escapingbabylon.com

So as you guys can probably tell, I’ve been updating the look of my website. (If you’re using a feed reader you should check it out). I liked the old version, but it came across as pretty busy, so I decided to flip colors and re-organize and clean up some of the sidebar.  Here are some of the other changes that I’ve made to the format.

• I’ve added Gravatars to the blog. If you want your personal avatar, you can go to www.gravatar.com to upload a picture that you’d like to use. These pictures can also be used on any gravatar-enabled blog.
• I’ve updated my mini-bio in the About section
• I’m going to be trying to include more pictures in my postings. Some will be stock , some not.
• All the photos in the rotating banner are photos I’ve taken. You can see many of the originals by clicking the Flickr link to the right.
• Hopefully I’ll be able to figure out posting via email, and so you may see some more Live From Babylon posts in the future.
• I’ve signed up for Twitter, but I don’t know what to do with it yet. If you have cool suggestions let me know.

Journey to Myself from humblebee - sxc.hu

The first days when I started biking to work, I made a rookie mistake that I believe must be pretty common. See, every time a biker (or even a car) would approach me from behind I would speed up. Instinctively I believed that I should be travelling as fast as they were, after all we were on the same road and in the case of bikes, travelling using the same vehicle. The result was predictable, I usually burned myself out during the first part of my ride, making the second half much harder.

At the same time I found someone online talking about cadence. In biking terms, cadence is the rhythm at which you are pumping your legs. Many sites suggested that while biking, you should aim for a cadence of 60 – 120 full cycles per minute. Cadence became the solution to my speed problem. Here’s what I learned, and how I think it applies to life beyond biking.

• Use your cadence to determine your workload, not your speed: Aiming to travel at the same speed of the other bikers was counter-productive. It made it harder for me to finish the trip that I had started on. What worked was to find a rate of energy output that was appropriate for me, my level of fitness and my bike and use the amount that is healthy for me to work to determine the rate at which I got work done.
• Gear down to keep your cadence constant: While biking, if you are using such a high gear that you can’t keep up your cadence can be damage your knees.  In biking, and in life, there is no shame in gearing down when the circumstances make your journey difficult, and no glory in trying to be badass about hills. In biking, it’s healthy to gear down when you are going up a hill. In life it’s healthy to cut back on things when life screws up, doing otherwise can be damaging.
• Gearing up is a good thing too: Here’s the funny thing about biking. Biking in too low of a gear ends up being more tiring than biking in a higher gear (or two). It’s unexpected, but you do yourself and your goal no favors by setting the bar so low that it takes very little effort to achieve it.

In essence, instead of determining your acceptable level of work by the level of work of those around you, you need to look at your own abilities and circumstances, and set a pace that is natural and challenging for you, and avoid trying too hard to match folks around you, not taking your circumstances into consideration, or setting the bar to low.

rollin' by DerMatze - sxc.hu

I used to bike to work almost every day for a couple of years, and while biking there were some things that I’ve noticed about biking that seems to apply to life in general. I’ve always wanted to write them down somewhere, and I guess my blog is a good place to do it (plus it gives me a fallback when I need posting inspiration). Here’s the first.

When you start biking, you realize something pretty quickly. Biking to work is hard. Your legs tire out pretty quickly, you start breathing hard. Ok, maybe that’s just me.

In any case, the first couple times I tried to bike for any real distance, I got tired, decided this was too hard, and I should stop for a bit. So I pulled over to the side and took a short rest break. My hope was that this would give me some energy for the rest of the trip. I actually found that the opposite was true. Once I stopped pedaling, my body seemed to decide that it was time to acknowledge how tired it was, and the short rest was not long enough for it to recuperate. Not only that, but I had lost any momentum I had up to that point, and I the trip was just as long as it was before I took a break.

There are three things that this taught me that is applicable to regular life.

1. My legs can do more than I think it can: When we push ourselves then we see what we are truly capable of, not just what is easy for us.
2. Momentum is a powerful thing: It’s a lot easier to keep going than it is to restart
3. The trip will always be the same length: Stopping in the middle does not magically make the last half of the trip shorter. Eventually you still need to the work to finish the trip.

The bottom line, is that if you mean to accomplish something, whether biking or in life, sometimes you just need to keep pushing through until it is done.

Via: The Suburban Jesus Hates Me

I used to get paid by large churches to tell their kids all about Jesus, get them into Bible studies and take them on mission trips- which I choose to be in the inner cities of Chicago and Boston, not the beach. The basic assignment was actually to keep these kids out of drugs, jail and pregnancy so they could go to college, make lots of money and pursue the lifestyles of rich Americans while attending large prosperous megachurches.

