I am a meteorologist and a former youth leader at church…I have a lot to say on both subjects…and then some
As the previous week has drawn to a close and the new week is just beginning, Mary and I just passed the 6 months mark. It is hard to believe in some ways, in others, it barely seems that it has been that long. This is one of the longer relationships that I have had, and one of quality to boot! In previous relationships, there was always something missing from the relationship that I could never put my finger on. I know now that it was God in the middle of the relationship and He has made all of the difference. So here we are 6 months later, and still saying cheesey things to each other and enjoying each others company. So what will the next 6 months hold? I don’t know but if it has been like my spiritual journey, I look back every 6 months and just say, “Wow!”
Okay, so we get things about how we shouldn’t lobby as a weather service employee. I can’t go out during an outreach event, like say a spotter talk, and then go tell people to go tell their congressman or senator that we need a certain piece of equipment at this place to help us do our job. However, as a private citizen I can go out on my own and tell people about certain peices of legislation and how they are bad for them.
One such threat is coming from outside the weather service, in the form of legislation to get the NWS out of releasing its forecasts to the public. The Commercial Weather Services would like you to pay them to see all of the forecasts that flow out of the government that are designed to help you make decisions on protecting your life and property. A few years ago I heard the statistic that it took $2 a person per year( in the US) to run the NWS. From that you get forecasts and warning services, that have steadily improved in quality, as well as, vehicles to get the information out. So they are asking you to pay for it a second time or at the least look at it with ads popping up in your face.
I try not to be paranoid, and use terms like “slippery slope,” but if the commericial weather services get their way, I could see a day, when the warnings don’t go out unless you have subscribed. But that’s just me being extreme.
It seems that everywhere I turn, I see or hear about something that I want to blog about. From sermons that I have heard preached to things going on the in NOAA’s National Weather Service, to articles that I have read. I could spend a huge amount of time just commenting, but then I wouldn’t get a chance to spend time with friends and family. So, I try to balance the things that I do with the things that are, I feel, most important.
A couple of weeks ago, Mary and I went downstate to see my mom and dad. We had a great weekend, hanging out and seeing the sights of Fennville and Holland. On the way back we decided to go to the Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville. The pastor there is Rob Bell, whom I’ve had the opportunity to see at the National Youth Workers convention. He was doing a series on Jesus is Difficult and this week’s topic was Beautifully Angry. He started from the passage in Mark 3 about the healing the man with the withered hand on the Sabbath. The question was from the Pharisee’s point of view, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath. It was a sticking point from the law that says you should help everyone, and yet you were to do no work on the Sabbath. There were rabbi’s at that time that debated the question. The one’s in power at the time said that you should do no work. However, Jesus turned it around. He asked the question, is it better to to do good or evil on the Sabbath? When the Pharisees wouldn’t answer Jesus got mad, and then turned to the man and healed him.
That’s the model that we need to take. If you get mad at little things, what do they matter? It’s the bigger questions like poverty, hunger, etc. that we need to get mad about about and then use the gifts we have been given to bring healing. So there should be two questions to ask when you are looking for that right job or career or such. One is, and is usually the one that most ask, what do you like to do or are passionate about? But the other is just like it, What makes you angry? In which case, how can you channel your anger into something that will heal others?
There is so much to blog and so little time. I’ll try to work on something on Thursday when I have my day off (and my alone time/Sabbath).
I began a practice of doing almost nothing but relaxing on my first day off after a long string of shifts about 3 years ago about the time I went to the National Youth Worker Convention in Pittsburgh. This has been a great way for me to reconnect with God on a regular basis. Especially, when my schedule is all over the place, due to the rigors of shift work. I’ve been able to do this pretty regularly. Although the next couple of weeks could be rough.
My main problem is having to break one of my main personal rules of not bringing work home with me. I don’t mind talking to people about the weather and how things work, but after being so absorbed with it, when I was younger, that I began to find it not as fun as when I first started to do the hobby stuff when I was a kid. As I began to let God guide my life and I concentrated on other things that I found just as fulfilling, my career as a meteorologist began to become more rewarding as well.
The reason for the break in the rules has been a couple of things, that have all come on me at once. The fire weather program, that I administer, has been a pretty big challenge this spring as the program had some large changes administratively, and this has lead me to have to, “put out a lot of little fires,” this spring. The other thing is that the NWS has put through a refresher course for severe weather warnings, Weather Service wide. A good thing, but it has put a time crunch on trying to get things done. I also have to go on the semi-annual SAWRS visits, where I go out and inspect the weather equipment of the back up weather observers at some of the airports. So now to get AWOC (the severe weather course) done by May 15th, I will have to break my rule.
