It’s not easy to find the highlight times during MPD. I’ll highlight some unusual things I did today.

After my noon appointment, I helped out the church’s full-time audio-visual technician to try out some new equipment and look at the Phase 3 construction site of the new sanctuary auditorium and basement. I played around with a Roland/Edirol media server that mixes video footage live in a dedicated operating environment, kind of neat but also limited in ways. Also, we donned hard hats and toured the new auditorium, talking about the expected installations of 3 projectors and seamless screens in full high-definition, an audio console built in precisely where it should be, and a great video mixing and control room at the very top above the balcony level where live camera mixing, worship lyrics, and lighting control can occur. I learned a heck of a lot about the interplay between all these things and how slight changes can affect everything else.

Integrating a 48-channel digital mixer and a 48-channel live recording mixer for post-production as well as HD video DLP projection with edge blending and spherical aberration correction in an environment designed to be pillarless, acoustically stable, accommodating 15 ClearCom beltpack systems while maintaining usability and cost-efficiency: full-time job anyone? I’m glad our church has this guy, Ian, to help coordinate all these various aspects. And to observe that he truly believes in using all these technologies to enhance the ability of the average church-goer to enjoy and understand and experience clearly the message of Jesus Christ; that takes a lot of humility.

Another week of MPD, settling in. I think my first couple weeks were rocky for a few reasons - one of which is that my daytimes are very free. I do not have many appointments in the mornings, but I usually have lunch appointments and then evenings are go time. That either means going to appointments or making the phone calls to arrange appointments. In this regard, my evenings can sometimes go late because of appointments, but my mornings have been good for getting sleep. I need to make sure that I still wake up at a good time and not misuse that time, however.

In order to use my day time well, I’ve decided to go over the memory verses that I should have memorized already from this past year of using the Topical Memory System. Today it was recapping 2 Corinthians 5:17 - “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” Sweet, I have it down right now. Need to continue to ingrain it into my head.

Today I had another person join my ministry team! It was really great to present to Encouraging Supporter (ES) because ES has supported me in the past few summer projects, and this time I got a chance to really get to know ES and what they do for a job and what God has been doing in their life.

Earlier today it was great to have lunch with another friend I grew up with and really catch up. That’s something I’ve been doing through MPD as well — catch up with old friends, find out what has happened in the past 4 years, and share with them my ministry. I know that being in Guelph has been great and I built up a great community that I thrived in, but the relationships I had in high school at church and youth group really disappeared. So this is time to rebuild.

I’ve tried to find things to do during the daytime that are low-commitment but still challenging. I’ve had to be very careful about what I commit to… I had to turn down helping with the Sunday music because I can’t commit to 2 practices and a Sunday service; that has been hard. A few other things that I’m attempting include the following: learning better Cantonese and starting to learn Mandarin, watching Anaheim vs. Ottawa games, and doing some video stuff.

Some devotionals with a book by A.W. Tozer have been really interesting as well. His lessons are short but hard-hitting. The words that expand on God’s word are still very relevant after many years. I think this is my first longer foray into biblical scholarly writings. I tried to get into some Piper books in the past years but it has been hard. Although in the past books that deal a lot with interpersonal relationships have been books I’ve whipped through, such as Henry Cloud, Josh Harris. Maybe I just need to build up my attention span and the more straight up theological stuff. Not sure.

I’m up late and I’m not having a great time. The Adobe Video Suite is giving me tons of trouble and I can’t seem to effectively complete conversion from .mov to .avi without programs crashing or errors occurring. Also, I can’t transcode .mov’s in Encore DVD in order to create a DVD-player playable disc. I’ve tried at this for over a week now. I didn’t think this would have been such an ordeal. It’s frustrating.

On the other hand, this week I have the most support appointments yet, with 7 in total. Not quite 8-15/week, but getting there! I need to be persistent on the phone.

