[Therapeutic stream of consciousness] Honestly, October felt a bit aimless. There were some good moments, of course, but I felt like everything that was happening didn’t really weave itself into a united, holistic, overarching narrative. It felt like a bunch of random scenes stitched together, and I feel like that’s hurting me and causing me to be less effective in everything that I do.

Running

I started running again. Like consistently… like, I put in 3 runs a week between 5 and 7 miles long for the past 3 or so weeks, because I felt like trying to pick it up again. I saw some of my friends running Boston Qualifiers, and I started thinking about going for it too. This time, I actually moved forward with training, with the plan to reassess after a little while if it was actually good for me to pursue.

Programming / Tech

On top of that, it seems that I did more programming in October than I have in previous months, because I’ve been entertaining the idea of basically wanting to become famous in the JavaScript community. I want to write credible and authoritative blog posts and speak at conferences and be known by other programmers. My motives should obviously be analyzed - but I’m not sure how well I can discern them myself.

Here were some of the things I did with technology this past month:

  • I added a co-maintainer to the ngReact project who has been really responsive and awesome and has led to us passing 400 stars on Github
  • I wrote a pretty decently received article on using React and Flux inside of Angular for the Tune Developers Blog
  • I taught my browser to rap using the HTML5 Speech Synthesis API and put in a talk proposal to FluentConf in San Francisco in 2015 (I also put in a talk proposal to ng-conf in Salt Lake City and thought about putting in a proposal for Reactconf in Palo Alto)
  • I helped launch a new product at Tune
  • I co-led a workshop at Tune for the front end teams over React and Flux
  • I did some work with socket.io for the first time

Spirituality

My walk with God sorta began to slow down. I am slowly going to Top Pot less frequently for morning quiet times. I don’t engage with my coworkers because I’m out running during lunch. My heart seems somewhere else - it’s thinking about things that aren’t God when I go to sleep and thinking about things that aren’t God when I wake up. I don’t want that to be the case… in fact, my life is immeasurably more enjoyable and more exciting and more purposeful when everything revolves around Him, when He’s the impetus stitching all of these not-so-random scenes together.

Here’s what happened this month, in terms of my walk with God:

  • My small group went to UW to do a philosophy discussion with non-Christians, and we’re actually planning on continuing to do this in some form
  • CSL basketball league is continuing to take up much of my Sundays, and we even had a team outing at Panda Express (since our team name is Panda Express)
  • Suzi and I went to the PSBA annual meeting and sat in a room full of church planters for 2 hours
  • Suzi and I went to Missionsfest for some seminars (such as mentoring young men in the inner city, the role of technology in missions, apologetics, etc)

Personally, I:

  • memorized about 70% of Romans 1 (and yeah, those first 8 or so verses are just one giant sentence)
  • had mostly consistent quiet times - I read through 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and some chunk of 2 Kings
  • read about half of Encounters with Jesus by Tim Keller

I hope this isn’t premature, but when I look back on posts like this, I’ll probably wish I had more transparency. Suzi and I started feeling like God was calling us to move into Beacon Hill so that we could live more missionally. It was the culmination of a lot of feelings or nudges that had come for the past few weeks, and the more we thought and prayed and dreamed, the more it seemed like God was pointing us in the direction of moving into Seattle. So it probably won’t be until 2015, but that’s the plan so far, anyways.

Suzi

Also, this post doesn’t do any justice to Suzi, who is coming off of a 30 day whole foods detox which was complemented with a greater intentionality to pursue God. God has really been moving in Suzi in internalizing a lot of truths about who He is into her heart and how her obedience is not in vain and it is sorta like she is a different person. She’s been going to BSF and doing their devotionals mostly everyday, through which God has revealed a lot of truths to her. The detox itself was helpful for her in terms of getting more energy for the day and figuring out how to make good use of her time.

In Closing

If you’re actually down here, thanks for reading. I think the thing is that I need to re-center everything around God - running, programming, my marriage, my ministry. I think that will put me in a righter place. I need to figure out how much of each of these outlets is healthy for me to be doing - whether I should keep on running during lunch, whether I should bring my laptop home at all, what my time at home should consist of, how much ministry I should be doing.

I certainly hope I’ll have better sentiments when I’m writing next month’s November recap.