Starting up an orchestra.

I'm not the one starting up an orchestra.

Since I'm working up in Portland I thought it would be fun to see what's going on in the local music scene. At work I saw a couple flyers for a string orchestra centered around employees and emailed the conductor.

A couple weeks later, I started attending rehearsals. Though the music is really easy, its nice to keep playing my violin on a regular basis. The biggest change since then is that we're becoming some sort of dual entity. Because we don't have enough players in general, the conductor has navigated lots of obstacles to turn the orchestra into a combined work-affiliated orchestra and a youth symphony.

Last week, we did an exhibition and had local kids come in and rehearse with us. It'll be interesting to see if there is any decent local talent. It also takes me back to a previous college symphony orchestras I've been in.

I'd always come late to rehearsal because of work. I end up walking in looking like a bum and sit in the back of the 1st violin section. Because attendance at rehearsals always varied, I'd always sit with different people and then figure out who my stand partner was right before the concert. It would also turn out that my standpartner would sometimes need help.

If you're not familiar with the organization of orchestra seating...there are several different sections composed of different instrument parts. For string instruments, you usually have 1st and 2nd violins, violas, cellos, and basses. I have played in 1st and 2nd violin and viola sections before.

Typical 1st violin mentality: "I have a solo...all the time. It's not me that's rushing...it's everyone else that's lagging."

Typical 2nd violin mentality: "Damn 1st violins are rushing again."

Since I'm primarily a violinist...it's not that fair for me to project upon violists. When I play viola I think: "Love the mellow sound...wish I had more solos."

My imagination of the mentality of a cellist: "Man...another boring rhythm section. When that section solo comes I'm going to wail away on my cello with a tortured look and break the heart of that cute guy/girl in the 3rd row."

My imagination of the mentality of a bassist: "Wassssssssssuuuuuuuuuuup. Hear me rumble on my basssssssssssssssssssssssssssss."

Sections are usually laid out in order of ability. Better players in the front, closer to the conductor...lesser players in the back. This can be detrimental if there is a wide range of talent in the orchestra. Having played in the back of several sections due to my lateness, I can safely say that a common mentality of players in the back of a section is:

"I don't want to come in at the wrong time so I'm going to start playing after see people in front of me start playing."

What happens then is that there is a lag between the front and back of a section. For a section to minimize that lag, it is even more important for players in the back to start playing on time because it takes a little longer for their sound to travel to the audience.

Anyway, when I would sit in the back of a section and come in on our cue at the right time, it helped other people around me come in on time too. Some of my 2nd violin friends used to say that they'd listen for me to figure out when to come in because they knew I was reliable. Or at least...not afraid to screw up. Since I didn't depend on the section leader to for cues and did my own counting...I'd come in when I thought it was the right time. Invariably, I'd mess up my counting sometimes and have my own solo before the rest of the section would start playing.

In any case, I used to coach my standpartners a little bit and so I'm looking forward to helping out high school and middle school kids. Mentoring can be a big responsibility and time commitment. Doing in orchestra is less of a commitment and seems like a good way to get my feet wet with teaching. I'll probably try teaching kids someday but have declined all inquiries thus far because it is too much of a responsibility in my eyes. Why?

When I give pointers to adults, I can talk in their language and they typically have a desire to get better. When people teach kids, they typically have to turn things in games in order to encourage and motivate them. This is something I need to learn how to do because I was not like this as a kid. I remember enjoying music and wanting to play more songs rather than having to be motivated to play games. I remember my parents playing music CDs and tapes all the time and wanting to play more difficult pieces. All those things that teachers do for their students, like putting tape markers to mark where the fingers go...I bypassed that stage pretty fast. I wonder if the biggest difference between my family and other families at that time was...somehow we were encouraged by a love of music from a young age.

Rather than having to make up games to motivate kids to play, I'd rather figure how to inspire a love of music in kids.

__________________________________________________________________

If you're interesting in partnering up with me in my trip to South Africa...please refer to my Prayer & Funding Request:

http://divingcatch.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html

Miracles, standards, and authentication

Being an engineer, I often try to verify things I see and hear. When you work with different types of people, you realize that everyone has a different definition of a task being done. As a musician, I realize that my standard of playing a piece of music is different than that of other people. My musical standards for myself are a result of all the hard work I put into violin practice when I was younger...sometimes practicing 5-6 hours a day during summers when I would visit a younger brother at a music camp. I practiced like crazy during those days because I was motivated by all the younger kids around me playing circles around me.

I am reminded of a passage from Barack Obama's Dreams of my Father:
“In 1983, I decided to become a community organizer.

