The Launch: Moz 08 Team Website

The team website is up and running (click on the photo), thanks to the awesome skills and efforts of Nathan Logan , one of our teammates.

Unless the Lord builds this "house", we know that we labor in vain, so I covet your prayers for the team and our time in S. Africa/Mozambique. Thank you!

A Glimpse at "Faith Expedition"

As promised, here's a selection of photos from VBS 2008! Kudos to Jason Kim for these great shots, and Sam Shin for processing them.

How to Find Peace With God

"We are never at peace with God till we resolve to be loved in Jesus Christ." -John Calvin

The Usual Suspects: Moz Team 2008

We were taking photos last night for a team photo, and we did this funny one. I've never watched "The Usual Suspects" myself, but there is an infamous police line-up picture we're trying to mimic.

Plodding Along

Today, I came across a helpful blog article about the principle of "plodding" (i.e. breaking up bigger tasks into smaller bite-size ones to tackle a little bit at a time) written by Douglas Wilson. The context from which he speaks is as a pastor, but the general principles in time management and being productive may be beneficial for anyone who bemoans lack of time. What I appreciate about what he says is what he is not saying: that his approach is a "one-size-fits-all" method. But these are simply principles to consider for time management and that adjustments are required depending on individual giftings and life situations.

His basic principles are: (1) redeem the fifteen minute spaces; (2) maintain boundaries for everything, boundaries that suit the circumstance; (3) measure progress by the extended video, not the snapshot; (4) use and reuse everything.

Often if I don't have a huge chunk of time to read, I tend not to choose reading as my activity of choice, as it always takes me awhile to settle down, especially when I am feeling busy and have a lot of things going on. But realizing that my life will never get "less" busy and may very well get even busier if, in the future, I were to enter another season (i.e. marriage and motherhood, Lord-willing), I thought the principle of "plodding" does make sense and that I should give it a try:

I believe in plodding. Productivity is more a matter of diligent, long-distance hiking than it is one-hundred-yard dashing. Doing a little bit now is far better than hoping to do a lot on the morrow. So redeem the fifteen minute spaces. Chip away at it. For example, I have a stack of six books that I am working through most weekday mornings -- a page or two of each every time I sit down to read. I do the same thing with writing -- if you have time for a little bit, then do a little bit.

HT: JT Between Two Worlds

VBS 2008

Last week, my church hosted our annual VBS for Gospel Train (the name for the Children's Ministry). It was a tiring albeit awesome week that held daily challenges and unexpected surprises, and for the duration, it felt more like a month because of the cumulative effect of fatigue and excitement mounting each day that passed. But God was so gracious to all the children and families who attended, not to mention upholding the team of teachers and volunteers who so faithfully served in a variety of capacities. How blessed it is to collaborate with others in serving the Lord! I hope to post some photos and videos once I get my hands on them.

Since "faith comes from hearing and hearing through the word of Christ" (Rom 10:17 ), I view the fundamental goal of an event such as VBS to be primarily about sowing the seeds of biblical truth through the faithful teaching, discussion, and hiding of God's Word in these young hearts. It may take years for a harvest to be reaped, but it is my ongoing prayer that much eternal fruit will be borne in the souls of our kids. What a joy and privilege it is for me to see the children learning about God and how He is the Author of our faith!

On our final day, we held a mini-carnival for the kids which included a dunk tank, jumpers, face painting, animal balloons, and a sno-cone and a cotton candy machine. And of course, yours truly took her turn at the dunk tank but so did Sam and Tim, my co-laborers in the Gospel. Sam's two oldest daughters got an opportunity to dunk their dad and succeeded! Here's a shot of Sam and Sarah:

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

In a recent article Is Google Making Us Stupid? from The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr examines how the internet is shaping not only the normative practices of accessing information, but the very ways we think and process information. This is creating a generation who readily turn to Google's search engine to quickly find information and store tidbits of information, as opposed to going through the painstaking process of reading through books and wrestling with ideas. (Ironically, I was tempted to abandon reading the article because it was much longer than the average blog post I read.)

As a former humanities teacher who read and graded the written works of high school students, including research essays, I saw how most relied heavily upon the information they found on the internet (as opposed to the old-fashioned way of going to a library and checking out books). Ironically, Carr also points out that there was a time when it was feared that books might make us stupid; Socrates once feared that the written word would become a "substitute for the knowledge [people] used to carry inside their heads" and “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” What a contrast not only in how research for papers are done nowadays, but also the inability for many of us, including myself, to sit and concentrate on what I'm reading for long periods of time. Carr aptly describes this phenomenon:

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. [emphasis mine] As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

How true. Reading this thought-provoking article is definitely making me reevaluate my internet practices, and the necessity sometimes to simply turn off the computer, grab a good book, and sit and read.

HT: JT Between Two Worlds

Does JC90210 live in Egypt?

For the past four years, there has been a mystery at Wellspring.

Who is JohnCalvin90210?

He appeared simply on the scene as someone possessing a Geocities account with the pseudonym JohnCalvin90210 and a seemingly innocent picture of church members' faces supplanted over the line-up of The Usual Suspects. But over the months that ensued, his repertoire expanded to pictures of Tim as Neo from The Matrix, the infamous caricature of Meg in a carrot costume, and even Mr. Jun as Mr. Incredible. There is even one of SuYoung adorned with curly soccer-hair locks to mimic one of the World Cup soccer superstars of Team Korea. Unfortunately, you must be a logged in as a Wellspring member to even see these works of art, but the mystery continues as a few of us attempt to figure out the identity (or shall I say identities) of this Photoshop bandit.

Well, this past week, he was spotted in Egypt. What do you think? Do you think this is him?