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.

Motion Sensors

There have been large sections of my life that consisted mainly of reacting to everything around me. I think I could have walked by a motion sensor without triggering it. I wasn't making any decisions or any sort of difference.

I think it's better if the lights turn on when I walk by.

Distance

The personal cost of missions to me has always been separation from family. As an MK myself I'm familiar with being away from family. When I was growing up in Ecuador, we were always away from extended family. We did construct a kind of virtual family that served as a good substitute, but there are some things you can't replace. After I graduated from high school I went to college in the States, and I was with extended family, but away from immediate family. I talked to my parents sometimes using a quaint old technique called a "ham patch." My dad had a ham radio and he would call another ham operator in the US who would make a collect call to me. Then he would "patch" the call from radio to telephone.
A conversation sounds like this:
"I love you, Mom. I wish we could be together. Over."
"Oh, I know, Honey. Just thirteen more months and you'll be meeting us at SFO. Over."

And at the end of the conversation, "Over and out" then hanging up the phone with your ear numb from pressing it to the earpiece, suddenly far away again.

Now there's e-mail and Skype and video chats, but they are just band-aids on the curse of distance. I think Heaven won't have distance.

For the geeks: Dad had a cubical quad antenna on his one kilowatt transceiver. This antenna was designed by an HCJB engineer in Ecuador in 1942.