When you’ve only had a limited set of experiences, your viewpoint tends to be limited. Many of my colleagues are in this position: Their life experiences are limited to growing up, going through the ALERT program, and then joining staff. Frequently, they end up in two positions, both of which are lacking:

1. They end up idealistic and oblivious. Without other experiences as a guide, they think “This is as good as it gets”, and they don’t see any of the problems or areas ripe for growth. This leads to stagnation and complacency; however, it is marginally better than the second outcome.
2. They end up critical and discontent. Problems get magnified, successes dimmed, and other organizations or places look so much better than where they are at right now. This attitude, while often framed as desiring progress, usually sabotages real growth because it harbors doubts about the foundation of the organization and actively demotivates work.

Having a wider range of experiences helps to curb either of these extremes. You realize that every organization and place has problems, and you learn to work around these problems. You also realize that nearly every place has advantages and good things. This brings balance and perspective.

Gaining wider experience requires an openness and willingness to move beyond what you are comfortable with. It requires risk taking, a willingness to fail, and a desire to grow.

What has enabled you to gain wider experiences?

If you follow me on Twitter, then you know I’ve been pretty sick the last few days. I decided to mount a concerted “Get Samuel Well” campaign and started with chicken soup. Now, I’ve learned that soup-making is pretty straightforward. You start with some fat, heat it up, add some meat and maybe veggies, saute them, then add stock, herbs, and more vegetables and cook until done.

I started with quality ingredients. The organic, air-packed chicken tastes WAY better than frozen Tyson chicken breasts. I tried the organic vegetable broth, and thought it was a little salty. Normally I use my own homemade vegetable-based soup stock, but I was out and didn’t feel like making it. Using fresh whole garlic is a lot tastier than the pre-minced garlic out of a jar.

Chopped celery and onions for the vegetables. I’m wishing that I had a good knife at the dorm—my nice knives are at the EMS station where I normally cook.

Quality spices are a key. Many of my seasonings are from Penzeys, which has an outlet store about a mile from my parent’s home. Their products are really fresh and really cheap. For this soup, I used a number of spices and added them by intuition. The cumin, chili pepper, and cayenne pepper gave the soup a kick; mustard and paprika added a bit of sharpness; cinnamon, garlic, and nutmeg added a slightly eastern flavor to the mix. I ended up not using the sage.

Chopped chicken and garlic ready to be sautéed.

I heated up extra virgin olive oil and then tossed in my chicken and garlic to cook. Once the chicken was firm, I added the veggies and soup stock.

After adding stock, herbs & spices, and veggies, I simmered the whole arrangement for about twenty minutes. The celery was tender, the chicken flavorful, and the broth amazing.

My family growing up wasn’t really into culinary adventuring, so unfortunately, I didn’t have Thai until last year when my pastor suggested a local thai cafe in Tyler. I loved it, and had to try cooking some of my own. Last fall, I tried a couple of Mark Bittman’s Thai recipes, with good success, and thus had ingredients on hand to try making a version of one my all-time favorite dining experiences: The incredible Thai Marlin at the Anchorage in Milwaukee.

I did this without actually measuring anything so this recipe is a rough guess, but it should get it close. Warning, this is, like much Thai, pretty spicy. And delicious.

Thai Peanut Salmon

Preheat oven to 375ºF
2 Tbsp. creamy peanut butter
2 Tbsp. vinegar
2 Tbsp. Nam Pla (fish sauce) (soy sauce could be substituted, but I didn’t have any. Nam Pla is VERY pungent.).
1 Tbsp. Molasses
2 cloves fresh garlic, minced (always better to use the fresh stuff than the refrigerated or dried).
1/4 tsp ground cumin ginger
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/4 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
1/2 cup finely chopped dry roasted unsalted peanuts
3–5 salmon filets (I used the frozen ones you get at Sam’s Club; make sure you thaw them first).

