Vanity

Something that I have a difficult time understanding are people that find it necessary to constantly show off. It doesn't really matter what it is that they are showing off about, whether it's musical, mental, physical, whatever. Just anything that they are obviously doing just to draw attention to themselves. Especially if they are doing it constantly. And even more so when they are clearly not all that good at whatever they are doing. Take, for instance, this guy that I didn't ever meet out at Harding. Now, for a while the cafeteria had a piano in it, for whatever reason. And everyday when I'd go to lunch or dinner, this guy would be sitting there, playing around on it, playing the same song or two over and over and over. Having played piano for a number of years, I would get quite annoyed listening to this guy showing off for anyone and everyone in the cafeteria, whether they wanted to hear it or not. Of course, there were always a couple girls that would go over and faun over him, which I'm sure was his main objective to begin with. In my mind, it doesn't make any sense why you would feel the need to just go over and start drawing attention to yourself about some ability that you really don't possess. Or even if you did, why you would want to just have people come over and start telling you how good you are.

Mandi has made the solid point to me that talents, such as playing the piano (or whatever the talent happens to be for whoever happens to possess it), is a God-given talent and that it shouldn't be kept from other people as it can bring joy to them. I understand her point, and realize that I do have a talent in terms of my piano-playing ability that God has given me, and that I should be willing to share that talent and ability with other people. But where do you draw the line between doing something for the glory of God and doing something to bring recognition to yourself? Or is there even a line there to be drawn? Is having a talent always going to bring personal recognition, and from that allow other people to recognize God through my ability?

It's something that I have a tremendous difficulty dealing with. I, for one, hate having people ask me to play the piano, especially in public places, because I do not want people coming up and telling me what they think of my playing, whether it be good or bad. I don't want to appear as conceited and vain like others that find it necessary to just go out and proclaim to the world how amazing they think they are at something (this applies to practically every young guitarist I've ever walked past). I don't want to make other people think like I do 99% o the time that I hear/see someone doing something to draw attention to themselves and get annoyed at them trying to get 15 minutes of fame whenever they can. I also realize, however, the my playing does make people happy and that some people enjoy listening to it, as it is a talent, and not something that everyone can do well. I would like to think that not everyone that plays does it simply to see how many girls (or guys) they can get to pay attention to them for a couple minutes. But how do you make the distinction between seeking recognition and giving glory? How can you keep it from being a matter of personal pride? How do you ensure that people see your action as one of praise to God, and not as a show of vanity?

South Carolina

This past weekend was spent having quite the time, and ending up being extremely exhausted by the end of it. South Carolina was fun, as it always is, hanging out with the Murphy's, and various other friends that I've come to know over the past few years of heading down there and camp. All in all, good times. I did realize, however, that mixing nothing but sugar foods, little to no sleep, and headaches results in one not-happy camper. We'll have to change the diet next weekend.

I have to say that Mandi did exceptionally well today at her first soccer game in probably about 8 years. She ran hard, caused problems for their full-backs, and helped lead to 2 of our goals. I ended up having to play keeper, which was ridiculous in itself, but ended up pulling out the shut-out. Someone our captain figured that my frisbee skills would be useful in goal. How about that, huh? Luckily the other team didn't have too many shots, and a couple of the ones that I would have had problems with got blocked before they even got to me. Still though, not bad, although I wasn't able to help out Mandi on the field and kinda coach her along. She did well, though, so it didn't matter all that much.

Oh, and I heard the quote of the day today from my brother. Maybe even the week, month and year. I just called him up to see how things were going since he's coming home tomorrow, and I was telling him about the weekend. Here's about how it went.

Dustin: "You were in South Carolina for the weekend?"
Me: "Yeah, I went down for a wedding."
Dustin: "So, Paul got married??"
Me: "...stunned silence...HA!!!! No."

A new song's in the player. Enjoy it.

