Football Schoolin'

I didn't know it but I was sitting on winning loto tickets - in a sense.

I had four tickets to the Baylor vs. Kansas State football game last night. Two of my family weren't interested in going, so David and I invited a couple of friends.  My friend, Brad, has coached football, played football, and I think, on occasion, actually eats footballs.  He is immensely more familiar with the game than I am.  Going to the game with me was, for him, like going to the Republican National Convention post-convention baseball game with European socialist tourist that only speaks French.

Brad and I in the cheap seats

OK, I'm not really sure what that meant, but let's just say it this way: he knows the game, I do not.

For instance, as we were in the Whataburger drive through getting some dinner before the game, he excitedly said to me "I can't believe you invited me to see the number one team in the nation!"  I knew enough to know that he was not referring to Baylor.  

"You mean Kansas State is ranked number one right now?"  I honestly had no idea.

Coughing on his double-meat double-cheese with no lettuce, Brad refrained from the opportunity to belittle my manhood.  I was grateful.  But I was also a little discouraged, since I figured that meant Baylor would lose badly.  This was the only game I planned to attend this year, and I didn't want to have my team down by, like, a hundred points or something.

You see, I am enough of a fan to watch Baylor play, but not enough of a fan to care about any other team.  I care about the school, not the game.  Well, that's not true. I also care enough to smile a little when Texas A&M loses.  Last year A&M abandoned century-old rivalries to join the SEC and get a more lucrative television contract. I think that represents the worst in collegiate athletics.  That and I think maroon is just plain ugly.

At any rate, Brad patiently schooled me on football during the game and I enjoyed it more because of it.  

And they played spectacularly.

And Baylor defeated the top-ranked team in the nation for the first time in school history!  I could not believe it.  I loved it.  It was the most fun I have ever had at a football game.  Thanks Baylor! Thanks Brad!

David watches the Baylor fans storm the field after defeating Kansas State 54-24.

6:8 technologies, a new direction

Oh Middle-Aged Fat Guy, what are you up to this time? Why haven't you been blogging? Why aren't you funny anymore?  

I have no explanations for the decrease in humor other than middle age and finally kicking that pain-killer habit. As for what I am up to, read on citizens, read on. 

Here's something really new in my life: I have graciously accepted an offer to join a well-respected local non-profit organization called Mission Waco/Mission World. For 28 years MW/MW has been practicing a holistic Christian ministry with the homeless in Waco, Texas. In addition to this, they do work in Mexico, India, and Haiti with long-term indigenous partners. They let me join up with them because I told them I could juggle and pick locks.  But of course, this is a lie.

In the town of Ferrier, Haiti, MW/MW has been working doing clean water ministries by helping locals drill water wells, maintain human-powered water pumps, and get access to water chlorinators and ceramic water filters. One of their main goals is to keep children under five years old from dying from water-borne illnesses. Sadly, this is too common. I'm eager to learn how they go about this and see if there is any way I can help. 

Perhaps, if the need is there, I could help them establish a solar battery-charging station for the chlorinator equipment or help with some other energy needs.  At this point I don't know how, exactly, I can help them, but I am willing and able to try. I am going on my first trip to Haiti next month to explore, support, and begin some new relationships.  Well, technically, I have been to Haiti once before in 1976, but that hardly counts on account of me being nine at the time. That's like saying you have been to all the states but really you only changed planes in Wisconsin. It didn't really count as "being there" unless you spent the night or got a movie from a Red Box.

So there will be a new program at MW/MW called Six Eight Technologies and I will be the program director. The name is in reference to Micah 6:8 - do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. If technologies can bring justice, if technologies can express mercy, and if they can bring people closer to God, then that's what we're about. In this role I will be supporting the other MW/MW works, especially in Haiti, and will be developing some training materials to help people learn how to do the same in other locations. I will have other blog posts about what this might look like later.

I used an online logo generating website to come up with a logo for 6:8 technologies.  I think it's pretty awesome. It looks like an 8. It looks like an infinity (think eternity). It looks like rolling waters. It even looks like sixes, all interwoven and twisty. 

After I pay a fee, the online logo service will give me a cleaner copy without the blue squares in the background.  But I kinda like them. They make it look like it is drawn on engineering paper. Reminds me of lock-picking school back in the day. Nostalgic sigh.

More to come...

Blood Marrow Donation: Final Entry

Today I found out that my blood brother died.  I never met him.

It began, for me, back in 2000, when I registered with the National Marrow Donors Program to see if I could be a match for a co-worker whose daughter had cancer.  I wasn't a match.  But seven years later I was a match for someone else.  They called me up out of the blue and asked if I still wanted to be a donor. Of course I did, I told them, I had to blog about something.

So in 2007 I wrote about going through the preliminary procedures.  In 2008 I wrote about the process of peripheral stem cell donation, which was the type I underwent. You can read them all here, I recommend them. I was funnier back then.  I also wrote about my great half-uncle who won the Nobel Prize in medicine for developing this very type of transplantation to treat leukemia (really). Then in 2009 I wrote about receiving a hand-written letter from a man named Lee.

Lee was in his sixties, had a wife and kids, and he had been the recipient of my marrow donation.  The letter included pictures of him drinking coffee and being with his dog. He was a real person after all.  In his letter he called me a hero. His wife and daughter also included letters and they called me a hero too. "Hero" seems like such an exaggeration.  "Nice" maybe, but not "hero."  I somehow felt like I had deceived them into thinking I was someone else, or that it was a case of mistaken identity that I was impolitely refusing to correct. He also called me his blood brother, which touched me.  He didn't have to say that, but he did.  Unlike "hero" which has objective standards, "blood brother" said to me that I was important to him, personally.