Mix everything except the last two ingredients together thoroughly until smooth. Place salmon filets in ungreased pan; spread peanut sauce over them evenly. Sprinkle the chopped peanuts on top (it should pretty well coat it). Bake the whole ensemble until done, about 10–15 minutes, probably (I actually didn’t thaw my salmon so it took me way longer. Oops.).
I imagine this would go great with stir-fried veggies, but my stove wasn’t hot enough to stir-fry them and I ended up with mushy uneatable veggies.
I should’ve taken a picture, but didn’t have my camera with me here at work today. Oops.
Enjoy!

I read a lot, and a lot of it is online. I do have a couple tools that make this easier.

The first is called “Readability” and quite simply makes it easier to read webpages.

As you can see, Readability simplifies web pages, making them easier to read, by eliminating all the extraneous graphics. To use this awesome tool, you simply visit the Readability website on Arc90. You set your preferences for text style, text size, and page width and then drag a provided bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar. When clicked, the bookmarklet automatically cleans up the page for you.

A bookmarklet is a special kind of bookmark that, when clicked, acts on or with your current web page in order to accomplish an action. I have a folder on my bookmarks bar with about 20 frequently used bookmarklet tools, such as Readability.

Another frequently used tool is InstaPaper. Once you set up an account, you can drag a “Read Later…” bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar. Anytime you are are reading a web page and want to read it later or archive it safely, you can click the bookmarklet and it will save it. You can then visit InstaPaper and see a list of all your unread “Read Later” items. One of the beauties of this approach is that you can read those sites from any computer; just browse to the InstaPaper site to see your saved pages.

I’ve been thinking about the (apparently) dying state of the press (by which, I mean the journalistic/news media industry). It seems that the internet, having nearly destroyed the music industry, has decided to take on journalism as well. This is troubling on many levels.

The internet is an invention, a piece of technology for the dissemination of information and really nothing more. It is the 21st century version of Gutenberg’s printing press, which also had a radical impact on culture and whole industries. The internet’s advantage is that it can move large amounts of information over nearly unlimited distances and duplicate it and edit it with ease. Now, the cost of reproducing information and distributing it is almost zero. This includes news. News online costs so little that it is being sold free, with ad revenue being used to cover the cost of operations. The problem is that ads will not cover the cost of a full newsroom.

My experience with purchasing music over the internet is, in my opinion, instructive on why there is hope for newspapers online. I buy nearly all my music through iTunes. It doesn’t cost more than it would offline and it is often a good deal. I use iTunes over the other sites out there because it is easy and the quality of the user-experience is exeptional.

I would pay to subscribe to a digital newspaper, whether it was local or national, if it had the same level of user experience and produced a similar quality of material. I get tired of AP retread news articles and appreciate genuine investigative journalism—and consider it worth paying for. Paying for print newspapers is out of the question, because I, like most of my peers, do almost everything electronically. But a well-designed newspaper experience, with quality journalism and rational editors, would definitely be worth paying for.

Free is not always better for businesses, but they have to realize that customers pay for value.

Wow. Sometimes, my kitchen experimentation turns out to be *amazing*…today was one of those.

Cream of Sweet Potato/Mango Soup

Serves: 4

Sauté  1/4 cup chopped green onions in olive oil until tender. Add 2 cups chopped sweet potato and soup stock to cover. (I used homemade vegetable stock). Bring to a boil, turn heat down and simmer for about 10 minutes. Add 2 cups chopped mango, add more stock if needed, simmer for about 25 minutes or until tender.

Add 1 tsp cinnamon and 1/2 tsp nutmeg, stir well, add 1/4 cup molasses, stir well, simmer for another 5 minutes.

Pureé soup in blender (be careful, it’s hot), or better yet, use an immersion blender to thoroughly liquefy it. Mix in 2 cup heavy whipping cream, thoroughly, and reheat over medium heat until thoroughly warmed.

To serve, pour into bowl, garnish with thinly sliced fresh basil.

