Yearly Archives: 2009

Adoption, Family

We Leave Tomorrow

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In less than 24 hours we’ll be on a plane for Ethiopia to bring home our son. It’s been such a long wait. And it’s almost here.

As the hours tick down, I love how all the extra stuff falls away and doesn’t matter anymore. My last day has been flittered away with random tasks here and there, none of which really matter. It doesn’t really matter if I heard the conference call my wife already heard a week ago. It doesn’t really matter if I write that blog entry today or not. It doesn’t really matter if I clean off my desk or not.

As I’ve told about everyone I can, you can follow along at our adoption site. My latest blog posts (if you come here you already know where to find them) will be there—many are just pre-programmed updates of what we’ll be doing each day— as well as my on-the-ground Twitter updates (assuming it all works).

I’m awash in emotion right now. I’m so excited to meet Milo and hold him in my arms. I’m eager to see his homeland and the country where he was born. I’m worried about Lexi and how she’ll do without us for 10 days (and how Grandma will cope with 10 days of Lexi). I’m expecting to be broken as the reality of this 19-month journey finally comes together.

Some things in life just wash over you, flooding you with grace and love and mercy and hope. That’s already happened so many times in this journey, but now we’ll be diving into it. Can’t wait.

Adoption, Technology

Ethiopia Twitter is a Go

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OK, never mind yesterday’s post. Looks like I will get to be a techno-geek while we’re in Ethiopia picking up our son. At least a little bit.

A friend has stepped forward and offered to pay for my Twittering. They shelled out for four updates a day for our 10 day trip (each international text message is 50 cents), and then some. How cool is that?

So when I’m thousands of miles away you can know almost immediately when my son spits up on me for the first time. Seriously though, we’ve had so many friends supporting us in so many ways, it will be fun to share this experience with you as it happens, a little bit at a time. Of course that assumes I can work the 9-button keypad fast enough to send four messages a day (I’ve used my cell phone exactly one other time to send Twitter updates).

I didn’t ask anyone to do this, I wasn’t expecting it and I’m pretty humbled.

Follow me on Twitter for the whole Ethiopia experience.

Adoption, Technology

Testing E-mail Posting

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We’re furiously trying to get ready for our trip to Ethiopia next week. While I’m quite the tech-addict in my day-to-day life, I’m not a very good techie when I travel. I didn’t get a cell phone until 2006 and while I bring my laptop when I travel, I use it primarily for watching movies on the plane.

For our trip to Ethiopia I think I’ll be even less of a techie. Our laptop has no battery life left, so it’s useless on the plane (plus I’m not sure 3 hours of movie for 18 hours of flying justifies the extra baggage). My iPod battery is also toast, so it’s useless (though I think Abby’s may be good). On the plus side, we are delivering a laptop to the care center, so we might be able to use it en route. Which might work out really nice. Something tells me we won’t have time to watch movies on the flight home.

Continue reading Testing E-mail Posting →

War

Peace or Justice in Sudan

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The news coming out of Sudan has been a bit bizarre this week as the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al Bashir on charges of war crimes. It’s the first time a warrant has been issued for a sitting head of state. In response, Sudan has been kicking international aid groups out of the country, threatening even more of the mess that Bashir is charged with in the first place.

What’s been especially interesting is the reaction of Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the international aid organization, Samaritan’s Purse. Graham wrote a New York Times op-ed piece arguing that Bashir should be left in power in order to maintain peace in Sudan.

So what’s more important? Peace or justice? It seems like a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation to me. There may be peace right now, but it’s being held together by a tyrant accused of war crimes. But bringing justice means more unrest, hardship and possibly death.

It reminds me of the situation in Iraq (if you ignore the whole weapons of mass destruction thing). Do you leave a murderous tyrant in charge or oust him and risk the messy aftermath?

Seems to me that real, lasting peace only comes when justice is ensured. But it’s never an easy process. Especially when different people have different ideas of what constitutes justice. Getting along with people (never mind entire countries of people) is no easy thing.

We’ve got friends who are currently in Khartoum, which makes this whole thing a lot more personal. We also had the option of a fuel layover in Khartoum on our way to Ethiopia (we opted not to take that route). Makes the world feel a lot smaller.

Daily Grind, Family

A Week of Highs and Lows

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If a week could suck, this one would be it:

  • Found out Milo has been sick for a week with gastroenteritis. He’s doing better, but the little guy doesn’t have much weight to lose (Today we visited a two week old baby who’s bigger than 4-month-old Milo).
  • Lexi threw up in her car seat on the way home from visiting said baby.
  • Friends went through another miscarriage.
  • Other friends in Sudan wait to see if they’ll be evacuated.
  • Confronted a family crisis and the related fallout.
  • A week of workplace drama escalated like a bigger/better party.

