this is the day - the last day!

Whelp, this is the day (pun intended). Not only is it the first update to my blog in about 4 months (oops), it’s also my very last day of missionary service! I thought it would be appropriate to post a little update on my life since it’s been so long. By-the-month highlights - here we go:

March

• March Madness at the Seminar Program: hosted 9 groups from Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.
• Bucket showers for lent: experienced a deep appreciation for water as a resource and gift from God, and remembered my baptism pretty much every day as I poured water over my head.

April

• Visited home for a few days and hosted my family in DC for a few days.
• Finished physical therapy with great improvements in strength in mobility associated with my spinal arthritis.

May

• Married off one housemate and welcomed a new housemate into our home.
• Experienced US-2 End-Terms, the final formal gathering of our missionary class.
• Summer season at the Seminar Program begins with 4 seminar groups.

June

• Began co-leading a Bible study and fellowship small group with The District Church, studying the book of Ecclesiastes.
• Spoke at Western Pennsylvania Annual Conference on my call to mission, my work, and Generation Transformation programs.
• Facilitated a workshop and screened a film, both on human trafficking, at the Youth2015 conference in Orlando, FL.
• Hosted 5 more seminar groups.
• Had the first ever “Find-a-Dave-a-Job-a-Thon,” where my generous friends volunteered to gather at my house to look up jobs they thought I would be good at, and then explain to me why I should apply. Discernment is best done in community. I highly recommend this for anyone engaged in a job search.

July

• For the first time in 3 years, rode a century (100 mile bike ride) with my roommate, fulfilling one of my little known DC goals of biking to the beach and back.
• Celebrated Independence Day with my roommates and friends here in DC.
• Hosted my last seminar group.
• Had the honor of witnessing a good friend be baptized.

What’s next? My first item of business is a bike ride across Iowa called RAGBRAI (Registers Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa). This is simply a huge bike tour I’m doing for fun with 3 friends from DC and about 15,000 new friends I’ll meet there on the journey. The ride will take 7 days and cover 585 miles.

After that, I’ll continue the job search, focusing here in DC for the near term, but expanding beyond as needed. As always, if you know of something at the intersection of engineering, education, and ministry which provides ample time for working with people or hands-on work, please let me know!

I have so many more things I would like to share, but this is all for now. Blessings friends!

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So I decided there is nothing better than to enjoy food and drink and to find satisfaction in work. Then I realized that these pleasures are from the hand of God.
Ecclesiastes 2:24 NLT

reblogged: challenge accepted

First appearing on Nov 15, 2014, this is guest blog I wrote for The Book of Fellows, the blog for United Methodists Young Adult Missionaries. Check it out and see what my peers are up to and thinking about!

Over November 7-9, 2014, a few of us Young Adult Missionaries traveled to Denver, CO for Imagine What’s NEXT. Through music, messages, conversations, and fun, this UMC gathering gave college students, and folks from agencies and organizations, time and space to connect, worship, and consider opportunities for service and vocation.

On Saturday evening, we were issued the $5 Challenge. As we departed for dinner and evening worship downtown, the organizers gave each participant $5 cash. We were not to keep this, but to use it to make the biggest impact possible in downtown Denver. They gave a number of ideas like buying a package of socks to give away, treating someone to dinner, or buying a bus pass for someone. They encouraged us to take pictures of our experiences and post them on social media with the hashtag “#5challenge.”

As for the missionaries, the gears in our minds were spinning. Personally, I had just given a talk earlier in the day, and one of my points was an old standard at Church and Society: we often fail to make the distinction between acts of charity – temporary assistance for urgent needs – and justice – lasting transformation aimed at God’s Kingdom. God calls us to both through our lives of faith (Micah 6:8, Matt 23:23), but we often focus our ministries on charity. For us, the $5 Challenge was to think and act outside the box and do something a little closer to justice.

An idea budded and blossomed during break time: what if we bought sidewalk chalk and wrote messages of inspiration, encouragement, advocacy, and awareness on the streets of Denver? We ran with it. After dinner, we fortunately came upon an office supplies store 5 minutes before close (yes, we were those annoying customers). Six of us went in and spent $3 on 3 packs of chalk. We hit the streets.

