Note from Friend

I received a note from a friend the other day and I thought it was worth recording, so here it is in my blog. I've taken liberty to change certain words and phrases, but I've left it for the most part intact.

I guess I just wanted to let you know that you are loved.

Quite simply.

I think sometimes in life we seek to know that we are loved ... but for those of us who don't believe that love exists or suspect its consistency, we go about searching for it. That search takes many forms: the affirmation from a woman, the respect of a man, or the accomplishment of a goal. Either way the search has the opposite effect of removing us from the object of study; love becomes something we look for but do not receive.

Christ talks about love in a lot of ways, but he defines faith, too, in the context of both love and trust. Those combined constitute what we Christians call faith. This faith is opposed to knowledge, which, once understood, becomes an idol and removes us from any dependency on it. So faith, like a child, is composed of trust, which when sought to quantify ... isn't capable of being fully felt.

We don't have to love ourselves first, or even give others reasons to love us (which wouldn't really be love anyway) in order to believe we are loved. Like God's love freely given, we simply receive. It is a gift we either receive or choose not to receive. But even before we feel love, we are loved, and by opening ourselves to that love, come to love ourselves even more. Similarly, Scripture tells us, that even while we were still sinners Christ loved us and longed to call us his children. Still, it remains that in dying that we receive eternal life. Only in opening ourselves to that love do we finally receive it. Not that when we have absolute certainty of it, but simply when we submit to its powers.

There are many who love you, myself, Glory, your Dad, Bert, and Monty, to name a few. Even the small one who is yet to realize how much love has for you. Even greater than these, God loves you, for there is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.

Anyway...I'm not sure how to close...

Your brother in Christ.

Lunch with My Old Boss

Yesterday afternoon I had lunch with my old boss. He looked OK, but the more we talked the more I realized how much he was still upset about how he was laid off. Right now we're undergoing a change in management, maybe even a change in personnel. I'm not really sure what our Provost and the Board of Trustees are planning, but it looks pretty sour. I have a feeling that all or most of our staff is going to be outsourced to a major software company. I don't know if there's much I can do about it at this point.

It's Thursday morning. Now that I have no one really directing me or my activities, how should I spend my time? I think that's the hardest part about all this. I feel like I'm on the Titanic, we're going down, and I have to choose what to do and what makes sense given the reality that my time on this ship is limited. I've thought about writing where I think our institution went wrong managerially. I've thought about doing business as usual, but both those things seem like a waste of my time.

It's hard for me right now not to hold anger in my heart against those above me. I guess all good things must come to an end; even our lives have a beginning and an end. But there are good ways to live just as there are good ways to die. And if this inevitable termination of duties is contrary to what makes sense for me, my team, and those we serve, how am I supposed to continue performing my duties joyfully?

A Tribute to John Francis

Today I wanted to write a tribute to John Francis, the man who, forty years ago, decided to stop driving and to stop receiving rides from others. Stories on the web tell of how as a young man he had witnessed the collision of two oil tankers in the San Francisco Bay and how days later he began experimenting with getting around by foot. Maybe I can relate to him a little, at least in his distaste for cars. I can't say that I'm a purist; just last week I drove my family and in-laws to Palm Springs in a van we had borrowed from a friend. I've received rides every now and then when it has been inconvenient to not do so, though I do most of my traveling by foot, by bike, or by light rail and bus, which, admittedly, runs on oil.

What is it about his story that fascinates me? The fact that not only did he choose not to take advantage of the luxury of expediency (not to mention the appearance of normalcy) that the modern automobile provides, but that he took upon himself a vow of silence for seventeen years to protest our world's reliance on oil. Sure, from the stories told about him, and believe it or not, mainly from the stories he tells about himself, he was probably quite arrogant in his attitude of moral superiority. Yet at the same time, as I read about his life and the way that others perceived him, he also strikes me as one who is and was a man of deep conviction.

