Pre Missions Sunday 2007

Missions Sunday [or as I am going to start calling it now - Pre Missions Sunday] was this past Sunday. It is the Sunday sometime in the spring or summer where the adult body gets to hear about all the summer teams. This time around, we were fairly ready with 3 out of 5 times, meaning that we had teams chosen, team pictures available and prayer cards printed. A fourth team was almost ready and a fifth team... well, we are seeking on that one...

This year, like every other detail every other year, has been a little different in that there are a whole other set of adult trips that GCC is doing this summer and fall - so the whole lobby was filled with mission stuff. All in all, there were ten or eleven teams represented. People stood up as teams were outlined on slides and then Pastor Mark spoke on Isaiah 58 and the idea of justice. He also outlined the overall direction for the Africa initiative and the first part of that is a partnership with AIDS Orphans Educational Trust, based in Uganda. [GCC has sent 3 or 4 teams to AOET in recent years.] And this Sunday was kind of a follow up to last Sunday, where the interview with Bono and Bill Hybels was shown.

I was surprised last year that my brain didn't implode sometime during the morning [it was Father's Day, I had worked all night, etc.] This year was just the opposite, nice and relaxing. It was also a lot of fun to see Em so excited about being able to stand up with the team. [K was sick with strep.]

The beauty of this Sunday is that the students feel like the whole church is behind them - which she is. And the adults feel like our students are doing really significant things in the world - which they are.

Photos: Some of the students standing during their slide; B and K McN in the lobby. B and K are from GCC and with CAI and are in MD for about a month before returning to the field. We will be hanging with them and their kids in August.

[Related: Pre Missions Sunday 2005 and 2006.]

how em rolls

how em rolls
Originally uploaded by tonytsheng.

seat belt - nah

crash helmet - absolutely

Why We Can't Do It Ourselves

[Pre-Missions Sunday is this Sunday. If you are at Grace, we would love to meet you.]

Our summer support levels for this year are about 20% more than last year. That is a little daunting because I thought last year was a huge stretch goal. Honestly, I am a bit anxious about the whole support thing. And I'm not the only one...

We as a family have quite a bit to raise.
We have some students that are going on multiple overseas trips and have a big goal.
Some individuals on our teams are looking at other projects post-summer and looking at the combined large goal.

A conversation I have had a few times now revolves around the idea that the intimidating amount of support should not deter us. Yes they are large goals but if God has called us to these tasks, then we should simply go and act on faith that He will provide the means.

And if the goal was small, if it was something we could simply do ourselves, if we could do it with our own strengths, smarts, and abilities - it wouldn't be worth it would it?

[Related - Mission Support Metrics, 2005]

Photo: Post Mission Sunday, August 2006. [Those are my feet on the screen!]

Friday Potpourri

::: Papua New Guinea has the most number of languages of any geopolitical country.


::: Kevin Kelly - founder of Wired magazine speaks at the Q conference:

1000 years in the future is only 13 generations.. what was it like back 1000 years ago: gospel, church, culture, future.. noted the invention - technology of printing.. it changed culture.. "science" was also a new technology that emerged..

and

[first time ever] Humans have only ever experienced a rise in prosperity in parallel with a rise in population.

via DJ



::: Alex McManus asks:

93. What insights will we gain about the scriptures the first day they are read on Earth Colony Mars?

If you think Alex is crazy, you do know that scientists just found a planet that might be hospitable, don't you?

Thursday Potpourri

::: A city of 2 million without street names or addresses via Jordon


::: "She said in one sentence what 1000 missionaries in 1000 years could never do." The real story of the 3 Christians killed in Turkey last week. via Floyd McClung [Floyd wrote one of the articles for Perspectives]

UPDATE: 2007-05-04
Andrew Jones posts that the media exaggerated the details of the murders.


::: The founder of YWAM from Bob Roberts --

It became real quiet for a few minutes while Loren answered in typical humble Loren fashion, "Oh, I don't know, I just said yes. All I did was obey. God spoke and I said yes. Maybe He asked 1,000 people before me, I was just the one who said yes--maybe I didn't know any better."

::: Rodney goes to jail [for a good cause]

What a life

What a life
Originally uploaded by tonytsheng.

ah the innocence huh...

The End of Poverty - Chapter 10

Another post in a series of posts based on the book The End of Poverty.