My good friend Chris wrote about my trip with Tim to celebrate Chris’s birthday last weekend. He posted several pictures; here is one of my favorite ones, of the three of us in a Starbucks:
Chris also shared these feelings he has on “growing up”:

Rather than gaining more responsibility and doing grown-up things with age, I realized that I’ve already done grown-up things (job, marriage, anniversary, moving, baby) – growing older seems to be more of growing into people’s image of an adult.  Don’t get me wrong, I have *plenty* to learn, do, and work on; just hope that the early start means a head start in some areas.

Chris was a “grown-up” in many regards many years ago. He is a great example to me of sobermindedness—sensible, serious about what truly matters, and not affected by the triviality that grips so many young men.

See the rest of the pictures here:

“Happy Birth-A-Day, to me” « Chris and Steph.

A couple of meetings and conversations I had today while working at ALERT reinforced my perception that there is a major divide between my generation and my parent’s generation. Those men and women from my parent’s generation are the ones leading ministry organizations, making key strategic decisions for the Kingdom, and holding the vast amount of influence in the Church today. They are in vital roles and have immense responsibility for stewarding the resources of God’s work and guiding the workers—my generation. My peers and I are the ones doing the work right now, but in ten to twenty years, we will be in leadership positions. My generation is of vital importance because it defines what the Church will be in the future.

A Failure to Relate

However, each generation fails to understand the other. This difference in perspective is killing us. There are many reasons for this; both generations are at fault, but typically, an individual is unwilling to own that there is a flaw in his reasoning.

Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? (Matthew 7:3)

My generation fails to respect the experience and wisdom of the older generation. In our rush to use the latest and greatest, we end up despising the truths my parent’s generation knows through experience. Furthermore, because they don’t “get us”, we don’t give them the honor they rightly deserve. Finally, in our myopic youthfulness, we make impetuous and ill-advised decisions because we don’t reach out to older men and women—who probably wouldn’t really listen to us anyways.

Shortcomings of More Experienced People

I can’t speak for my parent’s generation apart from subjective observation. However, two things bother me. First, the older generation fails to recognize or appreciate the significant differences in how my generation lives out its life. We don’t write letters or even make phone calls as often (to our detriment, I believe). However, we aren’t anti-social. Most of my peers are actually far more social than my parent’s generation but the means they use are foreign to the older generation—more on that later.
The second shortcoming I see is a large-scale failure to reach out to my generation. Partly, that may be due to a lack of skill or technological shortcomings in interacting with us in our primary channels of communication. However, it seems to me that my parent’s generation, for the most part, is wrapped up in themselves, selfish to a large degree, and unwilling to disrupt their comfortable lifestyles to engage the younger generation. This self-centered indolence is a grievous sin, with severe implications for the Church in the decades to come.

Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants

I can’t recall the exact place I saw it used, but I mentioned this metaphor in June when talking about social networking technologies. My generation has grown up around electronic devices, internet communications, and the whole digital world. We are natives here. My parent’s generation, on the other hand, grew up in a different world. I don’t really understand it. They are immigrants to my digital world. They have varying levels of understanding and appreciation for the unique languages, cultures, and modes of interacting my peers and I take for granted.
This was highlighted today in discussions revolving websites. While my peers and I take the value of websites for granted, my parent’s generation doesn’t appreciate their importance. My peers and I communicate regularly using email, internet-based chat, text messaging, and Facebook. These actually generate more and deeper relationships than my parent’s generation recognizes. If they want to interact substantively with my peers and I, they need to learn how to use these mediums.

Solution to the Problem

There are tremendous benefits to both generations reaching out and taking the time and effort to remove the log from their own eye and connect with the other generation. Both sides need to take proactive steps.
My peers and I need to:

• Respect the older generation’s experience and wisdom.
• Reach out and make connections with older men and women.
• Recognize that the older generation is likely to not understand us and not hold a grudge as a result.

The older generation needs to:

• Reach out and engage the younger generation on their ground.
• Seek to learn and appreciate the differing technologies and changes my generation considers important.
• Be open to younger generation’s having a better idea about how to do something using newer technology.

