Sierralima

I really like glow in the dark stuff. Actually, I had forgotten how much I did like it until this past Saturday for Kingdom Come. The theme was “Shine” and they gave out glow-in-the-dark wristbands. That night when I got home, I stuck the wristband under a lamp next to my bed. Actually , I put the wristband directly under the lamp so it would get maximum light. When I shut out the light to go to bed, the band was glowing, and it was easy to read the text written on the band. But after a while, the glow fades and eventually it emits no more light.

And that’s exactly how it works in our lives. We can’t generate the light of salvation ourselves. This only comes from Jesus Christ. Do you ever wonder why it’s so hard to live for Christ in your work or school? Maybe it’s because you aren’t placing yourself under the lamp of Jesus enough. The more we receive, the more we glow.

I was reading The Gospel Coalition blog and came across this article about Mother’s day being bittersweet for some who long to be mothers themselves. I found the following paragraph to be especially poignant:

Single woman watching your biological clock tick away, I encourage you to look today at your longings through the lens of the gospel. You don’t have to deny your longing or talk yourself into a happy attitude for all the good things you can do without kids. It’s OK to mourn the loss. God said children are a blessing. But after the fall, we do not all get to experience that blessing. The gospel makes up the difference. While you are disappointed in deep ways and that disappointment is real, you will one day sit with Jesus in heaven profoundly content with his work in you through this disappointment. In heaven, you will have no longing for something you missed. You will not be disappointed. May confidence in that hope sustain you.

It seems that many times we try to lie to ourselves about what we want, whether it be a spouse, children, a certain job, getting into a certain collage, or any other situation we don’t have as much control over as we would like to have. We try to tell ourselves that where you are is exactly where you want to be, and try to force yourself to be happy with your current status, or even argue that you don’t really want that spouse/job/college/etc. But this is very important – don’t be shy about your desires. It’s OK to know what you want, even though you don’t have it. Share that desire with God and with your close friends and relatives. But know that as you follow Christ, he is using your situation to bring you closer to the person he wants you to be. Your confidence and your hope is always, only in Christ. Just the same as it will be when you get these desires of your heart. Because of this hope, we must not base our lives or our value on what we don’t have or what will not last, but only on the gospel, which lasts forever. Like the article says, you will not be disappointed with the outcome.

It’s been a long day. I have attended parts of all four services that SCF offers, but none of them completely. I was collecting money and forms for the upcoming retreat for the first two, then running a video in the last two. After that was cell group. As of this writing, I left home over 12 hours ago and am now on the bus on my way home.

Life in the past 4 weeks since I switched jobs has been good. There have been some down moments, but I have often wanted to say I love what I do! All in all I’m very excited about the new group I’m leading as well as the potential for what could happen here in Shanghai. God has really blessed me in the past weeks and while I know the will be difficult times, I’m confident his way is right.

Things have been very busy for me the past couple of months, and this weekend especially. I’m starting to back out of SOAR so I can spend more time on the future group, and I also want to finish strong at work. With the transition, there is more work for me on top of the regular duties. This weekend we had a software delivery which are always stressful, I lead a meeting for the new youth group, and I had an interview for a job I wanted to get.

In about one week I’ll be going to Kuala Lumpur for a vacation. Hopefully I can relax a bit there. My cousin, Amber will be there for a bit and I scheduled my trip to be able to be there while she is. I’m really looking forward to it. After I get back, I suspect it will be the home stretch for by current job and lots of learning and planning for the upcoming youth ministry.

So it has been a long time since my last real update. I spent Christmas in Shanghai, but had a business trip to Cedar Rapids in January and spent an extra week in South Dakota during the Spring Festival holiday. The airplane has so far flown two more times since my last post, the most recent being this past Friday. 

