theo|digital

I didn’t expect the amount of reaction I received a few days ago when I updated my Facebook status to “Chris is poaching eggs in the microwave.” Laying aside the shame I feel for updating my Facebook status in the first place (what? what window? I don’t have Facebook open. “Face-book?” oh, you meant GOOGLE SPREADSHEETS. Right. Look over there.), I’d like to make the serious point that poaching eggs in the microwave is not only a lovely modern possibility, it’s also fun and safe to do at home.

Instructions:

1. Find your personal microwave poacher dish. A coffee mug with rounded bottom works great. Yesterday I used a glass 1-cup liquid-measuring cup.
2. Spray bottom of cup with non-stick spray.
3. Break egg into dish (obviously be careful not to break the yoke!)
4. Gently puncture the egg yolk with a toothpick. (just a small “hole” – no breaky – just quick in and out. Seriously. This is important to prevent unwanted yellow explosion).
5. Cover the top of your cup with saran wrap – pull tightly so it forms a seal. (will trap steam inside).
6. Pop in microwave.



7. Zap it. Technique is very important here. It must be done in small increments, and takes very little overall time to cook the egg through. I recommend something like this:
1. 12 second zap.
2. 10 seconds cool-down.
3. 10 seconds zap.
4. 10 seconds cool down.
5. 8 seconds zap.
6. 10 seconds cool down.



7. Visual egg examination. Does it look done? (remember, overdoing gives you hard yoke. Not as nice.)
8. And you’re done. The rounded bottom of the cup helps you simply tip the cup and slide the egg out onto your already prepared english muffin, with American cheese and canadian bacon. Instant Egg McMuffin!

I will be accepting apologies from those who scoffed.

Everyone’s reporting this one this morning, but I liked this global take:

Compassion asked for immigration status of missing soldier’s wife
By Yadira Betances , Staff Writer
Eagle-Tribune

LAWRENCE – The potential deportation of the wife of a soldier missing in Iraq has put the spotlight on two of the nation’s most volatile issues – illegal immigration and the war in Iraq.
…

The rest of the article.

Is anyone else confused on where to land on the issue of immigration? Supporting deportation and a fat fence seems so heartless… social compassion is usually my starting place. But as Ron Paul, Republican candidate for President, noted in a CNN debate, “if you subsidize something you get more of it,” speaking of allowing those who enter the US illegally to file for legal status. This makes sense to me… my degree in economics gives me a soft spot for arguments using words like “incentives.” And I was also surprised to find myself agreeing with raging conservative Congresman Tancredo whose hard stance on English-only made more sense when he reminded us how central language is to culture… and how countries with split language issues tend to be unstable.

But the hard part for me isn’t sorting through policy with a pragmatic value system. It’s trying to decide what the moral thing is in the first place.

Years ago I tried to erase the “Christian politics” I had learned growing up, and made an attempt to start over without a mental party affiliation – trying with each issue to wonder at God’s opinion. What does a compassionate and just God think of this? How should we govern if we wanted to match his heart?

This is what makes me both conservative and liberal at the same time (and incidentally what the mainstream press is only just starting to get recently… that the under-25 crowd is not just “moderate politically,” but actually tends to be strongly opinionated simultaneously on both “sides” of the chart. We all know that the polar “liberal” vs. “conservative” feels simply inapplicable).

But illegal immigration? God demanded equal treatment of foreign nationals in the nation of Israel (Numbers 15)… but what else do I have to go on? What would God do? I’m just not sure.

Slate Magazine notes today that those scrambled letter things are officially lame.

Computers and humans are becoming harder to distinguish in cyberspace. Latest problem: Security tests designed to block computers that impersonate humans (e.g., “type the fuzzy number you see on the screen”) have become too hard for many humans. The tests, known as captchas (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart), have been toughened because spammers learned how to make their machines better at “analyzing the images and separating the letters and numbers from the background noise.” Now the images are so hard to decipher that even a company’s chief technology officer flunks 25 percent of them.* Earnest complaint: Security screens have become an “intelligence test.” Cynics’ rebuttal: Fine with us.

I’ve posted a collection of shots from the conference (including the few I’ve already posted). Clicking this pic on the right will take you there.

It’s hard to give a final assessment of my time at the Willow Creek Arts conference because I’d have choose between goals for attending. Three days in a row I was dazzled by primary colors, jumbotron screens and professional crowd management (never once felt stuck or lost!). Both hospitality and production were professional in the “wow” sense of the word. We even had nifty Asian Chicken Salad box lunches packed by the Willow Creek in-house catering service.

But walking the campus (15 minutes to the other side) of Professional Church starts to feel like an eerie trip through Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom, complete with smiling hosts and talking plasma screens. A thoroughly comfortable place to visit, but enough removed from the real world that the 4-day pass is about all you can take.

