Statistical process control and the will of God

A geeky look at discerning God’s will…

Concert at library

Today the Sacramento Youth Symphony Premier Orchestra performed at the Sacramento Library. I had never been there before… imagined a small, stuffy room. Boy, was I wrong! It’s actually a super huge hall attached to the book part of the library. I didn’t bring my camera (we were rushing to get out the door) so all the pictures below were taken from my iPhone… so they were a little crooked and lighting was not too great. But it gives a general idea!

Here’s a picture of the hall, with the orchestra at the bottom. There’s a cool second floor gallery you can sit and look through the railings. (You can kind of see some people sitting on the right.)

Here’s the shot looking up where you can see the people sitting on the balcony. Wow, I just realized the building is 3 stories tall! That’s a huge library!

Here’s a better shot of the orchestra below.

Not only was the building impressive, but the acoustics were amazing!!! We sat in the third row and the music was so clear and rich. They definitely designed this building for concerts!

Here’s our daughter, warming up before the concert (before most of the rest of the orchestra showed up). We later found out she is the youngest one in the orchestra at 13 years old. (The kids go up to 21 years.) She just had a birthday a few months ago.

There she is, smack in the middle, half hidden by another guy in front. This is when they were still warming up.

I got a kick out of the fact that all the double bass players (and many of the cello players) all wore Christmas hats. One even put hat on their bass.

The next youngest player was 14. He did a sax solo. Very impressive!

The conductor had a great sense of humor and made the concert a lot of fun. At the end he had little kids come up and conduct the orchestra, just to show how insignificant the conductor really was. (Kinda funny, as musicians know that is definitely not true!) Megan told us ahead of time that they were told to play on autopilot. They didn’t follow the kids, though some of the kids actually had really good rhythm! It was very funny watching the musicians eyeing the “conductor” and smiling.

It was a super concert. I am really glad that we got to go even though I didn’t find out about the concert until yesterday (ahem, someone forgot to tell me, but the guilty party shall remain nameless), and I didn’t find out the time until today. That meant at church I had to do some scrambling but some very kind people stepped in to take over my responsibilities.

Oh, also this week I had a fun chance to be a little creative. One of our members brought in a ceramic nativity set for us to borrow for the Christmas season and I got to decorate the table. Not bad considering we had zero budget and I had to scrabble around for existing items to make it look good. We actually made this table our Meet and Greet table, which is why there is a basket there (it holds packets for newcomers).

I did end up going to Joann Fabrics and buying a little piece of the gold cloth under Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus because it looked a bit bare without it. But everything else was existing stuff: tablecloths, scrap boxes, big binders to put on the boxes (because the boxes sagged), garland with lights, little golden pears I plundered from last year’s Christmas projects, and extra gold ornaments.

Here’s another view.

Very fun to do some creative stuff once in a while and try something new. (I’ve never set up a nativity set before!)

Better Brainstorming for Innovation

New post at Visual Church Leader: how to do better brainstorming to develop more ideas.

Connecting People: The Lego Illustration

A look at how friendships look like Legos…

New posts

More posts from my Visual Church Leader blog:

Front Door Venues

Moving People from Disengagement to Full Involvement

Chasm of Involvement (making it easier to get people involved)

Strength out of weakness?

Being honest here, doing announcements at church is not my favorite thing to do. I am not an up front person and much prefer to be anonymous in the back. I have great admiration for people who are good up front and enjoy it (there are a couple people on staff).

So I did announcements this past week and in a follow-up evaluation was told that it was way better than before! Apparently I was a bit too perky and loud and energetic up front before. So the comment for this week was, “Whatever you did, keep doing it!”

I said, “Uh… well, I was really tired and also I didn’t practice the announcements.” I guess I was a bit less hyper because I was trying to figure out what I was going to say next!

Apparently, God works when we are weak. I just love that. I am dead beat exhausted and would prefer to crawl back into bed… but He gives us strength when we need it!

5 Reasons People Leave a Church

More on closing the back door… I have been mulling over why people leave or don’t attend regularly.

Check out the post.

