Where moral authority comes from. (Its not cheap.)

You want to be a "world changer". It doesn't come cheap...

I love finding a leader I can be proud of. Someone who leads out of moral authority and not position. Someone who has risen from difficult circumstances and overcome difficult odds. I'm a bit of a history idiot, so please hang with me, but I just found a story of this that I've fallen in love with. I had heard of this guy plenty of times, but never really realized his story.

I just finished watching "Invictus" with Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, directed by Clint Eastwood. Its a story of how Nelson Mandela was able to help his country begin the process of forgiveness after horrible near-war oppression of blacks by whites in South Africa.

My chin is still on the floor! This was a freak'n-awesome movie and a story that I had to know more about!! Even my son Jonathan was glued to every minute. I couldn't believe how awesome Nelson Mandela's character was in the movie. Every few scenes, the message of "Forgive those who persecute you" was beautifully portrayed. This movie was truly inspiring -- I had to know more. A guy like that had to have some connections with Jesus to understand that kind of forgiveness. Instead of taking the opportunity to get revenge, he forgives those who were his enemies.

How in the world could this guy, Mandela, get put in prison for 27 years, roughly from age 24~51 and have such a forgiving attitude!?! I couldn't believe it so I had to do some research to find out if the movie was accurate in that area.

Mandela bio:
http://www.answers.com/topic/nelson-mandela

Religious views of noble peace prize winners:
http://nobelist.tripod.com/id3.html

Mandela reminds me a lot of Martin Luther King Jr. Wow! What a life of suffering and responsibility -- What a calling. He spent 27 years in prison for believing that blacks should have the same rights as whites in his country. He mined limestone and harvested seaweed from Prison during the part of his life when the rest of us are raising children and "living the good life". His prime life was literally stolen from him. He lived in a tiny cell on a prison island for much of his term -- with only a bed on the floor for his early twenties, thirties and forties. Talk about plenty of opportunities to grow bitter. "Why is this happening to me God!" -- but he didn't become bitter. How did he do it!! This man deserves to be listened to. He's got some moral authority.

A miracle happens and he gets out of prison. Then gets elected president of South Africa. He's able to forgive his oppressors and form a coalition government with those who hated him and what he represented. Talk about forgiving your enemies, he kept many of his "enemies" to work with him in the new government when he was elected president. In fact, he was awarded the Noble-Peace-Prize WITH one of the men in the opposing government he was up-against, Frederik de Klerk

De Klerk also seems to be an awesome man who rose to the challenge at the right time. Is this a coincidence that he became President when Mandela was needed? Is there an opportunity for us to stand up for what is right? Can we sacrifice like that?

Core Truth: Forgiveness is really powerful. When someone will step up and take the first steps of forgiveness, its like throwing a rock at a wall of snow that is about to avalanche. Small acts of forgiveness really can make a difference.

These men were able to rise to a higher calling, and were able to lead-by-example in forgiveness. The really helped their nation to begin to reconcile the terrible hurts from apartheid. Reminds me of the biblical Joseph story -- a man who sat in prison for years, only to end up saving Egypt from a great famine, along with many neighboring nations.

Other notes:
Mandela was born in a tribe where he herded animals young in life. His tribal name was "Rolihlahla" which meant "Troublemaker". This name strikes me as strangely prophetic and sarcastic at the same time. The "troublemaker" becomes one of the greatest "peacemakers" of our era, from such humble beginnings.

Both of his parents died when he was young. He proved a very smart man and went to live with the Chief's family. He could have led a comfortable life with his status in the tribe, but instead went to college to be a lawyer where he started getting in trouble leading peaceful demonstrations against apartheid policy in South Africa. These activities eventually led to a "life term" in prison.

A couple of Mandela Quotes:
"If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner. " -- Sounds loosely like something a Jewish carpenter said a while ago..

"There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires. "

It's awesome to see leaders who we can look up to. I'm proud of this man.