I figured this out early on, but I kept telling myself it wasn’t the case. I thought that if one of those kids becomes a serious Jesus revolutionary, going among the poor, giving up the suburban lifestyle, my churches would have applauded.

Then, a few years ago, a church kid from Minnesota came to talk to me. She’d been out of college for a few years, had come to Appalachia to teach English, then taught and coached at our school for a while, after which she took off for Africa for a couple of years. She brought me a letter from her parents where they told her what they thought about her life.

Note: These parents were card carrying suburban American Christians in church. “Nice sermon, pastor.” “Oh the music was lovely today.” “We so enjoyed the youth leading worship today.” All that.

In this letter, the parents honestly said what they thought of this girl. They thought she was nuts. The called all the ministries she worked for abusive, slave labor operations. They begged her to come home, take her college degree into the city and make some money, get a house in the suburbs and find a husband with wealth and security.

I’m very glad to say that my parents were never like that. I grew up in a relatively wealthy family, at least wealthier than most of the people who were around me. My father runs the family business that my grandfather started and my father helped to build. He worked long hours and worked hard. Our family was able to afford and enjoy somethings that were unusual for the average rural Jamiacan and I am grateful for that.

They’ve always wanted me to work hard, prepare, and think about the future. To study so that I can get a good job and support my family. To be a part of the family business. To have enough money to retire

And yet with all of that, my parents always supported me whenever I made a step to follow my calling to help others. When I paid for my mission trip to Guatemala instead of getting a paying intership, they supported me. When I decided to join InterVarsity staff they did as well. They both are happy for me and support me in going to seminary. When I wanted to work in the non-profit world instead of in the corporate world they did too.

It goes deeper than that. I continue to learn how my parents used, and continued to use their privilege to help people around them. How running the company was as much about providing jobs for folks in the community as it was about making money. How they directly helped several people that I know of the best they could, and probably more that I don’t know of. They were believers in helping people out in a way that “the right hand doesn’t know what the left had was doing”. They led wonderfully integrative lives that I right now don’t even know if I can aspire to.

So I guess this post has two purposes. One is to simply share with the world my gratitude for the types of parents I grew up with. And also to say that there exists a different type of parents than portrayed in the clip above. And that even in relative affluence, one can truly and completely give it up to God for His use.

I am going to apply to Bethel Seminary to start their SemPM Master of Theological Studies program in the fall, with potentially a concentration in Global and Contextual Studies.

I’m scared.

I’ve often talked about the problem of race, bigotry and discrimination, so I figure if you’re still reading you are at least interested in the issue (or at best tolerant of my rants).  Asif (I would link to his livejournal but he rarely posts anymore) pointed me to an article on CNN that talks about racially segregated churches. There’s one quote that I thought was particularly interesting.

Via CNN: “Why many Americans prefer their Sundays segregated.”

The people in the pews must also do their share of adapting, scholars and ministers say. Only when ethnic groups no longer feel compelled to abandon their entire culture on Sunday morning can a church claim to be interracial, Brelsford says.

…

Interracial churches resist “taking one dominant identity and forcing everyone to fit into it,” Brelsford says.

I think this is the probably the hardest temptation to overcome when trying to create a church or other organization of mixed ethnicity, particularly if one is of the majority culture, you think that certain things are universal, as opposed to being part of your unique identity. It took me a very long time to get over the idea that if people just stripped away their American-ness/African-ness/Indian-ness/Whatever-ness then deep down inside they’ll be more or less Jamaican. This is often the error of people who say “why can’t we all get along” or “why do we have to talk about race/ethnicity”. They think that deep down, if you strip away all that “ethnicness” that you’ll be just like them.

It’s pretty easy to say that that’s not true. Speaking as someone who was born into an ethnic majority, it’s much harder to live it. There’s always that voice that says that ways that my culture have taught me to act, think and relate are “correct” or even just “normal” and that everything else is wrong or a distortion from the baseline of myself. I think that we start to silence that voice by deliberately being open to, and seeking to understand the spectrum of culture. I think that we also need to deliberately put ourselves in a situation where we are the minority, and we seek to learn from the culture in which we immerse ourselves. It’s always easy to jump into a culture from a position of “rightness”. We’ve seen lot’s of people do it, including some missionaries. The challenge is to jump in to a culture in a learning position.

Now, with all this being said, the advice that I’ve given above is for the individual from a majority culture. Some of it is probably applicable for people from a minority culture as well, but I suspect that a lot is different. And as the article talks about, members of minority cultures can have as many issues dealing with racial/ethnic integration as the majority. I do not mean to imply that those that are members of minority cultures have no responsibility in this pursuit, and may post some of my thoughts on that later. Their embracing or rejecting of the pursuit has absolutely no bearing on our responsibility to pursue equity.