Help for Overloaded Memories
Sometimes I make jokes about being forgetful. Old age, you know. But the reality is often that I suffer from information overload. Ministry or sermon ideas, new tools, results of important studies, passwords, logins, appointments, things-I-want-to-read (or watch) later… it goes on and on.
So a few years ago, I started looking for a way to gather a lot of this “stuff” into one place where I could easily get back to it. I found a program called “Stickybrain” (which sounds gross, but weirdly fit). The program was simple: I would create a new “note” for each piece of info I wanted to save. Passwords, logins, interesting web articles and registration info were some of the most common things I tossed into the program. Later, when I wanted to find the info, I just typed ANY word that was in the note and the program would present it to me.
The people I worked with started dropping by my office “what’s the login for…,” “do you have that article we were discussing?” “do you happen to remember the registration code for…,” “what was that website you mentioned…,” and so on.
Anyway, nowadays, I use multiple devices to get to info. I have my computer at work and one at home, a laptop as well as my iPhone. So it’s important to get to my data from anywhere.
If you think you would benefit from an extra pile of memory, check out a service called “Evernote.” It’s free, and there’s a web version, or you can install software on your PC, Mac or iPhone. If you have all three, Evernote will keep the data synchronized across them.
And Evernote captures all sorts of info: web pages, snippets of web pages, PDFs, etc. And it has many more tricks up its sleeve.
Or, if you’d rather keep your data on your own computer and not on a server on the internet, check out Yojimbo. It’s a great way to store the variety of stuff that we need to get out of our heads and stored for quick retrieval. Yojimbo is for Mac OS X. I’m still looking for a comparable Windows program. If you know of one, let me know.
Nerds Wanted: Why Your Church Needs Nerds
Most people would read a title like that and think. “This is kind of insulting. The church needs everyone!” And they would probably be right. The church does need everyone, and it should be there for everyone. Unfortunately, the nerd population of a lot of churches does not always have this demonstrated to them. I’m not saying that we like it, but churches are among the more segregated institutions on earth. Dr. King did not refer to Sunday morning as “the most segregated hour in Christian America” in vain. If you get really involved at your church, you will find that there are groups of people who are “in” and those who are “out.” This is not an indictment of the church so much as an indictment of human beings, combined with the fact that churches tend to be pretty homogeneous, when they’re not crusading against that sort of thing.
There’s an old saying that “20 percent of the people in a church do 80 percent of the work,” and most of us know that 20 and 80 are pretty generous numbers. If you look beyond how “busy” that makes some people, it shows that there are a lot of people in our pews who are not centrally involved in the church’s work, beyond coming to some events and participating in some programs. Add to that the fact that there are some people in every group whose interests are a bit “different” from other people’s and whose social skills are not the best, and you have a recipe for excluding the nerds. I’m probably stereotyping here, but I imagine that the real-estate, retail, legal, education, or medical professionals, who work with people every day are a lot more likely to be in the “20-percenters” than the IT professionals who work in a cubicle farm all day or the professional entomologists. The people who coach and play sports or attend classical plays tend to be more central to our leadership than the people who collect anime, wear star trek uniforms, paint lead wargaming figurines, and frag each other at network parties. We might go out of our way to include people of different ethnic backgrounds or economic circumstances, but we draw the line at people who are a bit “weird.”
And that’s too bad, because, quite often, the “weird” people of our churches have thought deeply about some of the important issues of the day and are just waiting to be asked for their opinion. They may feel very passionately about the church’s mission, even though they are not asked to provide leadership for it, and they bring some of the essential skills that a modern institution needs to really stand out. How many doctors can make a really killer web page these days? Who in your congregation can set up a live video feed on a big screen, so you can have a class directly taught by a missionary in the field? What “upstanding member” of your community is different enough to propose truly imaginative ways of reaching homeless children? When we’re all worried about what our kids are doing on the Internet, who really knows their stuff about it enough to help others learn to deal? Beyond that, people with what might be an otherwise “offbeat” persona might think about issues in different ways, seeing things that the rest of us cannot see. They may more readily identify issues that are important, but under-emphasized. They might even be able to help us understand oppression and the general feeling of powerlessness that comes with it, because they have experienced it at some point in there lives.