BTW, Clint Eastwood is putting out some pretty cool movies on reconciliation and forgiveness. This is at least his second one, Grand Torino was pretty awesome too.

Here is the meaning of Invictus, (Latin for "unconquerable"):
And the link to the poem: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/invictus/

Confessions of a PC Guy

OK, I'm going to come out of the closet here. To set the stage, first let me say that I make my living writing software for the web and for databases using mostly Microsoft technology. Not including the PCs we have for employees, we still have a PC for every person in the family (6) and then some extra laptop PCs laying around for company use. We have PCs in the closet and PCs running under desks -- It's like a LAN Party game dream house. Our 5 & 6 year old boys have a waiting list of boys who want to play at their house.. :)

So with all this PC testosterone flowing in the house, its really embarrassing to say, what I'm about to say. I really like the new Mac that a company bought for me to test some websites on. You see, we're doing some video conferencing type software development and it needs to run on a PC and a Mac. Normally we can just test websites on PC versions of the Firefox and Safari browsers, and that means it'll pretty much work the same on the Mac. But with video conferencing, we needed to be a little more rigorous in the testing.

So.. I felt a like I was soliciting a prostitute or buying drugs, but I bough a Mac. A little MacBook Pro. I felt sinful, and traitorous. I was betraying Bill. I felt like I should make a little brown book cover to hide it from my friends. I even had to spend a few hours on google to understand what I was looking for and where to buy it. Dell doesn't sell Macs, you see. Should I look for a pimp or a drug seller on the corner of some seedy alleyway to make my "offer"? Would one of my friends catch me? What if my family found out?

A little more on my PC background. I take a Texas approach on computers. Bigger is better. Whether that is more RAM, more harddrive space, a better video card. I'm a sucker for the upgrade. (Deanna won't let me go to the grocery store with her -- We always come out with way too much food.) I've got some of the physically biggest laptops that you can buy. Giant machines that would crush your legs after an hour if you even made it that far before they caught fire from the heat generated from them. We're talking Dual-SLI-Video cards that you can play 3D games on as if you were on a desktop. Machines that have a GOOD battery life of maybe 45 minutes. Their power bricks are literally brick size and weight.

So that's my laptop background. Never messed with "Sissy" laptops -- until now.

So here comes some embarrassing disclosures.

It came in a cool white box with a handle. Nice packaging. I've got an iPod, I knew that packaging is nice from Apple. I had buffered myself against this foreseen temptation. No problems.

To do a legitimate job on the testing, I'd actually have to USE the Mac a bit, to get oriented. I figured the main way to do that would be set up my email accounts on it and use it as a "short-trip-email/internet" laptop. That way I could learn my way around it and be able to help folks with Mac problems. Its hard to do that if you've never used one. Amazingly, that was easy to do and it actually felt pretty responsive in getting my 3 different IMAP email accounts set up and functional. I was embarrassed to find out that it actually felt a little BETTER than checking email on my PC. (It took about 5 hours to synchronize all my email folders, but that would have happened on any computer -- I've just got like 1 gb of email files.)

The first time I noticed I was lowering my well-calculated Mac-the-Prostitute defenses, was when I noticed that this little machine can sit on my lap without making me infertile. The heat it puts off is pretty minimal. I felt a little angry and embarrassed -- my PC laptops never did a lapdance for me and here was this little Mac-whore sitting there for hours...

There aren't even any fans -- I can sit using it with no noise. Wow. I'm used to multiple fans cranking at full speed, warming the room by 10 degrees and leaving scorch marks on the desk.

Second thing -- The track pad on the mac is freaking awesome. What the heck PC laptop manufactures?!? Have you used one of these? You've got to be embarrassed at how sucky the pc touchpads are? You really should be! And I didn't even know what I was missing. Dang. The mac-touchpad is huge, smooth and the two finger scroll / two finger right click are amazing. It took me about a day to get used to it, but now its ruined me for using a PC laptop touchpad. I feel like I did when I ate my first real Steak at Great American Land and Cattle Co on Alabama (El Paso, TX). All the rest of the leathery meat slabs I had eaten in my life were now left naked for what shallow imitations they were for real "Steak". Yeah, that's pretty much how I feel using my pc laptop touchpads now. It hurts.

