*cino: June 2004 Archives

we went to see fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday and, though i have many thoughts about the film, one moment stuck out for purely geographical reasons.

at one point, michael moore shows a clip from the today show in which the hard-hitting journalist matt lauer is interviewing an inventor from none-other-than three rivers, michigan who had invented some sort of parachute device for escaping tall buildings in the event of an emergency. the parachute only works when jumping from more than ten stories, which begs the question: is three rivers the best place to develop such an invention, seeing as our tallest building is a mere three stories high?

the scene is hilarious regardless of this knowledge. while the inventor is describing how easy the device is to operate, his assistant is struggling to strap the thing on. she finally gestures in frustration, prompting lauer to interject, "it doesn't look too easy ..."

as the kalamazoo audience murmured and/or guffawed around me while watching their unsophisticated neighbors to the immediate south making fools of themselves on screen, i thought, "great, no one's going to believe a cultural revolution can come out of three rivers after seeing this ..."

the thought that quickly followed was, "change always comes from where it is least expected." the revolution might not come from the old tripple ripple in michigan, but it will come from somewhere as unimaginable as here. and it will be amazing to see how God can use the least of these for God's purposes.

i registered our new server yesterday and have started moving sites from the old to the new. if done properly, no one will notice the sites have moved.

well, that's almost true.

i probably won't get to the culture is not optional or catapult magazine sites until the very end because they will pose the biggest challenges. these, unlike simple HTML sites, will most likely need to be taken down altogether for a few days to maintain database integrity. for example, i wouldn't want to have someone post something on the bulletin board right before everything switched over to the new server because it would end up getting lost in transition. get it? lost in transition?

well, that was almost funny.

after i finished school for the year, i thought i'd be able to slow down a little bit. unfortunately, this has not proven to be the case. i've found that i neglected far more *cino-related work than i had realized during the busyness of last semester and now i'm working almost every waking moment (almost) to try to catch up.

one of the most exciting projects we've got going is cultureVision, our cultural discernment curriculum, which should be ready to go my mid-summer. we'll then be testing it in a small number of schools during next school year to see what inevitable changes will need to be made in order to make the curriculum more effective when we do a full-scale launch next summer.

but, alas, i'm getting ahead of myself. first i need to finish the site!