Mac

I made the switch back to Mac 6 days ago. My PC has totally crashed for the 3d time in 5 months. By "totally crashed" I mean that a tech has to reformat the hard drive, re-install Windows plus about 15 different programs that I use. The first two crashes cost me about $500 in parts and labor, plus 25 hours or more in reinstalling Word, BlackBerry, MediaShout, WordSearch, etc. I wasn't going to do it again!! Two strong attempts to sustain the life of that PC was enough. (we might try to resuscitate it later...)

Anyway, got a MacBook Pro last Friday and I'm feeling quite good about it. iPhoto is amazing. iMovie is amazing. Safari seems excellent. iTunes is, well, iTunes. Numbers, I'm confident, is great...although I try to avoid such software in general. Pages is great. And Keynote has me intrigued. I'm looking forward to delving into it and using it some.

I have partitioned the disc and have Windows loaded on the Mac. Using Boot Camp, I messed around with Windows this afternoon--with MediaShout, our worship presentation software. It's far more responsive and stable on a Mac-using-Vista than on a PC!!!

It's nice to be home again...

Shifty Died...Who Knew???

As a post-Seminary graduation treat, I took the time needed to watch the entire "Band of Brothers" series (thanks Jeromy and Beth for loaning or lending, whichever is grammatically correct).

What an amazing series that is. Ordinary men, placed in extraordinary circumstances, accomplished remarkable things.

Shifty Powers was one of those men. He grew up in humble settings and enlisted when the war started. He took 6 practice jumps in training and was part of the 101st Airborne, which was being formed to try a new form of combat with gritty, semi-sane soldiers called "paratroopers." Shifty and Co. were dropped inland on June 6th, 1944 (D-Day). He fought in every battle that Easy Company faced for the rest of the war. He was considered the best shot in the entire company. During the Battle at Bastogne, he placed a shot between the eyes of a German sniper who had concealed himself extremely well and who had shot a number of US troops. All he could see of the sniper was a faint whisp of breath (it was bitterly cold).

Having survived the fighting, he was desperate to go home. He didn't have enough "points" to be discharged. But, HQ had authorized each company to hold a raffle to send a man home early--sort of a morale lifter. The rest of Easy Company--by now made up mostly of replacement soldiers--conspired to rig the raffle so that Shifty could go home. Sadly, Shifty didn't get home for months--his jeep had an accident on the way to the airport and he was seriously injured. All the other GI's rotated out of the service before he could even leave the hospital in Europe.

Shifty lived a full life following that. He worked for a coal company and had a family. He never talked to his family about his involvements and experiences in the war. He and his company were true-to-life war heroes. Not run of the mill soldiers, but the stuff of legend. Once Ambrose wrote the Band of Brothers book...and Spielberg and Tom Hanks made the series...all of a sudden his family saw their dad, grandpa, uncle in a radically new light.

You can see interviews of Shifty in the series itself--each episode starts with some 50-year-later interviews of the real veterans of Easy Company.

Now...Here's the deal. Shifty died on June 17th. So did Michael Jackson. Shifty's death has been completely obscured by the death of Jackson and the circus attendant thereto. Shifty saved more lives, risked far more, and all without agents or handlers. His death was totally swallowed up by Jackson's.

I'm FAR more grateful for Shifty and millions of other patriots who served this country over the years. And when I die, I hope and pray that there can be some shred of heroism from my life that my family and friends can savor.

Infection

I had lunch today with a great set of friends. All are or are going to be church planters. These guys walk on the edge. They give themselves to ministry and, with God's guidance and help, they pull off impossible things. People come to faith weekly on account of these guys who endure significant loneliness, pain and loss to do ministry in their places. These guys are my heroes.

Once a month, we get together for lunch. We share stories of victories and the hurts of setbacks. We encourage, we cry, we pray, we laugh. It's always a tremendous time together.

One of the fun phenomena of lunch with these guys is catching bits of conversations from all around our 20-seated table. I love to listen in as various guys connect and share. Today, one guy shared that he's really not cut out to minister in the place where he is ministering. He thinks he'd be much better suited to a different sized church, city, demographic, whatever. In any event, he ended his conversation by simply stating: "Jesus has infected me with His love for [my current place]. That's all that really matters."

Cool.

Fast forward 2 hours. I overhear someone else who said: "I just found out that my sister is infected with swine flu. How weird is that?"

