Thing a Week

After listening to Jonathan Coultons "Code Monkey" I bought one of his albums from his thing a week project. Each week he created a new song recorded and mixed. This has been an inspiration to me, so each week I'm going to release at least one new photo to my Flickr feed. my personal rules are as follows

Each photo has to be new. No archives.

Keep the cats to a minimum

no snaphots.

That's it. We'll see what happens.

The question is what does this have to do with faith and God and Veritas.

The way I see it is that in God's creation of mankind he gave us a little spark of that creativity. to let that creativity stagnate would be contrary to what we were created for. So well see how my experiment goes.

Ray

Patience is a Virtue

This message was originally posted maria. Due technical difficulties I republished this.

The other day, I was driving to work, and there was a lady with her daughter driving behind me.  Little by little, she inched her way closer to me so that, at some points, I’m sure she put less than a car’s length between us.  As someone who tries to follow the law and drives at-the-most 5 miles over the speed limit and keeps a fair distance between me and the car ahead, I was amazed how this lady was so impatient behind the wheel.  Her impatience was apparent as I looked back at her through my rear-view mirror and saw her fling her arms up into the air and mouth “Come On!”

 

Now, the first thought that goes through my mind when someone tailgates me is that I should drive slower and go the speed limit.  Yet, I’ve heard (and I know from experience) that this only makes the tailgater worse.  The second thought that goes through my mind is to pick up my speed and drive a little faster, hoping that it will satisfy the need-for-speed tailgater.  Yet, this seems to only reinforce the idea of tailgating if the tailgater always gets his or her own way.  Thus, whenever I’m in a situation where someone is tailgating me, I try to keep driving at the speed I’ve been going and not decrease or increase my speed.

 

A few years ago when I was in high school, I was fortunate enough to win a used car at my Junior Post-Prom event.  This elevation of popularity and the fact that I was only 17 made me feel invincible on the road.  I knew tailgating was wrong, but that did not stop me from driving fast and many times, end up tailgating people.  A year went by until this realization of the English proverb “Patience is a Virtue” finally set in.  On my way home from school with my younger brother and sister in my car, I was part of a 5-car pileup on a busy highway.  Although I did not start the crash and no one was seriously hurt, my part in the accident most likely could have been prevented by keeping more distance between me and the car in front (not tailgating) and by not going 10 miles over the speed limit (not speeding).

 

The whole concept of driving fast and/or tailgating someone is so dangerous and flat out ridiculous.  Our nation’s busy lifestyle has made us rude and conceited drivers.  If you are driving and find the need to increase your speed and/or tailgate because you’re going to be late, it’s really your own fault that you did not leave soon enough and you should not put other lives at risk by doing so.  Further more, you have no idea if the person in front of you is someone you know or if that person happens to be driving to the same place you are going.  Can you imagine how awkward and foolish you’d feel if that happened to you?

 

Did I mention that the lady tailgating me on my way to work was one of my neighbors?

 

I feel that everyone could learn how to be more patient behind the wheel.

A Visual Representation of The Genocide in Darfur

Each letter is a Human Life

Media and the Message

Beware Long Post Ahead

Jesus told his followers to "go and make disciples of all nations" (Matt 29:18-20) in what Christians call The Great Commission. These commands are the foundation for Christian evangelism. At this point in history we have the greatest oportunitiy both technologically and fiscally to make these words a reality. The greatest challenge however is not the money or the gear but the media itself. The desire is to broadcast the "unchanging message" Through all forms of media. The problem is that every form of media has an effect on the message.

Media is not a glass window through which we see the message but a lens through which aspects of the message are enhanced and others are distorted and weakened. This is something I'm relearning. It's a lesson I have been taught repeatedly throughout my career in graphic arts. A popup ad in a a browser window makes a different impression than a glossy ad in Time, or a badly copied and crooked ad in a zine run off on the library copier. These impressions effect the way the message is perceived and the importance that it receives by the viewer.

Cultural and generational issues also have an effect. In Shane Hipp's book The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: How Media Shapes Faith, the Gospel, and Church he goes into great detail about how communication mediums effect the thought process. People who have grown up in a Print Centric world tend to be more linear and follow what we would call modernist philosophies. People that have grown up in Image Centric world powered by Photography, TV and the net, tend to be less linear and more postmodern in philosophy.

So how do we as followers of Jesus convey the "unchanging message" . I think we need to learn from marketers. We need to accept that not every program, meeting, church service or advertisement will satisfy everyone. Humanity is to diverse for that. We also need to learn from missionaries abroad and understand the culture into which we are stepping. Most importantly we need to learn from Jesus and be real. People especially younger generations pick up on fake with incredible speed. we were brought up in a world of visual bombardment and I believe it's a defensive mechanism.

Early on in my career I was printing out some color proofs of magazine ads for Johnson and Johnson. When the customer came in I asked which of the 20 or so extremely similar ads she thought they were going to use as the final piece. She said all of them. Seeing my confusion she took the time to show me that the minor differences weren't as minor as I thought. The photograph of the family in the ad changed based on the demographic of the magazine the ad was going into. The Ad for AARP had an older couple. The Ad for "Women's World" was very different. Some ads the family changed ethnicity and in others gender. The ad copy would change as needed with the pictures. The only consistent items through the ad were the J&J logo and the product name. The goal of the company was to take this broad spectrum media (Print) and this broad spectrum product and make each group feel that it was made just for them. to focus attention on just the aspects that mattered to the group (Or the aspects that marketing thought mattered to the group). This isn't a perfect science especially across different cultures and languages. Just ask Pepsi In Taiwan, the translation of the Pepsi slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" came out as "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from dead". J&J learned to segment their audience. and they learned the culture. I am not an advocate for Church marketing but this lesson is significant. The church is God's chosen media to reach the world and we need to understand the culture in order to do his work.