Passing-Thought

life update

Some of you may be wondering what's been going on with me in the past month, so I thought I'd give you an update.

My work is going well. As I had mentioned in my last update, every morning at 9am the whole team starts off with prayer about our tasks and personal items as well. In my room are about 8 developers. The only thing that separates some of us is our monitors (no cubical walls). We try to keep an open environment to encourage interaction and exchange of information. In other nearby rooms there are 2 design analysts, and 3 testers. Right now I am paired with a seasoned programmer named Steve McConnel. In addition to getting to know my teammates better, "pairing" in our programming tasks has some nice benefits. I get to learn from Steve about areas of the software that he knows quite well and we get to work together to solve a common task. Last week I was paired with another programmer named Dan Hinton to write some tests for some changes we are making to how our software handles undoable & redoable tasks. Since our missionaries do lots of editing type tasks with the software, we want to provide a more reliable way to "Undo" mistakes or "Redo" things they didn't want undone. When multiple programs try to edit the same data, the software hasn't been responding like it should, so we're trying to fix that.

Next week, we'll probably regroup again to work on our upcoming release of a new Lexicon tool that helps missionaries rapidly build dictionaries & print them. Right now we are trying to make sure we have all the features (within reason) needed for missionaries to use the software to do real work. We're hoping to release the tool bundled with some other new tools in the Fall for all of Wycliffe. Then the organization can encourporate these tools in their class rooms for the linguistic students.

Next month, our team will travel to Waxhaw, North Carolina (Mar 6th - 12th), for our annual Language Software Developer's conference. There we will join with the rest of our software team (who is a little bigger than the Dallas group) to talk about what we're doing and to discuss our software goals and how to work together (by God's grace) to make it happen.

My extra-curricular activities seem to take up most of my remaining time. I have no idea how you fathers do all you do with kids (thank God for mothers!) I've enjoyed worshipping on Sundays both at Christ Covenant OPC (who meets at the Wycliffe campus) and Colleyville PCA. Both of these churches, by the way, are the first reformed churches I ever attended (before joining Grace).

On Saturday mornings (7am-8:30--yawn), I've recently started a men's eldership/leadership training course at Colleyville PCA under the direction of Pastor Dale Smith (who is currently working with an augmented session and in hopes to elect other elders later this year.) We are working through a number of books challenging to faith and life in the education of the responsibilities of elders. For what it means to "be an elder" we are reading Biblical Eldership by Alexander Strauch. He challenges the church to recognize the role of all elders to be 'pastor-elders'. Our next main text, Mother Kirk by Doug Wilson, is a combination of essays that helps understand the church and her responsibilities. We are also going through Wilson's Reforming Marriage to help define what a marriage is and, particularly, in hopes that our marriages may be an "a pleasant aroma to God" that preaches Christ's relationship to the church, and not a blasphemous lie about that truth. We are also reading through the Westminster confession of Faith and other readings in order to discuss them and to find ways in the church we can exercise some level of responsibility. I'm struggling to keep up! (Let alone waking up Saturday morning!)

On Wednesday evenings, I've been blessed by the prayer & fellowship of the saints of Christ Covenant OPC. Every week a group of 20+ members (including several children) meet at someone elses house to give praise to God and offer prayer (and to enjoy snacks afterwords). We typically begin by singing a psalm and/or hymn selection. The pastor has us focus on praying for something specific (such as thanksgiving and/or confession of sin). Then after singing again, he catechizes us from the text that was preached on Sunday morning, asking us (including the kids) to remember the main points of the sermon and to discuss them. Then after another song, he might pass out prayer requests from our mission works near and far, and have us pray through those. Followed by a time of prayer for needs in the church. What has been most edifying to me is the wisdom and enthusiasm of all the little kids, both in answering questions about the sermon and in their prayers! I've never heard so many little kids praying together amongst adults, some of them even confessing their particular sins, or giving thanks for things important to them in their life. I really get a good sense that these covenant children know that church is for them, and that their covenant relationship with God and others demands the obedience of faith. The church seems very committed to each other as a family. I was amazed to see this evidenced one prayer meeting by the number of people who met at elder David Mahaffy's house in Plano, which is probably 45minutes (or more) away from most of the church. Even though it was the Wednesday night before Christmas, still, the living room overflowed with people eager to sing and pray to the Lord.

On Tuesdays, I've been involved with the singles group bible study at Bethel (now PCA). We're going through Ed Welch's book, When People are Big and God is Small dealing with overcoming fear of man with the fear of God in the Christian life.

This coming Tuesday, I hope to start taking a seminary class on the Doctrine of God by Dr. Sinclair Ferguson. I still have 15hrs remaining for an MAR in biblical studies, and Lord willing, will finish that up in the next two years.

In my "spare" time, I try to find something around my friend's house to improve, or make beautiful. Saturday mornings I often shop for things to clean or improve the house. But I think I've come to realize that I don't really have the time or money for keeping such a pace. There is no end to things that can be done for home improvement. That said, I do think that the house seems more like "home sweet home" every week. Last night, I even invited a seminary friend (Paul Buckley) over for dinner. My cooking labors were not in vain. So for dessert, we watched a "pyle" movie. :)

I just bought an mp3 player (and a cassette adapter) so I can listen to my pastor's sermons (among others) in my car to/from work every day. (I have some catching up to do.)