Rafting footage (and carnage?)

For all you crazy outdoor fans out there, or for those who'd rather just watch from their seat... here's a youtube video of one of my favorite rapids, Seidel's Suckhole, that we "successfully" navigated this past May during raft training. By "we" I mean the trainees first run without instructors, and by "successfully" I mean four of the five runs either flipped or ejected half the crew. (Unfortunately, the video isn't of us, but it was taken two days after we were there, at the same water level/volume)

Blog vs. Facebook

Just a quick request to throw out there. Since my blog is also fed to Facebook, I tend to get comments on there rather than here, which is great, but some people don't have access to Facebook :( If you could, try and post your comment, big or small, on the BLOG, so that we can keep the conversation in one central location and available for everyone to read!

If you've already posted a comment on Facebook, feel free to copy/paste it to the blog. Thanks!!!

Oh, the places we [can] go...

I'm sitting in Algebra, a tea house in Little Italy just down the road from my apartment, sipping Fijian Tea and browsing through the seemingly endless possibilities of internships, grad schools, NGOs, and volunteer work there is on the world wide web. I suppose it doesn't help that my search is literally a "world wide" search as I'm open to traveling and looking for work in a developing country. Not that I'm overwhelmed, it's actually kinda fun, but throughout this perusing my mind's had a chance to wander a bit and think...

I think there's almost something... not good? ... about having too many choices and moreover, having the opportunity/freedom to choose anything, or sometimes everything, we want. I'm thankful that I'm blessed and I'm grateful for the freedoms that most of the world will never know. But is this the end goal of freedom? Is freedom giving us whatever we want, with endless possibilities?

I remember reading a book last year called The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber, and by his account, historically, Christians didn't ask what God's will was for their vocation until Martin Luther introduced it during the Reformation. Today that's one of the biggest questions for Christian's my age... everyone's searching to find what God wants them to do for the rest of their life, or at least for the next step. But what about back in the day when subsistence "restricted" people's freedoms. Raising cattle, farming, carrying on the family trade were all standard. The majority of history has lived with very little other opportunity.

So while I believe that with greater freedom comes much greater responsibility, and with new opportunities comes new facets for God's will to be lived out, I guess I also believe that we can really overthink our lives. As my ole youth pastor said, God's will is more about who we are than what we do. Or as a monk once wrote (don't ask...) about the mountain of decision: "If you'll take my advice, you'll drop the questions and go right up the mountain." It's actually comforting; it takes faith and it takes guts.