Countdown to Tübingen

Hi there. My name is Tyler, and I’m leaving the country.

Moving across the ocean demands a menial level of preparation. Three years of work in Germany will probably require a certain set of clothes, tools, and support structures set up back home. Here are some of the tasks remaining before departure…

• Get all the files off my old computers that I will want to keep, put onto my Maxtor Terabyte to take with me. I found this little gem above hidden on an old hard drive.
• Upgrade the laptop. Good technology is conducive to great work.
• Buy a second pair of jeans. Maybe a third. Great work is made possible by adequate clothing.
• Make a teaser video for FUMCLV.
• Give the sermon at Tuckerfirst on Sunday.
• Take the Tuckerfirst banner design to a print shop.
• Send out the last email newsletter from the States. Email spam folders need their fodder.
• Watch Shalynn graduate.
• Divide all my wordly belongings into what to keep and what to throw away.
• Pack.

Anything I’m forgetting?

If you’re like me, you are a stickler for quality. Call it perfectionism. Call it anal retentivity. I just like things good ‘n polished. And then polished some more.

The point, of course, is that I set a high bar for everything I do. In tenth grade, I was the star/envy/object-of-hatred-and-misunderstanding of my algebra class because I drew all my graphed functions on graph paper, cut them out with neat, square corners, and pasted them onto the notebook-paper where I would write sub-captions and explanations. Don’t worry, I’ve relaxed a little since then to a more reasonable level. But doesn’t the thought of a person with such professionalism in even the smallest details excite you about supporting that person as a professional missionary? Please say it does!

There’s something to be said for spinning straw into gold. Exhibit A: Cirque du Soleil has made a huge business out of it – taking the lowly art of the circus and elevating and perfecting it into something beautiful and amazing – and expensive. Exhibit B: Life for Children Ministry had a bunch of video clips and pictures from their work in Kenya and needed someone to put it all together in an engaging, exciting package. They came to me and asked me to make a video for them in my spare time – check it out above. It ain’t perfect, but I have to take a step back and admire that, yes, even my half-hearted attempts still turn out pretty good.

Now I just need to charge Cirque du Soleil prices.

paul, pictured here not making tents

It is common knowledge among fans of Paul of Tarsus that among the many activities of the Bible’s most prolific pen-pal, making tents was how the famous missionary funded much of his mission activities. The subject of Paul’s tent-making provides a lot of interesting discussion… What kind of dichotomy existed between Paul’s missionary and work life? Or, instead: can the workplace be a mission field? At any rate, Paul was early proof that at it’s truest core, delivering a message of grace freely given doesn’t pay well.

Unfortunately for me, German apartment prices demand a message that does pay well. Enter the once-a-week work day.

Leaving for Germany with 60% of my budget raised means I will be attempting to make up the difference by taking a day each week to do the jobs my degree should have brought with it: making videos, website development, coding, and (outside of the CS degree) design work. Paul made tents. I make pretty pixels.

Preparing to leave means lining up some work here in the states before I go. Between Lawrenceville FUMC’s video productions and Method 48′s web projects, I have enough tent orders to last me for weeks. But I’m hoping to make my initial stay in the field longer than that, so I’m thinking long term: brownlowdown is my effort to reach more developers in need of the kind of digital media I dig; FlashyThemes is my effort to build a tiny amount of equity in an online store for Flash components built for WordPress blogs. Both are works in progress.

I’m not a particularly big fan of Paul, but I continue to be surprised (or disappointed, I suppose) at how much my life reflects his. The biggest remaining difference? Paul’s letters get a lot more readers than my blog. But that’s just what Google says.

not available in your local missionary

You wouldn’t buy milk you knew would go sour the next day. You wouldn’t buy a car you knew would turn lemon the next month. So why would you support a missionary you knew would get sick?

Globalscope is proud to send to the field only missionaries that pass the strictest of medical and health tests. In order to meet these requirements, I am going through the cleaners, you might say, if by “cleaners” you meant a series of medical doctors.

Yesterday I visited the dentist, which is always a treat. There is a peculiar mix of guilt – for having to ask the poor dental technician to clean the “build-up” (from those nights when you were too tired to brush) off the back of your teeth – and fear of the news of how much your teeth have decayed since the last visit. Adult teeth are practically the opposite of progressing through grade school – you are always regressing unless, in the miraculous best case scenario, you are able to somehow maintain your previous grade. That was yesterday.

