Spirituality

Two things stick out to me as I think back about the month. I

  1. had a few really good encounters/opportunities to share/live the gospel, and

  2. felt a bit of jolt to avoid complacency/passivity/apathy

As for some good encounters, I was pretty happy to find opportunities to share my faith more. I had probably my best week ever in terms of everyday evangelism, in that I was able to share my testimony three times in that week. I had one dinner with someone who genuinely wanted to know why I was a Christian, what I believed about God, what made me happy, if I thought I was a good person, etc. and I could tell he was actually really listening to me and identifying with what I was saying.

I also had the chance to keep teaching 3rd grade Sunday school and even met up with one of my students outside of church for the very first time, which had been my sort of vision for the role a year ago that had never really been actualized until this past weekend.

As for feeling like I shouldn’t be complacent, that sort of thinking was sparked by realizing that I still have a lot of work to do in my life and a lot of character traits that are underdeveloped. My normal mentality, I think, has been to just get by and avoid controversy and tension and not stir the pot. But I started thinking that I should live up to the person that God has created me to be and to be the person that I am supposed to be (and, in a way, already am).

I think a lot of this has to do with my role as a husband and my ability to lead Suzi. I think I’m too often passive and disengaged and even afraid to make mistakes - and that this way that I’ve been living is no way to live a life… and it’s also a bad witness to the joy and infinite worth that is found in Christ and Christ alone. I should be both compelled and liberated to make more mistakes and to engage with people and circumstances around me because they are good things and can both help shape me to be the person I am supposed to be and allow me to see the glory of God.

A lot of this came from one night reading 1 Peter and eating ice cream at Coldstone:

“Conduct yourselves with fear… knowing that you were ransomed… not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.”

In terms of disciplines, Scripture memorization has slowed down a bit, so that it’s not quite a verse a day, but I was still able to finish memorizing Romans 8 and am about 85% finished memorizing Romans 5. I finally finished Deuteronomy and had some random excursions into 1 and 2 Peter and Philippians, but wasn’t very consistent either.

Work/Other Tech

June and July are gearing up to be two of the busiest months of the year for me regarding work. For the most part, it’s been pretty enjoyable and a bit too consuming; I don’t usually feel like I need to take a break from programming, but I definitely started feeling that way at points, and am intentionally planning on not programming outside of work for the next week or so.

Here were some of the company’s June highlights:

  • Twitter announced app install/reengagement ads, an integration I had worked on a few months ago: Techcrunch and HasOffers blog
  • There was this article written about our first class of interns
  • VentureBeat wrote this article listing us as one of the top 10 companies in the mobile app space

And here are some of the other tech things I did:

  • I started on a project using EcmaScript 6 (modules, classes, lots of fat arrows, default parameters - it’s a nice feeling) and transpiling down via Traceur. The project was more full stack, so I got to touch stuff in Node, Express, Memcache, and even write SQL for the first time in many months. I even wrote some CommonJS modules and scraped some Kevin Durant stats
  • I cleaned up davidandsuzi.com, documented here
  • I wrote about simple React components
  • I wrote about using React components inside of Angular apps and leveraging them to write isomorphic JavaScript to prepopulate views here

Other Just Random Stuff

Suzi and I watched more movies than probably any other month in the history of our relationship. We watched:

  • Amazing Spiderman 2 in theaters
  • Shake the Dust, about break dancers in third world countries, at the Seattle International Film Festival
  • The Goonies
  • X-Men 1, 2, and 3

Some other fun things that happened:

  • Went to a birthday party at Gameworks with a whole bunch of our church family
  • Karaoked at a friend’s house
  • Graduation BBQ at Judkins park with church family and went to the UW Graduation/Red Lantern afterwards for dinner
  • We made prayer cards for one of our church members going on missions to two unstable countries in Africa
  • I ran the Seattle Rock ‘n Roll half marathon off of little training. 1st 5k around high 7:30 pace, the 2nd 5k was around 7:12 pace, then hit a wall around 9 miles and struggled in at 1:46. First time racing a half - can’t be upset. Decent time… also, I forgot to bring any money with me and parked without paying at a meter and somehow didn’t get a ticket