Lid-closes-sleep-mode. First thing I usually do on a PC laptop is to turn off the "Sleep-mode-when-you-close-the-lid" mode. It just doesn't ever seem to work right -- It always freezes up some poor application that wasn't designed right. I have tons of PC applications, and its easier to just shut them down, then turn off the laptop manually. Then you don't have to battle some poor app that won't come back "awake" when I lift the lid again, or try to get a network connection back, or try to get my email program to respond, etc... -- I couldn't believe it, but the Mac version of this close-the-lid-sleep function actually works. And it works really fast. And all the software seems to be fine with "Being woken back up". The network just jumps back on. So I don't think I even know HOW to turn off the mac, but that's fine. It just works.

Now will I be throwing out the 10+ pcs in my house? No. I still need them because they run the majority of the software that I need to run my programming business. And they also run the 100+ games that my family loves to play. And they seem to cost 25~50% of what the Mac machines of similar caliber cost. And I know how to build them, replace their parts, diagnose them from the ground up if necessary. (And I assume all machines on earth break down eventually, even cool little silver ones with no fans and big/smooth track pads.)

Did I mention battery life? Granted nothing I have is a fair comparison, but still, I got like 6 hours of email work straight out of the Mac. This is unheard of on my PC laptops. Though I could probably get similar battery life on a PC laptop if I didn't always buy such power hungry monsters with big 17" screens. I just can't help it. (See the "Sucker-for-upgrades" comment above.)

With all that said, I feel a little like I've stepped out of the confessional. I've come out of the closet. I'm ready for the ridicule. I've been tempted, if not turned, to the "darkside". I can say it now I think... "macs are pretty cool."

Which laptop will I bring with me on little day trips? It'll probably be the cool little silver one with the bitten-apple on its cover. It's appropriate for my sinfulness feeling, but sometimes its good to be a little bad...

Hiking in Zion and Bryce

Hi everyone!

We had a great time over the last several days hiking in Zion and Bryce. Those parks are so beautiful.

Our first day in Zion we hiked down along the Virgin river as far as we could go before the snow bloated river was too strong and powerful to cross. It was beautiful! There were river water falls and we saw a group climbing one of the near mile high cliffs.

Next, the family hiked up to the “Weeping Rock”. It was a huge rock alcove where you can walk up under constant flow of water weeping right out of the rock cliff. It creates an airconditioned mini-rainforest type area where ferns and moss are growing. The water exiting the rock is supposed to have been absorbed from higher up over 300 years ago.

From weeping rock we hiked up to the hidden value, which is was about a 2~3 mile hike marked “difficult”. It was really fun, but challenging. We made it hundreds of feet above the valley floor and got to sit on a jagged area looking out over the trails and valley. We were holding Josh & Dan pretty close and tightly, but every was really proud that we made it that high! It was really fun!

On the next day we went on a 4 to 5 hour hike to the Emerald pools. The trail started by crossing the Virgin river via a wooden bridge, then slowly ascending into a side canyon. It gave a really nice view of the river valley and streams and waterfalls. There were beautiful flowers and plants of all types along with beautiful trees of all types of twisting shapes grabbing hold of the cliff faces.

The upper of the 4 Emerald Pools was amazing. It was a nitch hidden in the upper section of a canyon, protected on nearly all sides by 500 foot cliffs. Water spilled over the Eastern cliff wall and nearly turned back into mist before it hits the surface of the pool. The shade and moisture of the hidden little valley made it feel like we were transported to Oregon. The kids took off their shoes and played along the sand beaches and crystal water.

