Systematic Behvior for life...

This last week I spent four days in class learning about TOGAF. For those of you who haven't been engulfed in a barrage of talk on Enterprise Architecture(EA) over the past 6 months, TOGAF stands for "The Open Group Architecture Framework". This isn't a post about EA but I wanted to capture and reflect on a statement that the instructor, Bill Estrem, used sometime during the first day of class. When advocating the need for EA Bill shared the following statement:

"Only systematic behavior yields success."

In the realm of EA I'll take this statement at it's face value and accept it as a general truism but as I thought about this statement over the course of the week I began to ask myself if this truism may also apply to life in general. Think about it.

1. To raise kids, I have two boys, I have to be consistent and think about how I am going to raise them so that I and my wife are on the same page. Once on the same page my wife and I have to act in a common ( read systematic) way to train them to become the young boys and eventually men that we want them to be
   
2. When I used to run and cycle a lot my times and distances were much better when I followed a systematic training and dieting plan
3. I never pay off my credit cards if I don't make and follow a plan for doing so
4. My garden doesn't grow if I don't prepare the ground, plant the seeds, and water and care for my growing plants

Even as a computer programmer who's supposed to think and dream in binary I found that I initially recoiled at the idea of being more systematic in my life. "Why I like to be artist and creative." I told myself. But as I looked at my life I notice that those moments when I had the most success occurred when my behavior was more systematic.


Perhaps our creativity is unleashed in designing the system and our success is found in systematically following through on our creativity?

Epi's A Basque Restaurant??

So tonight I discovered from a friend of mine at dinner that Epi has started a Basque restaurant in the Boise area. They said it's really good and authenticate (read... sheep reproductive organs).

I'll have to try it someday for now though I guess the legend continues.....

Soul Cravings ....

I'm currently reading a book title Soul Cravings by Erwin Raphael McManus. Today in entry 22 in the section on Destiny Erwin closed with a statement on our individuality in Christ that I thought all us box breakers may find encouraging:

"When you come to God, you begin a process that re-creates you from the inside out. You begin a journey that is nothing less than life transforming. While there are some things we will share in common, the journey God has prepared for you is uniquely yours with him. Don't be confused about his - everything around us pushes us toward conformity. Whether it's communism or Islam, Calvin Klein or McDonald's, we are all pushed toward standardization and quickly find ourselves as assembly-line humanity.
We have to choose.
Liberal or Conservative? Democrat or Republican? Evolution or creation? Pro-choice or pro-life? The environment or development? Coke or Pepsi? Coke Zero of Pepsi One?
Choose your box and stay there."

I think I'm going to keep on breaking...

The long awaited return of EPI...

This last week thanks to a tip from an old friend and a productive Google search I was able to track down an old friend who I lost contact with about 7 or 8 years ago. You see the last time we really talked was when I was the best man at his wedding. Sure we exchanged a couple of emails in the late 90's but all in all I felt like quite the bum for loosing track of him and his family.

All this to say that when I did find is email address and picture cleanly displayed on the web site of his current employer I couldn't just send him an email and say, "Hey what's up? Sorry I haven't talked to you in 8 years." For some people, my wife included, that would have been the obvious choice but you see that's just not how we used to roll so I had to come up with something different... more true to our friendship.

Then it occurred to me that the best way to avoid that awkward, "Hey, I remember you." moment was to dig up an old story from our shared past before re-initiating contact.

You see back in High School we had a mascot in our Physics class that we had named Epi. Well maybe 'mascot' is a little too much credit to give to a gummy bear stuck to the book shelf at the back of class where we sat and tried to make our physics teacher fall off of his chair. We had good imaginations. And the name, where did that come from? If I recall correctly it was from a random Friday or Saturday night when I scribbled the letters E-P-I on the top of my friends car and we proceeded to scream, "Epi!" at random moments throughout the evening. That next week a legend was born. Simple huh... that is until the incident.

