Breaking the habit

Last weekend, despite heavy snowfall, my wife and I decided to undertake an excursion across the border into the wilds of Ohio. After an hour on the winding wooded roads of South Eastern Ohio we made it to our destination safely, the Southern Park Mall, where we spent the evening shopping. Well, sort of.

The first store we stopped in was Gap, where we found a cute red hat with a pom-pom on the top for Heidi. On top of being cute it was on the clearance rack for under $5! Needless to say, we didn't think twice. It wasn't until after we had made the purchase that we even thought to look where it was made. Sure enough, Made in China. Fail.

As you can imagine, we made sure to check every label from there on out. Out of everything we looked at we only found one item that was not made in China. A brand of shoes called Born that is made in Mexico. This adventure taught us a valuable lesson though. Ingrained habits are hard to break. Because we rarely buy anything besides food, my shopping habits have reverted to the way they were before our Made in China experiment. When I do go to buy something, I don't bother with where it was made, how it was made, or anything besides my desire for it. Its a sort of tunnel vision.

Then I got to wondering...how much of my life do I live like that? How often am I blind to the majestic and complex world in which we live? How often do I ignore the motivation and feelings of the people around me and focus only on getting what I want from them? Why am I content to be unaware of what is actually happening around me?

I don't want to live that way. It seems I'm going to have to keep a closer eye on all of this.

HTC ftw!

This is the generic message from each of the companies I contacted:

Regarding your concern, XXX has manufacturing plants in many countries around the world. XXX models are not usually manufactured in a particular plant, but in more than one manufacturing facility at the same time. For this reason, it is not possible to determine in which country a unit is manufactured beforehand. However, please note that XXX is a company committed to quality in all the steps of the manufacturing process. All our facilities undergo rigorous quality assurance processes to ensure that all products comply with XXX's high quality standards.

Pretty much says, "Our phones are made/put together in China!" So as you can imagine, getting the following message:

Thank you for contacting HTC Technical Support via email about where our devices are manufactured and put together.

I am happy to provide you that information. All our devices are manufactured and assembled in Taiwan. I hope this helps to answer your question about HTC devices.

*w00t* This means the Droid Eris and the Nexus One are good! Now watch as I don't have the money to get a new phone :).

The Phone Problem

As a result of leaving my cell phone charger in Lancaster I have been without a phone for the last week. This brought up an interesting question. If something were to happen to my phone in the next year, would I be able to buy a replacement? Being hopelessly attached to the evil little thing, this quarry has sent me all over the internet for the last few days, desperately trying to find a phone that wasn't produced or constructed in China.

The results have not been pretty so far. So far I have found that Blackberry, LG, Samsung and Motorola all produce phones in China. I have e-mails in to Nokia and HTC, but the little information I've found on their production doesn't leave me hopeful.

Interestingly enough, the iPhone is made of parts produced in Japan and Taiwan, but those parts are then shipped to China to be assembled and packaged. Ah well, just another reason not to jump on the wagon.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for HTC, a Taiwanese company, because they make Google's new Nexus One.

Chances are I'll be using the same phone for the next year, but that may not be a bad thing. With me going back to school and Heidi's debt to pay off I probably shouldn't be spending money on a new phone anyway.

On a related note, if you find any cool "Not Made in China" products or spot things I should avoid, drop me a note. It;d be a big help.

Not Made in China

I have recently been talking with various people about the advantages (and disadvantages) of Localization verses Globalization. In an effort to get a proper understanding of the hold that China has on the United States' economy I would like to spend the next year buying only products that are not produced or packaged in China.

My loving wife has agreed (on the condition that it doesn't get out of hand) and so we are good to go. This is the plan. As of January 11th, 2010, Heidi and I will no longer purchase anything that has been made or packaged in China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba or North Korea (the surviving Communist countries-I'll be referring to their products collectively as CCM-Communist Country Made). Over the next week I am going to be doing some research to try and come up with lists of safe products and brands as well as delving a bit deeper into the economic and social implications buying non-CCM products will have.

This idea of Localization is really catching my fancy so I'll be doing a bit more research on that as well.

Blessings.

Don't Feed the Beast

Believe me when I say that I could teach seminars on faking it. Through out my life I've learned the expressions and postures necessary to convey the maximum amount of me-and-God-are-super-tight with the minimum amount of spiritual work and vulnerability. Due to the incredibly diverse number of churches I visited growing up I can judge the correct angle/height of hand raising needed to impress others with my devotion and humility. For most missionary kids this skill is like a gag-reflex, it kicks in when we are threatened and up spews all the important words and actions. This is what happens when you are raised in a pressure-cooker of religious belief. Asked to pray? No problem, I've heard the masters-and sat through their 45 minute dialogues. Asked to talk about what God is doing in my life? Piece of cake when you know the terminology that can take any old event and turn it into a bona fide God-sighting. All these tricks are worthless though, unless you remember rule #1. Never stick around. You can't keep the faking up forever and so, unless you always keep moving you will be found out and exposed as the sinner you really are. Does not matter how good you are, if you don't keep rolling along people will catch on.