Before our eyes, the results multiplied like fishes and loaves blessed by God. People read our notes as they walked by, some engaging us in conversation. Some people wanted to write words of wisdom and inspiration for themselves, so we gave them chalk to take with them on their own journeys. We tagged each of our notes “#NEXT14″ so that socially-networked passers-by might go online and see what else we were up to at the conference.
 

I like to think that people’s lives were changed, even just a little, by our “street tweets” – that someone would know that Christians carry messages of hope as well as challenge – that another might grow in their awareness that all people are valuable and treasured – that yet another would come to realize we were created to be alive and vital. A few strategic and beautiful words, bathed in the power of the Spirit, have the power to transform lives forever.

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’ He answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.’ –Luke 19:39-40

when did we stop playing?

How would you define imagination? When I asked my seminar participants this today, they used some of these words and phrases: Visioning. Dreams. Transcendent humor. Even Spongebob.

I followed that up by reading the creation story, Genesis 1:1 – 2:4, from the Message version of the Bible. While it’s really not what you want to use for serious Bible study or exegesis, I really like to pull out the Message once in a while for its fresh, earthy, and non-academic language. Through the scripture, it’s fun to watch, in your mind’s eye, the creation story unfold as God’s divine imagination becomes a reality. I like to think of God as an engineer (big surprise, right?). God imagined the universe, designed it, and then built it – speaking it into existence.

I can remember being young and climbing all over a fallen tree with my friends and my brother, pretending the tree was a spaceship. We’d land on alien planets, fire the lasers, and gather “crystals” (aka, bottles and jars we found in the dirt, filled with creek water) to power the ship. We would run around in the woods and play all day on those warm, summer days until it got dark and our parents made us come inside.

When I was visiting the Seminar Program in New York City last fall, one of the speakers, a theater guy, asked us to pretend we were in all kinds of interesting situations: walking through honey, hurrying somewhere on the coldest day of the year, on your way to your first date with the girl/guy of your dreams. At the end of all this, he asked a question that hit me like a ton of bricks.

When did we stop playing?

Whoa. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I/we haven’t completely stopped playing, but it really isn’t something that happens on a daily basis. I remember a few weeks ago, a few friends and I were hanging out, and we pulled out some Nerf guns (sorry pacifists) and ran around the house marking each other in good fun! For others, playing looks like finding creative ways to make running a mile more challenging.

This kind of playing is all good fun (depending on who you are) and can be a needed escape from reality, but others still have found more humanitarian ways to play and exercise imagination. At Capitol Hill UMC, we have begun a sermon series promoting the UMC Imagine No Malaria campaign. It’s all about visioning and moving toward a world where malaria, a disease that claims a life every 60 seconds, is no longer a reality. We want to eradicate it worldwide, just like we did in the US in the 1950s. Simple preventative measures, such as a $10 bed net, along with education on how and why to use it, can protect a family from malaria-carrying mosquitoes while they sleep, the time when people are most vulnerable to bites and subsequent infections. Think about ways you might get involved in this, or something else that inspires your passion and sparks your imagination.

As I write this, I come to this thought: aren’t the times we feel most alive also the times when we are playing, brainstorming, and letting our imaginations soar? I hope you get a chance to get outside and play today.

it's just a coat (or is it?)

My first dilemma: it's getting cold in Washington, DC and winter is on the way. I have a winter coat which is fairly warm, waterproof, and overall, reasonably functional. On the other hand, it is also a bold blue and white ski jacket that I've had since college (at least 7 years ago). I wouldn't exactly blend in on Capitol Hill or walking around the city with seminar groups. So, if I got a more professional looking coat, basically just to fit in with the in-crowd, would that make me materialistic? My mom and a handful of other people more or less said, "no, it's important to look presentable" so I'm going to take that as a sign that getting a new coat might be an ok thing. I'm still a little uneasy about it, especially after recalling Luke 12:22-31, but let's put that dilemma on the backburner and assume getting a new coat is an acceptable thing for me to do.