It’s not like I wouldn’t want stay around. It’s entertaining and inspiring. There’s much free coffee, and I can daydream of working as a producer with a budget in the millions.

But for all the good intentions, and for all the rhetoric encouraging leaders not to copy Willow, but be inspired to do their own thing in their own context… the conference seems to teach something different than it says. It’s hard to stare into the moving light cannon Intellibeams on stage ($10,000 each, ballpark), and find much that deciphers the puzzles of a struggling campus community. A motley group spending most of its time exhausting all its energy into living a rudimentary definition of church.

So if my goal was to absorb and enjoy, I met it handily. But if somewhere buried between sessions God had wisdom and beauty to reveal about his Church in an imperfect world… I wasn’t able to find it.

Some amusing quotes from Donald Miller at this morning’s big session:

“I’m 1% left brained, meaning 1% of my brain balances my chequebook”

“GK Chesterton wrote, ‘It’s the mathematician that goes mad, not the poet.’
{Laughter, clapping.}
Whoa, I love this audience already! This is usually where they start booing. Quote that at a Reformed conference, and they’re not as friendly… (uh, don’t tell people I said that.)”

“I was out with my friend talking and drinking large cold pints of… coffee. In your part of the country this might be a sin, to have this particular kind of coffee… It’s regional; sin is regional.”

New Community is Willow Creek’s mid-week teaching service for Christians, and Donald Miller – who will do a separate Arts Conference session Friday morning – was there.

He talked some about his most recent book To Own a Dragon: Reflections On Growing Up Without A Father (one that remains on my read-soon list). Recently, he said, a movie studio called him to pitch an idea for turn the book into a full motion picture. On the phone he said, “No, God’s not really leading me that direction.”
Then they told him how much money they’d offer him.
“God has spoken.” Donald said.

So he let the team come up for a week and he joined them brainstorming about how to convert his book to a screenplay. The problem was “about 95% of what they were coming up with never actually happened.” (“guys, that building never actually exploded…” “the FBI wasn’t really involved”).

Finally a executive took him aside in frustration and explained, “Donald, we have to do this to make it more interesting.” Truth is, Donald explained, our lives are really too boring to make a movie. And that was his point.

“We don’t have good movie-like goals. For instance, imagine a movie about your plan to save up for five years to buy a Volvo. Movie ends as you drive the car off the lot. Sweet.”

Quoting several times from USC film professor-emeritus Robert McKee, Donald defined basic elements of good story, like “negative turn,” “conflict,” and “resolution.” But his point wasn’t about the writing of stories, but living them.

“Let’s live stories that would make good movies,” he said. With an emphasis on big goals, tough journeys, courage… he laid out a narrative idea that can help define a Christian’s life more than a Christian creed ever could – by defining what’s right instead of the boundaries of what’s wrong.

Dan Kimball spoke yesterday session 3, mostly summarizing his new book, They Like Jesus but Not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations. I appreciated his thoughts, but they weren’t new to my “young evangelical” ears. Comments about people being interested in Jesus, but thinking Christian tradition has distorted him; that the church is hypocritical. I guess this is already the way I think. (perhaps it’s a good message though. one big surprise of mine: the average age here seems like 45 years old…)

Right before he started, there was a sketch by the Willow team on a conversation between two old friends from bible college meeting up after 15 years of not talking. One had come out as gay. His best friend had simply stopped calling. I sorta sat tense in my seat waiting for bad stereo-typing, preaching, or oversimplification… but remarkably the dialog was both complex and genuine. It wasn’t a theological statement: more emotional. I liked it.

Dan only spoke for 25 minutes, in order to make time for a panel discussion including Brian McLaren, Sally Moregenthaler, Efram Smith, David Loveless, and Shauna Niequist. It was a great panel in theory, but I felt they were somewhat undirected, and aside from a few pull quotes, the conversation didn’t move anywhere worth writing home about. A little disappointing.

In our second session yesterday (Wed), Nancy Beach – arts pastor at Willow – spoke on hope and optimism. It’s supposed to be the theme of the conference, but I was getting ready to be too cheesed out when she frustratingly anticipated my cynicism. Mentioned that artists prefer depression pills and wearing black. So true. Believe it or not, she might have got to me. There are things that are “right with the world.”

Dang it.

From my car to the main auditorium – me arriving this morning at Willow Creek.

 

 

 

No pictures yet, but wanted to mention I’m sitting (right now) in a large session at the Willow Creek Arts Conference at Willow Creek Community Church in Barrington, IL. It’s just mid-afternoon, but I’m already in the third large session.

Their blog (having problems at one point, maybe up now) at:
http://2007artsconferenceblog.blogspot.com