There wasn’t much detail to the idea; I didn’t know anyone making a living that way. When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly. Instead, I’d pronounce on the need for change.

Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.

That’s what I’ll do, I’ll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change.

And my friends, black and white, would heartily commend me for my ideals before heading toward the post office to mail in their graduate school applications.

I couldn’t really blame them for being skeptical. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can construct a certain logic to my decision, show how becoming an organizer was a part of that larger narrative, starting with my father and his father before him, my mother and her parents, my memories of Indonesia with its beggars and farmers and the loss of Lolo to power, on through Ray and Frank, Marcus and Regina; my move to New York; my father’s death. I can see that my choices were never truly mine alone—and that that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry sort of freedom.”

Similarly, I can see that my need for authentication and my standards are in part based upon my experiences and environment. Yet, the need for authentication is also due in part, to the world in which we now live. Science has given us much, in that we now have a more dependable way to observe God's creation. Still, no matter how much we delve into the nature of the universe, we are still making observations and creating models to explain how everything works. We do not have the ability to explicitly prove how things came into existence. And so in everyday we have to make decisions using data that is second hand, probable, or merely plausible.

Nonetheless, when it comes to miracles, I am a skeptic. I do not personally feel the need for a major miracle in my life nor do I want to depend on them. However, I can see that a miracle at the right place and time would transform a person's faith for the rest of their lives. I can also see that many miracles in one's life might have a negative effect in making one too dependent on future miracles and inhibit personal growth. It all depends on the person.

How does this relate to helping people in South Africa? For one thing, my missions trainers have said that miracles occur during every venture. One example that was brought up relates to a car dealership in India. The average sales for this dealership amounted to ~5 cars/month. The REP consultant went to the dealership and prayed with the client over the dealership. New idea for me...I have never really prayed over a workplace before. No salespeople were in that day. What happened?

11 cars were sold that day. Only the accountant was around to do all the paperwork. Miracle? Random luck? I maintain some slight skepticism especially because I was not there and I do not know the full details. However, what I like about REP is that they have a defined process for documenting miracles they see on a venture. Like any scientific experiment, you need to have a control or baseline. In this case, the baseline was an average of 5 sales/month. While the sales on that particular day could be a statistical outlier, no such observed variability had ever been observed before. As a reliability engineer, I do look for data at work to be statistically significant (a measurement difference that is larger than noise). That said, almost by definition, miracles will be statistical outliers...things that defy repeatability and predictability. So if an event like that at a car dealership falls way outside of the known experiences of my client, I am at least willing to believe in the probability that it was indeed a miracle.

The most important thing in a miracle is not the numbers. In order for a miracle to be "authenticated" on a venture, the client must believe it was a miracle and be willing to back it up with testimony. It would be great if this happened to my client...but I don't need a miracle for myself. The most important thing is that they have been transformed inwardly by the miracle. The most important thing is that they now believe.

Prayer & Funding Request

If you think what I'm doing is interesting and you want to be a part of it...you can. First and foremost, I need prayer for the following things.

• Effective consultations with client companies.


• Strengthening of relationships with the entrepreneurs in community businesses.


• Personal spiritual growth, a servant’s heart & readiness to hear God.


• Physical, mental and emotional strength and stamina.


• Protection while traveling and while in South Africa.

My client will know his/her business more than I ever will. However, with a willingness to find out what God has planned, I hope we can work together to make an impact on the local community. My hope is also that my client will allow the margin and adaptibility in his/her planning and strategy to allow God to work in different ways. Your commitment to pray for me, whether it be every week or every day, will have consequences on my adventure.

If you have random things (dreams, visions, thoughts) happen to you that you think might be related to this trip, please let me know as well.

You can also get involved with this trip by helping me with funding. This trip requires more training than most and costs more than most. It requires me to invest more time in it than most missions trips and invest more in my teammate.

It is usually a given that a missions team will become close knit because of the shared hardships and experiences. We've been together for several months now, and it is turning into one huge family. In fact, a lot of alums stay around and help out with training and go on more ventures. It really is one huge extended family and I can say that I'm changing for the better because of it. We are a diverse group of people from different walks of life...but all of us share a motivation to understand more about ourselves and what God has in store for us.

All this training and fellowship does come with a monetary cost. I am looking to raise $5000 for this trip. It is somewhat hefty and I am leaving it up to God to provide. If anyone has any funding ideas...let me know.