A Bright Future

The older generation holds the future in their hands. If they are willing to obey God, humble themselves, and reach out to younger people, they can significantly impact the Kingdom of God in the future. Their life experience, wisdom, and collective insight can equip young people to go further faster and eliminate the need for costly “learning experiences” (mistakes). However, if the older generation fails in this respect, not only are my peers & I doomed to repeat their mistakes and make new ones of our own, many of my peers will undoubtedly fall away from the Church and lose their way.
For my generation, a similar situation is ours. We can keep persisting in our blindness and make many mistakes, or we can reach out to an older generation to learn from their wisdom and life experience. In the here and now, we can reach out and help the older generation learn how to better understand and utilize the radically changing landscape of digital technologies they face today.
For all of us, it will take a humbling of our pride and a willingness to reach out across a divide that is deep, but not impossible to cross.

In my line of work, I run across wrecks like this one on a regular basis. It kills me to know that these accidents are preventable. If you drive, or know someone who does, understand that you are responsible. Watch this video and take it to heart.

I love my family, so living 1,000 miles (exactly 1,000 miles according to Google Maps) from them is rough on all of us. Of course, my sister serves with STEP here at ALERT a couple months a year, and other family members show up on occasion (right now, my brother Daniel is attending the Quest program as a student).

I do call home often, but lately I’ve discovered a far better option: video chatting with iChat.

While at work, I can pull this up and talk to my family, share pictures, watch videos together, and have something much closer to a face-to-face talk. Definitely makes the days go by easier.

When I look at the internet and other technology today, I see powerful tools that can be leveraged to deepen relationships. Used carelessly, these tend to proliferate shallow, meaningless friendships. However, today’s social technology provides us with the opportunity to foster conversations and shared experiences on many levels and create meaningful relationships even over large distances.

Discipleship is a function of Christian community—Christ’s followers living together in close relationship. While that once required geographical proximity and functioned in the context of a geographically local church, we now have the opportunity to make disciples and sharpen one another irrespective of physical location.

Regrettably, this opportunity is being wasted. My generation seems more interested in using social technology to virtually throw cats at each other, build up virtual mafia mobs, conquer virtual kingdoms, and in general invest a great deal of time and energy into something that will reap zero eternal reward and zero tangible earthly reward. Rather than focus on what is eternally significant, most of my peers seem intently concentrated on the completely trivial. The antidote to this, in my mind, would be the corrective influence of older Christians who can provide a more balanced perspective on what is important, what is lasting, and what is merely a fad. Unfortunately, many older American Christians have lost their credibility while pursuing the American dream. They lack influence in the digital realm because of their unwillingness to engage in it. Understandably, many older men & women reject the internet and social technology because it is used for so many wasteful purposes. Certainly, there are huge amounts of risk—risks of wasted time, risks of corrupting influence, risks of lost privacy. However, most of these risks exist in any missionary context. When Paul was reaching the city of Corinth, many of these same dangers existed there.

Risk averse Christians are faithless Christians, and without faith it is impossible to please God.

What this older generation needs to do is reach out to younger people. They need to humble themselves and allow “digital natives” to teach them how to use social technology. Younger Christians need to humble themselves and let mature older men and women teach them how to build relationships and use time wisely.

Ultimately, the Church has a phenomenal, unparalleled opportunity to promote the Kingdom through real, tangible relationships freed from geographical limitations by technology. Where the slaves of darkness use it for evil, we can use it to spread light.

John Piper sees two responses to the emerging world of internet interactions:

One says: These media tend to shorten attention spans, weaken discursive reasoning, lure people away from Scripture and prayer, disembody relationships, feed the fires of narcissism, cater to the craving for attention, fill the world with drivel, shrink the soul’s capacity for greatness, and make us second-handers who comment on life when we ought to be living it. So boycott them and write books (not blogs) about the problem.

The other response says: Yes, there is truth in all of that, but instead of boycotting, try to fill these media with as much provocative, reasonable, Bible-saturated, prayerful, relational, Christ-exalting, truth-driven, serious, creative pointers to true greatness as you can.

I, obviously, choose the latter. I yearn for more Christians to be better stewards of the tools available to us.