Our Father in heaven,
Reveal who you are.
Set the world right;
Do what’s best— as above, so below.
Keep us alive with three square meals.
Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others.
Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil.
You’re in charge!
You can do anything you want!
You’re ablaze in beauty!
Yes. Yes. Yes.
(Matthew 6:9-13 aka The Lord’s Prayer)

Enough worry. Enough stress. Enough not knowing who I am. “The world is full of so-called prayer warriors who are prayer-ignorant. They’re full of formulas and programs and advice, peddling techniques for getting what you want from God. Don’t fall for that nonsense. This is your Father you are dealing with, and he knows better than you what you need. With a God like this loving you, you can pray very simply…”

I really needed that today…

In the migration, the blog also has a new name: “A Geek’s World”. I must tell you that I don’t regard the term “geek” to be an insult – it’s actually a wonderful reflection of my nature. As the tagline says – I love knowing stuff about stuff. One day it might be doing an intro course to the iPhone SDK to develop iPhone apps; another day it might be finding cheats for MarioKart on the Nintendo Wii, or musing about social phenomena observed at the local shopping centre (see future blog on buskers!).

Above all, when it comes to importance, is the fact that I am married to the most wonderful Norwegian woman, Ciwi, who keeps my feet and mind grounded in reality and gives me cause and motivation to try to break out of the typical social awkwardness that most geeks find themselves familiar with.

IT – I hate to love it and love to hate it! Why is it that I dread social interaction because I know it will inevitably lead to enduring the tale of someone’s current difficulties with their computer! I now know what doctors feel like at parties!

How to do it?

• Step One: get her to choose the ring! (Unglamorous, affects the surprise, but genetics dictate that I am not the expert in things that are shiny… God forbid she look down at her hand and think, “it’s a nice gesture, but he has *horrible* taste!”)
• Step Two: recover from spending so much money on something so small
• Step Three: the moment that the ring appears and slides onto her finger for the first time will stay with her for the rest of her life. *DON’T* screw it up!
• Step Four: marry her as quickly as possible!

That’s about it really! The ring is a representation of how much you value the person you are asking to tie themselves to you. If you go about this lightly, what does that say about the value you place upon her? It says, “I want you to be mine and mine alone… I am serious about this and I’m not messing around. Whenever you look at your finger, you’ll be reminded of the fact that you are loved, valued and cherished above all else (plus it’s really pretty when it sparkles!).”

Since I originally wrote this, some key details changed – notably that I gave Ciwi something sparkly for her finger. Heck yes!

So without further ado, 20 things about me…

1. I am viciously defensive about my church (Hillsong Church) when anyone criticises cos it’s MY church! (Ciwi agrees with this one!)
2. Although most people know me as someone who fixes their computers, I actually chose modern languages at uni rather than computer science for the primary reason that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life fixing other people’s computer crap! (Ironic that I do this both for my employment and for friends of friends of friends!)
3. I would fly halfway around the world to volunteer at Hillsong Conference if it came down to it.
4. I am engaged to a beautiful Norwegian girl called Siv Renathe, but everyone knows as Ciwi (she’ll kill me for using her real name!) who is 6 years younger than me – I’m in no danger of having a midlife crisis in 15 years time and running off with a hot young girlfriend because I’ll already have that!
5. Ciwi’s birthday is the day after mine, which is the followed by Christmas Day.
6. We’ve been together for 13 months but only spent six of those months together – so over the long distance relationship thing, but I think we did it really well. (She is BACK IN AUSTRALIA now!)
7. It really frustrates me when other people are late, yet I’m late myself all the time. (Ciwi is nodding in agreeance with this statement!)
8. I absolutely love languages, even though I don’t feel proficient in any other than English – I’m learning Dutch, write work emails in French, pick errors in German copy, layout books in Greek, understand a bit of spoken Spanish and play around with Norwegian.
9. I love grammar. I’m weird! Whenever I learn a language, I make a beeline for the grammar. I think it’s something to do with the genetic mix of my dad’s extreme scientific mind and my mum’s love for literature. Our family dinner times leave guests bewildered – we argue at the top of our lungs about grammar. We all know the proper usage of an apostrophe and lament its misuse in common English writing today.
10. I live with great friends, David and Kellie and their beautiful one year old daughter Milla – she is seriously the best behaved (and cutest!) baby ever – I have never been woken up my her, not even once!
11. I love Jesus but I drink a little. If you’re Norwegian and have a problem with that, I’m sorry… I like a nice Sauvignon Blanc (white wine for those unfamiliar with the French).
12. My family is truly international: there was a day not so long ago when I was in Sydney, my mum and brother were in Perth, my other brother was living in the UK, my sister was somewhere in Europe and my dad was in Malaysia. (Maybe I’ve got the specific countries wrong there, but I know we were 6 people in 5 different places!)
13. I am a High School Musical fan. I got hooked on it by a 5 year old and that was 18 months ago. In my opinion, there’s an HSM song for every occasion, even more so now that we have the third movie.
14. I drive a little Ford Festiva – when I have two passengers and am driving uphill, I get overtaken by a bus!
15. I like being a geek and knowing stuff about stuff!
16. I learned new stuff about my mum when I read her response to this quiz!
17. I’m a Mac fan (thanks to my boss!) and carry my laptop and iPod around with me most of the time.
18. Marco Borsato – even if you have no interest in Holland or the Dutch language, listen to this guy’s music – it is seriously amazing! It’s just an added bonus that most of the Dutch I have learned has been through learning this dude’s songs. Ik spreek geen Nederlands, alleen Marco Borsato!
19. Holland. I want to move there. Don’t ask why – I don’t get it either, but it’s what I want to do. P.S. Dutch is a really fun language to learn – you ought to try it sometime!
20. I don’t work for the church, but I spend my whole week (and I mean my WHOLE week!) working for Nick & Chris Caine at Equip & Empower, where everything we do is about building the local church globally, and more recently, we added the abolition of human trafficking to that list.

