurses who don't speak English have tried their best to meet my needs and explain what they need me to do, and were very nice about it.  All the doctors were very courteous and seemed to genuinely care about making me healthy, even when I looked very skeptically at them that I had any problem of the magnitude they suggested since I felt fine.  The nurse who rode in the last ambulance with me was very nice and talkative, which was exactly what I needed since I had to go to the bathroom so bad and needed a distraction.  I don't really know what it's like to literally be a prince, but I'm sure it feels like this.  (Not that a prince would want to be hospitalized, but if you're going to, this was great care.)  I think six people from work have kept me company each day.  Three of them had cell phones that could call home and I was able to call wife every twelve hours the whole time, as well as occasionally updating mom and boss.

The ICU room was a huge private room.  It was big enough for at least a dozen people and equipment, with a private bathroom.  That stay only lasted a day, and I don't remember much from Friday.  I do remember that walking was not easy, a few steps was as far as I could go without help.  The only practice I got was walking in the bathroom (which wasn't more than a few steps, but that was enough).  At first they wheel chaired me all the way to the stall, then by the next day I was able to walk across the little room, barely.  For those of you logical people like me out there, it's curious why my body didn't function.  The difficulty was mainly the discomfort of the angiogram healing, which wasn't "painful" but rather uncomfortable, but I didn't want to cause damage (which would surely be painful) before it was done healing.  Having one or two IV's (intervenes) sticking out of you doesn't make it easier, either.  Saturday morning I was doing well enough that I was upgraded again to the general ward.  On the way we stopped by the x-ray department and they confirmed there was a problem with my lower lungs, probably a bacterial infection.  The new room was still private, not quite as big (but big enough) and with more character (not a huge sterile white room) and just as many (if not more) features (including big screen TV, sink, private bathroom, and fold out love seat).  I spent almost four days here and it felt like a dorm room, because there were always between 1-4 other people here, we had a TV (which we didn't watch) and we were in a big building on a floor with a bunch of other people and girls (nurses and other workers) came and went all the time.

Saturday afternoon I was able to walk around the room without difficulty, but I could tell that was going to be as far as I got that day.  Sunday I walked down the short end of the hallway and was able to shower for the first time since Wednesday morning.  This was the first time I showered since it was the first time I could stand long enough (though they had one of those shower seats so I didn't have to literally stand the whole time).  Monday I walked down the long end of the hallway and walked to radiology in the next building over, where they rechecked my lungs.  (After three days of antibiotics on Monday my lungs were fine.)

Saturday I still couldn't talk on the phone very long without getting tired.  This is a really weird feeling for someone who's used to being healthy.  (Also, in case you don't know or don't remember, Beijing is 13 hours ahead of Chicago, so when I'd call home at night it was their time to wake up, and when I'd call when I woke up they were going to bed.)  My breathing on Friday and Saturday was often short unless I intentionally slowed it down.  It didn't feel bad to breath slow, but if I forgot about it I would breath fast (short).  I had my friends read to me in the morning but then realized my brain couldn't stand sensory data and had to ask them to stop.  All the lights were turned off and though I have a ton of music on my phone I just couldn't listen to it.  We talked sporadically because that involved short gaps rather than a continuous stream of sight or sound like recorded media has.

Sunday was relatively quiet.  Between one and three friends were around most of the day.  My friend tried reading to me but it was getting too much, so I asked her to read me anything she wanted in Chinese, so my brain wouldn't be able to "process" what she was saying, but I could close my eyes (they still for some reason were tired) and her voice would keep me company.  The rest of what happened that day I already explained above.

Monday afternoon I went to radiology while my friends went out to lunch.  When I got back I looked through the stack of DVDs they have in the room and found one that I thought I'd try.  I started it but then my friends returned and I turned it off to not waste my time with them.  That evening after they all left (but one) I resumed the movie.  It was "It's Complicated."  By Hollywood standards it's probably a great movie.  But by Christian and otherwise generally human standards it stunk.  The reason I kept watching it was it created a great opportunity to discuss these normally difficult and tender concepts with my friend, who is at least ten years younger than me.  I paused the movie I think three times so we could discuss how much people want to choose both their actions and their consequences, but we only get to choose the former and we're stuck with the later.  We discussed how wrong adultery is, even though the movie didn't come out and say it (that stupid movie even hinted that the opposite may be true).

