I’ve tried to write this post at least twice now. Reflecting on November doesn’t yield very exciting “results” - and my feelings about the month are just as ambivalent. I don’t know what to make of it.

My Scripture reading and memorization are way down, but I read the most in November than any other month. I also ran the most consistently this month than any other this year… and I traditionally haven’t known how to feel about that. And my schedule/routine may have been disrupted from Thanksgiving and having my family in town.

So maybe I won’t draw any big conclusions… here’s what happened this November:

Spirituality

In terms of my personal walk with God, I think I am off. I didn’t read or memorize very much relative to past months. I only read 2 Kings and 1 Corinthians and finished memorizing Romans 1 and about 25% of Romans 2. I did read Tim Keller’s Encounters with Jesus about how we can answer some big questions by looking at Jesus’ encounters in the gospels, and Eugene Cho’s Overrated on social justice, and a considerable chunk of Bob Goff’s Love Does, which reads with a sort of Blue Like Jazz narrative.

In terms of ministry, our church CSL basketball league ended on a good note (though we still ended up winless). I did a philosophy discussion at UW with some students and had some really good conversation, but weren’t able to begin to meet regularly as the quarter is about over. Suzi and I also tried to live more missionally, so we started having people over to our condo more for dinner and board games on the weekends. The biggest event that happened was a one-time praise night/Bible study event at our condo - we had about 12 or 13 people from church come and eat tacos, sing worship, and do an inductive study of Galatians 2:20.

Also had a fun time playing football on Thanksgiving morning with our church (our Turkey Bowl) and later watching our friend Jason get baptized at a church lunch/service.

Tech

Work has been in a weird transitory state, so I’ve ended up doing a few odd jobs and looking at some new technologies. This has included working with Django, rewriting an internal tool using web workers, and migrating to Docker.

Outside of work, I published an article for ReactJS News that got some good traction, went to the inaugural Seattle React meetup at SURF Incubator in Columbia Tower, and started playing around with Loopback from Strongloop to create RESTful APIs. The result of a small project with Loopback was extending the GIF-shooter I had made for Suzi’s birthday 9 months ago into a generic product where anyone can create galleries for GIFs - code is here, but it’s highly unlikely I’ll pay for the hosting (or domain) to actually put it online anywhere.

Suzi

Suzi has been doing really well! God has been pursuing her and challenging her a lot and Suzi has grown noticeably in her desire to do God’s will and her appetite for His Word. Each is epitomized respectively in Suzi’s decision to commit to working with a local non-profit ministry called REST, which works against sex trafficking in Seattle, and in her spending her free nights reading through and annotating some of Paul’s epistles.

So I’ve been very encouraged and happy with Suzi and her spiritual walk as of the past few months.

Random

Other than that, not much really happened this month. I got sick for the first time in a while, and I’ve put in a few good runs (including a 9 miler around Lake Union that felt surprisingly smooth and my first timed run since I started, which was also surprisingly clocked at 30 minutes at 7 minute mile pace). Also, Suzi and I watched Big Hero 6 and have been mostly consistent in our recently established Saturday morning Capitol Hill brunch tradition.

If you got this far, thanks for reading.

If you’re looking for things you can pray for me about, the things I’ve been thinking about are:

  • being a good friend,
  • being missionally minded,
  • being a hard worker, and
  • understanding how to run and program in a way that pleases God optimally.