Chapter 10 - The Voiceless Dying

:: Deeper cause of Africa's poverty than corruption. Ghana, Malawi, Mali, and Senegal failed to prosper whereas societies prone to more corruption such as Bangladesh, India, Indonesia enjoyed rapid economic growth.
:: Isolation and lack of basic infrastructure are the prevailing conditions of most of rural Africa, and that rural Africa is where most Africans live.
:: Malaria and AIDS
:: The WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (CMH)
1. Causation runs in both directions regarding poverty and disease.
2. Eight areas for longer life expectancy - AIDS, malaria, TB, diarrheal disease, acute respitratory infection, vaccine-preventable disease, nutritional deficiencies, and unsafe childbirth.
3. Donor aid from the rich world to the poor world ought to rise to $27B by 2007 - about an annual investment of one thousandth of rich-world income. $27B to avert 8 million deaths per year.
:: Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria
Key point was that drug treatment for the poor would cost the donor world much less. Antiretroviral medicines can be priced very low in poor countries due to high pricing in monopoly and high-income markets.
:: Geography has conspired with economics in Africa - lacks navigable rivers with access to the ocean for easy transport and trade, highland populations having more reliable rainfall and soils but more isolation have higher densities of people, more than 90 percent of crops are rain fed.

[Related: Notes from Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Malaria in Africa, Sachs the Optimist]

First SPACE 2007 Hungary team meeting

[clockwise sort of]
D, Robyn, Elly, Erin, Michelle, Lindsey, Sven, moi, Tyler, K, Em, Greg, Trevin, Tricia [not shown Leslie and Emilie]

We would LOVE for you to be praying for us.

And...

I was pretty convinced... but now I'm really convinced...

Jeffrey Sachs the Optimist

From talk 1 of this series:

::: malaria nets
300M sleeping sites in Africa that need protection from malaria
anti-malaria bed net costs $5 and last five years - $1 a year
multiple kids sleep under one
total investment - $1.5B for 5 years
the most amazing bargain of our time

::: the solution to overpopulation is child survival
it is a myth that saving children contributes to the overpopulation problem
in fact, child survival is correlated and causally related to reducing fertility rates among poor households
you want them to have fewer children? assure them that the fewer children that they have will survive
you cannot leave children to die to solve the overpopulation problem

::: optimist

I spend my time with people who are dying. Twenty-two years ago I started to say that we needed debt cancellation for the poorest countries. (APPLAUSE) It came late, but it came. I can't give up, that we are doomed. (APPLAUSE) That's why I started this lecture as I did, that too many of us think it is impossible, too many think it is unreal, but that is a dangerous defeatist belief. That's exactly where I started. We have to believe that we can make choices if we can understand them. We have to believe that the more we analyse together and reason together, especially in this house of all places on the planet, that it's possible to sort out some of these things. No part of the whole planet has done more than this institution to change the course of history in fact. Life expectancy was twenty-five years, and it's because of what this house and what it represents has accomplished, that in the rich world we're at eighty years, and in the middle income world we're at seventy years. And when I think about how Condorcet, months before he was killed in the French Revolution, talked about how we could harness reason to grow more crops and to extend life expectancy - what right did he have to be optimistic, but he got it exactly right. So what right do we have to be so pessimistic, and blind, and not moving, when people are dying on our watch?

The full transcript is here.

[Related - my posts from The End of Poverty - Chapter 1, 2, 3, and Malaria.]

SPACE Summer 2007 Forms and Downloads

::: England
07.England Parental Release Form

07.England Support Response Cards

::: Hungary
07.Hungary Parental Release Form

07.Hungary Support Response Cards

::: Baltimore
07.Baltimore Support Response Cards

::: NYC
07.NYC Support Response Cards



Thank You Inserts

Mission Support Letter Examples

Return Envelope Labels
[Please note - These have been formatted for Avery 5160/8160 labels]

Life that is surprising as life

"No doubt some will reply that God is not a God of disorder, incoherence, or arbitrariness, but a God of order. Of course he is. Unfortunately the whole of the Old Testament shows us that God's order is not that which we conceive and desire. God's order is not organization and institution (cf. the difference between judges and kings). It is not the same in every time and place. It is not a matter of repetition and habit. On the contrary, it resides in the fact that it constantly posits something new, a new beginning. Our God is a God of beginnings. There is in him no redundancy or circularity. Thus, if his church wants to be faithful to his revelation, it will be completely mobile, fluid, renascent, bubbling, creative, inventive, adventurous, and imaginative. It will never be perennial, and can never be organized or institutionalized. If the gates of death are not going to prevail against it, this is not because it is a good, solid, well organized fortress, but because it is alive; it is Life that is, as mobile, changing, and surprising as life. If it becomes a powerful fortified organization, it is because death has prevailed."

- Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, via Alan Hirsch

Our 2007 Missions Support Letter

Dear Friends, Family, Co-laborers,

Each year, right around this time, Tony sits down and carefully constructs a support letter for one (or two) of his many missionary adventures. For years, I have been the whisper in the background, voice of reason (hehe – OK, maybe not ALL the time!), prayer support, and the organizer of funds, hotel reservations, an administrator of sorts and the point person the homefront. It has honestly been a fun journey, while a little sketchy at times (like the two weeks while he was in Brazil and we had no shower to speak of in our house!), and I would never trade those years for anything else.

This year, things have come together for a different sort of adventure, one that we have been dreaming of in our hearts for several years. God has opened the door for us to go this year as a family on a trip that seems, in many ways, designed just for us! We have the opportunity to embark on a family adventure with a team of leaders and students from our church to Vienna, Austria and Sopron, Hungary to serve the European missionary families working through Christian Associates International. These families will be meeting together for a week long conference and retreat and we have been chosen to serve these families by providing childcare while they are involved in learning and planning together.

I would like to invite each of you along on this one in whatever capacity you feel comfortable. We will need lots of preparation and prayer, patience and wisdom as we attempt to be Godly leaders/parents/servants, and a huge amount of faith as we tackle the daunting task of raising support for our family of four. We are excited and scared all at the same time, so please join us in any or all of these areas in the first Sheng missionary adventure! ~Deanna

CAI's existence is based around impacting Europe via the multiplication of high-impact leaders and churches, and a family from Grace has been working with CAI for the past few years. Our team's main goal will be to assist with different facets of the children's ministry for the kids of CAI workers. This trip has great elements including: blessing Grace's network of families who have invested everything for humanity's sake in Europe; having students spend some time with these innovative and unconventional people; and the opportunity to do ministry in a spiritually hungry post-Christian culture that is Europe. Being that this trip is focused on children, our own kids will also have lots of great opportunities to serve beyond themselves. The 16 of us fly out on August 8 and return on August 18, and our travels include flying in and out of Vienna, Austria; children's ministry during the conference; and a service project day trip with the whole conference back into Vienna. There may also be possible opportunities for our students to travel with CAI middle and high school students to do some service projects with local ministries in Vienna for a longer duration.

We would love for you to be a part of our support team. To start, you can pray for:
- all of our summer teams [Baltimore, NYC, Liverpool and this one] - for their leaders, their students and the logistics.
- for our Hungary team - for unity, for our leadership and for the vision to know that we will prevail.
- passports, airline tickets and logistical details.
- for our Mission Advance weekend, a missions prep weekend for all our summer student teams, June 22-24.
- for Tony and I as both leaders and parents, and the discernment about both roles.
- for K [9] and E [6] and for the contributions they will bring to the CAI kids and our team in general.

We also have to raise a significant amount of money - the total for our family being $7100. If you feel led to support financially, that would also be a huge blessing. There are two ways you can financially support our team. First, you may send a check in the enclosed envelope with the response card. Please make checks payable to Grace Community Church and in the note section please specify, "SPACE Hungary - Shengs". You may also contribute via the Internet, by clicking the "Online Giving!" link at the top of the Grace Church webpage - http://www.gcconline.org. Click the "eGive" link and after entering the appropriate donor and bank information, fill in the amount for "Short Term Missions" and specify for "SPACE Hungary - Shengs".

We dream of how this summer will catalyze the lives of our students, our church, and our children - giving them a direction for shaping human history because of the passion that Jesus has placed in their hearts. Thanks for your support and prayers, for supporting SPACE [Students Prepared to Act For Christ's Empire] and being an integral part of mobilizing students for mission. ~Tony

Images: Austria and Hungary, Em's castle, Kt's thoughts, the fam at Easter.

Related: Historical Mission Support Letters [2007, 2006, 2005]

VT

In light of the VT shootings...

- A youth worker guide to helping your students via Marko

- The Copycateffect blog [if you hang with students or on campus, you should skim this.]

