davidleong.info

chris and i woke up this morning and went straight to escrow signing where we spent about an hour and a half initialing a three inch stack of legal documents for the house. good times. i kept searching for the firstborn child clause, but alas, they hid it from me. sneaky, those escrow signers.

afterwards we jumped in the car and drove straight to portland for my sister-in-law wendy’s wedding which is this saturday. portland is like a scaled down seattle, but with tax free shopping and a few degrees hotter. aside from not being able to pump your own gas, the city is fairly tolerable.

the weekend should be interesting with the in-laws, extended family, old skool reunions, and strangely, being somehow legally related to former roomie noah. what a bizarre universe we live in.

in search of info on lance armstrong’s remarkable 7th tour de france victory, an accidental googling of just ‘lance’ led me to stumble upon a different thirty-something year old white guy: lance archibald.

this lance is from utah, not texas, and his claim to fame is datelance.com, not cycling. apparently, archibald is getting a little too old to be single in provo, utah- and especially considering what a catch he is. at the top of his eligibility checklist is ‘returned missionary’- an absolute must in mormon country. to his credit, the billboard and website were not his own ideas, but instead the marketing ploy/practical joke of his coworkers.

i’ve never visited the unique state of utah that is proudly LDS-land, and personally i’ve always found the history of mormonism to be a sobering reminder of the persuasive pressure of socialized religion that often overshadows any question of doctrinal feasibility. unfortunately, the bottom line for most adherents to any religion is that the people you know and the relationships you value ultimately outweigh the consideration of theological arguments.

perhaps this is confirmation of the theory that people are far more naturally oriented to a relational worldview than a perspective based on propositional truth(s). lance seems like a smart guy with his harvard mba, but when it comes down to his religious convictions, my guess is that intellect doesn’t matter as much as his friends and family do.

back in the day, i was a corporate zombie at the now defunct at&t wireless. hired into a large but incompetent internal IT support division right out of my undergrad at UW, i spent nearly two years living out a strange hybrid of dilbert and office space. when i wasn’t on the phone unclogging email overflows, i was sleeping under my desk or zoning out in my cubicle. needless to say, it was not the most thrilling work experience.

the one upshot of working there was the free & unlimited cellular service- the lone bright spot in an otherwise dark era of vocational boredom. but i should have known that even this one benefit would eventually come back to get me… oh, the cruel irony of it all. basically, the morons known as ‘managers’ in my dept screwed up my termination date and mistakenly transitioned my cell service early, incurring about $500 of incorrect charges. because i had already left the company (and the country) to go to regent, i was unable to dispute the charges myself due to ridiculous corporate bureaucracy. so i left things up to my manager who was supposed to take care of it for me. big mistake. never leave things up to someone else when your credit is on the line.

three years later, out of the blue, with no prior warning whatsoever, a collections notice shows up on my credit report dropping me from a stellar 743 to a deadbeat 640. the culprit? at&t wireless. those bastards came back to bite me in the a$$ at the worst possible time- right in the middle of my loan application as we’re closing on our fist house. big surprise that my loan has now been rejected. worse yet, i have one week to close and find a new lender before we lose the whole thing- and there are 3 other offers chomping at the bit just waiting for the chance to bid on the house if our financing falls through. exciting times.

sometimes it’s just better to read other people’s words instead of writing your own. rarely am i prompted to write anything until i’ve read the writing of someone else.

I was prevented from getting to the London School of Theology’s symposium on the theology of atonement today by the bomb blasts in London. I got as far as London Bridge and had to turn back. The atrocity, however, comes as a blunt reminder that ’sin’ is not an abstract theological category: it is socially and personally devastating. The BBC, probably inadvertently, showed live footage of a man on a stretcher receiving CPR as he was wheeled from the ambulance into the hospital. So we need to remind ourselves – we theologians – that ’salvation’ must also not be managed as an abstract theological category; it cannot be less real than the pervasive, sometimes petty, sometimes terrifying, atrocity of sin… continued here.

I had an epiphany when I was only 13 and still living in Serbia. The moment of truth for me happened on the night of March 24, 1999. The air raid sirens sounded and people were panicking. I was outside of my building with my mother and all the neighbors when the first NATO bomb fell on my city. It was so surreal. There I was standing, looking in disbelief at a rising, fiery mushroom cloud that was caused by a bomb that just hissed over my head a second ago. I used to see those mushroom clouds on TV — specifically the gigantic, Hiroshima one. Now it was real and not very far from me… continued here.

i’m told that my blog often has some sort of guilt-inducing vibe to it, though that is not my intention. i’m not sure why i’m more drawn to ‘downer’ types of issues- it’s probably my own guilt complex for being middle class. for whatever reason, middle american angst torments me. and as they say, misery loves company (not that i’m actually miserable). if you’d really much rather read about trips to safeway, my pet rock, and whatever else i did today, feel free to let me know. but i’d hate to read my archives years from now and wonder why i wasted so many words on the mundane.

Genesis 12: The Call of Abram

1 The LORD had said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.

3 I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”

for the next two weeks at quest, i’ll be preaching on the story of abraham. he is perhaps the most looming figure of the biblical patriarchs, and today is regarded as the founding father of three of the world’s major religions: christianity, judaism, and islam.

a few years ago, abraham made time magazine cover story- what a fascinating legacy he must have left to be talked about thousands of years after his death. i hope to do him justice not only as a pillar of faith to be followed, but also as a fallen, broken misfit whose humanity often got in the way of god’s greater purpose. thankfully, throughout the biblical narrative, god is always the central hero, not the messed up people he graciously chooses to work through.

i’ve always been annoyed with one-dimensional movie villains whose driving disposition is hell-bent on some form of pure evil or destruction. with paper-thin character, their twisted persona is little more than a representation of some outside force of darkness. on the other hand, when a villainous character is humanized, it seems to me that the point is not to be shocked at the depths of their depravity as much as it is a sobering reminder of the evil that resides in each of us.

it’s been refreshing to see blair tackling extremism in the wake of the london bombings- even as they deal with the possibility of the suspects being british nationals. though it may be shocking for some locals to consider home-grown londoners as the culprits, often our most heinous criminals are not outsiders, but those right in our midst.

not far from the qcafe where i spend much of my time, a homeless man named carlos holguin was recently murdered in an allegedly brutal attack. the facts of the case are hazy, and while some police are speculating an accident, many people in the homeless community are fearful. a memorial service for carlos will be held tonight at the cafe as we reflect on his life and how we can be better advocates for the marginalized in our immediate community.

i grew up with the common middle class suburban perspective that poor and homeless people were just lazy and incompetent. i believed in the myth of a common meritocracy- that i had rightfully earned my position and status in life through personal achievement. i never considered the possibility that perhaps the system in place had provided me with certain inherent advantages because of my race, my wealth, and my education. now i realize that in this zero sum world, i may have to inadvertently step on people like carlos in order to maintain my own socio-economic status. i’m not quite sure how to feel about that.