Taking Things into My Own Hands

Grilling has been a significant delight now for several years. As my skills have increased (marginally, I know), I have desired to grill a wider variety of foods; foods that would require hours of “low and slow” goodness.

Yet due to my impatient personality, I have focused most of my grilling on relatively quick and super-hot cooking techniques. (Yes, I just wrote super-hot, but I didn’t mean it like super-cute.) After all, it is pretty easy to build a hot fire and quickly sear meat. To my shame, I have not attempted to cook many meats that require hours or even all day in a smoky, low temperature fire. The longest meal I have ever cooked has been the turkey on Thanksgiving, which only required about 2 hours.

I knew that in order to barbecue cuts of meat that needed six or eight hours I would have to manage the heat of the coals better than I typically manage my Saturday mornings. Frankly, I have not been happy with my success in cooking ribs, so my desires have leaned toward having a thermometer built into the grill lid. I tried using an oven thermometer with little success as it always got in the way of the actual food on the grill, not to mention turning a dark shade of dirty orange from the smoke.

My eyes started to wander away from my faithful grill towards one of those pretty models in the store that had a built in thermometer. I love Weber and want to stay with the brand. At the same time I realize that the brand name is expensive and they designed their line of charcoal grills to pull as much money from my wallet as possible. Hence only the most expensive models include the relatively cheap thermometer.

As much as I wanted a grill with a thermometer, I could not justify spending $300 on a second grill with a thermometer. Don’t get me wrong, I can justify a second grill; just not a $300 one.

Well, I explained my dilemma to the helpful men at Frattalone’s Ace Hardware in Arden Hills and we landed on an inexpensive, if somewhat DIY solution. Weber does sell a replacement thermometer for their gas grills, which would do the job perfectly.

So, I took things into my owns hands, in the suburban American weekend warrior sort of way.

Mission accomplished.

Do the Hard Thing First

One of the banes of my personality is procrastination. When I a was an engineer, I used the phrase “Do the hard thing first,” repeatedly in an attempt to keep myself on task. Being productive is an ongoing battle for me. In fact, one of the many new books I am reading is Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Alan Jacobs, who I quote here often, posts a lot of interesting quotes on his blog, more than 95 theses. One of his posts today speaks into my problem of procrastination.

“Every time we postpone some necessary event—whether we put off doing the dishes till morning or defer an operation or some difficult labor or study—we do so with the implication that present time is more important than future time (for if we wished the future to be as free and comfortable as we wish the present to be, we would perform the necessary actions as soon as they prove themselves necessary). There is nothing wrong with this, as long as we know what we are doing, and as long as the present indeed holds some opportunity more important than the task we delay. But very often our decision to delay is less a free choice than a semiconscious mechanism—a conspiracy between our reasoning awareness and our native dislike of pain. The result of this conspiracy is a disconcerting contradiction of will; for when we delay something, we simultaneously admit its necessity and refuse to do it. Seen more extensively, habitual delays can clutter our lives, leave us in the annoying position of always having to do yesterday’s chores. Disrespect for the future is a subtly poisonous disrespect for the self, and forces us, paradoxically, to live in the past.”

—Robert Grudin, quoted by Mandy Brown

I think this fits well with my simple idea of doing the hard things first.

Football Example of Opportunity Costs

A paragraph from a recent Run of Play post—A Wrinkle in Time—that wonderfully portrays the reality of opportunity costs. And, no, he is not talking about American Football.

When we are young, the stars of the football world tower over us, not least because, well, at that age any adult evokes a certain amount of awe. (To an eight-year-old, every adult is wise.) Throughout most of our childhood, we think ourselves invincible, and the world ageless; only as our teenage years end do we start to see that choices are coming down the road, closing off certain paths. Yet even then these decisions seem far away, mere abstractions that teachers and parents have conjured up to entice us to do a little extra work. Rarely do the millions playing rec soccer in high school possess the self-awareness to realize that already the dreams of scoring in the World Cup final (and, in many Americans’ cases, finally vaulting soccer to its rightful place at top of the sports heap) ended when we didn’t go for the travel team in elementary school. Even the most devoted young fans, when following the U-17 and U-20 World Cups, or their favorite clubs’ youth teams, see those players just as contemporaries, classmates if we’d gone to a different school. It’s only when we finally see a true up-and-coming star younger than us, whether Gareth Bale or Andy Najar or Josh McEachran or Juan Agudelo, that the real, physical evidence confronts us: those dreams are well and truly over.

Update: A friend noticed that today’s post on Run of Play was a bit inappropriate, so I removed the link to the main Web site to help you avoid running into something you didn’t want or intend to see. The link to the quoted post should be fine.

Pride and Guilt

Tony Sumpter wrote an excellent post over at Credenda.org about pride and guilt that ties in with much of what has been both in and behind the posts on this blog. It would be good to read his entire post; but if you want the summary version read on.

Tony explains the relationship between pride and guilt...

