Yup. We’re off. We borrowed a van, scrimped for gas, and headed out for a tour of the south with stops in Galveston Island (aunt and uncle), Texas; New Orleans, Louisiana; Starkville (grandma), Mississippi; and Ruston (brother), Louisiana.
High gas prices, you say? Pshaw.
No piddly increase in the cost of gas can stop the tradition of American Road Trips!
Here’s the craziest part. I’m not taking a computer. No internet. No hyper-connectivity on my phone. Nada. Just me and the wife and the kids and the open road.
Update: First leg in Galveston went well. New Orleans is fun. A little over 18 in places we learned, but we plan to avoid all of that for the next two days.
Second, DragonLight
While I’m gone, I’m missing the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour.
I don’t know the answer to that question. I really don’t.
Normally, I stay out of politics stuff. I don’t know where you stand on Obama. I don’t know where I stand, either. I’d rather talk about my daughter’s response to the second Harry Potter. Or my son’s poisonous frogs. (He’s four. Am I a bad father?)
But I had to share what I read in The Atlantic this morning. It’s a little political. It’s a little social media. The implications are pretty interesting.
What Obama seems to promise is, at its outer limits, a participatory democracy in which the opportunities for participation have been radically expanded. He proposes creating a public, Google-like database of every federal dollar spent. He aims to post every piece of non-emergency legislation online for five days before he signs it so that Americans can comment. A White House blog—also with comments—would be a near certainty. Overseeing this new apparatus would be a chief technology officer.
I don’t know about you, but that paragraph stunned me. Weekly YouTube updates from the President of the United States? A White House blog–with comments turned on (and presumably moderated at least)? Social Media peer review of government legislation? Funding transparency that uses google algorithms?
I can’t decide what to think of this.
Is the office of the president going to start getting distracted by Twitter? Is this what good leaders do? If leaders should engage the web 2.0 crowd–and that argument seems more and more plausible–how in the world can the leader of the free world stay on top of basic time management without creating a Twitter ghost, an Obama comments ghost, maybe even a Wag the Dog Obama Youtube ghost?
I met Andre Yee about two years ago when I was just getting into blogging. He still blogs over at Every Square Inch about “Conversations on the Glory of Christ in Business and Culture,” and he’s really good.
The Social Media Prophet
Andre was one of the first bloggers we hired to write for TheHighCalling.org. (You can read his two articles here.) But lately I think he’s been too busy with his nonprofit start up to write for us!
Andre Yee is like some kind of Social Media Prophet. I’m not joking here. He’s a wiki Moses. The church has has been captive for too long, and he’s leading us into the wilderness of the net. I’m not talking about a series of brochure ware nonsense. Or clumsy facebook groups. Or even webzines.
Andre knows where the wind is blowing–and he’s raised the sail.
Marshall McLuhen warned that the medium is the message. A lot of folks have used McLuhen’s cliche to warn us about how easily computers dehumanize us. Take that thinking to its logical end and we all become obese spacemen in floating chairs waiting for Wall-E to wake us up.
But Andre understands the gospel message is more powerful than any medium.
Andre says that nearly 60% of all evangelicals worldwide are in the areas of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. “But they suffer from a lack of biblically sound teaching material.” He goes on to explain that the current model of translation is expensive and limited in its reach. “Few books ever reach worldwide audiences, and some language groups never qualify for any translations at all.”
But you don’t need to read what Andre says. You can see it yourself. He’s been on me for months now to catch this vision with him. Sorry, Andre, I just didn’t get it. My faith is weak, I guess.
But this video helped me see what he’s talking about. It literally opened my eyes. Now I get it.
If you’re like me, you need to watch the video. Watch it. Then think about how you can help.
If you’re like me, you can’t be one of the translators. But you can help promote Andre’s vision. The Wiki Moses needs us! We can help “proclaim the gospel to all peoples in all languages to the glory of God.”
How You Can Help
I’m not talking about a big investment here. I’m talking about simple word of mouth.
Share the video on Facebook. Just click here. (I did!)
Tell others. Do it. I’ll make a social media press release here in a minute that has all of the tools in one spot to make this easy. (Update: here’s a link to the social media press release.)
