Category: Spiritual Journey
Next to Tinseltown
When I was five or six, we lived in a rent house. I can recall two things about the house: one of the windows had a very long hose coming out of it from the washing maching down to the lawn, and our next-door-neighbor liked to work on his cars and I liked to sit on the engine and “help” him. (This is the closest I’ve ever been to working on a car.)
When I was thirteen, we lived in a different rent house, in a different state. I remember two things about the house: my bedroom was in the basement (which I loved) and the big open room next to my bedroom seemed big enough to play racquetball in.
The New Guy
A new hire at Apple was announced today.
Given that Apple has over a hundred thousand employees, a new hire there usually doesn’t qualify as news. However, this one did. It wasn’t, of course, Apple who did the announcing, but the various media outlets who make a living from following Apple. Unlike most Apple “news,” which is typically a wild rumor in a very thin “it might be true!” wrapper, this news came straight from the horses mouth, i.e. from the new hire himself.
His name is Jonathan Zdziarski, and, although you can be forgiven for not recognizing (or being able to pronounce) his name, he is justifiably famous in the Apple universe, as he is perhaps the best and most well-known expert in iOS digital forensics and security.
Losing Weight
When my wife and I saw Arrival, she thought it was “ok” and I loved it.1 As we were discussing our respective views on the way home, she asked me why I loved it. Now, ordinarily, asking a man why he feels something is an exercise in futility. I, however, am very in touch with my feelings2 and had no trouble coming up with the answer.
Because it was a beautiful story, beautifully filmed, but most importantly, it had weight. Is love worth the pain? Would we make the same decisions if we knew those decisions would lead to tragedy?
Perspective
As you may remember, our daughter and family live in Cambodia. She teaches in a Christian school there, and she recently had occasion to need some rice for a class project. She asked her teaching assistant, a native Khmer woman, to go buy her some rice. “Get the cheapest rice you can, I’m not going to cook it, just use it for class,” she said, as she gave the TA some money to buy it with.
The TA came back with the rice, but almost fell over herself apologizing. “I am so sorry, Mrs. Phifer, I could not get the cheap rice, I looked everywhere, I had to spend 1800 riel to get a kilogram1 of rice.” She was unhappy with having to spend that much of Ashley’s money, and she was expecting Ashley to be unhappy, too.
Joy and Sorrow
Our first Postmaster General once wrote that nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. I’m sticking with the theme, but picking two different certainties, since Franklin’s two turned out not to be quite as certain as he thought. (See Jesus for the former and our President-elect for the latter.)
My first certainty is from yesterday’s post — there’s bound to come some trouble. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe next year, but there’s bound to come some trouble. That’s not pessimism, that’s just reality — we live in a broken world, and we all eventually step on that brokenness and find ourselves with a (figurative) cut foot.