I've said before that I believe that global warming is one of the most dangerous phenomenons we face today and probably also in the history of humankind through her various eons of evolution. The more I think about global warming, the more I am inclined to believe that because more people equals more waste, more pollution, and further ecological degradation, especially given our uncritical use of standard manufacturing, distribution, and disposal methods, overpopulation is the biggest danger we face today. We forget that we are able to sustain highly dense urban populations because of the fact that oil allows us to ship food and goods across states and nations. But when that oil runs out, will we be able to continue to do this? This laptop I'm writing on, the bicycle that I will use to ride home, the rice cooker I will use to cook the rice that was shipped from God knows where, all of these will be in danger of disappearing in the lives of my progeny, or at least being very difficult to obtain, when we oil runs out and we don't have an easy means of shipping everything from everywhere to everywhere.

So what does this mean for our future? It means that we better find alternative energy sources for maintaining our global economies or we better rely on our local resources and local activities for sustaining local populations. When we realize that harvesting alternative energy resources is itself a very energy-intensive activity, we will turn once again to depending on the land and resources that are near to where we live to provide for our basic needs as well as our personal and commercial activities -- and when we get to this point, we will find ourselves very concerned about population density and the overcrowding of certain regions, especially regions that don't normally have a lot of food or water.

But perhaps this shouldn't worry us now, given the fact that we won't know what a sustainable population for a region is until we run out of the oil it takes to ship food and other goods in from other places. Maybe it's a problem that's better left unsolved until we're forced to reckon with it. The problem, however, is that while we continue to produce, consume, and dispose of things the earth keeps getting hotter, not to mention the fact that the force and frequency of "natural" disasters continues to increase across the globe, even in Upstate New York where, according to my sister-in-law, a winter bereft of snow was followed by a spring and summer filled with mini-tornados and rain torrents she could not remember seeing the likes of which throughout her life. Pasadena has been hot lately -- it's usually pretty hot in August -- but unnaturally so. Brush fires have abounded the past two years -- there have been two just this past month. How much of this is due to climate change and how much of is it is just coincidence?

It can be argued that many of these phenomenon are temporary and that far worse conditions have arisen in times not too long ago. But one phenomenon that to me proves that serious changes in our climate are occuring is the melting of the polar ice caps. This is a phenomenon that is well-documented and observable and, to my knowledge, has no precedent in modern (and by modern I mean within the last six millenia) history. Again, the question is not so much are we experiencing global warming, but rather what is causing it? Is it the consumption of oil and its byproduct entering into the atmosphere? Is it other factors beyond our control?

This really is the sticking point. From a rational point of view, I can't really prove that our cars are causing a lot of the atmospheric warming that's happening around us. But I can tell you this. That ever since I've lived in Los Angeles I've realized how much we take gasoline and driving and commuting for granted. We've gotten used to the exhaust that comes out of our vehicles, forgetting that it can cause asthma in certain children and even lead to cancer. We've forgotten how nice it is to have a quiet street and a quiet neighborhood or to go shopping in a mall or among a group of vendors where 3/4 of the area is not bare asphalt reserved for people moving back and forth in these ubiquitous vehicles. We've forgotten what it's like to walk down a sidewalk and look people in the eye and smile and say, "Good Morning". It's a foreign thing to us to walk around our block, to feel connected to our surroundings and to our neighbors and to the landscape, to be immersed in these and be a part of them rather than to simply pass through them as observers.

Thinking Today

Today as I return from lunch, I think about why I am not as motivated as much as I would like to be. I can't really come up with an answer other than I wish I knew that someone knew and cared about what I was doing. We lost our director a while back. I feel pretty much in the wind right now, meaning I don't feel very accountable and I can pretty much do whatever I want, which is a sad state.

Now that I have a baby I can't really go off and do things on my own without consulting Glory. I'd like to, but that probably isn't wise. I wish she had an easier time with Jude. Maybe she just needs to learn to breastfeed. I don't know.

