Hmm… so it’s been another month, so here’s another recap.

At the beginning of the month, I wrote down three things that I wanted to do:

  1. Be a better husband/leader for Suzi
  2. Learn about cars
  3. Do some hard work

I can’t say I did the second very well (I watched a handful of Youtube videos at the beginning of the month, and that was about it). The first and third did all right, and will be mentioned in my normal monthly recap format.

Spirituality

Hmm… honestly, I don’t know what to say. Nothing immediately sticks out, though, and something usually sticks out when I write these. Things still feel good and steady. I was a little removed from church for the last week as I was off in Canada with family, and others were traveling a bit as well.

Pastor Matt finished a Friday night series on idolatry and continued preaching through Luke on Sundays (so we talked about the stumbling blocks, forgiveness, the dishonest manager, and the persistent widow).

We had our VBS, which was a lot of fun, but was also kind of really emotionally taxing. I finished memorizing Romans 5 and 6 and am figuring out if I should memorize 7 or 3 next. Daily quiet times are getting better with Suzi.

I talked with my father-in-law a lot about his church in Tulsa and I think my one big take-away was that, when people look at my life, I want them to see me as someone who walks with God. I want to show by my faith and speech and conduct and love and purity that I fear God and that I am seeking His will over my own, and that He is increasing and I am decreasing.

There was a good prayer group (we do that corporately every other week) in which I realized that I was unnecessarily critical of others, and that I was distracted and unfaithful in the way I treated the Bible and prayer, and that I still struggle with fearing what people think of me. The biggest example for that was at work - at lunch on a Monday, one guy asked me what I did over the weekend, and I told him that I was at church all weekend. It actually sparked a good conversation in which he explained his beliefs and stance on Christianity. A few minutes later, another guy sat next to me and asked me the same question of what I did over the weekend, but then I told him I didn’t do anything. I was pretty intimidated by him because I supposed that if I gave him the same answer, he would also give me his stance on Christianity.

Despite that, there has been a feeling that my faith in Christ is becoming easier to share/more organic. If I am going to share my life with someone, my life is inseparable with what Christ has done for me. So it’s been cool - there are a few people at my company who will now start conversations with me about Christianity and my faith. Like… I’m not even bringing it up anymore - it’s them bringing it up to me. I recently basically had someone invite themselves to go to church with me. So that’s actually really really encouraging.

Suzi

I wanted to be a better husband/leader for Suzi. And actually, I feel like I have been doing a better, more intentional job. I know she responds well to acts of service, and it just so happened that Suzi had her wisdom teeth taken out at the beginning of the month, so it became much much easier for me to feasibly give her acts of service. I could drive her around and clumsily prepare food for her and run small errands. So that was good for us.

I think we’ve been talking more as well, in general. To be honest, sometimes we don’t talk that much. Sometimes I don’t listen very much or very well. So for the most part, I’ve been making sure to make time to just talk and be on the same page and know how she is doing/feeling.

My small group asked me one night how our marital Bible-reading and prayer was doing. At that point, it was nonexistent. So they encouraged me to try to pick it up again, and we’ve been making more of an effort to read through Mark together and end each session in prayer. So I’m honestly pretty happy about that :)

Work/Other Tech

HasOffers announced our big rebranding as Tune (Geekwire and Techcrunch) during our big annual Postback conference. They decided to fly everyone in to Seattle (as we have offices in NYC, SF, Tel Aviv, London, and Seoul) for the conference, so it was pretty awesome seeing everyone and meeting all the names I would only see on emails. I busted through about 1000 lines of code in about 24 hours to get out a live demo for that conference (though I don’t think it was really used).

ngReact got some nice mentions. I also released an article about using React to get isomorphism in Angular, which was pretty well received, got featured in JavaScript weekly, and resulted in my highest website traffic ever (which was about just over 1000 user sessions in a day).

I tried to put in some hard work for my friend Chris Lim who is working on http://www.ceaselessprayer.com/. I also tried to put in some hard work into re-doing the CSBC website (the right way - since I foolishly hacked it together the first time, thinking I could just implement everything myself - the theme/styles/infrastructure to support sermons and sermon series). For that, I’m using Virtue and Church Themes and mostly configuring things within the theme/writing SQL using the Sequel Pro GUI to migrate all of my old Wordpress database structures into a consumable format.

Other

A few other miscellaneous things happened:

  • Church had an awesome 4th of July BBQ, some interns from my company came, we played kickball (our Independence Bowl), and we got to see our old friend Billy for the first time in a long time
  • A few of us from church hiked Poo Poo Point
  • A few of us from church ran the 5k Foam Fest (one of those obstacle course races… about a week later, we heard they actually filed for bankruptcy)
  • Suzi and I visited one of my summer project friends BDang as he was in Bellingham for missions
  • My church small group did outreach on UW and it was actually a really good time/thing
  • I finished reading From the Garden to the City from John Dyer (the director of web development at Dallas Theological Seminary)
  • Spent a few days in Canada with Suzi’s parents (Sun Sui Wah, Shabu Sen, Festival of Lights, Botanical Gardens)
  • I worked from a coworking space in Canada for one day and met a whole bunch of people and went to some incubators like Grow Labs, Launch Academy, and Institute B