One of the ways pride poisons his victims is through false guilt. One of the unintended consequences of thinking too highly of yourself is the reality of not meeting your own expectations. What does a proud person do when he or she knows that they are not as smart, not as gifted, not as diligent, not as beautiful as they have positioned themselves to be? What do you do when you look in the mirror and you realize that your projection of yourself doesn’t match reality? Well, like the idiot sons of Adam that we are, we frequently take what we think is the path of least resistance and we feel bad for ourselves. We feel guilty. But instead of feeling guilty for setting up legalistic super-standards for ourselves, we feel guilty for not meeting our legalistic super-standards. And we do all of this with Bible verses and pious thoughts and prayers. O, I know I should be sharing the gospel with every person I come in contact with, but I’m just so cowardly and selfish. Or I know my house should look like a model home on HGTV, but I’m just not as organized as I should be. Or I know I really should be using my theological gifts to write books and speak at conferences, but I just don’t use my time as wisely as I should. I know my children should recite Bible verse on command and never have a resistant look in their eyes, but I just don’t spend enough time with them or discipline them consistently enough.

The good news that repels this relationship between pride and guilt is the gospel.

But the good news of Jesus is freedom from guilt and sin. And this means in part that we are freed to be human. We are freed to be us. We are freed to be finite creatures. We are freed by the gospel to get tired. We are freed by the gospel to say ‘no’ to some things and ‘yes’ to others. We are freed by the gospel to be filled with the love of Christ to the very brim of our souls and spilling over, and then we can be fruitful in the tiny plot of planet earth that we’ve been given. We are freed to plant a garden, open a business, and have a family. We are freed to work hard and harvest the field that God has called us to. And since we’re sinners, we’ll screw that up sometimes too, and we’ll fall down on our faces. But the good news is that we can get up, ask for forgiveness and get back to work. But a big, sovereign God frees us to be little, humble people with bright eyes and laughing hearts.

I pray that the Lord will give me the grace to be fruitful and content in the tiny plot of land he has given me.

The Value of all the Foregone Alternatives Summed Together

2010 has been a big year. Wendy and I celebrated 20 years of marriage, I turned 40, and I entered fully into my second career. (The first career was in civil engineering, the second is in higher education.) As can be read in previous posts, I have been working through this major life transition for the last year or two and am quite surprised at where the Lord has placed me. Through this career shift, I have pondered many of the other things that I want to do or desire to accomplish in this life. Matt and I call this our pipe-dream list.

For example, today I saw an announcement of a new masters degree at another college that I would love to pursue. Yet, as I look around at my wife and kids and think through my various responsibilities—like loving my wife as Christ loved the church and gave up his life for her, and providing food and education for these children—it is clear I won’t be packing my bags for Moscow (Idaho) anytime soon. Life-long learning is a good thing. I can’t wait to keep learning unfettered once we get to the next great life.

Alan Jacobs, who I increasingly admire and enjoy reading, quoted Robert Nozick in his essay, “Opportunity Costs,” from his book Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant.

As Robert Nozick once wrote, “Although [young people] would agree, if they thought about it, that they will realize only some of the (feasible) possibilities before them, none of these various possibilities is yet excluded in their minds. The young live in each of the futures open to them….Economists speak of the opportunity cost of something as the value of the best alternative forgone for it. For adults, strangely, the opportunity cost of our lives appears to us to be the value of all the foregone alternatives summed together, not merely the best other one. When all the possibilities were yet still before us, it felt as if we would do them all” (Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring, p. 67).

The key sentence, and the one which has caused the most reflection is, “For adults, strangely, the opportunity cost of our lives appears to us to be the value of all the foregone alternatives summed together, not merely the best other one.” Several points regarding the opportunity cost of my life have surfaced out of the pool of thinking over that sentence.

First, the opportunity cost is only getting higher with each passing day. Recently, Pastor Sam blogged…

At this stage of my life, I must admit I am never going to be on the high school debate team, play on the college basketball team, pay off that mortgage in my forties, run that marathon in my fifties, and so on. For example, the evaporating number of days remaining in my life implies that I will have less and less time to read many of the great books.

Second, now that I have crossed the 40-yard line, I need to be ruthless about what things I spend my time doing. If with the passing of every day, the opportunity cost of my life keeps increasing, then the importance of using my remaining time wisely increases. If I ever want to accomplish any of the items on my pipe-dream list, I need to be ruthless in cutting out the things that are not on the list.

Third, I need to make the most of my career. There is no longer time to reboot—like we have done in the last six years—unless the next opportunity stands on the shoulders of this one. The time is past to start over (again). I do realize that the Lord will lead as he is pleased, but you know what I mean.

Fourth, Pastor Sam is right, I cannot grieve over the things that have passed; instead, I must be thankful that a sovereign God who ordains my steps loves me. If I am in Christ, God is 100% for me, and he has designed my life to display the glory of his son in me. I should be thankful, not regretful.

Fifth, as my inevitable death draws nearer, the importance of doing everything—whether it is eating or drinking—to the glory of God increases exponentially. I will face the Judge of the Universe in the relatively near future. I do not want to have wasted my life.

All of this, then, causes me to sincerely wonder what it means to not waste my life. This is not as simple as it seems. If you are familiar with the circles I run in, then please don’t write off this question. It is worth thinking about. More to follow.

More and more people’s jobs are made up of dozens or even hundreds of e-mails a day

“What you’ve probably discovered, at least at some level, is that a calendar, though important, can really effectively manage only a small portion of what you need to organize. And daily to-do lists and simplified priority coding have proven inadequate to deal with the volume and variable nature of the average professional’s workload. More and more people’s jobs are made up of dozens or even hundreds of e-mails a day, with no latitude left to ignore a single request, complaint, or order. There are a few people who can (or even should) expect to code everything an “A,” a “B,” or a “C” priority, or who can maintain some predetermined list of to-dos that the first telephone call or interruption from their boss won’t totally undo.”

—David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, p. 8