When desire is met by grace. Coming home.

Yesterday I posted about my frustration and disappointment at having to remain in hospital for a while longer due to an infection. Well God heard my prayers and understood my heart's desire to be home with Megie, Courtney, and Liam! When the orthopedic surgeon and the physician conferred on my blood tests they were happy to say that the antibiotics had taken their intended effect and so I was cleared to come HOME!

Some may say that it was science that made this possible, others may say that it was God's healing grace. I think they're spot on! It is a mistake of dualism to think that science and faith are mutually exclusive! In its most extreme forms one finds religious deformities such as those the Christian Scientologists (Tom Cruise's lot) or the Jehovah's Witnesses. On the science side aberrations include the treatment of illnesses instead of people (as if a leg can be made whole without caring for the person who's leg one is treating). In all instances of such dualism the mistake is to think that 'cure' is the same as 'wholeness' (healing). One can be physically well and still not be whole! I encounter many such people! Conversely one could be quite sick, or have a severe handicap, and be 'whole' - at peace, filled with joy, blessing, and true life.

Well, coming home for me is an integrated experience. It takes BOTH science and faith to bring wholeness, and I experienced both in hospital - there my body and its needs were acutely understood and cared for, yet at the same time I encountered many persons who encouraged my spirit and uplifted my heart (both from the patient and loving care from the staff for me as a person, and among patients in the ward who faced far greater challenges with courage, grace, understanding).

At home I will also experience physical care and loving support - at this point it is the latter that I long for! I feel a sense of wholeness when I am with my wife and children. Their love lifts me out of my selfish pity, they offer me a perspective that is far beyond my current situation and my physical state.

It is great t be among people that I love surrounded by familiar things. My recovery progressed by a further step the instant I arrived home.

This is not only a meeting of faith and science, it is also a meeting of desire and grace! Oh boy, I can't tell you how hard I prayed t b able to come home, and I can hardly express how grateful I am for the God who created both science and faith! God has blessed me even more than I could imagine (Eph 3v20).

Now that I am home I need to start sorting out my insurance claims... I haven't had the courage to look at my Vespa yet. Paul Ooshuizen who got it home for me tells me it is not too bad (but also not too good... We'll see!) My laptop, however, is completely wrecked! The screen is smashed, the casing is bent (I mean BENT!), the optical drive no longer works... BUT in true Apple form it surprised me. I plugged in an external monitor, a keyboard and mouse, and viola, she booted up and ran! So I have saved all my personal data and will take it in to Apple today to start the insurance claim process.

Well, thanks once again for all the prayers and messages of love and support - it means so much! I will be on sick leave for a few weeks as I figure out new ways of being mobile.

Technorati tags: broken leg, pain, motorcycle accident, Vespa, home

It's a slow and frustrating process... Stories of the 'bionic leg'....

Warning, don't scroll down if you're a bit squeemish

I had hoped to be out of hospital by now. However, the process of recovery seems a little slower than expected. I have had a (minor) setback in that I caught a 'hospital infection' in my leg, and so need to bget that cleared before I can be discharged. When the 4x4 hit me and my leg broke (either on impact, or as I fell from my old orange Vespa.... May she rest in pieces) the bone punctured through the back of my leg leaving an open wound. It is likely that I picked up the infection either in the ambulance or while being xrayed and stabalised in the emergency ward before surgery.

My leg is much less painful (now with added iron - in the form of a pin that runs from the left knee to the left ankle (sensible choice that, if it ran to the right ankle it would be extremely difficult to move ;-), it has a metal plate in the left ankle and a few screws in the ankle and knee), and I am already up and about on crutches (it's like riding a bike... if you'd excuse the use of that particular simile... as soon as they put the crutches in my hands the muscle memory returned, all those neural pathways relit, and I was hobbling up and down the corridor, over stairs, and around corners with ease). Sadly my fever has not yet come down (sitting at around 38 to 39 degrees C), it does at least mean that my body is putting up a good fight, and that the antibiotics are starting to fight the infection. So as soon as that is clear, and of course having had a day or so of o bservation, I hope to be home with my darlings Megie, Courtney and Liam.