I talked to my Cardiologist, Dr. Bai, this morning and she confirmed I did not have a "heart attack."  The data we had on Thursday morning (the blood test with elevated enzymes and the EKG) did point to one, but subsequent data (mainly the angiogram) has made it clear I did not.  Assuming God didn't do a miracle and clear up my arteries for me, the latest theory is that I contracted a bacteria and/or virus that attacked my heart and lungs.  This is a serious differentiation for my future health, my sister's, and that of my biological daughters.  Thursday morning my white blood cells were up, later that morning after I had taken some antibiotics they were down, then after that wore off the white blood cells were back up again.  This is textbook symptom of a bacterial infection (and tells you how many blood tests I got that day).  The ultrasounds have all turned up normal (I suspect even the one at the first hospital did too) and the EKGs have been fine since day 2, though they were completely different on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but completely normal on Monday and today.  They also revealed an incomplete right bundle branch block, which she said 20-50% of all people have and is insignificant.  Ken Ham, the founder of one of my favorite ministries (Answers in Genesis) has a saying: "It's designed to do what it does do. What it does do it does do well."  I suspect my heart is working just fine, but I appreciate the care and caution I got when the warning signs were noticed.

Followup: I did some Internet searches after I got home (at 3am while jetlagged) and found that there are a lot of people in the last decade or so who don't think heart attacks are caused by the traditional paradigm of artery blocks.  A growing number of people seem to be thinking heart attacks are caused by very small fatty deposits on the artery wall that break and form only temporary clots that quickly disappear.  Obviously this would stink, because detecting these is extremely difficult.  I'm no doctor and don't know if this is an acurate model of reality, but if it were true would make it more believable that I had a [minor] heart attack.

Missed Opportunity

(Written on Tuesday, June 19, in a hotel in China, unable to post until I returned to the USA.)

Well, I blew it tonight.  It didn't even occur to me that I could have.  I was on a random street in a random town in a random country where the native language wasn't English, and I was tired.  I had just finished a good dinner and had just started heading back to the hotel when I heard someone say "Hello."  Again they repeated "hello!"  I am used to walking through big cities in foreign countries (and at home) and just ignoring people who say that.  They typically want to sell something.  It didn't even occur to me that this would be different.  Again she repeated "hello!"  And still I continued to walk by without looking.  Eventually I glanced and halfway smiled, and I noticed it was a young lady, perhaps 20, respectfully dressed, and a handful of other girls.  I saw her for about half a second, but continued walking.  I didn't really think anything of it.  As we're walking to the corner to get our taxi, one of my colleagues said "she was talking to you."  Still, it didn't really register.  Or at least that's what I tell myself.  But after it was too late I realized, duh, she was speaking English to me, and duh, she wasn't trying to sell me anything.  She just thought it novel to see a white man walking by and wanted to say hi, and I snubbed her.  There goes a huge opportunity to put my money where my mouth is and prove that "everyone matters" by taking two seconds out of my day to stop and say hi, or even have a short conversation with her.  But I was tired, and now it's hours later, and she was a random girl on a random street in a town of millions, on a planet of billions, and the opportunity slipped through my fingers.  Not that she matters to me specifically, but she matters to God, and what better way to prove it than to have acknowledged she existed and maybe even told her explicitly that God loves her.  Hopefully next time I'll be better prepared.

Capitalism & Socialism

(This was typed in mid May but was delayed at being finalized until now.)  Following is a modern parable.  My comments will make more sense after you read this.

[Begin parable]

     An economics professor made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class”. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A…. (substituting grades for dollars – something closer to home and more readily understood by all).
     After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.
     As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. It could not be any simpler than that.
     Remember, there is a real test coming up: the elections. Here are five critical applications from this experiment:

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.
2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!
5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of all the people.