I’ve read that adults who grew up feeling “different” (as many nerds have) tend to be much more focused on social justice and ensuring that people are treated fairly than those who did not. Many of these people, after all, have had extensive experience with being bullied as a child and having been passed over for opportunities as they grew. This is precisely the kind of person who would pour heart and soul into helping others, if they were given the chance. If you could tap into these otherwise silent people in your congregation by finding ways to reach out to and include them, who knows what might be possible?
I can’t speak for everyone in every congregation who is a bit out of step with everyone else, although I have tended to be that guy, even when I was in the front of the room. But I think that I have a good argument here. Everyone needs to belong to a group of fellow-travelers in faith. Every congregation needs every member who has chosen to walk with it. Every group has people who seem a bit out of step, but, for some reason, wants to be a part of what that group does. Every person has gifts and passions that can contribute much to whatever group they are in. Everyone matters. Everyone is loved by God. Deal with it.
Post-Katrina Jungian Jambalaya
Six years ago, I was living in northern Kentucky. Six years ago, I was about twenty years out of high school and about twenty years out of Louisiana. Six years ago time and space began to disappear into the mystic.
Five and a half years ago I had almost completely shut down. Shut down at the seminary where I was studying; shut down at the church I was serving; shut down at home.
I realized that from the time Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and during the five to six months that followed – even though I was way up north between Louisville, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio – I was caught in some transcendent lasso which was pulling me back to my high school. Back to Destrehan, Louisiana.
I couldn’t stop thinking about school experiences (the great ones, the good ones, and the awful ones). I couldn’t stop thinking about teachers, classes, specific lessons, band events and practices, and specific people. My body was in Henry County, Kentucky, but I was walking along the roads in Destrehan; I was walking along the levee and looking out over the mighty Mississippi River. I could smell the river, the food, the sweaty gym locker room at school, the sanctuary at the First Baptist Church of Norco, and all the scents in my own house on Ormond Oaks.
Repeatedly, my dreams at night were about Destrehan. High school friends from the early/mid 1980s were mixed together with my seminary studies, with my church, and with my family. It was like time ceased to exist and everything and everybody were all stirred in together in one big kettle of some sort of Jungian jambalaya.
I obsessively began seeking to locate and reconnect with old neighbors and friends, and to establish more frequent contact with the few friends with whom I never lost touch. Thank you letters were sent to a handful of teachers who were tremendously influential in my life; teachers like Mrs. Chaisson and Mr. Greene – whom I hadn’t seen nor talked to since I walked across the graduation stage – were thanked for their determination to teach me something, even though I didn’t always want to learn.
Tears were ever-present in the corners of my eyes; my eyelids were levees fighting to hold back a great flood of emotions.
I clearly remember asking, “God, why am I like this? Why the obsession with who I was and where I was over twenty years ago? Why can’t I focus on where I am today and who I am today and what I should be doing today?”
The late Trappist monk Thomas Merton writes about trying to be still to let God do some work in one’s self. Maybe this was God doing some work in me …
I was disconnected with my past. It was as if I had lived two lives – the first eighteen years in Louisiana (up through high school), and then everything since 1986 when my family moved to Tennessee, and I went off to college, got married, had kids, etc.
Maybe God was making whole this divided, schizophrenic self.
What I do know is that since Katrina, I have never felt more connected to New Orleans, to the River Parishes, and to Louisiana; and thanks to Facebook, I have reconnected with so many people who were very important to me in my younger days, and who directly shaped who I am today.
It’s been six years since Hurricane Katrina. Time and space have long since reemerged into the very real present. And thanks be to God, my reality is no longer divided into unconnected pieces, but all stirred together into a whole, healthy body of gumbo.
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