Photos and fencing

This past week was quite windy. Tuesday as I was driving to work, I noticed 3 huge tumbleweeds totally blocking the turn lane. Even though the wind was blowing really hard it was like they were stuck!

When I grew up in Illinois, tumbleweeds were things you only read about in books. It has been interesting seeing real live tumbleweeds in California. There also seem to be quite a number in Davis. I regularly see them rolling around in the wind.

Wednesday when I got into work, I was greeted but a big gift.

You can’t really tell from this photo, but this thing literally filled my entire office, all the way to the window! It was a huge tarp (I think it was like 120 feet long or something). They had used it at youth group the night before, then threw it into Matt’s office. When Matt arrived, they took it out of his office and put it in mine. Matt caught incriminating evidence of Keith pulling the tarp. What he didn’t catch was Glen on the other side, his partner in crime.

After we took it out of my office, it lay in the hallway all day until at the end of the day it mysteriously ended up in Alex and Kyle’s office. Wonder how it got there?

Friday, my sister texted me with a spontaneous invite to join them downtown Davis as Steven went around trick-or-treating. I was delighted to see them again so went downtown, and admired my nephew in his very cute costume. I don’t care for spiders but he can make anything look cute.

He took quite a liking to a business that handed out breadsticks. He’s too young to eat all the candy. His parents sure made a killing though.

It was also the first time I heard him talk. He kept going, “Bike!”

It was very cool to see all the kids out and about trick-or-treating and to see the businesses participating. I also earlier took a picture of some green aliens I saw at Nugget. They had ghost ones too. Very creative and cute!

Today our family headed to Berkeley for a fencing tournament. This is the first offsite tournament our family has ever gone to, and the first tournament I have watched Daniel fence in like a year!

We got up way early (to me), ate breakfast (an unusual event), piled in the car and headed to Berkeley.

The place was not particularly organized, evidenced by the fact that it started 2 hours and 20 minutes late.  But Megan and I were prepared! We had brought stuff to work on. I even started knitting a scarf (because I am always cold). I haven’t knitted since high school! It’s looking a little lumpy…

Finally registration started (see the long line in the back). Here’s Daniel, all ready to go!

Daniel did a good job fencing but he had to face off a very experienced opponent so he got eliminated pretty quickly. I was quite impressed how much he has improved. He looks like a pro!

Megan was a poser. She took Daniel’s foil and amused herself bouncing it up and down on her toes. That kid is amazingly self-amusing. A little later she walked in circles around Albert when he lay on the ground. She used to do that when she was toddler. I guess some things never change.

Then it was Albert’s turn. He fenced epee and did a good job! Even better, he had fun and was relaxed and really enjoyed himself! He said it was nice our whole family was there because he felt a lot more relaxed.

Megan and I walked like a mile to find McDonalds for some food because everyone was starving. So we got our exercise too! By the time we got back, Albert was all done and it was time to go home!

Conked out in the car… guess I was a bit tired. But it was a great day with the family!

Grace Culture Spectrum

I’m fascinated by different church cultures. Here’s one way to look at church culture: where you fall along the grace spectrum. New post at my Visual Church Leader blog.

Teaching and learning

Today was Attempt #2 to go down to the Bay Area, after my extraneous trip yesterday!

My day started out quite stressful, involving a missing video camera, missing blank video tapes, 3 minutes to run to my office and tech booth before service started, a cup of untouched chai latte calling out to me, and trying to fix a broken toilet (don’t ask).

However, it ended great. I went back to my old stomping grounds, Bridges Community Church, and taught the SHAPE (spiritual gifts) class. I used to teach the class regularly but I guess they hadn’t had it since I left three years ago. There is now a new director taking over who will be teaching the class but since she had never taken the class she asked me to go down and teach it so that the staff could get trained.

It was a total blast!!!!!! I totally love the people at this church. Great people with great hearts for God. I miss them! It was a super fun group too. People were very talkative. Best of all I got to reconnect with many dear friends, brief though the time was.

So in a previous post I said that my blogs will now focus less on what happened and more on what I learned. As a result of reading a book on leadership, I rethought how to best help people learn and adjusted the teaching of this class in hopes that people would learn better. Here is the blog that explains what I did.