With a couple of other things going on this weekend, I will probably have to take Monday, the day I would probably would have done little, but relax, and sit front of my computer and do my weather lessons. I’m starting to think this is sounding like whining, but you have to realize that my alone time with God is probably the most important thing to me. When I let it go or get myself into a scheduling pickle, then I find that I am distracted and my flesh takes my spirit for a ride, instead of the other way around, like it should be. That may sound esoteric, but for me, it works. I am more content and feel more plugged in when I keep my spiritual side alive and well fed and I am content and feel that all things are possible. Of course, I could just not schedule so much as well.
Which brings me to what I do during my meditation times on my Sabbath, which is where I think I really wanted to go with this post. I have come across couple that work for me.
1) lectio devina or sacred reading – this is a cool way to read the Bible. Although, it doesn’t work for all of the verses. Since it has been said that lectio is praying the scriptures, its hard to pray the begats.
2) Breath prayer/centering prayer/Jesus Prayer – this one is good for those times you don’t know what to pray, but want to pray. They are all similar as that you repeat a particular phrase over and over.
There are others as well, but these are my favorite.
Things otherwise are going well.
I’ve been contemplating another name change to the blog (The first was from Jeff’s Blog to the current title). This time I would just take the word Youth out of the title. The reason that I am contemplating this would be that the more I study youth ministry, the more I realize that it is just ministry, and that adults have the same hurts and desires as the junior and senior high students. Sometimes the adults, don’t act much different than the kids (Read my dad’s human resources blog to see my point).
An analogy to this is in meteorology(I have to work weather in there somewhere). When I would study smaller scales of meteorology, like say thunderstorms. In the met profession thunderstorms are in the mesoscale size. You could see, if you mapped out the temperatures and the surface pressure surrounding a thunderstorm, that it looked just like the weather maps on TV with the cold fronts and low pressure systems. I’m beginning to see similar things in ministry.
You see, for the most part, that each generation suffers from the same sort of things, like inflated egos and competition to the point that everyone becomes very self-centered. That’s just the way sin is. It doesn’t matter how old you are, you are doing something that you think will get you ahead, usually at the expense of the next guy. In youth ministry, you deal with kids that are trying to find their way in the world, usually using whoever they can in school to find some way to fill that hole that is all of us. In adult ministry, you are dealing with adults that put themselves first thinking that they can use whoever, to fill that hole that is in all of us. The only difference is the size of the problems and how we try to accomplish finding “happiness.”
So while I am still rooted in youth ministry, I have begun to try and help young adults and adults closer to my age with their problems. So ministry of all ages. Which leads to me contemplate my original calling. I’m not sure that it is just youth ministry that I will be in, but just general ministry. I think that, maybe, just helping youth pastors and directors sort out where God is moving in the background while they minister to the youth. We will see, but the same feeling that I have had for about the last 3-5 years is that sometime in the future, I will be out of the meteorology business and in some sort of full time ministry. God will show the way.
I ran into this story yesterday, but then saw this on My Yahoo! this morning again and felt that I needed to comment on it. After reading this, you will understand that I am not necessarily right or left of center on the political spectrum, because just as you hear me say something like why I supported sending troops to Iraq (see my previous post here) then I write something like the following.
One of the things that I hear from politically conservative people is why we should fight for Iraq and support the troops and the president. That’s all well and good, and I do (my own cousin is in Iraq right now), but we have to realize that there are costs to everything we do. Just because Saddam was biding his time to become a major player again and we go in and kick his butt out, doesn’t excuse us from not helping the civilians that have been caught in the war and hold the military accountable. I support organizations that try to do just that. I didn’t know about this particular organization, but from reading its website, I would have supported it. I may still donate to it in the future.
One way they were trying to keep the military accountable was trying to get the reports of civilian casualties. I’m not a big numbers person, because behind each number is a person. However, we should all be informed and remember that we have brothers and sisters that we need to watch out for (Matthew 25:31-46), no matter who they are.
The last few months with Mary have flown by, and we are still in awe of the God that we worship, and know as the one who brought us together. The two of us have just passed the fifth month of courting. So many of our friends that are single, as well as the students in the youth group talk about wanting to date and find someone to couple with (I mean that in the marriage term and not the physical, though the two are at times confused for one another.).