It can be quite frustrating and humbling to be totaly reliant on others (particularly when one is accustomed to setting one's pace and be self-sufficient). But of course self reliance is not they way of Christ, who lives in a perichoretic self-emptying relationship in the Trinity. Neither is it the way of the Kingdom of God, to which interdependance and relationships are central. I constantly need to be reminded that my wholeness is as a result of the love and sacrifice of others (Christ died to give me life, people give of themsleves to offer care, support, and healing. I have to be humbled into receiving thse gifts, unworthy as I am to recieve them, in the knowledge that they are a gift from God who is the giver of all good gifts).

Please pray for me I learn, grow, and recover.

Thanks so much to Billy Fletcher who made my day by sending me this wonderful image of blessing and encouragement, with a Mac theme! Thanks Billy! It is now the centre of the desktop on my Windows machine, until I can replace my Mac. It leaves me with an eschatological hope, in find a realised eschatological hope (what is to come (a NEW Mac) is ALREADY a reality (the insurance is in place and it should be a simple matter of completing a claim), so all I have to do is take courage and find hope in the reality that already IS, but just remains to be seen - this sounds like a sermon Hebrews 11:1!

Blessings,

Dion

Bible comic featuring giant killer robots! Biblical narrative moves into the future.

Mecha Manga Bible Heroes is a series of graphic novels featuring "action-packed mecha-manga art and adventure-filled tales from the Old Testament." Shown here, the cover for #1, the David and Goliath issue.

The characters, stories and themes remain the same. Only the setting has changed – to a futuristic world of robots, aliens and advanced technology!

Link (via Comics Worth Reading)

from boingboing

Technorati tags: Bible comic characters, Manga+Bible, Superhero Jesus Cartoon, Bible relevant to teens, Mecha Manga

MIT Professor's lecture on 'how to talk' (the science of a good 'talk')

Here's an amazing video on the science of a good speach / public talk given by an MIT Professor. I've seen parts of this before. It is a masterful mix of genre's (empirical research, phenomenological insight, and sprinkling of quite a few disciplines).

See how your preaching / public speaking equates (if you'll excuse the bad pun!)

MIT prof Patrick Winston gives an infamous annual talk called "How to Talk," a lecture on how to give good lectures. It's open to students and, apparently the public. This 1999 version of the talk (pre-Powerpoint!) is filled with damned good advice on persuasive public speaking, delivered in the form of "heuristics" that you can use to guide your own presentations. Link

posted in: Video

What do you get when you cross a Nintendo DS lite with a Macbook air? This....

My youtube is not working in the hospital network, so please let me know what you think of the video (I haven't seen it), but this looked pretty funny!

From engadget.

It's hard to deny that Apple's MacBook Air advertisement is pretty catchy, and while the DS Lite doesn't exactly pull off the whole envelope exit quite as elegantly as Cupertino's latest lappie, it doesn't do a half bad job representin'. In the spoof waiting for you after the jump, you'll see a black DS Lite retrofitted into the MBA spot, and while the text, lighting and overall smoothness isn't on par with the original, at least the music is spot-on. Click on though to see for yourself.

[Via DSFanboy]

Update: Psh, thanks for pulling the video, YouTube and / or user. Well, trust us, it like totally existed. ... Ok, looks like we're back. Thanks EspadaUno.

Continue reading Nintendo's DS Lite retrofitted into MacBook Air ad

It 'lures' your children outside and 'tricks' them into moving around!

First the Nintendo Wii, now THIS! Next scientists will tell us that exercise is good for children! I say, PSP and a packet of crisps.... Just kidding!

From engadget.

We saw a few clever products at Toy Fair 2008 designed to get kids up and active, but none so nefarious -- and cute -- as Swinxs. The "toy" is basically a talking computer with an RFID reader, that guides kids through different pre-loaded games or stories. The kids wear RFID wrist bracelets that identify them in the game, and let them interact with the machine. We heard, from a reliable source, that if kids engage in this type of "running around" in "grassy areas" they very well may die, but that's all hearsay. Once kids grow tired of the included games they can download and install more over USB, and there's a free SDK for developers to create new entertainment for Swinxs. No word on a price or release date, but hopefully we'll be seeing more of this one as time progresses.