Two types of infections. For one there's no vaccine. For the other, we can be vaccined by by our own desires, our goals, our plans. We can be innoculated against the infection of Jesus by this world and what it has to offer. Sadly, lots and lots of "Christians" would love to live life without being infected by either of these things.

I've got no vaccine for either...the swine flu or the infection of Jesus's love for others. How about you?

I could do this all day

I had 2 great opportunities to speak directly into the souls of a couple people yesterday. One is spiritually seeking, the other is quite far from God. For the one who is seeking, I spent an hour or so listening and interacting with her thoughts and questions. As we talked, I was able to share with her a different perspective on God than she's been struggling with. Her world was rocked a bit as she learned more of the one true God, revealed in the Bible.

Later in the day, I was able to speak into a hurting heart at a time of pretty significant turmoil. She had done a couple things that were pretty daring and harsh, and she had upset others in her family. I truthfully told her that her spirit reminds me of Christ. That kind of shocked her, since she's a professing atheist. She let me pray for her twice before our time together was finished. Very cool!!!

I could do this all day. Literally.

Almost killed myself and my wife tonight...

So, we got a new toy last fall. We're using it to clear brush, mow the lawn, grade the driveway, mow what is basically a hay field, move, dig, level, pull, push, and, in the winter, handle all the snow removal.

Tonight, we took out an old sandbox. I used the bucket to lift up the wooden frame of the sandbox, and it lifted out completely intact. Andrea will use it for a raised garden bed next spring. Cool!!

Then I set about to scoop out all the old sand. Moving it down to the fire pit. And the fire pit will be moved about 15 feet to the west and south (if you've been there, you can probably imagine this).

So, I scooped up a big load of sand and started to drive down towards the fire pit. As I was making a turn, the tractor started to tip due to the weight in front. Not having weights in the back to stabilize the load, I grabbed some help. Josh and Andrea jumped on the back hitch. That stabilized the tractor some.

I swung the turn and started going down a hill that runs for about 120' and drops about 15'. It's a decent grade. As I was heading down, I made a tragic and rookie error: I raised the bucket, fearing that it was going to hit the ground. Not a good idea. The weight shifted up and away from the tractor. We started tipping over towards the front of the tractor. The bucket pulled the tractor up on its front wheels.

Josh, my oldest son, bailed off the back once we started to fly forward. My poor bride was unsure where to go or what to do. She hung on for dear life. I am reasonably coordinated. I was able to brace myself by placing my feet up and onto the hydraulic arms from the bucket.

The tractor was fully perpendicular to the level land. It was then that I felt and saw my wife tumble from behind me (i.e., above me) and fall down to the ground. She thankfully fell clear of the bucket. But, her fall was probably 8 feet, and after hitting, she tumbled a bit more down the hill.

With my rear facing the heavens, I hung suspended, keeping myself in place only with my legs bench-pressing me there. Andrea thankfully could move, and she cleared away. I slowly lowered the bucket, which basically lowered me and the tractor. I got to terra firma, dumped the load of sand, and then let my heart recover.

Andrea's on the couch, with a sore left knee and bumped up left arm. She's got some ice going and kicked back 800mg of ibuprofen. I'm in now, having moved all the sand. My back is locking up. Ibuprofen's on my agenda too.

Two important life lessons from this crazy physics experiment:

1. When you're carrying a heavy load, don't try to carry it at arm's length. You will be far more stable if you don't try to shove your burden away from you. Keep it close, take it to where you can safely drop it, and then do so. This is true for tractor buckets filled with hundreds of pounds of sand...and it's true for people who are struggling with fractured relationships, broken careers and the crises that life brings us. Too many of us try to prematurely jettison our burdens. We need to navigate through them, getting to the proper and healthy place for us to unload.

2. You need to turn into the tip. On the tractor, when it starts to tip, the human reaction to avoid pain and danger takes over. If your back left wheel is tipping, you want to steer right to get away from the tipping. Doing this will typically worsen the tip. The correct response is to turn into the side that is tipping up. That's kind of against our nature. I'd rather get away, but the safe solution is to head straight into the perceived danger. When we lean into the problems, we have a far greater chance to survive without any harm.

Now, ibuprofen...and CraigsList to see if there are used tractor weights I can pick up for cheap.