On Apple

Go to Apple's website. As of this writing, you'll be greeted by a full-page spread of the iPad, along with a line describing it as "Magical and Revolutionary".

This has been bothering me for a while.
A little while ago, Apple released the "Magic Mouse", which replaced the already single-button apple mouse (or the however many button 'mighty mouse') with a touch-sensitive surface.

I watched the speech where Steve Jobs revealed the iPad, months ago.
He stood up there and called it "Magical".
Like, not even joking. It was as if he was calling it, "awesome".
Except he called it Magical.

Magic doesn't exist.

But what does exist, is a famous quote from Sir Arthur C. Clark, the writer of 2001, A Space Odyssey: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

And everyone knows that science fiction writers are always right.

But the quote is pretty accurate. Think back to things like electricity, magnetism, the first computers... as far as anyone in the general public was concerned, it might as well have been magic.

But for a company, especially one as in-the-limelight as Apple Computer, to actually assert that their product is Magical is entirely nutty.
Maybe they're trying to be cute.
I'm sure Apple doesn't actually believe their product to be magical.
They probably know that their latest offering will work magic with their stock prices, but there's nothing unexplainable about it.

Here's what I don't like.
Even with the recession and people remember how to be thrifty, we're still a completely consumer-entrenched culture. Companies aren't even trying to sell us their stuff anymore- they don't have to, we buy it anyway. Advertising dollars are literally spent for the sake of selling brands and corporate identities rather than the products that merely carry those identities into peoples' homes.

And you know, i'm sure Apple payed out a pretty penny for that slogan. Have our minds become so numb that a company has to yell "LOOK AT OUR MAGICAL PRODUCT" in order for us to be interested?

Its insanity. I don't like being treated like a consumer.
RPI tried to convince the class of 2013 that we were gonna "Change the world".
Whatever that means.
I'd rather go around yelling at people, "LOOK AT MY MIRACULOUS JESUS" than buy an iPad that claims to have magic.

On 1000 Years

There's a bible verse that causes a fair amount of disunity between different schools of thought- in 2 Peter 3:8 Peter says, "...A day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day."
There are people who use that concept to justify "old-earth" vs. "new-earth", saying that the 6 "days" in Genesis could have been millennia.
But that isn't really important at all.
What I think a lot of people miss is the other half of that statement- that a day is like a thousand years.

I don't know about you, but a thousand years is a long time. Think about everything that's happened in the world since the year 1010. Its essentially all of modern history. There are people who spend their lives devoted to studying a single decade; there's a whole lot of stuff that goes on in a thousand years, and I think you and me probably have no grasp on the size of that scale.

Now think about what you did yesterday. You could probably make a list of events that happened. Pretty boring. Pretty lame.

Christians usually hold that God "Has a plan for each of us". I'm not really sure where the Bible says that, but i believe it to be true. I think that there's no reason why God doesn't plan out our days for us, how we're going to interact with each other, the way that the weather influences us, the wind blowing on our faces.
Imagine if God put the detail of a thousand years into each single day of our lives.
He is familiar with every micro-second that goes down. From your life-changing decisions to how hungry the dust mites inside your pillow are.
What we think about as another mostly boring day is actually jam-packed with everything you could find in a thousand years.
I think we should try a little harder to appreciate that.

On CCM

If you asked me to make a list of the things that i dislike about college, somewhere towards the top would be, "no car."
I love driving. I made my brother let me drive the entire way back from a conference in PA over winter break. 2 stops, not counting getting pulled over. It was wonderful.
Part of not having a car is not having a radio.
And part of not having a radio is not having Air1.
...Which makes vacations nicer, actually. Because the time in between my breaks gives the station a chance to change a few songs in the line-up. I come back and there's something different, which is excellent, because it lessens my view of the radio as a song-destroying consumer machine that cashes in on christian subculture.

There's always one or two songs that are just really annoying. Usually its because they are overplayed, but there is a certain example I want to harp on. It's "God shaped Hole" by Plumb. It's not only overplayed and annoying to begin with, but fundamentally distressing. The chorus goes, "There's a God-shaped hole in all of ussss". I couldn't disagree more.
The idea of the song, of course, is that we're all missing something- God- and that He fits right into us and makes us complete. That's about as theologically sound as jello is concrete.

I think a better comparison might be to think of ourselves as Ground Zero after 9/11. A giant heap of burning rubble responsible for hundreds of deaths. It will be 12 years later when the replacement building is finished. That's a long time, and a lot of complicated mess to deal with. But ultimately, One World Trade Center will be a much better, taller, nicer looking place to be.

There's no "god-shaped hole" in anyone. Just a smoldering mound of junk. It takes us to recognize that and realize that we can cash in the insurance and get the Best instead. Simple in concept, often times difficult in practice.

On Unleash

This weekend was absolutely the best 3 days of my life. Actually, it wasn't even the weekend. But that's okay. Went to Unleash at Newspring church in Anderson, SC. It was an 18 hour each way road trip with my favorite people in the whole world.

Newspring's campus is amazing. Perry Noble, their pastor, has talked a lot about how the church ought to be the most creative place on the planet, and that secular organizations should be looking at the church and asking, "how can we do that?" instead of the other way around. His church is an excellent example of that concept at work. Original architecture and definitely a contender for the most creative kids ministry ever conceived. The church bleeds excellence. From the 600 volunteers at the conference to the 109 staff members that pour their hearts into their ministries.

The conference was divided up into 4 teaching blocks, 2 main sessions taught by the Man Perry Noble and then 2 break out sessions ran by staff members on various topics. As valuable as the teaching time was the space in between, some of it occupied with the free chick-fil-a lunch but the rest with literally being able to wonder around everywhere and absorbing absolutely everything possible.
I'm not going to lie, my face literally started twitching from smiling.

Worship was unbelievable. Newspring is the first church i've been to where i was satisfied with the way the audio was mixed. They had not-too-huge line arrays but lots and lots of subs. And with a D-Show for both FoH and monitor world, everything about everything screamed that they mean business.

We stopped by Elevation Church's main building in North Carolina on the way back. Their graphic arts guy was bomb enough to give us an impromptu full-on tour of the place. Looking back on it, the contrast between Elevation and Newspring might be the most awesome part of the trip. Newspring is an example of a church with a 13.7 million dollar annual budget, with a very deep bucket of resources and some 15,000 total attenders.
Elevation on the other hand, just turned 4 years old and have 1/3 of the members. They have a lot less staff members and have focused a lot of their attention on stretching everything they have as far as possible. Their facility was impressive in its own right, not for how huge it is or for nice equipment, but for how they've utilized what they have. Example, their graphic designer is one guy. Newspring has a team of 9 full time employees complete with an internal 2-week turnaround on all requested work. I saw more graphic arts in the 45 minutes that we were in Elevation than the 10 hours that we spend at Newspring church. He also gave us all t-shirts. That's sweet.

But what do you care?

Sound and Light guys, as well as musicians, are completely obsessed with gear. All of them. You can go up to a sound technician after any show and start asking questions and he will all of a sudden turn into a kid in a candy store talking about his own equipment. Its part of his job to love that. Its part of his job to know exactly how it all works together and seamlessly to produce what you paid money to see. There was no shortage of that enthusiasm at Newspring.
But on the car ride back home, I realized that over the past year or so, i've started to become pretty much church obsessed. I watch church services online. The last time I missed a sunday morning was when I was 12 years old. I love talking about church. I love hearing about church. I loved our 36 hours worth of being on the road for a one day conference about church.
If the symmetric property applies to occupation, then something becomes glaringly obvious.