And if you still haven’t watched that video, here it is:
Recently, my daughter and I have begun to pray by personalizing the scriptures. I say one line, and she repeats it after me. (She’s seven.) Every so often, I ask her if she wants to lead the prayer. She’s still a little shy about that, though.
The exercise is a good challenge to me to memorize more. But it helps her memorize, too.
I remembered all of this when I was looking at the 22 Words post yesterday. (I like that blog because Abraham Piper is a web content editor. Like me.)
He talks about teaching his so to pray as if he is just “talking to Jesus.” Like the old hymn I grew up with. “Have a little talk with Jesus.”
Several years ago when I tried this approach with my daughter. She has always been shy about prayer. It’s a failing of mine as well. So I explained that prayer was just like “talking to God.”
Man, she called me on it. “Dad,” she said. “God isn’t here.”
I stammered through a theological explanation that God IS here. Jesus lives in our hearts. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
But I couldn’t shake the honesty of her response.
Because no matter how much rhetoric we use, we can’t talk to God in the same way that we talk to people because God doesn’t talk back in the same way.
I don’t know what to with that thought. I don’t know where it takes me. I don’t know where it takes you. So let’s just watch the Oak Ridge Boys sing with butterfly collars and afros. Seriously, you have to watch this. They go totally nuts at the end.
I’m pretty excited about GodBlogCon.com 2008. You never know what’s going to happen there. I went to GodBlogCon.com 2007 with Mark D. Roberts and ended up on a Hugh Hewitt’s radio show.
Here’s what’s even better. Laity Lodge and TheHighCalling.org are sponsoring this year’s event. That means 10% of the proceeds from registrations through our affiliate link will be donated back to our programs. What’s not to love?
It’s the day we celebrate our country–and frankly, I feel a bit like dancing with the world today. This guy named Matt beat me to it. (And 4,000,000 other people beat me to the youtube clip, but I’m sharing it here anyway; hat tip to Karl Edwards for sharing this with me on Facebook.)
(Go to Youtube and click under the video to watch in high quality.)
Or if Matt dancing is too not American enough for you, try the muppets. Can’t go wrong with that. (Hat tip to Steve McCoy and Slashfilm.)
I mean that in a good way. As some of you know, I really like horror films, horror novels, and horror stories. In fact, I’m writing some of my own. (It might also be a thriller, rather than horror, but I’m still a little fuzzy on the difference.)
That’s why I’m always interested in strange things like the new animated Dante’s Inferno I found this through Greg Wolfe on Facebook. (He’s editor of Image Journal–great magazine.)
Here’s a link to the preview if you’re interested. This one’s definitely, definitely not for kids, though. Startling, disturbing images. You’ve been warned. I was going to embed the youtube, but my wife didn’t think that was a good idea.
So here’s the question. Is there something wrong with me that I enjoy this stuff? I love horror. I really do. The stark justice of it is really interesting and, oddly, inspiring. Am I just crazy?
Randy Ingermanson just posted a hilarious article called Three Reasons to Ban All Non-Amish Novels that does a great job of listing some of the quirks of the Christian publishing world–in particular the cussing problem. Randy says, CBA limits authors to “tofu cuss-words that make them sound like that gosh-darned Miss Marple.”
Heh heh heh.
One question, though, Randy. If I were Lassie and Timmy told me to save him because he’d fallen down in “gzbr wll” again, I’d have a problem. I’d have absolutely no clue what “gzbr” meant. Geezburr? Jeezbeer?
Sam Van Eman and Tina Howard got me wondering about the high calling of advertising and media with some recent posts of theirs. I elaborated more on this over at HighCallingBlogs.com.
Specifically, I asked readers this:
Have you seen any ads that glorified God lately? I’m not talking about ads for church or black billboards with God asking if you can come over before the game. I mean, have you seen any business ads, doing what ads do normally, and still glorifying God at the same time?
(As way of example, consider this ad for Honda that concludes, “Isn’t it nice when things work?” It is nice. And it’s by the grace of God and a tremendous amount of good design and diligence when things work. That’s an edifying thought, isn’t it?)
I’m turning the comments off here, so as not to divide the discussion between that post and this one. But I do want to know what you think. So go comment.