At Bryce, after recovering from a day of tummy aches – ugh, we drove along the scenic routes. Bryce is higher than Zion – nearly 9,000~10,000 feet above see level. There was still snow in many areas of the canyon. We took a 3 hour hike into the Queen’s Garden and Navajo Trail. It descended from sunrise point down into the canyon, through the queen’s garden and into the hoodoo amphitheater that are on most postcards of the canyon. It was a challenging hike due to the fairly drastic elevation changes, but was really fun and beautiful!

Grand (Windy) Canyon!

Hello everyone!

 

We’ve been out of internet range for a bit, so I’ll catch you up. We got 4 new tires for the back of the RV and the ghetto-fridge-wiring is holding up great. We made it to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on Saturday where we found a nice campsite in the Kaibab National Forest. (You can camp for free there, as long as you don’t leave any trace.)

 

Wow, there was still snow on the ground! It was beautiful – the snow was melting and there were bright blue lakes of water in amazing emerald green meadows. We saw lots of deer, a turkey, ducks and some other birds.

 

Sunday morning we got up and saw a new view of the Canyon that we never saw before. It was 20 miles or so from the more visited north rim area and it was really beautiful. From the ridge where was were, you could see a more eastern part of the Grand Canyon off in the distance. It was almost like a painting or backdrop. You can imagine what the first explorers might have thought – “What the heck is that giant gaping crack over there? Is that for real?!? It’s huge!!!.

 

From there, we went on to the Traditional North Rim Lodge and hiking area. It was gorgeous. You can walk out on a narrow path to a crag that overlooks the canyon. There are thousand+ foot drops on 3 sides when you finally get to the viewing area and drops on two sides for probably ¼ mile or so of the hike. Wow it was sure windy though!! The forecast was for a windy day and hanging out on the side of cliff that overlooks the biggest canyon in the world can sure amplify even that wind!! We were holding onto kids and rails to keep from going airborne like Dorthy & Toto!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wouldn't you know I should have replaced those back tires

Well, Gallup New Mexico wasn’t where we intended to stay the night, but heck, that tire store won’t open till tomorrow…

 

We were driving down the road enjoying ourselves with a good family book when we heard this huge explosion like sound. Jonathan thought the refrigerator exploded. I pulled over quickly, and we started looking around. Sure enough, our right inside tire – one of the ones we chose to NOT replace until next year had blow out. It had great tread still – It was all over the road like the remains of a tire grenade. Ugh, we should have had those replaced…

 

Let me tell you something about RVs that we learned today.

 

When a back tire on an RV explodes, it takes a lot of stuff with it… The muffler got beat-up and bent. The Wheel well got blasted and the two nearby compartments are now crunched in a bit where they meet up with the wheel well. There are also a bunch of wire bundles that go through that area. Now they don’t..

 

We were actually pretty lucky though. It was just our automatic step and refrigerator that stopped working  --- Funny how electrical devices are so picky about getting their wiring blown up and dragged down the highway. They just don’t like that and pretty much refuse to work after that. Step – Not a big deal. Refrigerator – Sort of a big deal. Missing tire – Pretty big deal.

 

SO we called Triple A to help with changing the tire – Luckily we had a spare since the Navajo reservation where we stopped is a little short on RV tires. Unfortunately, the previous owners who bought the current tires had bought a size slightly larger than the tires that were on the vehicle originally. Of course they did NOT buy a spare tire, they just kept the slightly SMALLER spare tire. Second NOTE about RVs – They usually have TWO tires on each side of the back axel and they pretty much need to all be the SAME size.  We put it on anyway.

 

After driving back to Gallup, NM where they had things like tire stores, Walmart, and HomeDepot, we found a place that would sell tires the proper size and in the proper quantity. (It’s amazing why a store would have (1) tire of a certain size.. Are there a lot of people driving unicycle trucks out there who only want NEW tires?) But luckily Gallup has some sane folks selling tires too, and we found someone who could help. Of course he was on his way out and we need to come back tomorrow to get them put on.