On the plus side:

  • Distractions abounded, including the flurry of a U2 album release (did you see them do the top 10 list on Letterman?).
  • I found out exactly how much the Federal government owes me (it’s like my own personal bailout!).
  • Mazie didn’t eat anything she wasn’t supposed to (well, except for the feet of a little plastic girl of Lexi’s, but that doesn’t bother me because Lexi didn’t put it away).
  • Ate at Los Cabos for the first time in months. Mmm… tasty.
  • Two friends welcomed healthy, happy babies into the world.
  • And best of all, I get to meet my son in two weeks.

Sometimes life is hard and messy and ugly, but there’s always beauty. In that sense, I’m an insufferable optimist. Life may not always be happy, but it is joyful.

Adoption

When Regular Life Falls Away

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Two weeks from today we’ll be heading to the airport. We’ll spend a few hours on the ground in Washington, D.C. (never been there before), and then fly across the Atlantic (never done that before). We’ll spend maybe 45 minutes on the ground in Rome (my first contact with Europe) and then fly off to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (yeah, never been there either).

If you noticed the trend, you could probably guess my international travel experience begins and ends with Canada. So this is going to be new and different. Plus that whole thing where I get to meet my son. It’s hard to put into words exactly what we’re feeling right now.

We’re excited. We’re stressed. We’re giddy. We’re tired. We’re overjoyed. We’re busy.

We’ve got a lot to do. Our to do list keeps getting longer, but we’re hacking away at it. It’s amazing how the things of everyday life begin to fall away as you realize what’s really important. Some of my side projects are being neglected right now. Other distractions I just don’t have the time for. I do still manage to find time for certain stress-reducing diversions (preserving sanity is a priority). There’s somehow time for tickling, laughing or just sitting with Lexi. What needs to happen does, and the rest falls away.

Continue reading When Regular Life Falls Away →

Business & Marketing, Internet

Nothing is a Secret

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There are no secrets in the Internet age. Everything you’ve ever done can come to the glaring light of day.

That can either be a blessing or a curse.

Marketing guru Seth Godin describes a friend who googled the applicants for a housekeeping job, and those Google results made nixing applicants easy. Pictures of binge-drinking, your police shoplifting record or a blog post about how you’ll quit this menial job as soon as you can aren’t encouraging to potential employers.

Of course not showing up in Google at all (unless you’re cursed with a common name) can be just as worrisome.

And if you’re an employer, imagine the potential harm in not Googling. That quick search could reveal that your perspective rock star employee was fired from their last job for indescretions, a detail they carefully evaded in the interview. Oops.

Godin sums up the solution:

“Everything you do now ends up in your permanent record. The best plan is to overload Google with a long tail of good stuff and to always act as if you’re on Candid Camera, because you are.”

Business & Marketing

Networking Works: Sitting Around in PJs & Applying Online Doesn’t

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CNN has a great story of a guy who found a job through his church. Michel Butler was an unemployed husband and father of 3. His industry tanked and he had to find a new job. He joined a career workshop at a local church, brushed up on his skills and then plugged back into his network of college friends and former employers. He eventually ended up with two job offers and took a six-figure marketing position.

It rarely works that well for everybody, but networking is how you find a job. The money quote is in bold below:

[Butler] was also smart to dig into his networks, said Ford Myers author of the upcoming book, Get the Job You Want, Even When No One’s Hiring.

“The wrong thing to do is sit at home in your pajamas and apply to jobs online,” he said, “it’s isolating and depressing.”

Reconnecting with college friends, former coworkers and even other unemployed workers in the community can pay off big time. “That’s called networking and that’s the single most important activity anyone can do when they are in transition,” Myers said.

For Butler, those connections led to not one, but two job offers.

I love hearing these kinds of stories. The job market sucks right now, and it’s hard, but this is how you find a job. And this is exactly the kind of thing the church needs to be doing right now.

Business & Marketing

Jim Collins: Get Used to Economic Turmoil

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Jim Collins, the renowned business author of Good to Great and Built to Last talked with Fortune magazine last month about the current economic crisis. He claimed that 1952-2000 was an aberation of stability that brought unprecedented economic prosperity. He said that’s rare in human history and doesn’t think it’s likely that we’ll see it again in our lifetime.

He concludes: “What we’re experiencing now, get used to it! It’s life, and it’s the normal life.”

That kind of economic pessimism seems commonplace. It reminds me of something I posted on Twitter last week, a quote that “Americans’ standard of living is undergoing a ‘permanent change’.”

I don’t know if any of that is true. Nobody can predict the economic future with absolute certainty. Though I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing if we have to realign our standard of living and get used to getting by on less (another tweet about the average American consuming as much as 520 Ethiopians comes to mind).

Of course Collins goes on to talk about how great companies can survive these times, so it’s not all gloom and doom. And he points to making this a defining moment, not just a state of panic: “You have to ask the question, What can we do not just to survive but to turn this into a defining point in history?” Sometimes a bad situation can be a blessing because it forces you to do what you really needed to do.