Going to Alaska! FTW

So I'm running up to Alaska tomorrow. I get to travel with Nick, Josue, Mirella, Tina, and Yulia. We're taking a full sized SUV that will seat 7 people and driving from Seattle to Fairbanks, Denali, Talkeetna, Anchorage, Homer, Seward, Whittier, and Valdez before we return to Seattle. And we're gonna do it in 14 days.

So what stats...that's really the hardest part of these trips, not driving, not paying for gas at Canadian prices, not braving US Customs, not dodging bears, not fixing the occasional flat tire, its really picking what stats to use...

How about:

• Miles traveled (old standby)
• MPG (yawn)
• Bears and Wolves seen (ok kinda Alaska-ish)
• Alaska Manly-Man Beard sightings (I'm geussing at least 400)
• Total Caffeinated drinks consumed (at least 4-5 million)
• and last but not least miles hiked

We are driving 2,300 miles each way plus about 500 more touring around. We will be camping and backpacking in Denali for about 6 days and hangin' in Kenai for another 4 days.

Of course the MAP:

View Larger Map

This trip is gonna rock. Check back to see pictures, videos, and all the stories...

An Apology to Adam Truesdale

Why am I writing this? Because I felt convicted that I had been harboring anger and resentment toward an old classmate, and I needed to confess it and release any grudge against Adam. God moved in me, and I felt impelled to respond.

Back in the wonder years of middle school, I met a classmate named Adam Truesdale. He lived across the alley from me and was changing middle schools to Washington Middle for the 1999-2000 school year. Since he was joining a new school with new people I was asked to introduce him around and tell him about the school.

8th grade saw us sharing a couple of classes (social studies with Katz and maybe Language Arts with a teacher whose name I don't recall). He seemed to fit right in (which I held against him since I had spent two years failing to do just that). Honestly I looked at him with envy because he had everything I wanted - height, money, married parents, a nice house, popularity, athleticism, nice clothes, and an outgoing personality. This was horrible on my behalf. I was not living to be happy for other folks' apparent success.

Hell, I never even found out if his life was as awesome as it looked. He might have had hardships I couldn't see, but I was so self-absorbed and idiotic that I secretly loathed Adam.

Man I am so sorry Adam for being such a jerk.

He was the only friend I ever invited to my house all the way from 6th grade through my high school graduation. He came over once or twice to play the game Half-Life on my computer. I then got in trouble because I didn't get permission for him to do so. So I held a little more bitterness against Adam for that...it totally wasn't his fault.

When we got to Garfield for high school Adam seemed to be even more popular and socially prosperous. So my envy flourished. Me and my odd collection of friends used to play lunch time football out on the muddy field where glory was sought by mostly non-athletic "brainiacs". Adam would on occasion join us and he was often the best player. One such day his team had pretty much destroyed my team and I became indignant. He (being about 160lbs to my 115lbs) clotheslined me and left me in the dirt mocking the foolish way I had responded. My getting frustrated and combative was totally wrong. I was at fault. Again I am sorry for being such a jerk.

After 10th grade I dropped out of high school in favor of full time running start at a local junior college. I didn't see Adam again until a post-graduation party at my friend Jonathan's house. Adam and some of his friends were having a party next door and he came over to share some graduation good cheer. I became sullen. I remember I was sitting in a wicker chair and Adam walked over to me with his hand extended in friendship saying, "No hard feeling man?" I refused to get up. I refused to shake his hand. I just said, "No."

I was the total religious jerk who could forgive and let go. I am very sorry for being such a unkind jerk to you Adam.

Easter Sunday!!!

Dude! The expectations Mars Hill set were for 500 baptisms and 20,000 people.

The final count came in at 724 baptisms and 17,500 in attendance!

God showed up on a dreary Sunday afternoon in the 5th least churched city in the United States and saved people.

The pictures:

The Volunteers arrived early with a great attitude!

We ran out of ponchos!

Tim Smith with Bryan and Dustin Kensrue

Pastor Mark delivering a forceful sermon all about Jesus.

Pastor Mark's Full Sermon

Wow what an event. Generations will be impacted by what happened here today. So on Sunday how did I help? I was a leader for the North side baptism crew. My role was to run (literally) members of the baptism team from the field to the North tunnel and pair them with people getting baptized coming down the freight elevator from the 300 level. It was pandemonium! We setup careful teams to coordinate all the baptism activities but as soon as people responded to be baptized everything fell apart and then God showed up. We ran out of everything! Towels, small, medium, and large sizes of T-Shirts and Shorts. In 42 minutes, 724 people were baptized!!! That's 17.2 people baptized a minute!! It was epic.