 

So this gave us plenty of time to shop at Home Depot for wiring materials. (For those of you who don’t know, Lowes and Home Depot are our favorite vacation spots – we spend a lot of our RV vacationing time at these stores. We’ve bought light knobs, aluminum pipes for when the kids broke our bed wrestling, screws, brackets, tools and other remodeling stuff. We’ve seen them all up and down the west coast last summer and were excited to see how the Gallup stores faired.) And as usual, it was like buying tickets to Disneyland. I came out of the store with two plastic bags and $150 less.

 

Out in the parking lot, Deanna had the Refrigerator access panel pulled off. We were looking the tell-tale signs of something missing from someplace that looked like it needed something stuck into. After finding some promising looking wire sized holes, we tried to figure out how the heck the wire mess hanging from the wheel well ever got to the place we had found. Had it ever – who knew – There was even a few other wires hanging around that looked like they hadn’t been connected in years? Were those important? Maybe the previous owners did their own repair work like us!

 

Well I figured a little experimental wire check was in order before I tried to rethread everything the professional way. There was a DC 12 +/- set of clamps that were lonely looking, so I figured what the heck, maybe we’d get lucky. I cut a couple lengths of promising looking wire I had picked up from Lowes and stuck them from the 12volt house battery to the fridge. And hey, it worked! The fridge got its DC juice it wanted and fired up the propane converter. (I’m still amazed that a fridge can run on propane.) Of course this was the TEST run. The wires were running out the house door along the outside wall of the RV and into the access panel. Since the sun was going down and the fridge was working, I decided I shouldn’t mess with this great getto job, so I just taped the wires in place and left them. (I told the kids not to trip on the wires running in through the door.) Deanna was of course thrilled that we didn’t have to empty the fridge tonight.

 

Important Tip on RV fridges – Never leave food like uncooked chicken in a Fridge that stops working – We did that last year and the chicken defrosted and found a way into various cracks and cranies of the freezers door panel. Add some El Paso summer heat and wal-LA! You’ve got the most nasty smell invented on the planet earth wafting through the RV. It took loads of Arm&Hammer, with plenty of bleech water injected through a turkey baister to finally get that smell gone! So no, Deanna didn’t mind the ugly ghetto-tape & wire job to get the fridge back online. We’ll have some time to reroute the wires and make it look more presentable soon.

 

We’ll wish us luck on those tires tomorrow. As much as we love being handy, it’d be fun to spend the rest of the trip out of maintenance/repair mode.

 

 

Learning to Breath

Before knocking off to sleep, I’m working on a book called “Mystically Wired” – a book on prayer from the pastor at Ann Arbor Vineyard. We live in an intentional Christian Community called Desert Rain that tries to be contemplative and prayer focused. We host retreats for groups and individuals and offer them an escape from the city. So I was thinking that this book might be a good view on how someone in the Vineyard is viewing the relatively new shift toward more ‘mystic’, or ‘unexplainable’ points of life – blended with our heavy-science-individualistic American culture. We’ve been listening to a lot of topics like this from the early church fathers, but the modern folks who are commenting on them are typically from the monastic communities, Catholic streams, or from older denominations. This is the first book from a Vineyard pastor that I’ve noticed specifically focusing on these topics as the exclusive subject of the book. (Note: Don’t let the word “Mystic” bother you – its just from the word ‘mystery’ – which means you can’t explain it with science. Christianity is a very Mystic religion.)

 

So far I like the book. The author (I’ll get his name for the next blog) described how he always felt obligated to pray, but wasn’t very good at it. “Pastors are supposed to pray! It’s their job!” So he forced himself to have a private prayer life but he always felt guilty that he didn’t like it very much. He started using a prayer book and practicing periods of silence. It helped him because he was tired and uninspired. He said it felt like cheating, but he started looking forward to it, because it didn’t rely on his own efforts as much. He was able to make the prayer time more of a retreat.