[End parable]

So the first question is, do you agree or disagree?  Disagreement would involve having contradictory or conflicting facts or interpretations, which might make the above wrong. If you do not have this then you simply dislike my conclusions and it's important to consider that the above is true.

A friend responded after reading this that socialism is in between Capitalism and Communism, but that's incorrect.  Capitalism and socialism are on opposite ends of an economic policy spectrum. Communism is a form of government that employs socialistic policies.  Democracy and monarchy are two alternatives to communism, capitalism is not. As I was thinking about writing this, a thought popped into my head about the specific socialistic classroom idea presented in the parable above.

Schools around the world are either capitalist or extreme capitalist, but I've never heard of a socialist school.  What I mean is, even in China (one of the first countries I would think of if you asked what countries in the world are communist, after Russia gave up on it, even though China has actually flushed Communism down the toilet in favor of Capitalism anyway) the students are graded individually.  Each student gets a grade for their own work. (However "own" is different in China than in the USA, in China it's expected due to their interdependent culture that students will cooperate to get assignments done, whereas that would be called cheating in the USA. But the point is each student gets their own grade.) This is capitalist, because you get what you deserve based on your performance & results.  Then there's extreme capitalism, and that's also called a bell curve. With the bell curve, not only do you get what you deserve (the opposite of everyone getting the same) you only get the best grade if you're better than your immediate peers, not just better than the objective test. If socialism were so great then why would it not have a manifestation in school grading?

So let's be clear on the rub. Socialism makes everyone equally poor and capitalism makes everyone unequally rich.  If your priority is equality then you're automatically going to side with socialism and put all effort into raising the bar for everyone from poverty to wealth. If your priority is accountability and meritocracy then you're going to side with capitalism and spend your philanthropic efforts on helping people understand what it takes to succeed in a capitalist society and then providing the opportunities for people to make themselves rich. A key point there is the last three words: "make themselves rich," which carry an implication of hard work. I know some of you reading this are going to hate me for saying that, but if we're honest (and pessimistic) then socialism could be interpretted as a philosophy of the lazy and capitalism could be interpretted as a philosophy of the arrogant.

Am I really trying to promote either one? Not really, I just want us to be honest and consistent. If you want to be rich, you either have to be capitalist or be the one in charge of a socialist society. If you don't care if you're rich and you just want to survive, then either philosophy will suit your needs, though socialism will be a lot easier. If you're a career politician, odds are you want to be rich. So if you're a politician and you're touting socialism then you're probably a liar who thinks socialism is great for the masses because it allows central control of all resources which thereby allows you (the people in charge) to control and distribute the money. If you're not a polititician and you desperately want to convert your capitalist society into a socialist society, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're serious, well intentioned, and would honestly follow through if given the opportutnity. But there's this problem that rich people don't feel comfortable in socialist societies because there's always the threat (if not the explicity mandate) that their wealth will be taken from them. So that means in a truely socialist society anyone who actually develops a good work ethic (even though there's no incentive to do so) will abandon ship at first opportunity and move to a capitalist society where there will be legal protection of their wealth. This trend will severely hamper your efforts to raise the bar for the general population and perhaps even make it impossible.  Which then begs the question, is it better to dedicate your life trying to change human nature and get socialism to work, or is it better to figure out how to work within the bounds of Capitalism and spend your life dedicated to making sure we all treat each other as humans (are accountable for our actions)?

Government 2.0

While most of this blog is dedicated to my kids when they get older, this post is more general.  Even as recently as 1912 the concepts of government were rather static.  Someone in the capital represents the people and makes decisions for them based on information learned word of mouth or by written letter.  It was common yet non-the-less fairly expensive for the leader to communicate a consistent message to all the people.  (For example, the royal decree.)  It was even more challenging for the people to visit the leader, since an entire population cannot live within walking distance of their topmost leader and even if they did live so close they would likely only be allowed to visit by appointment, when the leader happens to be in town (especially in the case of leaders like Xerxes where showing up unannounced meant death.)