Wow I can't believe that I was privileged to serve in such an amazing Jesus-centered event.

Easter Setup @ Qwest Field

Uploaded after the Easter event...

On Friday April 22nd, I got to the stadium at 8am and joined up with team "Ops-Elite". (Say it out loud several times fast and you'll see why we changed the name to the "Blackhawks") My team was composed of 8 "trusted" Mars Hill interns who had to be able to operate independent of central control and direction.

We started by setting up all 5 Connect Desks for the Event. These desks were places where visitors could go and ask any questions, get free Bibles, get the Mars Hill Annual Report, and get one of these amazing handouts:

We were treated fantastically by Mars Hill. As an Mars Hill intern, I am unpaid and have given months to God's work with no expectation of any blessing. Yet we were lavished with food at Qwest. We had like 7 meals all provided. For those of you who don't know my love language is food. ("love language" is a reference to this book that Dr. Gary Chapman wrote a while ago that says that men and women feel loved in one of 5 ways: acts of service, quality time, physical touch, gifts, and words of affirmation)

After completing the first tier of prep work, I jumped teams to the lighting team. I have worked for ERM a Seattle area event staffing service as a lighting tech/stage hand. So I knew how to do this job well. Here is what the stage looked like with our fancy lights up:

Here are some additional shots from Saturday as the work progressed:

(In the foreground you can see one of the 20 baptismals dwarfed by one of the two huge Led Jumbo-trons)

(Here are the faithful volunteers who put in thousands of hours to make this happen)

(From the 300 level North: On the top and bottom we see the Baptism tents. The far left tent is the men's changing tent, the center tent is the women's changing tent and the right tent is the prayer tent where people who want to get dunked will be prayed with and interviewed to see if they understand who Jesus is. The stage is flanked by two 35 foot jumbo-trons and a 40 foot stage where Pastor Mark will preach)

(From the Southwest 300 level of Qwest Field: Here you can see the 20 Baptismals that are pipping hot 100 deg F)

A funny story: Back in January when the Executive Elders of Mars Hill decided to do a massive Easter service they called up the people who organize events for Luis Palau (an evangelist), Greg Laurie (an evangelist), and others to see how to do baptisms in a mass-meeting like this (a perennial tradition at all Easter Services for Mars Hill). EVERY single organization said "Don't do baptisms!" its too crazy, you can't cope with the masses of people, keep things organized, and logistically keep up. They do them out in the parking lots all afternoon. Well guess what we are planning for...500 Baptisms in 40 minutes... That means that each Baptismal must accommodate 25 people in 40 minutes. That means 25 baptisms every 1.6 minutes must be completed for us to not run over time. Fou n'est-ce pas?

(Here is the Choir getting set for sound check on Saturday. Since the theme for the event is a happy sunny country fair the choir in their fancy robes act as the golden backdrop for the sermon)

Atlas Shrugged

I had the chance to enjoy an independent film with my Grandparents, Atlas Shrugged Part 1. This first installment of the trilogy of Ayn Rand's Epic, covered the entire plot up to Ellis Wyatt's Destruction of the Colorado Oil Fields.

Instead of making the story a period-piece, the director Paul Johansson contemporized the plot by setting the characters in 2016 after a war in the Middleast cuts off oil shippments to the West driving gas prices to $36 a gallon. Under this dystopian future scenario, the only feasible means of transportation of people and commodities is rail power. (Modern CSX freight trains can move 2,000lbs --907 kilograms-- 500 miles on one gallon of fuel) This allowed me as a admirer of Rand's Objectivism to suspend my disbelief and fall into the story.

Dagny, acted by Taylor Schilling, is just as brutal and sublime as the one conjured in my imagination the first time I read the novel. She faces the world and never backs down as her universe spirals out of control. The male leads were well acted and for the movie's small budget ($1o million) did not detract at all. Still it would have been really cool to have had Angelina Jolie and Brad Pit as the iconic Duo of Hank Rearden and Dangny Tagart. But contractual obligations prohibited it. The $1.7 million gross for the opening weekend may allow the productions costs to be covered but indicate that there will be no part 2 or climactic part 3.

I love the novel too much to offer an objective review of this "Objective-ly" awesome movie.