- Our schools are dangerous places, just like the world we live in. They require bravery.

::: Update 2007-04-23
Our friends on staff with CCC and alumni of VT wrote that Crusade at VT sent flowers to Seung-Hui Cho's family.

Thursday Potpourri

::: Campus Ministry Primer for Cities - via Jeremy


::: Global Subways to Scale - link


::: Cities not like ecosystems after all

2007 summer mission and travel resources

mostly so i can remember these details...

::: Travel Agent
Sybille - bcdtravel.com
Manchester is closer to Liverpool than London

::: Passports
Catonsville, MD post office is still doing them while you wait

::: The Shot Lady
M Carrington - Columbia MD
[no shots for any of our teams this summer]

::: Visa Service
http://www.americanvisadc.com/
[no visas for any of our teams this summer]

- scan passports and visas and email the images to yourself
- each minor's parents have signed a notarized, signed letter of consent and responsibility
- each leader carries copies of all paperwork for each team member on their person at all times

[very cryptic I know, but if you need more info, get in touch and I will get you specifics]

SPACE 07 Baltimore

If you are on the SPACE07 Baltimore team, you might be interested in this post from my friend Jeremy Del Rio. Jeremy is a good friend of SPACE and Matt Stevens, who runs Chain Reaction, is his partner in crime.

Character and Context

In The Tipping Point, in the chapter about 'the power of context', Gladwell writes about the relationship between character, context and behavior. He writes:

The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people's behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context. We will always reach for a "dispositional" explanation for events, as opposed to a contextual explanation.

He then continues:

Character, then, isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment. I have a lot of fun at dinner parties. As a result, I throw a lot of dinner parties and my friends see me there and think that I'm fun. But if I couldn't have lots of dinner parties, if my friends instead tended to see me in lots of different situations of which I had little or no control - like, say, faced with four hostile youths in a filthy, broken-down subway - they probably wouldn't think of me as fun anymore.

Gladwell also sites this study about a test of seminary students studying the story of the Good Samaritan and which ones will stop to help someone. [You guys and gals at Grace have heard this story before.]

"What this study is suggesting, in other words, is that the convictions of your heart and the actual contexts of your thoughts are less important, in the end, in guiding your actions than the immediate context of your behavior.... we need to remember that small changes in context can be just as important in tipping epidemics, even though that fact appears to violate some of our most deeply held assumptions about human nature."

I read this chapter over and over for about a week, trying to wrap my head around the idea that character doesn't matter. Is that really what Gladwell is saying, and if so, the leadership paradigm I have used for my whole life has been wrong.

Instead, I think his point is *not* that character or belief systems or convictions don't matter. Rather, his point is that context, culture and environment matter *a lot more* than we give them credit for. And one of the mantras of SPACE has been that context and culture are significant.

If Gladwell is right, it should make us think about:
- Teaching students about engaging culture on a deep level, both their own and ones they travel to, is important.
- How much of the way we currently *do* spiritual formation relies on teaching and molding character versus understanding context?
- Since the Gospel was meant to be moving from culture to culture, how are environments more significant for us [and that would be you too by the way] who have been blessed with it in order to bless others? [And the idea that contextualization is a Biblical principle.]

But at it's essence for SPACE, *everything* about the environment, context and opportunities we create for students communicates that the precious students we have been privileged to share time with - we must communicate that *they* CAN and MUST can change the world.

[Related - most of you have probably heard about the Washington Post article, "Pearls Before Breakfast." Also brings up the idea of context.]

Mr. Mère

D and the Madre are in Savannah visiting her sister and their family. They stayed in a hotel last night near Dulles and flew out early this morning, so I have the little angels until Tuesday night. My parents will be coming to help out a bit Monday and Tuesday so I can get in full days at work. Every time she leaves me I tease her about her leaving me with our children, how much work it is, etc etc. My dramatic side comes out nicely.

Seriously though, the past few summers, as I have gallivanted to other parts of the world - really fun parts by the way - she's taken on quite a bit while I've been gone. In 2005, I was away for 28 nights, all for this supposed thing I like to call a 'hobby.' So, a few days away for her together with the Madre to see her sister and her fam will be fun for D. It will be nice this summer to all go away together and to have my kids see first hand what this 'hobby' really is about.

And... where is the line where it isn't a hobby anymore...

