Church Hunting

We visited All Souls Christian Church this morning. The pastor is Evan Wilson, and we've been curious about it for a while. I don't know why we have a thing about the Wilsons but we just do. We were nervous about it because once in the summer we were driving past on the way to First Pres and we saw people going in who were better dressed than we were. Well it wasn't so highfalutin as all that. We got there a couple minutes early and were greeted by Rev. Wilson, who knew we were visitors "because you're on time." People were very friendly, we liked everyone we talked to. The service started with some hymns as people were wandering in. After the first one the rest were requests shouted from the congregation. That how prayer requests were done too, except for the shouting. Then the prayers themselves were offered, as people were led ( men and women, unremarkable and non-controversial, but almost counter-cultural in parts of this town, i.e. Doug's church across town.) Scripture reading came next, and then...coffee break. We trooped downstairs, got some coffee (churches here aren't going to spring for actual cream, it's all powder all the time, but the coffee wasn't bad. Or maybe it was and I've just acclimatised.) and chatted some more. Fifteen minutes later and Evan herded us back upstairs for the sermon. And it was a pretty good sermon. A good hard look at Hezekiah and how you can get into trouble when you get too attached to your life and your stuff and your comfort. It was definitely not a Presbyterian service, though it was a pleasant example of doing things decently if in no particular order. All in all, we had a blast.

Linux 1.01

Roman numerals just weren't going to work out. I'm still a newbie though, so it could take a while to get to 2.0. I'm spending my afternoons down in Clint's lab in B13 of the JEB. Mostly it's been a couple of weeks of re-installing Ubuntu and various video cards trying to find something that will work. The cool-looking 'Unity' desktop is a bit of a clunker, and when it gets right down to it, the gui sys-admin tools are all useless nerfed crap and a damned waste of disc space. I suppose it's that way on purpose to look like a complete gui, while shielding the os from the modern end-user. They just figure the real geeks will just get in there and destroy the OS from the command line like they always used to and then just reinstall it and try again.
I've got LinuxMint 11 on my home computer, and Ubuntu 11.10 in the lab, neither computer seems to be able to use nVidia's proprietary drivers without hosing the display. Which is funny, or would be if it were happening to someone else. Linux is a monster, and I have to crawl into its guts, figure out how it works, and make it do what I want.
I've pretty much given up loading Windows during the week. I don't really need it for anything but the occasional sortee into Borderlands. Gotta figure out how to run Borderlands under Linux. Oh wait, my nVidia drivers don't work.

Linux I

So part of me doing what I came here for involves spending a lot of time cuddling rather promiscuously with a lot of flavours of Linux. Getting them to reveal their secrets, finding out what makes them tick, exploring their hidden files, that kind of thing. I'm sort of going steady with LinuxMint11 at home, but at the lab there's OpenSuse, Fedora, and that exotic minx Ubuntu. Ubuntu 11.10 in particular is getting all my attention lately as I've been trying to get her to give me her best 3D Unity desktop experience, but after three hours of wrestling with her I've come to the conclusion that I just don't have the hardware that she needs to really let loose. My computers' functional but aging nVidia 7600 GS with 256Mb just isn't enough to get her going. I'm going to have to let this new hotness go off to greener pastures and settle for an OS that's a little more mature, a little less demanding, and that doesn't mind dealing with my older hardware.

Spiritual Warfare

Last Sunday we visited "The International Church" which holds it's meetings at the Nuart Theatre here in Moscow. It turns out to be the latest in a string of about a dozen or so churches started in Moscow and Pullman since 1971 by Jim Wilson. The service was informal: some a Capella singing from a broadly-sourced traditional hymnal; a children's homily (with cookies) that was sincere, appropriate, and affectionate; prayer requests taken and then immediately dealt with; communion; an adult sermon by the same guy as preached to the kids and by adult I mean vague and overly introspective (guy is not Jim Wilson, it wasn't his week); another hymn and then the Benediction.
   Afterward I got to chat with Jim for a while. He's 84, lost his wife a year ago. Walks with a cane. Two of his sons are pastors of daughter churches of his. Christ Church and All Souls, but his sons have very different theology from his. I told him I'd visited Christ Church. He explained why he didn't like Reformed theology, and I nodded. I explained why I didn't like Pietism, and he nodded. It was very pleasant, he gave me a copy of his testimony, a copy of the sermon he preached at his wife's funeral (she' asked him to) and a couple of pamphlets he'd written. I asked him if he'd had a purpose for coming here, to Moscow. He told me he had.
   Jim joined the Navy as soon as he graduated from High School in April of 1945, and while in boot camp, applied to the Naval Academy Prep School. He got in, earned his appointment and entered the Naval Academy in June of 1946. He became a Christian during his Plebe year. After graduating he spent eight years as a Naval Officer. He gave me another book that he'd written in 1964, and has been updating regularly up to its current 2009 fifth edition. It is titled "Principles of War: A Handbook on Strategic Evangelism."  He said that he'd looked around for an objective that was both feasible and winnable. New York was neither, but Moscow/Pullman was both: Pagan, liberal College towns where he could have a broad and deep impact on the culture and future of two states. I think that he is doing just that.
   I have always kind of scoffed at the phrase "Spiritual Warfare," as being a nearly oxymoronic cliché, an inappropriate metaphor. But how am I supposed to become the person I am meant to be? Do I think that I'm going to get even part way there without a struggle? I can barely deal with my day-to-day concerns: getting some food, succeeding in class, the success of my wife and children, not becoming incapacitated by depression or anxiety. Gosh am I over my head.
  I liked and admired Jim Wilson immediately. I've started reading his book. Also, I'm starting to wonder what's in the water over here.

So I started this blog yesterday while I was supposed to be doing my math homework. It worked out because Seri came over to do math around 10 and we slogged along for a couple of hours and got it done. Very last thing. I don't know that I would have done it at all if she hadn't come over, I likely would have just blown it off and read up on celebrity gossip instead. I went around and around in my head over this, thinking that I couldn't do this on my own, couldn't repent of both sloth and slack, and then realising that being a self-made man was never a part of the plan and wasn't going to work any better than paying for my own sins and saving myself was. I will succeed here not because I have any virtues, but because I'm going to do a lot of work. A snack, then off to the lab and then the ACM soldering party.

I wonder

I have always thought of myself as a late-bloomer, but lately I have realized that it is entirely possible to go completely to seed without ever having bloomed. It seemed to me that if I didn't go find myself some grow sticks pronto I could really completely miss my chance. And I really want to bloom. I better get started.