The past couple weeks have been joyful and stressful. I am learning about myself and how I deal with stress. I realized that I always have and am still dealing with a fear of making phone calls. Formal calls to people I don’t know I can do, but when it comes to calling acquaintances and assuming they want to talk to me, it’s tough. I err on the side of thinking people do not want to talk to me. I fear the rejection and the possibility of offending them. I also fear that my poor follow-up after previous projects has caused people to feel like I used them for their money. They don’t know that they’ve truly encouraged me and partnered with me to do great things. And I don’t know how they feel about me at all (whether they feel used or extremely supportive). The unknowns cause me anxiety.

Sometimes perhaps I only put the good stuff here for people to see — the photoshopped pictures, the edited blog posts — and shy away when something tough is going on. Well, I’ve blogrolled 5 times each day and no one else is posting anything that frequently. I sure as heck haven’t, but I think it’s because sometimes I don’t feel like I have anything profound or knowledgeable to enlighten you with. It’s never the most inspiring thing to read about how I believe fully in the call that God has for me towards the campus but I’m still paralyzed and speechless with fear. MPD was never advertised to be easy. I’m fully behind it no matter what it is doing to me, since I know this process will allow God to transform me into somebody four years of university could never have inputted.

In other news (and you can interpret for yourself what makes sense to you): I hope I’m glad Anaheim advanced to the Stanley Cup final to face Ottawa, now I don’t know who to cheer for. I don’t understand why Peter Petrelli didn’t fly when he was about to explode. Chinese Cantonese food really isn’t healthy at all, and I’m not getting my proper nutrients living at home right now (time for supplements). My family went to a garden centre where we bought some perennials (I think they will grow back next year, if we actually bought perennials) and I had the chance to plant the whole front garden (it’s not very big) so hopefully in some time it will be covered in purple and white ground cover flowers. And I’m really interested in the Honda Fit. We may purchase one soon.

This week I’ve been making some phone calls and meeting up with some good friends and supporters. It has been encouraging. My biggest insecurity is talking to people over the phone. But I love it when I’m meeting people in person. It’s a joy. At least that’s what I’m experiencing right now, and it’s only the first week.

Today was a weird day in that I had to deal with car troubles. Right in the morning as I was heading out I realized I had a flat tire, driver’s side rear. I had no idea how to change it. But thankfully in the parking lot where I stopped, there was a public works employee who pulled over for lunch and he essentially showed me how to do it. I watched him loosen the wheel nuts, jack up the vehicle, remove the nuts, replace the wheel with the spare, and tighten the bolts in the star criss-cross manner to ensure optimal even bolt tightening. It was a great help. But for the rest of the day, the car was going crazy with the automatic lock system, it would lock and then unlock and then lock on its own repeatedly, and not respond correctly to the remote control’s buttons. Apparently the humidity sometimes affects our car… how crazy.

As I was driving around today, I started thinking about heaven. What will heaven be like? Sometimes, it seems like we only know what true joy is because of all the suffering and problems we go through. I only know how nice it is to drive a smooth vehicle after being in a car accident and having driving with flat tire recently. I don’t know how to truly value things and circumstances properly without this frame of reference. But in heaven, when time is measured with respect to eternity, will I be counting? Right now I know when I’m in tune with God because my will is aligned with his. But that “knowing God” is punctuated by so many instances of slipping into my own desires, my own will, my own direction. I can’t really imagine how it would be like to be “knowing God” ceaselessly.

I’m told that it is the greatest joy and what will bring me purpose and satisfaction. How I could be “knowing God” as my full-time occupation and hobby and expenditure of time is way beyond my understanding right now. My natural self feels like that would be such a boring pursuit after, say, 200 years. Something inside of me feels like that would be pretty cool, however. There are people in my life right now who make me smile when I think about how I know them, and they know me. Life would be pretty unexciting and empty if I didn’t know each of these people. Perhaps that’s more of a glimpse of what “knowing God” really means.