If you want to help me with my trip directly you can do it several ways:

1. Make a check out to "REP" without specifying any names in notes (so your contribution can be handled as a tax deductible donation):

Michael Choi

18548 Paseo Tierra

Saratoga, CA 95070

I will send the checks on to the REP organization...or I'm also asking them for an address if you want to send the check to them directly.

2. Company Matching
Please remember that many companies match their employee’s donations of either finances or time given by the employee to the non-profit organization. Please see the REP website for more information: http://www.repurposing.biz/.

3. PayPal

Please note that Paypal assesses a 5% fee on all payments.

You can make a PayPal donation to:

Account name: rēp

Email: mailto:rim@inst.net

Please state in the subject line the name of the person you are supporting – see the rēp website for a direct PayPal link: http://www.repurposing.biz/contribute/
Please be sure to state your street address so rēp that can send you a tax-deductible receipt.

Please note that REP also adds on a 3% processing fee for donations. If you have any questions about what I'm doing or about funding, just post a comment and I can answer. This is my official start to fundraising. Let it glorify God.

Amount raised: $0

Funding Letter

Dear Blog Reader,

In the coming months, I will be part of a team called rēp from the U.S.A. that will go to Capetown, South Africa for about 2 weeks to partner with local business professionals in a transformational venture. Working with believers there, we will help re-purpose companies to align them with God’s agenda of transforming the societies.

The rēp Vision is Repurposing Business—Transforming Society® (http://www.repurposing.biz/)

• Repurposing – using practical, proven frameworks and tools to re-cast business practices in the mold of Truth
• Business – medium sized, entrepreneurs, community-based core businesses
  o An effective vehicle for completing the Great Commission
  o A time-tested platform for missions
  o Reaching most of the people within a culture that they know: work, global business culture
  o Tremendous leverage when business owners understand that their business is their household.
• Transforming – God is in the transformation business. The prize that he won for the price that he paid is transformation, not just of individuals, but of…
• Society – when we were commissioned with the words “Go into all the world…” Jesus gave us a mandate to reach whole ethnic groups. Practically, this started with individuals and households, and it extended to whole communities or societies.

I am investing about 80 hours in weekly training meetings and 50+ hours of preparation and reading outside of these sessions prior to the mission trip. I am developing a deeper understanding of business as a calling, why business can and should be ministry, the interplay between vocational training and ministry gifts, the eternal principles for business, cross-cultural missions, and trends in church planting.

My responsibilities in Capetown, South Africa will include:
1. Daily consultations with a South African company on steps they can take to be re-purposed.
2. Developing a Kingdom scorecard for my client that includes what is good for their business today while also producing eternal results.
3. Participation at times in various prayer & evangelism events.


Prayer support is essential as we break new ground. I would covet your prayers as mentioned below. Each team member is responsible for enlisting at least 10 prayer supporters. Also, I am raising funds for my own expenses and for the expansion of the ministry into new frontiers, including Africa, Asia and the Middle East. While I’m away, daily updates will be posted on our website (in the Team Updates section) and on this blog.

If you feel you would like to play a role in this kingdom venture, please let me know. Funding and prayer request details will follow.
Sincerely,
Mike

The First Diving Catch

In an alternate timeline/universe where I have much more readership, someone asked me: "What is the significance of your blog name?"

I have been saved. I have been saved not only by my last minute efforts but even more so by the opportunities that came seemingly from out of nowhere. Now, the pragmatist in me tells me that these opportunities were always out there...that I merely did not know how to search them out or recognize them. Yet I cannot ignore the timing nor that they opened up out of the efforts of other people. How have I been saved? I've flirted with unemployment twice this year already. In each case, I felt like an opportunity was thrown in my general vicinity out of nowhere and I had to exert that last bit of effort to dive and catch it.

Friends tell me that the job market in the SF/Bay Area is brutal right now. I have been lucky to receive advice from friends and colleagues and remain employed. However, I was at the brink of being laid off at the end of February and then again in mid-March. I went around to different people trying to find something that would fit into my future goals and promising opportunities kept slipping between my fingers.

Other things were at stake. I was 2 months away from earning a 2 month sabbatical (read: paid vacation) and I was looking specifically for temporary assignments as I was applying to graduate school. I did not want to get a job and then run off if I got into school after only a couple months into the assignment. However, at the point, I had no guarantee of being accepted at any graduate program...I had been just been rejected at one of my top choices. As it turned out, this very issue turned out to be a test of integrity.