Today I visited the good folks at Passport Health in Roswell to get some of those immunizations I’ve been craving for so long. Here’s a question for you: how do you spend $265 in under a minute? There are several less wholesome ways I can think of – or, if you’re kind of a health nut like me, run out and get yourself some Typhoid and Menactra shots.

The doctor at Passport was one of the jolliest doctors I have ever been patient to. As I entered the front door, she was inviting the office to check out the “eye candy” of a man-patient that had landed in her patient chair with his shirt off. The office did just that, and then I took Mr. Candy’s place. The good doctor talked a little with me about Germany before opening up her mini-fridge full of syringes (where one might, were it not a doctor’s office, expect to find a beer stash) and gave me two quick, successive injections as she hummed a song she was making up on the fly and told me “we’re just having a little fun here”.

Feeling a little more invincible than I was this past weekend, I’m ready for anything the modern world can throw at my digestive and immune systems. That’s a missionary you can feel secure about investing in.

the incredulity of saint thomas by caravaggio

Last night, I got the opportunity to speak at Cafe (the original! – at GTCCF). My instructions were to pick anything from the Easter story according to John 20 as my focus, and in my terrible honesty I talked about how I connected with the story of Thomas expressing his doubt about the Resurrection (and I’m in good company). The talk included a clip of Michael Shermer, editor of Sketpic magazine, talking (at TED, I love it) about debunking miraculous appearances of religious figures in tree bark, grilled cheese sandwiches, and other questionable “miracles”. Some points from the talk:

• Is God, the force that Created the Universe, bodies of space that stretch to Infinite Distances beyond what the human mind can comprehend and everything in it down to the tiniest speck of dust and the nano-molecule, now spending his days putting the faces of His closest friends in grilled cheese sandwiches? How miraculous is it that microwave fishsticks could ever in a million billion years freeze in the shape of the cross? Is it miraculous enough to sell on eBay?
• Was Thomas so wrong for saying that he wanted to see Jesus for himself before he made any conclusions?
• Seeking God means being willing to meet God halfway.
• “Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find.” (from the Gospel of Thomas)
• There are a lot of fantastic, incredible, over-the-top stories out there from lots of other people, but you don’t have to buy into that. God is alive and working in your life story, and your story is the most important story.

Here is the full text: link

a synched ipod, an average latte, and thou

How concerned with Facebook status updates, Twitter feeds, blog posts, and Web 2.0 are the people of Tucker, Georgia? With online minutia becoming all the rage (and content of CNN reports), surely Tucker, a prominent suburb of one of the most wired cities in the United States, one of the most wired countries in the world, would be surfing the foamy crest of that technology wave.

Here I sit in Mighty Joe Espresso, gathered with the city’s most tech-savvy coffee drinkers (coffee and technology have been long-time bedmates ever since they met in Seattle, btw). But the peak of electronic technology even here, at the epicenter of Tucker technology, tops out at the Japanese teens across the room listening to iPods with earbuds firmly in earlobes while they converse with each other over the music they are blaring into their heads.

Change is slow in the 30084 zip code. Tucker Day, one of Tucker’s dearest, longest-held annual traditions, just got its own website. Yes, just ten short years after the widespread advent of the internet, Tucker Day has a website featuring the latest in 90′s web technology. The Tucker Day banner, a valuable artifact that dates back to the 50′s (let’s say), has been changed to reflect the new website, with “.com” pasted on to the right side of the banner.

It’s the kind of climate one should really measure before launching a major effort to capitalize on trends and conditions. The blog for the Tuckerfirst Contemporary Service, for instance, has been around and advertised for months now, and has a solid traffic stream of one visitor: me. All the sermon podcasts, Twitter updates, and pictures of the service have not changed the fact that nobody in Tucker cares about internet presence. Compare this to the volunteers I met at Off the Blogs who had updated their Twitter statuses seven times in the thirty minutes they had been greeting people at the doors.

How concerned with computers, the internet, and technology are the people of Tucker? Not very. But that’s a lesson in outreach learned.