Tips for dealing with multimedia meltdown in your worship services

Our Church's worship coordinator sent these great tips to us. They are quite useful and simple to implement and apply.

Worship Concepts
The Online Newsletter of WorshipFilms.com

Vol.6, No.2

Recovering from a Multimedia Trainwreck
by Jesse Lewis

We had just begun our praise and worship set when our projector suddenly flashed a warning message about overheating, then decided it needed a rest and shut itself down. This type of event occurs in churches all around the world every Sunday: a computer locks up; a bulb blows; there is no audio feed from the DVD player; the disc that worked fine 20 minutes earlier now will not read.

As techies, our goal is to go unnoticed, and when things go wrong, everyone notices. So how can we make the best of these situations?

1. Don't let the distress that you feel over the event show outwardly during the service. Remember, our goal is to go unnoticed, so the less demonstration we make, the better.

2. Priority number one is to clear the screen or platform of anything that is distracting. It is far better to have nothing on the screen, than to project something that should not be projected.

3. Look for the fastest way to minimize the disruption to the flow of the service. For instance, if a sermon illustration video clip is malfunctioning, it is probably better to move on and skip the illustration than to wait several minutes for the video to be resurrected. Ask this question: 'Is the overall effectiveness of our communication today going to be higher if we simply move on or if we wait it out?' Obviously, there is not one answer that fits every situation.

4. Do the best possible job you can without taking yourself too seriously. No matter how much you plan and prepare, something will happen sooner or later that is unexpected. And when you have done your homework and it still happens, most of the time a little laughter is better than a big blow-up or silent sulk.

5. Learn from the wreckage. Research why things happened the way they did, and take the steps necessary (assuming they are financially feasible) to prevent their recurrence. Was the incident caused by operator error? If so, would additional training help? Was it because of equipment failure? If so, look for ways to add redundancy, so that if your primary mode of media delivery malfunctions, you have a quick fix (e.g., if the church uses a desktop computer, is it possible to have a laptop on standby?).

Technorati tags: worship resources, dealing with multimedia failure, Church equipment, tips

What do you thnink about the South African campus riots by disgruntled students?

What are your thoughts? Today we heard of another campus that was disrupted and vandalised by unhappy students...

I can understand that a student (or group of students) would become angry when there is no service delivery by their academic institution. I can also understand the desperation to gain higher education in order to be employed, and the frustration with the cost of education (and particularly higher education in South Africa).

Cost is a complex issue, as a Dean of a college we have found that we simply cannot register too many 'private' students (i.e., students who will have to pay fees as opposed to our 'Church sent' students for whom no fees are required). The sad reality is that the expectations of the Department of Education and the Council on Higher Education are so high that they cause institutions to incur HUGE costs that are not directly related to education. These are costs such as administrative systems, reporting mechanisms, sureties, and other such things. We have incurred hundreds of thousands of Rands worth of costs to meet the requirements. However, if one were to conduct an 'audit' of the DOE I'm fairly sure that one would find that they are not fit to offer the service they are required to offer... But, tha't is another matter entirely.

Sadly, what this means is that private and public institutions either need to find donor sources to absorb the new costs, or they have to recoup them through registrations and student fees. This is simply not feasible! We currently have to provide a surety ammount that is more than double our student fees for every one of our private students (in other words, we don't make money on their training, we loose the cost of their education, plus pay an additional amount in surety!) If we were ruthless we could simply charge three times what we currently charge in order to make a profit (and so grow our operation and train more people).

However, that is not the case....

In reality, I guess, that most administrations do a bit of both, they try to fund some of these costs by donations, budget cuts, and some other creative means, and then other parts of the cost through raising student fees. The pressure must be released somewhere!

Sadly, it would seem, that the students who are threating educators, intimidating fellow students, and destroying the costly facilities of their campuses show no insight into these struggles! In fact, if the news reports are to be believed, many of the students in Durban and at the Tshwane University of Technology who are 'striking' are doing so because they have been excluded from current study because of unpaind debts arising from previous study... Now that is just thuggery! How can one carry the costs of previous students (and previous years) into the current year and still provide quality education if there is no money coming in!

