He’s not hanging on a cross or bleeding in a garden anymore.  He’s alive, isn’t he?  The suffering part of his work for me is finished.  He’s doing other work for me now.  The suffering was the biggest, most difficult part of the work he’s done for me, but it wasn’t the end of the work he does for me.

I suppose I’m just thinking out loud.  Thinking about how I think about Jesus.

I might have actually done it-dropped out I mean.  I don’t know for sure, but the cost of my tuition certainly made it tempting.  In the end, the deciding factor was the strain that dropping out would have had on my marriage.  It’s one thing to do something scary and unusual.  It’s another thing to do it when your wife feels even worse about it than you do.

The takeaway idea for me is that even if you have the courage to take the road less traveled or follow the different drummer or insert other metaphor here, cultural and societal currents can grab you indirectly through the people you love.  It’s like a metaphorical hostage situation.

I had been talking about the possibility of dropping out of school for a month.  It surprised me how the tension surrounding this decision suddenly spiked.

I’ve been thinking about his words a lot.

Let me give you a generic, but nonetheless truthful example from my own life.  An example of how I lose focus and am less loving.  My wife and I spend a lot of time picking up after and cleaning for our children.  We also spend a lot of time trying to prevent messes, especially if those messes are going to involve poop or pee.  Sometimes in my efforts to keep paint or marker or poop or pee off of our household surfaces and furnishings I get grumpy with the children.  I become so focused on the goal of keeping poop off of things that showing love to the pooper moves down on my list of priorities.

I think that everyone’s like me.  At least in this regard.  If you were to walk up and ask any one of us if loving our family or friends or co-workers or neighbors is what’s most important we would be quick to say yes.  But if our family, friends, co-workers, or neighbors are getting in the way of an important goal or causing significant problems our focus is primarily on the goal or the problem.  We try to be tactful and avoid meanness, but few if any of us think at all about how we are going to be loving to the other person involved in our conflict.

PDF of the speech 

His books were recommended to me by a couple of folks, and I’m glad.  Wendi and I enjoyed the Mistborn Trilogy quite a bit.  I was surprised by how it ended.  At present, I can’t think of many other books where I was completely surprised by the ending.

And here are screenshots of games that I have made:

Pizza Cooking Prototype Game

Pancake Flipping Prototype Game

Lite Green - The Environmental Party Game

Casino-type Game Prototype

Improved Casino Game Prototype

Monkeys On The Bed Counting Game

Shape Slinger

The Slinks

This year I’m making a cooking game.  The premise is that you are a chef at a cafeteria at a summer camp for fat kids.  You’ve got to cook healthy, delicious, and low calorie meals.  If the meals aren’t delicious enough kids will run away from camp.  If meals aren’t healthy enough the kids will get fatter and you’ll lose your job.

I’m making a prototype of the game in Flash right now.  Perhaps I’ll post my progress here at some point in the future.

I wrote this first one for my game design class.  It’s not worth reading in its entirety, but I think it’s funny and worth scanning.

This is a portfolio-type thing that I made for my projects class.  It’s not too heavy on text, and you might find it interesting.  It is supposed to document my contributions to the pinball-esque game I’ve been working on this semester.

This last one I wrote for my Diversity in American Film class.  It’s really not worth reading, but I do think the subject matter is interesting.  You can find a more interesting treatise on the subject matter here (it’s a 2-minute video).