Motherfucker...Loving it

I love the word "motherfucker". Who came up with this word? How long has it been in play? This word is older than one might think. I remember reading an article about Dinah Washington -- she once confronted a heckler in the audience using the word "motherfucker". I also remember a scene in Bullworth -- you know, that show with Warren Beatty who plays a senator who all of a sudden has nothing to lose because he's got a contract out on his life -- where Bullworth is trying to "mac" on the young African American female played by Halle Berry. The woman's brother notices Bullworth's advances and says to him, "You ain't no real nigga, is you?" Then Bullworth retorts back, "Is you a real nigga?" Then her brother, out of disbelief, shouts back, "You callin' me a nigga, motherfucker?" And then (here's my favorite line) Bullworth looks back, smiles, and says, "Would you prefer motherfucker, motherfucker?"

Loving it.

Oh, one more thing. I visit prisoners over in a federal holding center in downtown L.A. One of the guys I visit has this tattoo on his head that says, "Love Me, Don't Hate Me, Motherfucker!" I told Glory I would have the same creed etched on my person, not on my head (that would hurt), but on my arm.

Love me, everyone!

The Letter I Sent to Our Provost

Dear Sherwood,

Together we find ourselves in a strange, foreign situation, seeing some of our friends having to leave the seminary because of budget cuts, and having to make some decisions that will require other members of our community to leave as well. I've been really disheartened by all that's going on around me, I've been distracted at work – it's even been difficult to know how to put into words all that's going on inside of me.

My friend Steve got laid off about a month ago. I found out about it, believe it or not, through a report that one of my colleagues set up to find any changes that occur on a Banner employee table. The report picked up on the fact that the latest version of the table didn't have Steve's information. It told me he had been terminated and so I went over to the office of his supervisor Vao Mose to confirm the news and, of course, it was true.

I'm very sad about Steve. Despite the opinion of those responsible for his departure he was a good worker. This letter is not an attempt to dispute or discredit their decision, but their decision and my recollection of it are a segue into the larger array of issues I wish to explore here.

Everything seems to be going so fast. On the schedule you showed at our staff meeting a few weeks ago, you, the oversight committee, and the ART and ORT, along with the board of directors, would be making some pretty drastic changes within the span of a couple of months. I was amazed and frightened at how quickly all this would happen. Perhaps I was reading too much into the situation, but I felt as if I could read some of the same diffidence even in the eyes of the speakers that day.

I work in the same building as Jane Doe. I had heard that she had sent a letter to you suggesting that we, all of us, take a pay cut in order to preserve jobs. I confirmed this and asked her for copy of her original email and of your response.

I agree with her suggestion, and I also agree (with you) that there are systemic problems that need to be addressed. In fact, I don't believe that you two are at all in disagreement with each other. It is in fact possible to imagine a scenario in which salaries and benefits are temporarily reduced in order to be able to meet the immediate crisis of staying in the black while administration is given the ample time it needs in order to make prudent decisions regarding how the the three schools can and should be consolidated as well what positions should be eliminated based on plentiful discussions with directors who know best how their office runs, and who, within their departments, should be let go. In fact the only kind of restructuring I know of that can be successful and truly amenable to the institution's health is one that is thorough, well thought-out, and not subject to the immediate pressures which we now face.

Furthermore I understand that the oversight committees are looking for ways to make our organization more “lean”, one definition of which is to cut excess positions that may not be perceived as necessary. I wish to caution you and, by proxy, the committees to remember that most positions are not created simply because an administrator had too much money in his budget at the end of the year and didn't want to have to give it back, or because he/she was feeling kind of lonely and needed one or two more people in the office to keep him/her company. They were created because at the time that administrator found himself/herself in a position in which he/she could not meet the institution's expectation for a given service because the service did not before exist, because it had mutated, or because a higher quality version of it was expected. In such cases, the staffing needs are imposed from without, not from within. For example if, when wireless services had been implemented on our campus, ITS had been fully “tapped out” in terms of having no person-hours to spare, we would have been forced to hire an additional staff person to help manage those services. And if after that hiring, a committee were to evaluate our positions in hoping to find one that could be eliminated, they may not be able to find any, given that, well, everyone was busy doing something. But what they should really have been looking at is not whether or everyone was busy, but what types of institutional demands and expectations made them busy and whether or not these demands and expectations were good ones, and if not, whether they should be eliminated or at the very least mitigated.