It is a grave situation! Perhaps Naledi Pandor's student pledge is not such a bad idea after all (I have not read it yet, I need to do so). From what I understand it deals with the issue of entitlement and encourages learners to understand the privelages and responsibilities of learning.

What are your thoughts? What should we do? Someone is going to have to pay, it is either the tax payer, or the learner... Who should bear the cost?

Many world quantum theory, an easy explanation using a multiplay Super Mario game!

This is so cool! Multi world quantum theory explained in a fun way!

The Mechanically Separated Meat blog has created a merged video of hundreds of games played against "Kaizo Mario World" (an insanely difficult homebrew Mario level) and used the resulting video as the jumping-off point for an extremely stimulating and enlightening discussion of the Many Worlds hypothesis in quantum physics. If I had to explain Many Worlds to an eight-year-old (something I expect to have to do in, oh, about eight years), this is where I'd start. I'm especially enamored of the choice of Mario for this, since it's just the right blend of puzzler and jumper to make you want to explore all possible choices (I've recently become brutally addicted to Paper Mario, which now occupies about 10 percent of my brain on a more-or-less permanent basis as a kind of low-grade background process).

This said, tiny quantum events can create ripples that have big effects on non-quantum systems. One good example of this is the Quantum Suicide “experiment” that some proponents of the Many-Worlds Interpretation claim (I think jokingly) could actually be used to test the MWI. The way it works is, you basically run the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment on yourself– you set up an apparatus whereby an atom has a 50% chance of decaying each second, and there’s a detector which waits for the atom to decay. When the detector goes off, it triggers a gun, which shoots you in the head and kills you. So all you have to do is set up this experiment, and sit in front of it for awhile. If after sixty seconds you find you are still alive, then the many-worlds interpretation is true, because there is only about a one in 1018 chance of surviving in front of the Quantum Suicide machine for a full minute, so the only plausible explanation for your survival is that the MWI is true and you just happen to be the one universe where the atom’s 50% chance of decay turned up “no” sixty times in a row. Now, given, in order to do this, you had to create about 1018 universes where the Quantum Suicide machine did kill you, or copies of you, and your one surviving consciousness doesn’t have any way of telling the people in the other 1018 universes that you survived and MWI is true. This is, of course, roughly as silly as the thing about there being a universe where all the atoms in your heart randomly decided to tunnel out of your body.

But, we can kind of think of the multi-playthrough Kaizo Mario World video as a silly, sci-fi style demonstration of the Quantum Suicide experiment. At each moment of the playthrough there’s a lot of different things Mario could have done, and almost all of them lead to horrible death. The anthropic principle, in the form of the emulator’s save/restore feature, postselects for the possibilities where Mario actually survives and ensures that although a lot of possible paths have to get discarded, the camera remains fixed on the one path where after one minute and fifty-six seconds some observer still exists.

Link (via Kottke)

A plushie brain cell... mmmmm.. gifts for geeks!

I don't know about you but getting a gift that shows thought, care, and insight, is always a great blessing! Examples are: the two die cast Vespa's my friend Wes bought me, the tin Vespa model my wife gave me to celebrate the award of my Phd, the Vespa cap that Ingrid Turton gave me for my birthday two years ago, the Vespa T-shirt Pete sent me for Christmas in 2006, and the 'geek questionaire' book that Dr Kate (Wright) gave me in 2005!

These are all great gifts because show insight, care, and thought.

Here's another great gift idea for the geek in your life!

The fun folks at Giant Microbes--makers of such plushified diseases as Hepatitis, Staph, and Ebola--also sell this cute stuffed neuron. It's only $7.95.
Link

Previously on BB:
• Plush guts Link
• Cute virii stuffies Link (via Mind Hacks)

An emotional recovery

At first I thought that I would entitle this post 'the emotions of recovery', but in truth, I have no idea what these emotions are, and I would hate to sound like I have any insight or expertise in such matters.

