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Today is July 1, 2005. This date marks something - I’ve been at this thing for basically six months now. Wow, half of a year. Being 26 years old, I’ve lived 52 half years. So one of my 52 half years on this planet have been spent roaming this country, meeting great people, learning more about God’s character, showing what I’ve learned about that character, and so much more. That’s only 1.388889% of my life, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but trust me they’ve been more significant than most other years in my life. Here are some of the things that I’ve learned, and also some things that have been confirmed for me so far this year (note that a lot of things could and probably will change over the course of time as God continues to work on me):

I’m not a speaker

I’m not the best person to talk in front of a crowd. I’m not the best person to talk one on one with people that I don’t know really well. It’s just not how I’m wired. I have a lot of great ideas, and things that sometimes I feel I should impart - but when I get started speaking my brain totally goes faster than my mouth can handle and I end up sounding like an idiot. So there it goes - I might be doing a “missionary” thing, but I won’t be seen preaching or speaking at any of our events.

I fit best in a supporting role

I’m not a leader, but I can a lot of times see the big picture and see how things should be done. I’m not a speaker, but I’m one of the best people to have running the soundboard, lights or projector (or a combination of the three at the same time). Sometimes I’m not at the same ministry appointments as everyone else because my role as documenter (the website) forces me to find internet access to do some work. Most of the time I’m only seen by what I do, and most of the time people don’t know that it’s me doing it.

I still like to rant sometimes

I’m sick of things that try to do everything. I like things to be simple. If something has a job to do, do it well – even if it’s the only thing it does. iPods are a perfect example of a perfect invention. Podcasting seems like a stupid concept to me. Ring tones on phones are annoying. Rings should just do the simple task of letting me know that someone is calling me, they shouldn’t invite me to do the freaking Macarena every time Uncle Bob calls. RSS feeds are impersonal. HTML emails waste bandwidth. Most flash-based websites are horrible. Microsoft is horrible. Macromedia being bought out by Adobe will probably turn into a bad thing. Next year I might ditch Apple OS X and install Linux on my Powerbook.

I know what my goals for the next few years have to be.

A lot of things that I’ve learned this year is how not to do things, and yes that does include how we did The Wave USA website. So this just confirms what it was that I felt God was calling me to do earlier this year… I’ve got to build (or be part of building) a good looking, standards-based, efficient and easy to use CMS (content management system) for ministries to be able to use to build an effective web presence that works well and looks good. Most of my thoughts so far are on something that would still require some basic training on whoever is running the site, so it’s probably going to be something out of the scope of an individual missionary or even a small church. Who knows what it’ll bring though. I am thinking of using Wordpress to get this started, I’ve read a lot of how-to’s on extending it’s functionality and using it as a CMS. That’s a lot of the reason that I’m now starting to do things like incorporating the Gallery program into my Wordpress site. A lot of things I’ve done on this site, well even starting this site, was made because I wanted to teach myself how to do something because I knew that doing it would give me good knowledge that I can use later. So expect a lot of changes to happen on this site. It is my testbed and can hopefully serve as a device for me to teach myself and also to impart things to my readership (like it’s hopefully been doing). So I now know how a site like The Wave USA needs to be different, but it’s too large now to change it without wasting too much time. Don’t get me wrong, I love the look and most of the way we’ve laid it out. It’s the backend, what makes it tick, that I think should have been done different (which I, along with most other people who haven’t been coding websites for over 5 years full time, don’t know how to do). Maybe there will be another large trip like this that’ll need me to build a site the way I want it to. The Wave Asia??? The Wave Europe? The Wave Africa? Time will only tell I guess.

I can’t wait until December 18

I can’t wait until the end of The Wave USA. My reasoning is nothing like me being tired of this or anything negative like that. My reasoning is that I feel that God wants to reveal something to me as soon as I complete this thing he had me start. I have to finish the race to receive the prize. I don’t know what it is, but I do feel that something will be revealed to me, some kind of knowledge.