I cite first the implementation of wireless because it is visible and we can trace its genesis. We can easily remember how it got here in the first place, how much it cost (in monetary terms), and if we worked hard enough and could tolerate some level of inexactness, we could remember for the most part how many hours each of us put into supporting it since it got here. But there are other services, that, over the years, have become more sophisticated, and because of their sophistication, have required greater and greater levels (in quantifiable terms, hours) of attention.

How we handle information has changed over the years. Bill Roberts, my previous supervisor, was at one time the only employee of what was then known as the Computer Room. This was twenty-five years ago. Since then information management and specifically the transition from a paper-based to an electronic-based infrastructure has required not only new machines, new networks, and new software, but also new types of specialties and skills that are just emerging from the marketplace to meet this new demand. Now our office has nine people – a ninefold increase! If one were to examine ITS with the hopes of finding out whether or not we could still meet the IT-related needs of the seminary if we were to reduce our staffing, one might find that it would be impossible without altering the quality, reliability, security of the information technology infrastructure that the seminary has come to rely on.

But that's the point. We've come to rely on them. Whether or not we knew what we were doing at the time, our current state of affairs is a result of many decisions made along the way by various people; some of these decisions were made with much forethought, like the decision to purchase Banner; others were hasty and haphazard. But cumulatively, those decisions have brought us to the state of complexity which we now find ourselves in, the proverbial bed in which we must lie. I'm sure there are analogies in other areas – advancement, student services, admissions, finance – where a host of decisions (premeditated and otherwise) have caused those areas to become more complex and thus necessitate a greater level of staffing.

It is very easy, especially when it comes to technology, to say that our institution's state of affairs is inevitable given the world we live in, a world where everyone it seems is carrying a cell phone or some other mobile device and has his or her own Internet access at home. It is easy to go along with all this, rationalizing that somehow, it will turn out to be better for us and for those whom we serve if we buy the latest gadgets and the most popular software, for when we do, we will finally achieve those levels of efficiency that we always knew were attainable, but somehow eluded us. And, every now and then, we get lucky; we're happy with the results, at least at first. But when this approach is taken at institution-wide level, by individuals or departments, without discrimination, investigation, or forethought as to how a given technological product or service will not only affect my own department, but those departments around me as well, both now and in the future, we end up more often than not condemning ourselves to becoming dependent on a product that requires a slightly different type of (technological) expertise than what we ourselves have and which will require some type of support from either an outside agency or our own ITS staff. As more and more of these types of products are purchased, they evolve into a system that necessitate the creation of additional in-house infrastructure (like an additional T1 line, for example, for increasing our networks' bandwidth). As the system grows we need more staff to manage it. And so our dependence grows on the systems and on the additional staff as well, and after a while, we simply forget how we got to where we are at.

It takes discipline to say no to things. It takes humility to ask others: Do you think this is a good purchase? How much time will your staff have to put in on a regular basis to manage it? Will it necessitate, either now or in the future, the creation of additional infrastructure to support it? Is there another way of doing this that I might not have considered? Honestly, do I even need this? Even after we have asked these questions we may find ourselves still having made a poor decision. At that point, we must swallow our pride, be willing to concede our losses, and do the harder work of figuring out how to break from this thing that we've become dependent upon.

My point in all this is that there are business processes, cultures, and expectations, both internally and externally, that have caused us to be who we are. We cannot save costs and avoid detriment to our institution's viability without first examining the nature of what we do and why we do it. I know we're already doing that by combining the administrative oversight of the three schools, but if we were to be honest with ourselves, we would acknowledge that there are reasons why each of the schools has evolved to having its own advising and academic programs offices and that simply force-merging them won't remedy or address those underlying factors that caused them to be this way in the first place. And we cannot discover those factors in two months time.