So, I chose the more honest title 'an emotional recovery'. I woke up at around 3.30 am this morning with some pain. I guess it is the pain of recovery. As the wounds turn into scars and the experiences form memories I have begun to feel a fairly profound sense of loss. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of instances in which I express my gratitude to the Lord for saving me from a much worse fate than a broken leg! I am truly grateful for that! But that is a gratitude that comes from the creation of perspective. The reality, for me, is that I have a set of experiences to deal with that form my reality and challenge me to find and create meaning and hope.

The first set of experiences are what I call 'dailyness' - I'm not sure if anyone else has experienced these? What 'dailyness' refers to is a grinding routine, not a blessed one, but a necessary one. 'Dailyness' has to do with survival, not with living. I have experienced 'dayliness' before, as a young child seperate from my parents, as a young man in the army, when I took up my first post as a minister in a strange context - I feel it now again at just before 4am on this morning. In the intercessory prayers in the order of morning worship there is a prayer that goes something like "Lord, help all people to rise above the drudgery and want of their daily lives into the joy and glory of Your life..." Something like that. It speaks of the reality that so many people face - simply rising, working, sleeping, rising, working, sleeping.... There is no joy, no excitement, no wonder, just each day. I awoke with that feeling today - in a short while I'll be woken for the morning rounds (change the drip, take my blood pressure, take my temperature, have my morning medication...), then the day moves towards its regular rhythm of interupted sleep, therapy, thought, longing, concern, medication, sleep, therapy, thought, longing... You get the idea.

Perhaps recovery requires some measure of consistency, some measure of calm and 'dailyness' for the drugs to take their effect, the bones to heal, the scabs to form, and the experiences to become memories.

The second set of emtions are those that are far more profound, they are much less tangible, and much more subtly powerful. These emotions form the backdrop of every moment (whether waking or sleeping), they are what Paul Tillich would have called 'existential' realities, truths that really are true. Of course we seldom face these existential realities because of the 'undailyness' of our regular lives. For most of us, our regular lives are filled with drive, commitment, energy, encounter, discovery, renewal, objectives, and a myriad of activities. These things fill every waking moment (and sometimes even the moments that should be given over to sleep!) Achievement, success, qualifcation, ownership, satisfaction, hunger and freedom are but a few of the things that drive me away from the existential questions. So, this week, lying in my hospital bed, as the world goes on without me, I have been given a chance to ask a few of these questions 'What am I here for?', 'What does my skill set and personality contribute towards humanity, and of course the will and work of deity?', 'How am fairing on life's journey? [in my instance this is a question about 'depth of living', not 'speed of living' - I guess it will differ from person to person]. Of course there are many other questions I have been asking, some have to do with my past, some with my present situation, and others about the future.

One thing is certain, such 'existential' reflection requires change, not the kind of change that says I will move from doing this activity to doing that activity... The dailyness will return to any activity if it is not filled with some greater purpose, meaning, and intent. No, this is a substantial change, the kind of change that has to do with values and virtues - what matters MOST and why it matters most. These must surely be the things that shape my living.

You see, the one thing I have come to realise is that recovery could simply be a process of return to the functioning I had before my accident. But, that is not recovery at all. True recovery requires the courage to get to a state of greater well-being and wholeness than what I previously possessed. Pete spoke of this in a recent post on his blog about 'balance'. I have lived with imbalance so long that I though life was supposed to be a bit skew!

An emotional recovery... That's what I am experiencing. My recovery has emotion within it, it also deals with a myriad of emotions that stem from 36 years of living, the dayliness of this day, and the existential hope of a better day to come.

I have had a verse from the Psalms within my heart for the last few days, Psalm 18:35-36 "You give me your shield of victory, your right hand sustains me. You stoop down to make me strong. You broaden the road I walk on so that my ankles do not break" (I would add the addendum, "and IF they do break, you make the whole again")

Have a blessed day. Spare a prayer for those in hospital.

A picture of the (broken) leg in question

I must be bored (and feeling a whole lot better after the accident and surgery) since I am taking pictures of my leg.

Here you can see where it was cut to put the plate, pin, and screws in place. There is one other wound on the back of the leg where the bone punctured the skin either as the car hit me, or as I hit the road when falling from my bike.

Better days ahead! Sun is shining!