The Weekly Wrap-Up: August 22-26, 2016

Well, then.

I've discovered another benefit for doing these. They help convince me that I'm not actually living the same week over again.

It's not that I think I'm living in a Groundhog Day situation. I just tend to do a lot of the same things every week, and I can see myself believing that there really isn't any variety to life.

"But surely," you would say to me, "your evenings should be full of variety; certainly enough to convince you that life is indeed moving forward and you're not stuck in a time loop."

To which I would reply: "Umm ... sometimes I watch episodes of Star Trek: Voyager instead of West Wing."

Moving on.

It's Outreach week! We're doing two versions now, remember, one print and one online. Although, the first part of the online version is the same as the print version, but still - the workload doesn't really change for proofreaders. The focus is on India for this issue, which is exciting because Train & Multiply gets a huge shout out from our India training in June. People in India have really embraced T&M, which is great, but also means more work for us. There are 1,652 officially recognized languages in India. Only about 150 have a sizeable population that speaks them, and there are 22 official languages. We've translated about four. I imagine we could spend a year just on Indian languages alone and still have plenty of work.

Speaking of languages, I counted up how many active projects we have going on right now. We use Trello for tracking (which if you haven't heard of it, it's a great program), and we have 25 open boards. Maybe half of those are going right now. For the rest, we've received requests, but we're still working out translators or fonts or something else is preventing us from starting. There's a lot to consider when translating something.

For example, the other thing I worked on this week is the test file. I talked about this last week, but this week I had to write up the process so that I can train others how to do this. It's a fairly simple process, but I ended up with roughly 18 steps before it's completed. And that's just when everything goes right!

We had a big discussion this week about what we do with materials people need from us. It's a real hassle to handle individual requests for information. We're trying to figure out how to get everything in one place, but only give access to people who need it.

Anyway, that discussion is by no means resolved. We figured out we needed to hire at least two more people, so that's something. Trouble is, it takes so long for people to fund, what do we do in the meantime?

So I guess this week was actually quite varied. Maybe it's just Fridays that seem the same. Or neverending. I'm ready to go home.

One more hour. 

I Didn't Really Need to Kiss Dating Goodbye

I'm going to give an off-the-cuff response to this article. Then I'm going to leave it for a little while and return with hopefully more insight.

There are things that I hate about modern "Christianity."

It's in quotes, so read further before you freak out.

In every age, there have been set models of what it means to be a Christian. Every age. I can't even make an exception for the first few years after Christ's resurrection, because there was the whole 'you have to be a good Jew to be a good Christian' debate. Every few years, someone pops up with something else, saying, "Look, I found something new! This is what it really means to be a Christian. You must act/dress/eat/live/breathe/date/school/insertverbhere in exactly this way in order to be the perfect Christian. Or apparently just pray about it a lot and, bonus!, you get the American dream - I mean, the life all Christians deserve.

I don't like that book, in case you couldn't tell. (And if you don't know what book I'm talking about, click the link! But beware.)

What was I talking about?

Right.

I've lived through several of these crazes now. There's probably one going on right now, whenever you're reading this. And for some reason, I always get asked, "Hey, are you reading this? It's great. You'd like it." Like they don't know me at all. I'm not going to like it. A) because you told me I would and my inner rebellious nature automatically decides to hate it until I decide it's cool; B) because I hate following the crowd on anything (I didn't watch Frozen until a year after it was released because everyone told me it was great - I thought it was merely okay); and C) it's probably some mass market propaganda that capitalizes on one insignificant detail that completely overlooks the bigger picture and was really just designed to make the author a crapton of money at the expense of the spiritual lives of their audience!

Look, I'm sure some of them mean well. They believe they have discovered something amazing and must impart it to the world. And sometimes they make a good point.

But more often than not, they belabor a point that didn't need to be made, or they overemphasize something that people really shouldn't fixate on but do. All of a sudden, it becomes 'do this or be a bad Christian.'

And it annoys me. Because all of this could be easily resolved by READING THE BIBLE. Not just a couple verses, but the whole thing! At least find a concordance, people. They spent a lot of time putting things into categories. The least you could do is see what other verses say about your chosen topic.

See, despite what many people think and keep trying to force down our gullets, what it means to be a Christian has not changed since the concept came into being. We are Christ followers. We strive to be more like Christ, and we learn what that means by studying Scripture. While books/sermons/tapes/music may provide exposition or commentary, they are not (as we say in the fanfiction business) canon. These books/sermons/tapes/music might point you toward salvation, but they can't actually do the deed.

(Incidentally, this is not a new phenomenon. Jews have the Old Testament, yes, but they also have commentaries. And commentaries on those commentaries. Muslims have the Qur'an. And the hadith. We've actually managed to avoid this pretty well over the years, but I think it's starting to creep in more and more.)

So no, I'm not surprised people feel let down by Joshua Harris now. They took what he said as gospel, and when it didn't bring them everything they wanted, they felt betrayed.

Here's my point, though, and what I really hope you take away from this. I'm afraid that what people are taking away from (as the article put it) Harris' "not-quite-apology tour" is that, because he's rethinking some things, he was actually wrong about everything. Abstinence isn't important, isn't helpful, isn't what God planned.