You sent an email out to administrators a few weeks asking us to really think of ways in which we could eliminate excess costs, hopefully with the aim of being able to salvage a couple of jobs that otherwise would have been cut. If a department manager were to feel that his/her staff is overworked as it is and in addition, doesn't have me much room to cut costs in non-labor areas, either, that manager could still help out the seminary by suggesting various ways in which she could cut institution-wide costs, but only if he/she were able to see a spreadsheet or a tally of those areas that cost our institution the most money.

Would it behoove us to provide that type of information? Maybe we could send a report to our seminary community that told us how much we spend in various categories, such as utilities, software licenses, rent, travel/accommodations, and advertising? Wouldn't that be helpful? For example, someone might notice that we spent a lot of money on software licenses and might ask the question, What exactly are we buying? “Well”, someone who knows this side of our business might respond, “A lot of is desktop software, like Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, or Adobe Acrobat, as well as anti-virus software. And our biggest single expenditure is our Banner and Oracle software licenses, which total $160,000 per year.” Then that person might ask whether those things are really necessary or whether or not there are alternatives out there; from there, a conversation between the two could grow to a larger conversation between many. Perhaps with greater awareness across different departments of these and other costs what we can better focus our efforts on the things that really do cost us the most. A macroscopic view is necessary.

If we want our seminary's employees to be lean, they need to feel included. Only when they truly feel included will they truly invest of themselves and draw those energies which heretofore remained dormant. In order to feel included, they must feel empowered. And part of feeling empowered is being in the know, to have access to fiscal data, both for the pragmatic purpose of helping them know where to focus their cost-saving efforts, as well as for making them feel as if the institution trusts them, and that's important. Being fiscally transparent as an institution has the added benefit of adding accountability, not just on a few individuals, but on the seminary as a whole. And, at the end of the day, we might not really know how much damage we're doing to ourselves until someone shows us. You used the cancer analogy in one of our administrator's meeting. Well, maybe another way of putting it is that in order to prevent cancer, you need to every now and then take an MRI; the more eyes you have looking at that MRI, the better chance you have of spotting that cancer early on.

But all this means taking a risk, right? Being vulnerable, being open to criticism. So be it. Do you want people to care about this institution? Do you want them to stay more than just a few years? Then give them a voice. Show them that you care about their opinion. Include them in the decision-making process. Not everything needs to be voted on, but make sure the proper channels exist through which all can truly participate in the decisions that most affect them. Ensure any cost-saving initiative works not only from the top-down but from the bottom-up, too. After all, the greatest efficiencies that you'll see in your people are not those that are imposed from without, but those that come, and are realized from, within.

Thursday Morning

What now? 4 1/2 hours from now we're to have a meeting in which our administration is supposed to ask us how we feel about everything going on around us. I'm scared of what's going to be talked about and I'm scared to think that I might have to speak up.

Before I start the day, I want to get back to global warming, climate change, whatever you want to call it. We're fucked. We really are. If I observe the general culture around me, people don't care enough. They keep driving their cars, having babies, turning up the AC, as if nothing were no harmful effects of their actions.

We're really at a critical point in our history. Never has our planet and the people in it had the power to completely fuck things up for good...I'm not going to say forever, but I'll just say for a really long time. And you know what, I don't think there's any other alternative. I really feel as if widespread destruction and chaos is the only thing that will turn this world around. How can we really be shaken out of our complacency until we start seeing visible effects in the environment around us? Until we ourselves become affected? The images of the polar ice caps melting has scared the shit out of me, but I don't think it affects others the same way. For them to be affected their mom or their dad or someone else close to them has to die of a heat stroke or some other climate-related incident in order for them to listen. But by then it will have been too late.