The maximum scope of accountability in the old paradigm meant government only officially met in an open forum where visitors (or perhaps the press) were allowed, or an accurate list of meeting minutes were provided afterwards.  Then anyone who desired could go way out of their way to see what their leaders were up to.  But typically accountability took another form, the form of "does my leader keep his people propserous (by whatever definition the locals want to use) and does he seem to be an honest person?"  Without methods of mass communication what more could you do?

All this was consistent from the time of Adam up until the fifteen century.  Then around 1439 Johannes Gutenberg invented the first printing press, revolutionizing and exploding the power of the written word forever.  (Paper as we know it today was actually invented in 200 AD in China, and about a millenia later the first mill was built in Europe.)  In the later half of the 1800's the typewriter was developed and refined by many people, further empowering the world of text.  In 1837, Samuel Morse invented the first electric telegraph, thereby allowing words to be spread across great distances without paper or person.  In 1876, Allexander Graham Bell was awarded the patent for the telephone, around 1900 the first radios were being built, and televisions became relatively common in the 1930's in the USA & Europe.  While the concept of the computer evolved over time, the first microprocessor was released around 1970 and the backbone of the Internet was laid in the 60's and 70's.  Hypertext transfer protocol was a significant milestone in Internet adoption and was created by Tim Berners-Lee, which also signified the birth of the World Wide Wed in 1991.  About 10-15 years later the more interactive concepts of Web 2.0 became common.

In the 1930s and 1940s, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave what he called Fireside Chats.  In these the president spoke directly to the nation through radio.  Television was employed heavily by President John F. Kennedy, arguably most memorably with his 1961 challenge to the nation to put a man on the moon within a decade.  By now most Americans know that whitehouse.gov exists and that, if we wanted to, we could see what the president is saying any time we want.  However most of us do not have time to randomly go there and watch videos of speech recordings.  Thomas.gov provides a good resource on bills, if you need some heavy reading to help put you to sleep at night.  Congress.org (not an official government website) provides a great summary of who our officials are, how they voted and on what, but lacks one important detail: why.

At work I have a few mantras and one of them is "transparency, accountability, and accuracy."  Now that we live in a connected world of instant messaging, emailing, and blogging (intentionally leaving out names of specific websites) the functional concept of what democracy means and even what a republic means has opportunity to change.  I am not talking about re-writing the dictionary, but adapting the concepts to fit the times.  In the year 12 AD, it made sense that the Roman government claimed accountability and limited transparency based on word of mouth and some written communications.  In 1972 it made sense for the USA government to have a republic that claimed accountability and limited transparency based on word of mouth and written communications, live TV and radio broadcasts, and two way telephone calls.  In 2012 perhaps it is time that we embrace the next evolution in transparency and accountability.

Many of us have used (if not bought from) Amazon.com, Walmart.com, iTunes, or some other Internet based store, and seen (if not read) the product reviews and ratings at the bottom of each page.  We know it is possible to have your voice heard no matter who you are or where you live or how much money you make, your review on Amazon.com can influence the purchase of thousands of people.  Imagine the power of being able to politically vote online.  That would take democracy to the next level.  This would address the "transparency."  Archiving all votes for many years and allowing voters to review their history would address the "accountability."  Count how many times you hear the word "recount" next time there is an election.  Yeah right.  Moving to an online voting system would address the "accuracy."  Now I know the natural next question is, who is going to manage this database and ensure it is being used properly?  (If the people in power do not fear God then it does not matter if you have a democracy or a dictatorship or communism, the leadership is going to be corrupt and you are doomed to opression.)  So if we cannot agree on who would manage the database then I guess the answer is no, we are not ready for this evolution.  But perhaps there is one change we can still make that would still change everything.