The thing that Mary and I have been doing over the months is reading books together about courting and asking questions of each other before you ask “the question.” This has been great, because we have been able to talk about everything, which includes our personal pasts and problems that may jump out at us.
However, the big thing that we have seen is how God brought us together and how if we had concentrated on God and waited, we might have not needed to go through the pains that we did (although the pains we did go through did help us to grow). I guess what I am trying to say is that waiting for God to present someone isn’t as bad as it seems. True, society puts pressure on us to couple and makes you think that something is wrong with you if you aren’t married by a certain time. A case in point was my cousin who was getting remarried, (I’m not going into the details because they aren’t relevant) to someone who had never been married and was approaching 40. The people that they worked with asked, “What’s wrong with them?” Well, as far as I know nothing was. A similar thing happened to me, as Mary and I began to go out, when I was asked, you’re such a great guy, why aren’t you married yet? My only responses have been, God knew that I needed to heal over past baggage.
And that brings me to the conversations and the sermons that I have heard as of late. We, individually, need to heal, but we need to do it with the church family, and focus on God. And then, when God says we are ready, as strange as it sounds, God will present you with someone.
I know that the last part of my healing came a year or two ago, when I finally said to God (and meant it) that I don’t need to be married and that God was enough. While I wanted to get married, I would be content if I didn’t. Then after hearing someone read Psalm 37:4 [Delight yourself in the LORD; And He will give you the desires of your heart.(NASB)], I felt a peace that I would probably get married, when God presented her.
I guess the thing that I am trying to get across, as counter intuitive as it sounds, is don’t do the dating thing, because it only brings the heartache of breaking up, whether the relationship gets physical or not (and the more physical the more painful the break). Two books that talk about this are I Kissed Dating Goodbye and Choosing God’s Best.
I know that some have tried to tell us that we need to try out each other, but as Mary and I have focused on God, and struggle to stay pure (and I mean struggle) we have found that we have established a strong friendship and a strong spiritual relationship. Those who are close friends of ours, and Mary’s kids, have not raised any red flags with us (and believe me, I have friends that would, and so would Mary’s kids) about this relationship. So as we wait on God’s timing, we do it with anticipation on what He will do next and what we are to do next.
The preliminary outlook this morning showed that the cold front will be around Portland Friday morning. Which is a flip-flop back to what we saw two days ago. This front initially looks week. The current predictions along your route at the various offices, look mainly like rain west of the Wasatch. The Salt Lake City NWS office has a 50% chance of snow on Saturday/Sunday time frame along I-80. Looking at the web cams along I-80 in SW Wyoming, the snow is on the mountains with the valleys dry. The Riverton NWS office has slight chances of snow as you get over the Wasatch.
So the Friday doesn’t look bad, but Saturday/Sunday between Boise and western Wyoming looks like snow. Once you get past the Green River Tunnels on I-80 in western Wyoming, the forecast is for slight chances of snow, more than likely, by looking at the web cams, the snow probably won’t be heavy in the valleys, just on the surrounding mountains.
I read this article about a convicted rapist/murderer and the argument that his defense lawyer used to get him out of his death sentence. I am against death penalty on moral grounds and someday I might blog them, but the argument that the defense made and the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in favor of was of the life sentence becasuse:
The Supreme Court said that “at least one juror in this case could have been influenced by these authoritative passages to vote for the death
penalty when he or she may otherwise have voted for a life sentence.”
Very interesting, at least the court recogized that the Bible is authoritative.
The defense argument was this:
During oral arguments before the Supreme Court last month, defense attorney Kathleen Lord said the jurors had gone outside the law. “They went to the Bible to find out God’s position on capital punishment,” she said.
I’m not sure, but weren’t the majority of the founding fathers and those that crafted the Constitution, influenced by the Bible. And it makes it outside the law how?
The state was making the argument that is fairly tolerent:
Prosecutors had argued that jurors should be allowed to refer to the Bible
or other religious texts during deliberations.
If they refer to the Bible or other religious texts like say the Quoran or a Buddhist text, that’s not allowed either? Does that mean that no one gets a fair sentence, because somebody on the jury has a particular religious affiliation? I don’t know, but I think this is just getting a little too picky about how much we are to shut off our brains and not express ourselves…but that’s just my opinion.