[A picture of my dog to prove I am a real person after all too.]

When I looked through my mail today I saw another letter from Washington state.  I know very few people who live there, so somehow I knew what it was without opening it.  It was from Lee's widow.  She told me of his recent and peaceful death. It was a death that had been postponed a few years by this procedure, but eventually had come nonetheless. She wanted me to know. She said to me "You, Brian, will forever be in my heart and prayers."  That touched me.  The way she inserted my name in that sentence like that. It was personal.   To her, anyway, I was a real person after all too.

Wind Turbine Project, Part 17: Post Mortem

I have a great job. I get to teach engineering students about design and renewable energy. We talk about ways to use engineering to serve poor people in developing countries. Back in 2008 we decided to build a small-scale wind turbine to generate electricity.  We got the plans for the blades and the alternator online, but we designed the tower ourselves! Too bad it fell down. Yes, too bad. Too bad it continued to haunt me for years, an annoying reminder of my own limitations, resonating around in the back of my mind, a public failure. It joins the list of the most embarrassing things I have done that race through my head on nights when I can't sleep. The worst memories on this list are the public humiliations and high-visibility failures.  Like that time in eighth grade when my "girlfriend" and I were roller skating. It was a couples skate and we were the only ones on the skate floor.  All the adolescent eyes at Skateworld were upon us as we made the first loop around the rink. Brimming with overconfidence, I decided to show off my skating ability and turn around and skate backwards, holding her hands as she skated forwards facing me. It was a Scott Hamilton moment on wheels. I'm sure my eighth grade friends would have broken out in applause if they hadn't been so jealous of my coolness. Of course, I flubbed the turn around and did a face plant to roars of laughter while she skated away in her own humiliation. This memory still makes me cringe.

But I digress. The wind turbine project was good blog fodder for years and I have enjoyed going back and looking at my blog posts about it. They started in January 2008. My kids were smaller then. Here's a picture of the boys mixing concrete.

[The boys helped me several times on this project. Here they are mixing concrete. Great memories.]

[Here is the cool hinge we made back in 2008.]

[Here is the same hinge in 2012. The rust was the result of a design failure on our part. We couldn't see it, but water was collecting inside on an unpainted area, and it rusted enough to weaken the structure.]

[This video shows the wind turbine spinning and generating electricity!  I made this video and set it to the Kansas song "Dust in the Wind." Tonight when I watched it again, I was struck by the last lyrics you can hear in the video: "All we do crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see."  Is that foreshadowing?]

[You can see the tower broke in half and the top, now upside down, dangles by the large copper wires that were inside the tower. It sat like this for over a year while we talked to the folks at the farm where we built it.  Every time I saw it I had to roll my eyes with more than a touch of embarrassment.]

[Finally, we got the go ahead and the spare time to take all the pieces down. No longer do they stick up out of the field as a mocking insult. It was redemptive in a way, thought the concrete pads that remain weigh over 1000 pounds and are buried in the earth. We will need a jack hammer or a back hoe to remove them. That means they aren't going anywhere.  That's OK, the grass will cover them.]

What's all this "Justice" stuff anyway?

"...with liberty and justice for all."

As a kid I recited the pledge of allegiance robotically every morning before school.  Prayer had already been removed from this daily ritual by the time I was in elementary school in the 1970s, so the pledge of allegiance was the only thing we said.  But even without the prayer, the daily repetition did its job and caused the ideas of liberty and justice, perhaps too abstract for a kid to fully understand, to slowly soak into my innermost parts.  To what ever extent I could understand them, I learned that liberty and justice were important and to be valued at the highest levels. 


As the years went by, I continued to hear about the importance of liberty (freedom) and how the United States was "the" global example of a free country. I was taught to be grateful for our freedoms.  Example after example reinforced this value: one of the most symbolic icons of the United States is the Statue of Liberty, the Emancipation Proclamation is heralded as a great milestone in our history, and there are countless others.  Furthermore, in church I was given at least two important theological bases for valuing freedom: the work of Jesus was, in part, to set us free from slavery to our own sins, and secondly, our free choice to love God was what made our love real and not robotic.  Free will, freedom, democracy, these are at the heart of Western culture and especially America.


But I heard less about justice than liberty.  Justice is harder to define. When one celebrates "justice" it's usually because there was first an "injustice" that has now been remedied.  "Justice has been served" and similar phrases tended to make me think that justice was primarily punitive. That is justice, in my limited view, was performed by law enforcement officers, vigilantes like Clint Eastwood, and lawyers (at least the good ones) but not by everyday people.  I didn't hear much about justice in church either. When I read the Bible I found many verses expressing the value of justice, but I didn't hear many (any?) sermons on it. My friends didn't talk about it. "Hey man, how 'bout that justice, eh?" We didn't sing songs about it on the fourth of July.


But then, later in life, I started hearing about "social justice".  I had no framework for understanding what this was, how was it connected to punitive justice or biblical justice?  I found that other evangelical Christians were uneasy talking about it. It raised questions of "rights" and whether or not those rights had been violated. It seemed to be too much about pointing fingers and laying blame to be the topic of polite conversation.  And though the Bible had much to say about justice, it didn't use the term "rights" or seem to speak about justice in the same way. What was I to make of this?


During this week, I plan to write several posts about my personal journey to understand biblical justice and why it matters a whole whole whole lot. I will give you my amateur thoughts about the history of the church's teaching on justice in the United States during 20th century.  I will share my struggles on whether or not I can be a Republican and like social justice. And I will share with you something special that my students and I are doing, an event called "Camp [In]justice" later this week.