In a republic the people decide who will represent them, rather than voting directly.  Remember how in the year 12, the Roman representatives had word of mouth, papyrus, and stone tablets to document for the citizens how they had used their power.  Scribes and writing substances were expensive so use was limited, and you only have so much time to talk in the day and only meet so many people in a year so word of mouth for most citizens was less about hearing directly from the representative as it was hearing third (or three hundredth) hand (and hopefully we all know how well the childs game of "telephone" works.)  But now it is the year 2012.  The important detail is not that it is two millenia later, that is irrelevant because people have not really changed.  But in the last 50 years our world has, and we now have the ability to document anything for virtually no cost.  Voting is only one piece of what we elect people for, but it is the most significant place where the "rubber meets the road."  What if the government adopted a database that kept track of how every elected official votes on every official vote?  What if every representative was also given the ability to explain their every vote?  What if every citizen was also given the ability to browse the bills, votes, and explanations?  Not only browse but search, sort, filter, and compare?  This would be the unification of the governmental concept of a republic and the communication power of web 2.0 and could change the world as we know it by providing unprecedented transparency and accountability.  At the very least it would make the election season more objective.

Wouldn't that be cool?

Memories from the Vancouver Olympics

About a year and a half ago I went with Answers in Genesis on an outreach to the people attending the Vancouver Olympics. I kept a brief journal at the time on my phone but the notes didn't fit exactly on my website and I hadn't started this blog yet so just kept them on my phone. Recently I was thinking about those notes and realized duh, I should put the highlights here.

Eighty of us from 13 states and 3 other countries stayed at Stillwood Christian Camp (map), almost two hours east of Vancouver. It was a very nice campground with a beautiful lodge and really nice cabins, not far from a lake and mountains. Each morning the staff there made us breakfast and prepared a sack lunch for us and made dinner. It was great food and I'd be stuffed each meal (and I'm not one to normally say that).

I arrived Saturday evening and left 8 days later. That first day after we arrived we got to hear Ken Ham speak in person at a local Penticostal church in Abbotsford. This was where I recorded the quote "You may not believe the Bible but I do... I don't use evidence to prove the Bible, I'm going to use the Bible as a starting point and show the evidence fits." Each day we drove into town on two charter buses and handed out tracts that were custom made for this event. The tracts gave a history of the Olympics, the gold metals, the gold rush in western North America a hundred years ago, the streets of gold in heaven mentioned in the Bible, and the gift Jesus gave by coming to earth, dying and resurrecting, with links to the Answers in Genesis (AiG) website (no local contact info was needed since we'd be giving these out to people from all over the world.) We had these tracts in 6 different languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Japanese.)

The first couple days I walked the streets with a nice guy from Ohio named Sherman. We started out on Granville Island and then moved into downtown Vancouver, Robson Road specifically. We discovered hundreds of "inuits" (the little stone statues like the Olympic symbol that year) lining the bay out back behind BC Place Stadium (map). So I stopped and offered to take people's photos for them and then offered tracts. I gave out about 125 tracts these two days.

Wednesday I took a 3 hour bus ride up to Whistler (map), where the downhill skiing was. I walked up and down the street (there was basically one main pedestrian walkway with a few spinoffs) and said hi to people, took their pictures for them, handed out tracts, telling people God loves them. I gave out about 120 tracts this day.

The next three days were spent out front of Canada Place (map) which is where the hockey games were held, and we were a half block east of where the Olympic torch was being kept. I had thought about walking down to the steam clock (map) since I had been there 11 years before with my family on our way to Alaska, but if I did that then I'd be leaving three teenagers to pass out tracts alone so I stayed back at the Canada Place. (You never know when you'll want an adult around when you're doing something as controversial as passing out tracts that tell people God loves them.) I didn't write their names down but I think the kids' names were Isaiah, Silas and Avery. Thursday the four of us handed out 500 tracts.