My second dilemma: the act of buying a new coat. My checklist: warm, waterproof (I bike, walk, or bus to work), and professional-looking. Mom told me it should match my pants (whatever that means) (yes, Mom still helps me shop for clothes because it's something that exhausts me). It would be great if it is also responsibly made. There's a redeeming factor for buying a new coat - it could lead to opportunities to raise awareness about responsibly made goods.

My first thought was "sweatshop free," and my next thought was American Apparel. I remember talking about the company in Bible study back in Michigan. They have a couple stores in downtown DC and they have some coats listed online which look to fit the bill. They are a bit pricier than I would generally pay (coats in the ~$150 range), but responsibly made means you pay a legitimate price for a product instead of the product being subsidized by low wages. I actually read large pieces of their "About Us" page and felt good about their business model and corporate attitude. I came across a small part of their page which talked about a line of products they have made with organic cotton. Whoa. I wasn't even thinking about where the raw materials came from. As far as I can tell, they don't tout any coats having been made from responsibly sourced materials. Maybe I should poke around on the internet and see what else I can find, just for fun-zies.

I found it difficult to find clothing, especially outerwear, made from responsibly sourced materials. I did come across Patagonia. The way they keep shop really blew me away, both from the standpoint of intentionality and also humility. Workers taken care of? Check. Organic cotton? Check. Some fabrics made from recycled plastic bottles? Check. Black Friday ad saying "Don't buy this jacket"? Check. Inspiring. The cost of a winter coat? We're talking about $500.

To quote the founder of Patagonia, "Living the examined life is a pain in the ass." Yes, Yvon Chouinard, it is a pain in the ass.

To formalize my dilemma, $500 is a real stretch on a missionary budget. $150 is doable, but is buying just to the level of responsibly manufactured really worth the premium? Maybe I should just go for one of the $50 coats I found with my family over the weekend?

After agonizing over it for a few days, here's where I land. I think we have the responsibility to do the best we can with the resources we have. In Luke 12:34, Jesus tells us "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." We ought to put our two cents (or $500) into places we can believe in, insofar as our finances permit. Not all of us have the resources to buy the most responsibly made products. Plenty of people make way less than I do and just need something warm on their back that looks respectable. But some, even many, of us can choose to support companies who are oriented in a way that respects God's creation. When there is a market need for something, companies will be looking to fill it.

Disclaimer: this is approached from a personal responsibility perspective and doesn't address the more socially or systemically based question of why everyone can't afford clothes that are generated sustainably. Maybe someday I'll have ability to try that one, but I'm not there yet. I think I will say that it isn't enough to consider only individual or social responsibility, but both together.
 

Feeling like a disciple

I think I finally get it. After years of critique of those crazy Twelve, both my own and listening to others, I've become as one of them. Jesus called the disciples out of their chosen careers - some fishing, some tax collecting - and into a much different walk. How did they respond during the initial portions of that walk? Lots of ways we like to poke fun at. They argued about who is the greatest and asked who would sit at the right hand of Jesus in his kingdom. They had times of confusion and times of little faith. They fell asleep as Christ perspired what were like great drops of blood. They ran away and denied Jesus in his darkest hour. Maybe Thomas is the one we like to give the hardest time of all, when he declares that he won't believe in the risen Christ until he physically touches Jesus' crucifixion wounds.

I can relate. Six months ago, I was in engineering, and God was calling me. Just three months ago, I was wrapping things up at the lab, preparing for my new adventure with Jesus. Today, I'm serving as a missionary in our Nation's Capitol. As I begin this new walk, sometimes I just don't get it. The things I read or the things people say don't always connect with my experience. Sometimes I'm stubborn, and sometimes I shut down for a little bit. I probably fall asleep on or walk away from Jesus all the time.

I appreciate the persistence of the disciples. Even when they didn't get it, they hung in there. I appreciate the patience of Jesus. Even when they didn't get it, he hung in there.

I hope I'm a person who can hang in there, knowing I'm not always going to get it, and asking Jesus for crazy things like being able to see his wounds, and experience his life, death, and resurrection, in ways which are tangible to me. He'll meet me there, because that's how Jesus rolls.