Keys

In Orwell's 1984, the government was trying to simplify the English language with the ultimate goal of reducing it to a single word. I don't know about language, but I want to do that with keys. I want one key that will get me into anything I need to get into.
Since my family is moving around right now, I have a fluctuating keyring. A borrowed house key finds its way onto my keychain for a couple of weeks or months, then is returned to its owner. Occasionally I borrow a car and pick up an extra key for a while. I feel my keyring in my pocket when I walk now. It isn't a stable shape any more and it tends to poke and bulge.
Yesterday I handed over a work key I'm not going to need any more. One by one the keys to the cars, the office, my parents' house will get sold or returned and when I get on the plane to Africa I will have an empty keyring with just a flash drive on it.
I don't know how to feel about that. I should feel light and free, but today I just feel like the doors of my life for the last 15 years will be closing and locking behind me and I won't have the keys to open them again. I will have no keys, no means of opening locked doors.

Great News

I’m finding that I don’t want to know what’s going on in the world so much any more. An average television newscast has an astounding amoung of deep tragedy. Any one “bad news” item would be catastrophic in my family. How am I supposed to process it all with any semblance of empathy? The only options I can see are callousness or ignorance. There’s enough tragedy on my own street to keep me busy.
I don’t want to drop out completely, I care about what happens to the world, what happens to people, but I can’t handle every child that drowns in a swimming pool in the United States. I can’t process every murder/suicide rampage and train wreck. This is the downside of RSS feeds. All the disaster of the world shows up on my desktop in real time. If a father burns down his house with his children inside in New Jersey, I know about it before the ashes are cool.

Finishing

I have an aversion to finishing. I like to keep my options open- something better might come along. I might get a better idea, or I might get stuck with something I don't want. This is also the classic male failure to commit. I did get married though. I wouldn't recommend waiting too long on that one. It's worth it.
By the way, I'm an INTP. If that doesn't mean anything to you, congratulations! You aren't in a box.

I invented

I invented the concept of density. Minus the mathematical formula, I figured out that the ratio between mass and volume could be valuable to know. I was too late by a thousand years or so. I also invented postscript before it was actually made by Adobe, but I had the idea. My dad invented turbo and also a rocket platform. He was disappointed to see that someone was already doing turbo. NASA ended up building a rocket platform, but not my dad's.

I don't speak up enough. I invented this thing where On-Star collects traffic statistics between points for live, extremely accurate route predictions. Someone probably already thought of that.

We are the Experts

I've worked in media at a church for almost fifteen years and we have made just about every boneheaded mistake possible. I have personally made horrible typos, I have sometimes created bland art, lousy video, flat websites. I have missed deadlines.
The team at the church has had at various times mediocre administration, self-serving individuals, lapses in focus, petty infighting, and feuds with people working at cross-purposes.
God seems to be completely unaffected by all of this. When He decides to speak to someone, he does it in spite of all our screwups. We have often come off of a weekend bloodied and battered, with nothing having gone right, and we'll get a note from someone in the service thanking us for speaking into their lives, for bringing them into the presence of God. I don't believe we have any such power. It may be that God blinds people and deafens them to what we are doing and speaks to them directly sometimes.
And still we aim at excellence, even though it doesn't seem to make a difference, like Milton said, "God doth not need either man's work or his own gifts..."
So why bother if there is no strong correlation between our effort and the results? Because God made us for something, and the better we do that thing the more pleased He is. And when I'm doing what I'm designed for, the more fulfilled I am.
So there's another tension- excellence vs. trust.

More nametags

I was at a baptism one time where the people being baptized (baptizees?) had adhesive name tags. When they came out of the water, their nametags had soaked off, so when it was done there were ten or fifteen name tags floating on top of the water. It was an interesting picture of the idea of "dying to self", but I've noticed as well in my experience as a follower of Jesus that I become more uniquely myself as I follow him. The life of faith is full of tensions, this is the tension of conformity vs. individuality.

I wore a name tag last night. I had my real name on it, although that did not seem to be in vogue. When I left with Angela I took off my name tag and her name tag so we would not be embarrassed elsewhere and I stuck them together back to back. There was something intimate and comfortable about that - sticking my name and my wife's name together, even if it was only to throw the tags away.

I remember another time name tags spoke to me. Maybe later today.