That's not (I hope) what he's saying.

What I would say is this: Let's look at what the Bible says about sex. What does the Bible say about sex outside of marriage? What does it say about purity? Now take that and apply it to your life. That is what will make you a better Christian. If you think courting is a good way to practice that, great! If that really isn't your style, fine! Do whatever you need to do to keep in line with the biblical teaching. Not because Josh Harris said so. But because that's what it means to be a Christian.




(I'm reading this later. I let it sit for a whole day so I could give it a good think. I haven't really changed much. I feel like I could probably explain it better. But I'm going to hope this is sufficient.)

The Weekly Wrap-Up: August 15-19, 2016

I liked this week. No real reason. There just really wasn't a reason not to. 

It's a nice feeling. 

I learned a new program this week. It's an Internet-based program called UXPin. Or something like that. I've been building a new landing page for T&M. It's a fun program to use, and I like being able to play around with it. It's a great thing to add to my skill set. 

One program I have not been able to master is GatherContent. I'm supposed to build a blog/update page related to the landing page, but it is not an intuitive system. I'm trying to figure it out. I have some time. I just hate not being able to figure something out. 

We've been cleaning up the app as well. We've got a great product in English, but we have to make sure it works in other languages just as nicely. 

I'm also learning more of the production process. We send a test file to our translators to make sure we have correct fonts and that what they send us matches what we produce. It's a fairly easy thing to do, and it's a good thing to have in my arsenal. 

I think we need to have an office Olympics. Prizes for speed filing, wheely chair races, expense report time trials...

It could be a thing. 

The Weekly Wrap-Up: August 8-12, 2016

You know how you can go a whole week without any interruptions or emergencies or interrupting emergencies that turn into three-hour meetings and then at 3 o'clock on Friday suddenly everyone needs your input on something?

Yeah. That happened.

(That's why this wasn't done earlier. You should thank me for staying late to get this written. I'll preemptively thank you.)

So the first part of my week was pretty straightforward. We have a bunch of old files that people still use because they haven't updated the translation yet, or it's somewhere in the process. But many of those files had watermarks or were not secure. This is pretty easy work, but there were about 1,500 files to correct, so it takes some time.

Once the files are secure, I had to replace all of the old files with the new ones in our download program. Again, not difficult, just time consuming.

I took some time to clean off my desk this week. Apparently (as my coworker told me), a clean desk is a sign of a sick mind. But sometimes you just have to get rid of some things. It's still not really up to my usual standards, but I can live with it for a little while longer.

We're still having app trouble. I spent most of the rest of this week trying to sort out tags, finding duplicates, deleting bad tags, and generally pulling my hair out at the mess.

Fortunately, I've been able to let the Olympics play in the background while I work. I admit, I took about fifteen nail-biting minutes off today to watch the U.S. women's soccer team lose terribly in penalty kicks. (I like the British commentators best. They are very soothing.)

The big emergency today was not actually an emergency in that it's something we've talked about for months but finally decided we should probably actually do something about. It was actually helpful to have this conversation because we have a new feature that I knew nothing about, and now I can offer it to people and they can stop asking me questions I don't have the answer to.

(I'm watching sailing now. There's no commentary, so I have no idea what is happening. They look like little sharks from overhead. There's a horn that keep sounding. I can only assume one boat is telling another to get out of its way. Seriously, how does anyone know what is going on? Oh wait! I think they were lining up! Someone just counted down, which generally means something is about to start. Now my question is, how is it fun to hang off the side of a boat surrounded by 20 other boats?)

Whatever. I'm gonna go now. I have a whole weekend ahead of me.

:D

The Weekly Wrap-Up: August 1-5, 2016

I've talked about the OMS acronyms before, right? There are a million. It would be possible for the following sentence to be said:

"MFM, ECC, DWIM, and IMD are working together on a trip to CAJ, CAM, and CIS to discuss scholarships for SEMBEC, MECS, and MTC."

Granted, it wouldn't be very likely. But nearly everyone at OMS would know what you had meant.



That has absolutely nothing to do with my week. But it's fun.

Anyway, this was a T&M training week. My duties are largely limited to backup and data recording. I did get to take the group photo, though. It turned out quite nicely.

We did another release of the T&M app to update some new features. I've been testing it again to make sure everything is working properly. We're trying to decide which features actually need to be implemented. We have a list of about 275 things that need to be changed, added, or tweaked. It's way too much for one update, so we're trying to sort them by order of importance.

In addition to all that, we're working on changing the covers of many of the books. If we can streamline the process so we don't have to change all of the art in every book, we can get books out faster. It's hard to come up with illustrations that correctly reflect the content of each booklet.

This was the last week for our intern Morgan. He's been here several weeks learning about church planting. We get interns every so often, and their contributions vary. Morgan has been very helpful to us.

I hope to have a prayer letter out soon. I wrote most of the copy this week; now I just have to put it together.

Remember all that sleep I didn't get last week? This week wasn't much better. And this weekend won't be great for sleep, either.

Oy vey.