 

I can relate to him on these points. I’ve grown up feeling like written prayers were “cheating” and that you should pray your own prayers like in a conversation. But that wears down after a while and is hard to do 3 times a day. We’ve been practicing prayer meetings at the community 3 times a day, 5 days a week off-and-on for the last 5 years or so. We started with on-the-fly prayers, then went to “topic-based-on-the-fly-prayers”, where we all pray about something together. Eventually we went to starting each prayer time with a written prayer from a prayer book and having periods of silence, with some optional on-the-fly prayers at the end. This style does feel more sustainable just for the fact that you get sick of hearing you and your friends talk all the time! Its nice to know that if no-one is specifically inspired, we can just sit and listen to the breeze blowing. It’s a chance to listen to your own breath, reminding yourself that the Holy Spirit, Wind, and Breath are all the same word in the Bible. Its good to take a breath.

 

Time to do some more pondering 2010!

The Steele Fam is on an RV vacation again!! Hurray, and like last year, I was going to try blogging again. So here goes…

 

This year we’re going to try more of a hiking / slot canyon / river rafting type adventure. We’re going to repeat part of the trip we went on last year, but spend more time in the Utah area – seeing Bryce Canyon, doing some hiking, and spending time in Jackson, WY.

 

A bit about RVs…

 

The great thing about RVs is that the family gets to be together  while site seeing, but we don’t have to be smashed together in a car. We’ve got 4 kids – Mikaela (14), Jonathan (13), Joshua (7) and Daniel (6), so long trips in a car is a bit tight when you include luggage.

 

So we figured – hey, why wait till we’re retired, lets try RV trips now while the kids can enjoy them.

 

RVs combine the most irritating parts of vehicles and houses. They have all the stuff that need maintenance on vehicles like tires, shocks, suspension, electrical/battery stuff, starters, engines, oil changes, fluids of all types, spark plugs, etc. (See last years blogs.) This is combined with all the cool stuff from a house that needs maintenance like plumbing, air-conditioning, heating, water heaters, water pumps, beds, sofas, etc. You get the idea. So it allows you to pretty much have some type of problem every day of the trip along with plenty of things to work on when you get back!

 

But even with all that, we’ve been having a blast. The kids have named our RV “Rev”. Daniel was asking yesterday when I was filling up the water tank if “Rev” was thirsty. I told him that he sure was, “He’s been drinking fuel, water, oil, transmission fluid – you name it, He wants it!”

 

We had just got two new tires from Firestone last week for the front. They felt real smooth driving home, but when we started the trip out, I noticed that the steering wheel started to vibrate when we started driving above 70 mph. Since we love to listen to the CarTalk guys on our iPod, I remember that the tires might need to be rebalanced – I sure wish we did that before we left!!

 

We stopped near Elephant Butte to get some gas -- Pronounced Elephant “Butt” by Jonathan, “Why would anyone want to live in an elephant’s butt?!?” he exclaimed. It was around 7:00pm so I knew there was no chance to find anyone who could balance tires till tomorrow. But as I was pumping gas, I saw a young guy in one of the garage bays at the gas station. He didn’t look like he was doing much, and next to him – were my eyes deceiving me? No, there was a tire balancing machine! I figured, what the heck, I’ll ask him if he was up for balancing some tires. After convincing him that an RV is just an F350 truck with a big campershell, he said, “sure, I’ll give it a try”. He popped off each front wheel with ease and balanced them one at a time. $11 a tire later, and success! We get to go 75mph without feeling like Scotty is going to yell from the back, “Cap’n, the ship can’t take much more of this – she’s gonna fly a’part!” Of course if we go much faster than that, all the other things that rattle, shake and bump, start kicking in – but 75~80mph is pretty good for a top speed.

 

We stopped in Albuquerque last night at the Flying Eagle Travel Center / Truck Stop. It seems to be on an Indian reservation – We’re right across the street from a circus tent style Casino and there are about 20 other big rigs in the lot. Because you kind of feel weird being the only RV in the lot with all the trucks, I asked inside to makes sure it was OK to park with them. She said it was no problem. We kind of felt like the little poodle hanging out with the junk-yard dogs, but hey, it was free!

 

More to come! (Mikaela is going to be blogging too, so make sure to check her blog – Link on the right of my page.)