So often, we underestimate the ability that music has to lead us on a journey, to tell us a story, to communicate that which is beyond words and needs to be injected directly into the soul. Many people downplay this powerful role that music has, some try to strip it of its power and relegate it to the ‘background’.

Enter the filmmaker – the person with a story to tell and 24 frames per second of widescreen technicolor canvas to do it. They can create a convincing set, sculpt emotion and mood by lighting, place memorable lines of dialogue on the lips of the actors, but without a musical score, the story is two dimensional. It is a series of lines, events and places strung together to create a narrative. But the music adds that third dimension: it brings movement and emotion to an otherwise flat picture.

Music is the ultimate storyteller because it sticks with you long after the more tangible aspects of the story (or film in this case) have left you. You may not be able to recall the overture or the predominant theme note by note, but you are left with the essence of the story. You will remember the celebration; you will remember the tragedy. You will remember the tension; you will remember the resolution. The skilled composer will use all the tools at his disposal – dominant melodies, crafted harmonies, blends of complementary rhythms and instruments – to take you on that journey, as he knows better than anyone else the lasting effect of a story told by music.

The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
– William Wordsworth

One illustration I’ve been given before (I think it might have come from Chesterton or someone) is that balance is not finding a neutral, safe seat of mediocrity but a reaching to embrace all extremes and hanging there in the midst of all the extremes. I like that idea – the fact that you CAN have it all, and that in doing so, you can be a balanced person.

Another idea I just had was that balance isn’t really the goal. Picture a tightrope walker – they are walking along a tightrope, keeping their balance and trying to get to the other side. Note the purpose of this exercise – everyone is looking at him wondering how he is going to stay on the tightrope, but that’s not what he’s doing! He is going from A to B! The tightrope is just the means to get there, and it’s tricky to stay on it. The moment you stop and start thinking about staying on the tightrope, you start to lose it. The key is to focus on the destination, the purpose of staying on the tightrope to begin with. The goal is not to make sure you’re not too unevenly loaded, but that you keep moving towards the destination. And think about it: the more the tightrope walker is moving forward, the more the balance takes care of itself.

I want to live a balanced life, but that is not my goal. I don’t want to compartmentalise and set aside this portion of life for work, and then set aside another chunk of ‘me’ time in the name of balance. The purpose of my life is not to have a nice, comfortable existence that doesn’t stretch me too much. The purpose of my life deserves its own blog post, but can be summarised in this: it’s not about me! Focusing too much on the balance amounts to focusing everything on me here and now. Sorry – again, not interested. I need to be moving forward at a fast enough pace towards my destination for the issue of balance to just take care of itself.

My friend who is currently engaged just admitted to his fiancee that he’s going to bring a book to read on the front row until she steps out of the car!

I was thinking of this in relation to dreams and desires today. I’ve come across people who don’t give themselves permission to dream or to think big. They wouldn’t put it as such, excusing themselves for being realistic. But for one’s dreams to live within the confines of a present situation severely limits the capacity to break out of that. Complete satisfaction with reality robs you of any motivation to better that reality. Goethe said that “to be pleased with one’s limits is a wretched state.”

True, there is always the element of lying to yourself: the things you dream may never come to pass. Friedrich Nietzsche said, “The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.” To be consumed by your dream with no regard for the present reality is foolishness. The dream becomes nothing more than a fantasy with no chance of coming to pass.

Let me then propose a balance, a solution that embraces both extremes: a dream gives the dreamer direction for their present reality. A dream without direction or foundation in present reality is merely fantasy. A present reality without a dream is a mundane existence. The purpose of a dream is to determine and motivate the direction from the present reality to the future reality.

Now allow me to use examples from my own life. I dream of being a great husband and a great dad in the future. I am neither of those at the moment (something to do with the fact that I’m not married, nor a father!). If this dream doesn’t affect my actions today, it’s just a fantasy. I will never become these things just by dreaming them: I need to get myself around married couples and families and learn from them, to pursue relational and emotional growth in my existing relationships, intentionally becoming the kind of person that I need to be. If I didn’t have this dream, the likelihood of my ending up at the same destination are even smaller – I didn’t even have the motivation to try, let alone something to act upon!

I may not step into my dreams overnight, but I refuse to aim for nothing. Even if the outworking of that dream looks different to what I originally saw, I believe my life will be different and better as a result of acting upon a dream.