Obviously, this is not the best system in the world. In fact it is down-right horrible, take it from me. Yet, for the longest time I did not know how else to live. I thought I was doing it right, following the correct formula for a spirit-filled, purpose-driven, God-fearing life, yet when I was truly honest with myself I had to admit that I had no clue what I was doing. On I struggled, hiding my feelings of purposelessness behind seemingly solid spirituality, never finding what I was missing. Thankfully our Lord is full of grace and He has brought me a long way since those days, breaking and reshaping me until I came to understand what key ingredient I was missing.

I was recently reminded by a non-believing friend about the single most important part of a Christian's walk, this key ingredient if you will. We were comparing Scripture to a letter between friends and I had one of those /facepalm moments. My friend said that he thought it would be really stupid if one of his friends sent him a letter and then they never hung out, and all he had to base their relationship on was this old letter that he kept reading over and over. Describes me pretty well actually. For someone who claims to be friends with Jesus, I spend a ridiculously small amount of time with him. For someone who claims that the Bible is the wellspring of life and the source of all truth, I sure do spend a lot of energy consuming other things.

See, the key to Christianity is this, you are what you eat. I'm not joking. If you were to practice no other principle in your life, you would be fine. Don't believe me? Keep reading.

Romans 7 and 8 talks about the split nature of all Christians, the flesh and the spirit, each warring against the other for control of our lives like the mini angel and devil in the Emperor's New Groove. What people forget is that there is a third part involved in all this; the head between them that decides which it is going to submit to. This third part, the decision making bit, feeds either the flesh or the spirit by submitting too, and following the desires of one or the other. When we feed our flesh by living for ourselve-whether that is playing video games, over indulgence or masturbation-our flesh grows stronger and becomes more dominant. When we deny our flesh-by living for others-it grows weaker, and is less dominant. This is all well and good but when we leave it here, as so many do, a void is created in our life and eventually our old habits of selfish living move back in to fill it. Even as we deny our selfish side we must be feeding our spirit in order to make it stronger, strong enough to dominate our lives, leading us in true life. It is not enough for me to remove bad activities and habits from my life, I must build good habits and start good activities to replace them.

Do you see it? The key to the whole thing? If we want to live lives worthy of the Gospel of Jesus Christ it is imperative that we spend our time feeding our spirit, giving it nourishment, exercising it, submitting to it. How do we do that? Spend time with that friend who sent us the letter. Fill your life with Scripture, prayer and worship. Eat, sleep and drink the truth that is found in the Gospel. Focus your gaze on the only being truly worthy of your attention. And when you fail to do this, like I do every day, remember that our failing is turned into victory in the Cross. Get up and try again. This is a matter of life and death, of vital importance to your soul.

Interaction

I've got this theory about how women deal with guys they don't quite know how to handle. I first observed it with a close friend in college and then refined my theory in the subsequent years. It resurfaced after I got married when I noticed all my friend's wives were doing the same thing. When ever we were in a situation where the girl didn't feel especially confident or was unsure of how to proceed they would refer to the guy who was the source of their problems as a small child or with a condescending air, as if to infer that they were correct simply because of an age/maturity difference-even if no such difference existed. My wife and all the other women I confronted about this denied it emphatically, but they would, wouldn't they?

Humans have the understandable tendency to reduce objects and ideas in size until they are, or seem, manageable. This can be seen everywhere, from the division of gigantic tracts of land into small maps to the scientific categorization of every variation in plant life we are aware of. Somehow, our solar system becomes more manageable when we turn it into a three foot model, people become less perplexing when we analyze and label their behavior. To the bewildering images thrown on canvas by an empty artist we say, "post-modern" and to the confused business man who struggles to find meaning we say, "Mid-life crisis". Faced with an omnipotent, eternal, uber-complex being, it makes perfect sense that our minds carve out a small chunk, put it carefully in a box and label it God. If we did not do so our minds would just shut down. Give it a shot right now. Try to wrap your mind around the concept that God is everywhere, at the same time, interacting with everything, simultaneously. It is not possible. Our brains were not built to think in multiple dimensions at the same time. We have a hard enough time keeping one thought in our heads, let alone, two or three or infinite.

How then, practically speaking, do we interact with God? Most often, I divide him up into small pieces that I think I can handle. A method as faulty as it is common. The past few weeks have been revealing an alternate method, if you can even call it that, for handling my relationship with the Almighty. In his book, Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton says, "The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits." What a profound thought? What if, instead of dividing God into compact, easy to manage portions that fit inside my head, I instead began to dwell "in the heavens" with him. What if I were to seek to be constantly in his presence instead of seeking to introduce him, piecemeal, into mine?

This deserves more thought. What do you think?