Haiti teaching

On Sunday, I preached in a service at a church in Jacmel. It was a fantastic experience... while I am picking up some Creole, of course I had a translator. Working at the church in Jacmel was a grand experience... working side by side with congregation members. We returned to Port au Prince over the mountain, and drove through much of the city. What our eyes witnessed can not fully be written down. The city was clearly once a thriving community with infrastructure, roads and commerce. But what has happened since the atrocities of 1986 and 1999 has been a complete neglect of every resource the country possessed. Roads are barely usable, from the holes and the refuse everywhere. Masses gather everywhere walking and peddling looking for a single way to make so much as a morsel to get them by for the day. The conditions that these multitudes endure is beyond belief. The streams and waterways are overrun with garbage, and the primary traffic rule seems to be chaos. In the midst of all the despair that seemed apparent to me, such was not the attitude of the people. Despite the heat and close quarters of so many thousand, I never saw a single squabble or sign of ill-will.

For the last week, I spent my time at the seminary with 40 or so pastors in a series of lectures on the book of Revelation. So much of my teaching on Apocalyptic literature hinges on careful distinctions regarding the use of language, and I found this a very difficult task when making use of an interpreter. There were some who were overwhelmed with what I was offering and some who were overjoyed. Teaching in this context has been complex and challenging. The students have a wide variety of education and theological background. All in all, it went well, and my colleagues would share with me the sentiment that it felt good to feel useful and as if our presence really was making a difference. As the end of the week, I was in the faculty procession of the semester-ending graduation ceremony. (I actually handed them the diplomas as they crossed the stage.)

CONASPEH is an incredible organization and makes possible a feeding of multitudes with such a small loaf.

Haiti trip

I have been in Haiti preparing for a lecture series at St. Andrew Theological Seminary, the seminary of CONASPEH in Port au Prince. From the moment of arrival for the group I travelled with, the drive through Port au Prince was eye-opening. Waste and trash evident, people upon people looking for a means to get by in the streets. But I have not witnessed despair, rather a strong spirit among those I've met so far. One of the CONASPEH officials overwhelmed us with her words of thanksgiving for our presence, and for our enthusiasm to come and contribute to their ministry. Sleeping in the heat was not at all unbearable, and I in fact have been sleeping soundly. On the first morning we had a meeting scheduled with the regional coordinators and pastors of the council of CONASPEH. CONASPEH is the ecumenical Council of Spiritual Churches in Haiti that we work with as mission partners. It is essentially the ecumenical gathering of poor Haitian churches left out of the loop by those in power. They are our host.

Our group drove to the CONASPEH central building in Port au Prince and were stunned by the number of pastors and regional coordinators that had come together just for the opportunity to meet with us. There were some 50-60 who had come from every corner of Haiti, and some islands. Mind you these pastors and churches are poor, so they come by small bus and by foot, some of them many many hours. As we introduced ourselves and they introduced themselves, their expressions of joy and solidarity at our presence was spirit-filled.

Our second day takes us to Jacmel on the south coast where we will be working on construction of a church. After 3 days, we will then return to Port au Prince where our group will work on another church while I teach course on Revelation to a group of pastors in the seminary.

What A Literal Translation Does Make

I have long been bothered by claims that a literal translation is one whose word count will most closely approximate the word count of the original. It is the appeal of one word for one word, and even worse, always the same word for the one word whenever possible.

It has long seemed to me is that articulating a desire for a translation that changes as little of the text as possible betrays a flawed understanding of translation. What seems blatantly obvious to me is that the desire to change as little of the text as possible is a desire that comes not from good translation theory but from a theological assertion regarding not altering the exact words of holy scripture as we have received them.

Access Any Menu Item in Your Application with a Keystroke Using Quicksilver Proxy Objects

Being attentive to how you work, when you're doing the Lord's work, is just plain good stewardship.

I have become a big fan of Quicksilver, the Mac utility that puts an endless amount of productivity at your fingertips. Here's a great tip for accessing menu items in an application: Comprehensive and feature-complete applications have lots of menu item options--too many to remember the assigned keyboard shortcuts for those that even have one. Enter Quicksilver. Here's how to gain access to every menu item with a simple keystroke. For adding some great features to Quicksilver, you must enable "Proxy Objects" in the Quicksilver section of the Catalog. Invoke Quicksilver and press Command semi-colon (⌘;) to bring up the Catalog preference pane. Check "Proxy Objects". When you've done this, Quicksilver now has access to the "Current Application" item. Now you can invoke Quicksilver, start typing "Current Appl..." and it will find this action... then tab to the next pane and start typing "Show Menu Items". (Make sure you have that action and not the "Show menu" action.) When you invoke, you'll get a new Quicksilver window with an exhaustive list of every menu items in your current application. A couple keystrokes later and you have your menu item. The real bonus of this method is you don't memorize keyboard shortcuts. If I want to set the text to blue, I just type "bl..." and hit return. One obscure keyboard combination is not quicker than a few keystrokes, because typing familiar words takes less time. The final step to putting all of this into muscle memory is to assign a keystroke to the "Show Menu Items" action. Simply invoke Quicksilver again, get to "Current Application", tab and then "Show Menu Items", but instead of hitting return, press Command apostrophe (⌘') to bring up the Trigger pane of Quicksilver preferences. Press the little "+" sign at the bottom of the window and add a new hotkey. You can see mine is set to Control-Option-M (⌃⌥M) as in menu). I now have instant access to any menu item in any app.

So, let's say I have some text selected in Accordance, and I want to change it to Yellow. I just invoke with my "Show menu items" trigger, and type "Yel.." and return. If this is a menu item that I use alot and it doesn't have a built-in keyboard shortcut, I can make a trigger to that item. Just invoke the menu items, and select "Yellow", hit tab instead of return and then Command apostrophe to bring up the Trigger panel to make a new trigger again.

If there's anything you can't make easy with Quicksilver, this incredible free utility, I don't know what it is. You can also find a video cast on using this feature from productivity geek/guru Merlin Mann. Have fun being productive.

Haitian Creole Accordance Bible Module

I've been busy preparing for summer church trips, which include Canada on one trip, and Haiti on a mission trip. I have been asked to teach a mini-course on Revelation to local pastors at the CONESPEH seminary.

Part of my preparation has included some work in Creole, and with the nifty new user bible feature of Accordance, I was able to create a module in Kreyòl Ayisyen. You can download it here, and hopefully it'll make it's way to the Accordance Exchange.

Rev. 1.1 Men revelasyon Bondye te bay Jezikri pou l' te fè sèvitè l' yo konnen sa ki gen pou rive anvan lontan. Se Kris la menm ki voye zanj li bò kot Jan, sèvitè l' la, pou fè l' konnen tout bagay sa yo. 2 Se menm Jan sa a k'ap rakonte tou sa li te wè. Li rapòte mesaj ki soti nan Bondye a ansanm ak verite Jezikri te fè l' konnen an.