Saturday Potpourri

::: End of Poverty Podcasts
Link via Jordon


::: China, the Olympics and Sudan
Link via Rudy


::: Your Future?

* If I were an engineer I would get a job with a company that works overseas.
* If I were in college today I would study international business.
* If I was graduating from college this spring I would take a civil service test, apply for a State Department job and try to get an overseas assignment with the U.S. embassy.
* If I were a history, english or math teacher I would apply to teach at international school in the Middle East.

More from Dr. RG Lewis

England 2007 picked

This evening, our second summer team was finalized. The England team is now final and this leader team has already put together a schedule for their meetings, put deadlines on the team getting support letters done and distributed key contact information for the whole team. Wow, they are making me look lazy...

To give you some insight into our recent processes for all of our teams:
- choose overall direction and destination based on some of our student mission values and goals
- leader team recruited
- info sheets distributed
- applications submitted
- Tony and MPM meet with leader teams to review next set of milestones
- team chosen
- support letters written

Fun, huh?

Wednesday Potpourri

::: Sam posts from Buckingham and StrengthsFinder on the myths that holds us back.

MYTH 3: A good team member does whatever it takes to help the team.
TRUTH 3: A good team member deliberately volunteers his strengths to the team most of the time.

::: An interview with Rodney Stark [via Reinhold]

- One thing about religious truths is that we have to take them on faith, and faith needs reassurance. What’s more reassuring than noticing that some other people, whom you admire, are so certain that it’s all true that they’re willing to go the ultimate mile?
- What Christianity gave to its converts was nothing less than their humanity.
- People value religion on the basis of cost, and they don’t value the cheapest ones the most. Religions that ask nothing get nothing. You’ve got a choice: you can be a church or a country club. If you’re going to be a church, you’d better offer religion on Sunday.

::: The World's Most Livable Cities
- Yaounde - 182
- Paris - 33
- Washington, DC - 41
- Los Angeles - 55
- Vienna - 3

Mission Support Letter Examples

We've just put together some mission support letter examples via a public Google doc. Feel free to use it or pass it on to someone who could benefit from it. Link located in the upper right sidebar as well. [Note that our examples have some specific funding details you will want to change.]

[Related: my personal 2005 and 2006 support letters.]

Book Notes - The Tipping Point

The Tipping Point - How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Malcolm Gladwell
[I know I'm late to reading this, but this was a fascinating read. Gladwell is a great story teller and there are some pretty significant principles in this book about leadership, movements and change.]

::: Law of the Few
Connector - they know lots and lots of people, different kinds of people that they know, manage to occupy many different worlds and subcultures and niches, social glue.

Maven - information broker, not just passive collectors of information, but they are delighted to pass that information on to others as well, wanting to help for no other reason than they like to help, data bank.

Salesmen - skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced.

Also, idea of emotional contagion - how emotions are transferred person to person.

Mimicry is also by one of the means by which we infect each other with our emotions. In other words, if I smile and you see me smile and smile in response - even a micro smile that takes no more than several milliseconds - it's not just you imitating or empathizing with me. It may also be a way that I can pass on my happiness to you. Emotion is contagious.

::: Stickiness
Fear experiments - free tetanus shots - included a map and appointment times that made the difference

Sesame Street

Virtually every time the show's educational value has been tested - and Sesame Street has been subject to more academic scrutiny than any television show in history - it has been proved to increase the reading and learning skills of its viewers. There are few educators and child psychologist who don't believe that the show managed to spread its infectious message well beyond the homes of those who watched the show regularly... They discovered that by making small but critical adjustments in how they presented ideas to preschoolers, they could overcome television's weakness as a teaching tool and make that they had to say memorable. Sesame Street succeeded because it learned how to make television sticky.

Blues Clues
- active involvement
- repetition -

"So the driving force for a preschooler is not a search for novelty, like it is with older kids, it's a search for understanding and predictability."

Tinkering for Stickiness

We all want to believe that they key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present. But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what they were saying. Instead, they tipped the message by tinkering, on the margin, with the presentation of their ideas... The line between hostility and acceptance, in other words, between an epidemic that tips and one that does not, is sometimes a lot narrower than it seems.