The obvious flaw in Objectivism still doesn't shade Rand's fun Novels. Check out Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead today.

Longest Bike Ride

Miles Run:122.9

Miles Biked:129.09

Miles Hiked:8.70
Total Miles:260.69
Stadium Stairs Run*:2244
Steep Steps Run*:1340
Days to Rainier:104
Summit Team:7
Aspirin Tablets:42

My week has been fun. My work, which is in a secret location, has been very varied and allowed me to share a little bit of the Gospel with my not-yet-Christian friends. I even got to build a library system for a pastor with a 1,600 volume library. Hopefully in two weeks his entire library will be digitized.

I even went on my longest bike ride yet from my house in West Seattle to the new Shoreline Campus of Mars Hill (25.7 miles). The first event at Shoreline's new home was a lecture/sermon by Sam Storms in the topic of spiritual warfare. The talk was awesome (check it out at http://bit.ly/fame6u). Their facility is amazing. It seats 357 people with additional overflow rooms. Their children's space is huge with plenty of space to grow. Donald bought me teriyaki; that was soo kind and soo amazing, I was blown away by his generosity. Charlie and Lacey gave me a ride all the way back to West Seattle. Then I hade the highlight of my entire day! The back door was wide open at 10:30PM. I got to do a room by room clearing drill! So much fun.

The downside of the week is that my summit team is in decline. I lost my guide, who has been to the top; he is no longer able to lead us up Mt. Rainier. So unless I can find a new leader, our team has no first-hand knowledge of what lies above Camp Muir. I know only 40% of the route. I cannot lead this team in good conscience up to the top. So if no leader emerges, I will have to call off this adventure again. That means a fourth failed season.

I am considering soloing Rainier. I cannot endanger my team. But I am in the best shape of my life and I will be more-than ready for a summit. I know a secret campground at Camp Muir which will enable me to avoid the Ranger checkpoint. I can then cross Cathedral Gap onto the razer ice field on Ingram Glacier. After traversing the steep field, I can scramble up Disappointment Cleaver to the longest 2 miles of my life as I work up to the Caldera. Then circle to the true summit.

I can do this alone. But if anything goes wrong, if I slip, if I get disoriented, if the volcano produces nasty lenticular clouds or storms I might not come back because there will be no one to help me.

I can't invite someone else to join me on this journey. I can't ensure their safety.

Oh and Easter is only two weeks away! 20,000 people will come to Qwest Field on April 24th 500 will be baptized, the biggest church service in the history of the Pacific Northwest! Come. It will be amazing!

Page-Rank and Page

Miles Run:122.9

Miles Biked:103.39

Miles Hiked:8.70
Total Miles:234.99
Stadium Stairs Run*:2244
Steep Steps Run*:1340
Days to Rainier:104
Summit Team:8
Aspirin Tablets:42

I'm over my sickness, feeling better.

I have started reading The Google Story by Vise and Malseed about the first six years of Google Inc. The company was begun by two Stanford grad students who sought to create a better way to gather information from the seemingly endless Internet. Their system used popularity as expressed by total number of links made to a given website and also a ranking of the importance of a website determined by the total number of links made to that website. Existing search engines were good at collecting keyword associations and reporting them to users. Google's usefulness came from it automatic ability to place the most relevant search results at the top of what is reported to a user. Now what is required to properly rank every single website on the entire World Wide Web? Two things, continuous automatic web crawling of every website on the internet and multiple complete backups of the entire Internet. The Entire Internet!

Google maintains these records.

So Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Google Founders, focused single-mindedly on creating this search engine and refining it. They brew through tens of millions of venture capital dollars with minimal focus on monetizing their amazing technology. Their first step to make Google profitable was to license their search to other big Internet companies. They had marginal success, but then the world of advertising opened to Google's consciousness. Their simple text only target ads that directly relate to the search results reported to the searcher. This shift in focus and specific verifiable ads allowed advertisers to spend money to garner attention to a product/service that lead to sales and also made Google madly profitable.

Soon afterward, Larry and Sergey became billionaires and shifted Google from a privately held company to the biggest IPO in Silicon Valley's history. That's as far as I gotten. It's a good read, check it out.

Last night I went on a little hike on a dark and rainy night...and 9 other people came with me. So what does that say about them...Or me? It was cold and everyone got soaked, but they seemed to have fun which was the whole point. I got another 4 bricks up to Tiger Mt. It was really fun.