The location was really a great intersection between those two landmarks and also triangulated by being a major intersection for people coming from or going to downtown, so it worked out beautifully. Not only that, but we had a concrete awning over our head in case it rained and a huge curb to put all our boxes of tracts on so they'd be easily accessible. The next day since it worked out so well we returned to the same spot. This day we passed out 2,400 between the four of us. We ran out of English tracts twice and had someone go get us more from the bus, because like hikers in the mountains we had to cary everything we had with us, lunch, tracts, rain gear and all. I should make note that AiG prides itself that their tracts don't get thrown around as garbage by the people who take them and they don't become litter in the streets of the Olympic host city. (This was not the first Olympics they had sent volunteer missionaries to.) All week whenever we saw our tracts on the ground we'd immediately pick them up and either throw them away or redistribute them, but by the end of the week I think I had picked up maybe 30 (and I even went up and down the streets at least twice a day looking for them.) Of the 80 of us there, some where good at striking up deep converstaions with people and would spend 30-90 minutes with someone. I'm not good at discussing anything on the spot, but would never hand a tract and run. I always said what it was, gave it to them if they wanted it and paid close attention to their reaction. In the very rare occasion that someone wanted to discuss it with me I did, but usually people didn't even stop when taking it.

The last day for distribution was Saturday, which was also the last day of any official events. So it was a big day. We returned to the same spot again with so many boxes of tracts that our arms ached by the time we walked from the bus drop zone to our spot. Most of the last couple days I had been standing in the crowds of people proclaiming in a decently loud voice, but not shouting "Free souvenir, gold metals of the Olympics, gold rush in this country 100 years ago, the city of gold described in the Bible, the good news of Jesus." This had to be said very quickly as people would only be in earshot for 3-5 seconds before they'd pass you by as they're rushing to their next destination. By Saturday I heard God give me another idea and I started adding a second sentence: "God loves us and sent His Son to prove it, He has a wonderful plan for your life and wants a personal relationship with each of us." This was a little more bold and perhaps less politically correct but I really thought it was an idea planted by God and I figured, if anyone's going to raise a stink about this new sentence they'd probably raise a stink about my original sentence anyway so why not. By now I was spending half the day literally in a crowd of fastly moving people. There wasn't even time for lunch we had so many "customers." I estimated that I said my short little commercial at least 5 or 6,000 times this day alone. As I spoke I was paying attention to the reaction I got, compared to when I just smiled, and when exactly in my speach people decided they were interested in taking the tract from me. As the day progressed I was amazed that it was the second, more explicitly love related sentence that got dramatically more people to take what I had to offer. By the late afternoon I was skipping the part about the gold and just telling them the part about God loving them. By the end of this last day, and on just this last day, in just this one 20 by 20 foot spot, in 6 hours the 4 of us passed out a full 4,900 tracts. That was an average of one every 4 seconds.

At the end of the day the organizers came by to say it's time to go but we wouldn't have been able to hand out those tracts faster if they had diamonds taped to them so they just let us keep going. In those last 30 minutes two of us broke open and emptied a case of 480 tracts EACH. I estimated my personal total for the week was 3,000 and the group of 80 of us handed out a grand total of 91,460 tracts in the name of "encouraging people that the Bible is true and God can be trusted."

Interesting trivia: we had been living in our current town for about a year now and it wasn't until I was on this mission trip in Canada that I met a guy (named Helmet) who lived in the next town over from us and had his own creation appologetics ministry.  Not only that, but he works for the same company as me!  Small world.

With 80 people fighting spiritual warfare in the middle of a few million people you can imagine there were plenty of stories to tell each night. But the one that stood out the most to me was actually as much related to the previous mission trip to the London Olympics as it was to this one. Some people can understandably be skeptical about tracts really being of any value at all. But the AiG office got an email from their website just a couple weeks before the Olympics started. It was from an athlete who had gotten one of the tracts four years prior and never looked at it and stuck it in their bag of souvenirs. As they were getting ready to come to this one they emptied out that bag and skimmed through the contents. The AIG tract stood out to him and he read it and God spoke to him in that moment. The man was not a believer but after reading the tract and hearing God speaking to him then, he read the prayer of salvation at the end and promised God he wanted to live for Him in gratitude for His love. Praise God, and thank you Answers in Genesis for standing up for the uncompromised authority of the word of God.