But I suppose the biggest news, at least to me, is my plan to change jobs. I have informed my company that I do not plan to continue in my current position after August 14 of this year. I have felt the call to be more involved in the youth ministry with the international fellowship I have worked in during the past two and a half years. I want to spend more time helping with administrative things and, more importantly, spend time with the students. My current job makes it difficult to commit to specific times as I often have to work in the evenings or overnight. Also, I no longer find this job very enjoyable. 

I don’t have any job lined up after August, which is a concern as I will need a source if income and a visa to remain in Shanghai. While it is possible for me that I’ll work part time at my current position, it is not my preferred option and I will likely not be employed by Collins in any capacity after August. So this phase of my life appears to be coming to a close. 

After I talked to the church about my plans, an opportunity to lead a new group near several international schools appeared. This was presented to me, so this will be what I will be doing in four months. I am quite excited about this. After I agreed to lead this, they started a small group of students themselves, which I try to visit whenever I can. I am also starting planning for the next school year when I will be directly involved. I’m excited to see what God has in store!

The journey over the next few months will be interesting. The airplane will likely be transferred to Yanliang and I expect to spend some time there after that. I need to document a few things I know so that my coworkers have the information after I leave. I need to plan what I can for the upcoming youth ministry. I need to prepare for a significant lifestyle change. And possibly most importantly, I need to mature and develop into the person I need to be to be in this leadership position, focussing on what is important and leaving the rest to another time. But it will be a fun ride!

And a lot has happened. Trip to US in Jan, great youth group retreat last weekend, and I’m getting a new job in August – I just don’t know what yet. More details later – kinda slacking off at work now.

This week has been one of a little more rest than I was accustomed to in November. Since first flight, things are a little slower at work, and I have my weeknds and evenings to myself again. At least for now. I’m sure at some point in the future that will all change again.

So this past week was generally unproductive. I accomplished nothing significant. It was dedicated to let my brain relax a bit and allow me to catch up on a few things. I watched a few movies, was able to spend some quite time at home, and – my favorite – be able to spend time with the youth again.

During the month of November, I gave up any commitments outside of work. I was being asked to work nights and weekends and the conflict of trying to keep my personal life as well as my work life was too much. So I only had a work life. There were only a few times during the month (until Thanksgiving) that I was able to do something that wasn’t work related. They were only possible because nothing required me to be at work at that time. There were three days during the entire month that I didn’t work: the first day and the last two. Some required 24 hours continuous, and others simply overnight. I rarely got more than 5 hours of sleep at a time, and learned to sleep and be awake at pretty much any time of day. It was not much fun. I hope I don’t have to do this again, at least for a long time.

Today (Sunday) I started an interesting experiment. We had our Sunday School Christmas program at church and the Sunday School leader asked me to take pictures or video of the kids as they sang and performed. I have been interested in media for a while and have aquired some video and audio equipment, and very quickly came up with a somewhat complex plan. OK, so it’s not nearly as complex as most of what you see on television, but considering I’m only one person, and very much an amateur at that, it was a bit of a stretch for me. I ended up having three people take video for me – one in the center and on either side. I also had three channels of audio recorded from the sound system. I took still photographs myself. The plan is to get everything imported and manually sync them with each other, then I can cut between different angles from the three video cameras. I’m not sure how this will turn out. I’m importing the first video as I write this, so we have a long way to go before I can see much for results. The end result will be a DVD, and hopefully it will not turn out too bad. While this is mostly an experiment for me, I have a little experience with video recording. At the retreat in October, I had the sessions recorded, and things didn’t go too badly, but I had a few difficulties, particularly with audio, and wanted to resolve that in the future. This is why I recorded separate audio from the main mixer this time. It will add an extra layer of “fun” trying to sync everything together, but hopefully the result will be better.

So that’s my challenge for this week: see if I can do some major video editing.

ARJ21 completed its first flight today. Everything went very well.

