Author: jay

A month or two ago, a friend of mine asked his Facebook friends "Do you believe in God? Why or why not?"  Usually reluctant to (a) share personal things and (b) participate in the online debate / flamewar of the week, I refrained from answering.  I did follow the discussion thread as it grew, and the burden of answering the question continued to roll around in my head. A couple of times a year, I get to dust off my professional ministry hat and put it on for a bit.  Aside from the occasional wedding, I sometimes have the opportunity to fill the pulpit for our pastor while he is on vacation.  This often happens after Christmas, as he likes to take some time off following the very busy Advent…

I have long ticked off friends and family by not following their lead and subscribing to a single political party.  I've made no secret about being registered as an Independent voter.  I think at its core, I find Libertarianism to make the most sense.  Indeed, in the last election I voted for a Republican, a Democrat, and a Libertarian.  I was kind of proud of that. Lately, it seems as though I have needed to hide more and more friends' posts from my Facebook news feed.  Maybe I've just lost patience with zealots in general, but discounting entire ideologies or people based on a label seems to demean us all and our capacity for critical thought.   I'm not really speaking of a particular current event in the news.  The…

I am a spy.  That's very cool.  More accurately, I am in my own small way a counter-terrorism agent.  For example, when the FBI or CIA speak of success, there is always mention of the prevention of "countless unknown acts of terrorism."  There's truth here, and I'm grateful that those invisible agents stand between me and unspeakable unknown harm.   Anyway, that's kind of what I do. In my own journey of self evaluation, I have recently discovered that my professional success may be measured not by what I can accomplish, but rather what I can prevent from being accomplished.  As a Project Manager, I was originally under the assumption that I was meant to take reasonable requests for products or services and organize them into successful results.  Instead, I spend most of…