Archive for November 2013
Work
I was amused to find this in my fortune cookie last night.
For most of the last thirteen years, I have worked on IBM’s z/OS Communications Server mainframe networking product. Over the last two years I have still reported to Comm Server management but have been on loan to other IBM product areas as part of helping to lend our networking, security and high-availability expertise. I’ve only had three managers in the last thirteen years, which I think is fairly unusual.
But now I’m making the move to the IBM PureApplication System organization, where I have been working for the past year. You can think of it as “cloud in a box” (although this is both a little inapt and also oversimplified).
I’ll miss working with all of the wonderful folks in Comm Server. But I’m looking forward to wrestling with a new challenge.
Reformation
Jon Barlow writes:
History works because of the suckers. I am not ashamed to be counted among the suckers. If the sucker can rule his own heart, he is greater than he who can rule a city (Prov. 16:32). Tell me that the broken politics in America right now is not an externalized vision of your own heart and I’ll praise your self mastery. Otherwise, there is a city for you to rule right now. It requires no compromise. You are a little laboratory of the word and spirit and and you can try out any program of reform you like right now. You can experiment with incentives. You can legislate morality. You can implement austerity. You can give everything away. You can keep everything and use it for good. There will be a day when your little city stands before a much more exalted bar than a senate oversight committee meeting.
Jordan Ballor quotes Bavinck on a similar theme:
All good, enduring reformation begins with ourselves and takes its starting point in one’s own heart and life. If family life is indeed being threatened from all sides today, then there is nothing better for each person to be doing than immediately to begin reforming within one’s own circle and begin to rebuff with the facts themselves the sharp criticisms that are being registered nowadays against marriage and family. Such a reformation immediately has this in its favor, that it would lose no time and would not need to wait for anything. Anyone seeking deliverance from the state must travel the lengthy route of forming a political party, having meetings, referendums, parliamentary debates, and civil legislation, and it is still unknown whether with all that activity he will achieve any success. But reforming from within can be undertaken by each person at every moment, and be advanced without impediment.
I gotta have my orange juice. 