::: Power of Context - I
Bernie Goetz and the Broken Windows theory [there is something foundationally important we should explore on this one - more later]

::: Power of Context - II
John Wesley and community
The Rule of 150 -

[British anthropologist Robin] Dunbar has combed through the anthropological literature and found that the number 150 pops up again and again. For example, he looks at 21 different hunter-gatherer societies for which we have solid historical evidence, from the Walbiri of Australia to the Tauade of New Guinea to the Ammassalik of Greenland to the Ona of Tierra del Fuego and found that the average number of people in their villages was 148.4.

WL Gore factories and work teams, Hutterite colonies

::: Case Studies
Airwalk sneakers and the diffusion model

Suicide in Micronesia -

... a group of researches in England in the 1960s analyzed 135 people who had been admitted to a cetrnal psychiatric hospital after attemping suicide. They found that the group was swwrongly linked socially - that many of them belonged to the same social circles. This, they concluded, was not coincidence. It testified to the very essence of what suicide is, a private language between members of a common subculture... If suicide in the West is a kind of crude language in Micronesia, it has become an incredibly expressive form of communication, rich with meaning and nuance, and expressed by the most persuasive of permission-givers.

Teenage smoking -

Yet all signs suggest that among the young the anti-smoking message is backfiring. Between 1993 and 1997, the number of college students who smoke jumped from 22.3 percent to 28.5 percent. Between 1991 and 1997, the number of high school students who smoke jumped 32 percent. Since 1998, in fact, the total number of teen smokers in the United States has risen an extraordinary 73 percent. There are few public health programs in recent years that have fallen as short of their mission as the war on smoking.

::: Principles

1. Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key areas - Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen.
2. Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuition. What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus... We are actually powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us... Merely by manipulating the size of a group, we can dramatically improve its receptivity to new ideas. By tinkering with the presentation of information, we can significantly improve its stickiness. Simply by finding and reaching those few special people who hold so much social power, we can shape the course of social epidemics....In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push - in just the right place - it can be tipped.

::: How About It?
- Keep on the lookout for Connectors, Mavens and Salespeople.
- The Law of the Few reminds me of StrengthsFinder Connectedness, Relator, Woo and Includer, but seems to go even deeper than that. Not everyone is one of these but when social change is concentrated on these three types, that is when things tip. Could it be that these are the 2% required to change a whole population? Also reminds me of the principle of reaching leaders and not just followers - these three wield a lot of influence.
- Emotions are contagious.
- Experiment with our SPACE experiences not only in content but in environment and architecture to make them sticky.
- Context and culture are significant.
- Was the apostle Paul a Connector, Maven or Salesperson? I think at least one.
- What makes Christianity sticky to a suburban, American teenager ?

easter saturday disney craft

easter saturday disney craft
Originally uploaded by tonytsheng.

Easter crafts yes of course disney related. happy easter everyone!

0405071819.jpg

0405071819.jpg
Originally uploaded by tonytsheng.

Sometimes when you are trying to ignite, you accidentally burn.

Mister I Ain't Got Nothing But It's More Than You Got

For some reason, I've been listening to selected tracks from Rattle and Hum over and over for the past few weeks. It probably has something to do with the CD mix I made entitled, "Fun with D's Subwoofer." [I almost like the title more than the mix.]

Specifically, tracks 3, 8, 9, 13, 14 and 16. Man.

Bono has of course been getting a lot of press for the past few years with Africa, The One Campaign and Product RED. But I remember Live Aid, the Amnesty International tour, and lyrics about apartheid. You remember apartheid right? Which is now history... It's interesting to talk to K about the race issues around the world in the past - she gets pretty incredulous that the world could ever operate like that. That same idea is what has me so stoked about the ideas in The End of Poverty - my kids would be able to say "Well people used to live like that but my friends and I helped end it." And... you do think that your kids and my kids are going to be a part of it, don't you??

And about Bono, passion that endures.

Baptism at the Warehouse

Easter Party with a Cow

Yesterday, the development across the street from GCC had an Easter party. Right, an Easter party which is interesting enough. In our postChristian society, who does Easter parties anymore? Anyway, we took some one SPACE kids to help out. Kind of a missed opportunity in that I should have done a better job of inviting and promoting

There is a fine line between an 'event' and a group of friends serving a small piece of humanity. I like the latter but not sure we got it this time.

Photo: EllyK with MaggieMoo [a local ice cream place] and the Easter Bunny. Speaking of MaggieMoo, how do Hindus feel about eating ice cream from a store with a cow as a mascot?