Frustrated Satisfaction

Re-formatting your hard drive, while not the most enjoyable process to go through, can end up not being such a bad thing. I've just finished going through that process on my desktop computer. Programs were running extremely slow, cpu usage was almost always at 100%, and nothing seemed to work right. It all added up to needing to just wipe the slate clean and start all over. In the end, it's now 3:00 in the afternoon, and I have an empty hard drive, and a fast working computer again. Not a bad trade off. Good thing I backed up the hard drive just the other week.

The paper/powerpoint for the thesis is coming along nicely. Obviously, no work has been done today since it's taken me until about now to get my internet connection working again, which is necessary since in order to use the programs that my paper is on, I need to connect to ORNL's VPN network. There's about 3 weeks left now...the countdown is on. Things are looking good though, with the paper formatted and essentially finished except for maybe a few more minor cosmetic adjustments, and the powerpoint layed out in it's entirety. Now I've just got to add some graphics and such, and it will be ready for presenting. At least, that's the plan.

I just realized yesterday how incredibly terrible I now am at the game of ultimate frisbee. We played last night for a couple hours here in OR, and I got consistly owned by the other team, at least in terms of me making defensive plays. Even Mandi looked at me like, "What the heck are you doing???". It was really quite sad. I guess that comes with having not played a lot, and just being out of shape in general. On a positive note, though, my throwing is probably the best that it's ever been. Sam throwing a 40 yard flick for a score? Yeah, it's possible now on occasion. Who knows where that came from, but for me, not playing much apparently translates in to improved throwing ability. Hopefully by the end of the summer, things will be more back to normal.

And on a side note, somebody needed to talk to the people getting married in the coming weekends (Josh and Mark) about picking their times for weddings (11 AM and 8 PM respectively). Who has weddings at those times anyway? Just kidding guys. Enjoy the new tune.

Good Search

This isn't really anything in particular, but Mandi was telling me the other day about a search engine that is able to donate money to charity for every search that you run using that program. It's called goodsearch, and if you go to that site, you are able to pick out a charity that you would like to donate money to. Now, it's only about 1 cent per search, but if you figure how many times you search for different things during the day, and if you can get a number of your friends to help out, and a number of your friend's friends...well, you get the picture. If you don't have one that you might like to sign up with, I'd suggest a company called International Justice Mission (IJM) based out of D.C. Not a bad way to donate a little money, all while you're just browsing around on the internet. Oh, and the song in the player has changed. Still can't get it to have a playlist though.

And on a completely random note, does anyone know what the T's in ITT Technical Institute stand for? I figure there's only so many times you can say Technical in a school title...

Now Comes The Night

Well, I had been wanting to try and find a way to put up some of the music files for the songs that I reference as I go through this blogging thing. Today, since I was utterly bored at work for most of the morning, I went googling for help. I came across ways to do it, and lo and behold, I've got a way to play the songs that I've been talking about at random times throughout the past almost 9 months I guess. Maybe one of these days I can figure out how to get the playlist version to work, but for now I'll change out the song every couple of days. I'm kinda slow at this whole HTML coding thing. All the help places made it sound so easy...and yet, it's been difficult. Me and programming just don't go together to well.

It has been an incredibly busy 4, now 5 days. Friday was spent first of all trying to track down the ever-elusive Paul Murphy. We had rumor that he was in Nashville, perhaps staying with either Mandi's brother, or some other unknown entity. We also had a phone number that he had at one point called another friend with. The problem with this number is that when one tried to call it, the line went directly to voice mail. And not so that you could leave a voicemail, but needing a password to check your voice mail. Eventually, Mandi and I find out that he is actually staying with her brother, and so we pack up to head for Nashville. Luckily for us, there was frisbee to be played and we met up with some good friends in the Jordan brothers and Kevin Burr. Frisbee was played, and good times were had. We came back home late Friday night.