One day we strolled in to physics class to find that Epi had disappeared. Some thought that Epi was dead, others reasoned that Epi had run away with Elvis. Either way the mystery, like the premature death or a rock star, only made the legend of Epi grow even larger. We even managed to hold up a sign to Epi in our senior class picture. Poetically enough the picture that made it into the yearbook showed us holding the sign upside But his post isn't about High School memories it's about connecting to your past so we'll move on.

To initiate contact with my former partner in legend making I sent an inquiry asking about the whereabouts of Epi to the customer service email on his web site. Noting that rumors had been circulating that Epi had been seen in the forest around my friends current home town with a certain Jack the Gnome, another one of our illustrious creations. Several replies later we had concluded that Epi was in fact dead but not before Epi had conquered a small island in Vanuatu and given the island the name Epi. At that point I finally responded with the, "Hey what's up? Sorry I haven't talked to you in 8 years." line and we began catching up on the lost time without any awkward moments.

So maybe I a little weird, I'll give you that, but what I think is great about this whole exchange is how quickly the connection between the two of us was rebuilt after so many years. You see I'm not really a people person and usually I take some time to warm up to somebody after so many years without seeing them. In this situation the connection to our shared past recreated the brotherhood that existed so many years ago. Even though today we are both different than we were and separated by thousands of miles I feel like I've just rediscovered a long lost brother.

What's even better is that my friend and his wife are still married after all these years and expecting their second child in October. Sadly so many of the couples that I saw married 7 or 8 years ago are no longer together. Perhaps it's because somewhere during these past years they forgot about their past and begin living out of the situation and resources of the present. I don't mean to suggest that we should live in our past but I am suggesting that we should use the relationships and bonds in our past to remind us and regrow those things that we've forgotten in the tyranny of the present.

Connecting to the past and discovering that old forgotten friends aren't really old or forgotten... just another way to break out of our box.

This guys just scares me....

This guy just scares me... and I'm not sure why... it might be a hidden love of bad kungfu movies... but I like it. Maybe later I'll think of some great meaning behind it all but for now it just scares me.

Of Little Miss Sunshine and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Recently my wife and I joined Netflix, initially just to get animated features for the boys, but we've since gone to trading off one for the boys and one for us. The last two movies for us grown ups have been Little Miss Sunshine and Bonhoeffer Agent of Grace. I like both of these movies and would recommend them for mature audiences. On Wednesday nights we have been studying Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship and after watching Little Miss Sunshine last night I got to thinking:

• What message would Bonhoeffer have for the Hoovers?

But what the question really turned into for me was:

• What do the Hoovers have for me?

Now it's not that their family was anything to aspire too I'm not going to become a heroin addict, create a 9 step program, become a Proust scholar or take a vow of silence. Yet at the end of the movie I somehow felt that they had found something worth having. I had felt the same way at the end of the Bonhoeffer movie as well but the endings couldn't have been more different. Bonhoeffer ended with him naked standing on the Nazi gallows where he was hung only months before the end of WW II and Little Miss Sunshine ended with them push starting the old VW bus one last time before crashing through a fence and driving off down the interstate.

I think I was hit by the fact that both sets of characters finally found a way to act and live for something beyond their own selfish desires and in living for something else they finally found a little bit more of what they were looking for. Both are journeys of self discovers obviously taken along different paths. The calling to live for the dream of a 7 year old to enter a beauty pageant and to live a life of discipleship to Christ are two very different calls.

So I think my answer to the Hoovers would go something like this:

Living for somebody else is honorable; it's only when start living for somebody else that we truly find out who we really are. But the person we live for must be chosen carefully because there is only one who person who we can live for who will not let us down and whom living for will truly result in find ourselves and that person is Jesus Christ.

Like the crap that the Hoovers went through to get from New Mexico to California there is a cost in following Jesus but it is in following him that our homesick hearts find a place in this world we call home.
I think I'll close this murky glimpse outside the box with the following quote from The Cost of Discipleship concerning the Grace of Jesus Christ:

Blessed are they who, in the knowledge of such grace, can live in the world without losing themselves in it. In following Christ their heavenly home has become so certain that they are truly free for life in this world.

God bless all you freedom seekers climbing out of the box. If you see me on the way out offer me a hand.