An article with a picture: http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2008/11/28/319486/pictures-chinas-arj21-completes-first-flight.html

You can also check out Google News at: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&ncl=1275359489

I knew it had been a while since I updated this, but I hadn’t realized it has been almost one month. How time flies! It has been a really busy time for me. From the time of my last post until October 5 I was busy with the youth retreat and its preparations. One “nice” thing is that I had three days off of work before the official start, which meant I pretty much spent all that time with preparations, and meant I started my short nights a day early. This year was well thought out and planned, but made for a lot of preparations ahead of time. That is a good thing. I’m not sure how we made it through the previous retreats. Overall, the retreat was good. The kids had a great time. I enjoyed it as well, but had a different experience. I was “in charge” of putting together the video at the end of the retreat, so I spent most of my time working on that. Too much time – I need to not do the same thing next retreat… Now I’m working on putting together a DVD (or several – there is a lot of material) of the retreat lessons, dramas, etc. I need a bigger hard drive. 500GB is not big enough for editing 10 hours of high definition video, plus pictures.

The last time I made a post I was in Xi’an with Josh. It was a lot of fun having him around, and I’m glad it forced me to take a bit of a break from work. I managed to get a little extra sleep ahead of the retreat, but the highlight was hanging out with my cousin. We don’t get to do that much any more, which I guess is mostly my fault for moving to China. I had another trip to Xi’an this past week. Actually not Xi’an proper, but a “small” town (~250,000 people – small for China, big for American midwest) north of Xi’an about an hour called Yanliang. That was a last minute trip, the return being 48 hours after the decision to go. So I have flown into the Xianyang airport 3 times in the past 5 weeks. If things go as expected, it will become a lot more familiar in the next year.

Work is still busy, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. First flight is still looming, and the pressure is on to keep to the schedule (which still appears to be moving to the right). We are being asked to do some things that are unreasonable with the current schedule, so while the end result of the discussions won’t be much different than where we are now, it will be a painful road to get there.

So today I think I am mostly caught up on the sleep I missed during the retreat. Meetings and other work on the weekends prevent me from sleeping in, which is where I get caught up. For some reason, six hours of sleep waking up at 9am is much more restful than 6 hours waking up at 6:30. I did some cleaning today of the office, which desperately needed it. I threw out a bunch of papers, but otherwise just allocated the mess to other places around the office. It looks better at least. Still more work to do. (Overall, I’m doing a better job of keeping the place clean than I did 5 years ago. Wait, I have a maid now…)

Mom and dad – I promise to call you soon.

There are a lot of non-government taxes around. The stupid tax (lottery) and ignorant tax (where a pretty girl calls you handsome and wants to practice English with you, and conveniently knows a good tea house to sit and talk at, then conviently orders expensive tea and doesn’t have the money to pay) are a couple. Another tax which is well known in these parts is the foreigner tax, where locals get a nice low price, but people who don’t understand the language get a higher one. This is not particularly suprising. I arrived in Xi’an today with Josh, and this hit square on with me. I was looking at the information counter at the airport and saw maps of Xi’an, of which we currently had none. The agent said the map, in Chinese and English, was 10 RMB. When I pointed to another one of the maps, she said that one was only in Chinese. 5 RMB. I laughed. I briefly considered buying the Chinese map, but spent the 10 RMB, feeling somewhat sad that I was supporting a business model not in my favor, and wishing I knew how to read more Chinese.

So the week has been interesting. Josh arrived on Tuesday night. I didn’t spend too much time with him while he was in Shanghai – too many things on my plate – but he seems to do quite well on his own. I took him to youth group and church so he could meet my friends, and we all had a good time. Now that I’ve taken a few days off work and left the city, I’ll have more time to spend with him. I’m not particularly excited about being a tourist again, but I’m beginning to think the time off couldn’t not have been better placed. I’ll know more on that later this week. I must say the weather is quite nice right now. After the hot humidity of Shanghai, the cool weather tonight feels wonderful.

I’ll probably go to bed early tonight. Hopefully shortly after I submit this. Maybe I’ll be able to catch up on some of my sleep. I’ll sure need it for the retreat next week.