Saturday came early, and Mandi and I enlisted Paul to help us do some set-up work for our upcoming VBS. We drew quite an exceptional lion for our Daniel and the Lion's Den bible story for tomorrow night, and then proceeded to cut pictures for one of the largest mural's I've ever seen printed. Hopefully I can get a pic soon and throw it up here. We then went to SC to get Paul to camp for the week. I have to say, that after being out there for just a couple hours and seeing everyone, I was quite jealous, as was Mandi, that they were about to start camp and that we couldn't stick around and have some fun as well. Oh well...maybe next year?

Sunday began VBS, and so we've spent the past few days playing around with 2nd and 3rd graders and getting them back and forth between classes and crafts and games and such. It can certainly be trying at times, but it is fun, and for the most part our group has been incredibly well behaved. What more can you want from 2nd graders?

And just as an update regarding my thesis, the paper is moving along nicely. I'm in the early stages of my second revision, and will certainly have more to talk about the next couple days before all my mentors head out for Turkey. I'll be meeting with them for any last things that need to be discussed, and then it's essentially me working on the presentation aspect once I get the particulars of the paper fixed up. We're flying up on the end of all this school stuff. It's really pretty crazy thinking about how 2 years ago I had just finished at Harding, and was in the process of getting started here at UT, finding an apartment, getting ready to start off more on my own than I had at any other point. It seems like it wasn't all that long ago...At any rate, the night has come. Actually, it came long ago.

Already

Well...how about a late-night post, huh. I've been hunting around on the net for some stuff that Mandi might be interested in doing after work that relates to service projects or just getting involved in some form or fashion with some people that would need it. Sadly, I haven't been able to really find any information at all on anything like that. I guess we'll just need to do some more digging.

Another thing that would be helpful, is if anyone has any ideas about how to spice up the story of Daniel and the Lion's Den, Mandi and I would be quite appreciative. We're teaching the class on that story during one night of our upcoming Vacation Bible School. The main emphasis is on prayer, obviously, and we're trying to come up with ways to emphasize that point, as well as to try and make it somewhat fun for the kids. Mandi's a huge fan of having me dress up as a lion and attack the kids at random and have them start praying and have that cause me to back away from them. I think she likes the idea mostly cause she thinks it would be amusing to see me running around in a lion's costume...Any help would be beneficial though, if there are any thoughts.

It's strange, how quickly time can pass. I don't really know where all that time went, thinking back to January when this past semester was just getting started, and thinking of all the time that I had to get things finished for the master's degree and everything. Now, it's already June 1st, and I've got about 5 weeks to finish my paper, create a powerpoint presentation, and take care of the business stuff that UT requires me to have completed. Things are moving along, although my first draft of my paper was decidedly a very, very rough draft. I've gotten most of the corrections taken care of, and now I'm waiting on the 3rd guy to go through all the data and see what he says about it. Last I checked, he didn't know what to do say about it, and if the guy that's been studying superconductivity for 30 years doesn't know what to say, I'm sure as heck not going to know what say about it. Unless I'm a genius...

Something that I've started doing in the past couple months of posting on here (and sporadically from the beginning) is to start using song titles as the title for my posts. They are usually just what I've been listening to either at the time of the post or that got me thinking about whatever random thoughts I put down for that day. Some of the time, the song content doesn't even relate to what I end up rambling about, and sometimes it coincides quite nicely. It's really interesting some of the inspiration you can get from a song title, regardless of the genre that the particular song comes from.

With that in mind, today's song title comes from a new band called Rush of Fools. I guess with looking at how quickly the past 5 months of this year have passed, it seemed fitting to use this particular word, especially given the constricted time frame I will soon be dealing with. The song deals with the idea that God has already taken care of anything and everything. There's nothing left for us to do but accept Him and do His will. He already loves us, He already has taken care of us, He already did everything that was necessary on His part to bring us to Him. For me, especially in a time when I'm feeling as if I have to work hard in order to have anything work out correctly, it's comforting to know that, for this aspect of my life, all the "work" has been done. All I've got to do is step up and accept what's on offer. Once I'm to that point, it shouldn't be all that hard to go out and do His will, should it? After all, the hard part has already been done.