Three days before my layoff deadline, my former manager sent me a job requisition describing a job I thought I could fit into very easily. It was a full-time position in a different city but it was a logical progression in terms of my own technical development. I submitted a resume and got an immediate response from the hiring manager. I set up a meeting for the next day to discuss the job in further detail, desperately hoping that I could somehow change the parameters of the assignment to fit into my design to go back to school. When we met, I probably overplayed my hand by describing my situation of wanting to go back to school and needing a little more time to get feedback on my applications.

The hiring manager negotiated from a position of strength. He had other candidates for the job and plenty of people within our internal company pool. However, my background was good enough that he did want to interview me with one caveat: if I interviewed and he extended me an offer, I would take the job and give up my aspirations of going back to school. Strained between the pull of my future aspirations and present need, the best I could do was to ask for more time to think about the decision. He gave me the weekend.

Over the weekend, I discussed my situation with a couple friends and spent some time alone in thought. If I end up taking the job, will I jump off to school if I am offered admittance? Would I be ok with burning bridges like that? What are my chances of not getting into school? How much do I want the chance at this job compared with a chance of going to school? By the end of the weekend, I had decided that I could not make a definitive decision about the job unless I interviewed...and to let the manager decide if he wanted to interview me. I had accepted that there was a high likelihood that he would not interview me and I would be joining the lines of unemployed people.

In our Monday morning discussion, I laid out a line of reasoning on why I could not promise to take the position until I interviewed for the job:
1. Our previous half hour discussion was not sufficient to fill in the details about the job requirements. Was it truly a job I would give up on school for?
2. I needed to meet people in the group. Could we work together effectively as a team? Would I be able to further develop teamwork skills?
3. Training and circumstances. Having been thrust into difficult situations before, I wanted to make sure I was set up for success.

After I barfed all these reasons on his lap, he was still willing to interview me. Through the ensuing interviews, I earned a couple more weeks towards my eligibiity for sabbatical.

Using feelings/leadings to understand the tongues stuck out at us.

I recently did a weekend of training for my South Africa trip.

It was a weekend of fellowship, discovery, and healing. Lots of girls crying. I didn't make them cry...I swear. And it was good for them. At the end of the weekend, I had a chance to talk to guy who they cried with and made an observation.

Me: You seem to be very sensitive to the feelings of other people.
Him: Why do you say feelings?

And so started a short conversation on feelings versus leadings of the Holy Spirit. I am not good at distinguishing between either so I categorize my impulses as feelings. Why is this important? Well, this weekend was an eye-opening experience regarding the leadings of the Holy Spirit.

One of the speakers at the retreat brought up the topic of speaking in tongues. With the skeptic in me now weighing in, she continued to speak about how speaking in tongues is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit expressing itself. We then did an interesting exercise where we partnered up and tried to glean messages from the Holy Spirit for our partners. So I get together with my partner and pray together with her for guidance and then we try to meditate. We only spent about 15 minutes and I only saw a few coherent pictures in my mind. The rest were way too random and complicated to try and explain.

However, my partner saw some interesting images for me that I can share. A warrior on a journey. Swimming in water and resting for the moment. I did not share anything when she indicated those images to me...but she seemed somewhat surprised when I incorporated her images in my sharing/testimony at the end of the retreat and also shared about having kendo practice swords in my car trunk. What happened next? Well a bunch of us ended up playing with my swords at the end when everyone was hanging out before leaving the retreat site. A couple people were surprised to learn that I had actually trained in kendo and that my "costume" last Halloween was actually real. Coincidence? Maybe...but it will be interesting to see if the warrior journey pattern plays out in my life.

When the subject of speaking in tongues was brought up...my mind flashed back to a memory of watching the movie, Babel, in Korea with my cousin. I'm glad we were able to watch it with Korean subtitles or else I probably would not have gotten as much out of it. On the flipside, my cousin came out of the movie a little confused. For those that have not seen the movie, here is a plot summary from IMDB:

"4 interlocking stories all connected by a single gun all converge at the end and reveal a complex and tragic story of the lives of humanity around the world and how we truly aren't all that different. In Morocco, a troubled married couple are on vacation trying to work out their differences. Meanwhile, a Moroccan herder buys a rifle for his sons so they can keep the jackals away from his herd. A girl in Japan dealing with rejection, the death of her mother, the emotional distance of her father, her own self-consciousness, and a disability among many other issues, deals with modern life in the enormous metropolis of Tokyo, Japan. Then, on the opposite side of the world the married couple's Mexican nanny takes the couple's 2 children with her to her son's wedding in Mexico, only to come into trouble on the return trip. Combined, it provides a powerful story and an equally powerful looking glass into the lives of seemingly random people around the world and it shows just how connected we really are."

I asked him after the movie if he was able to figure out why the title of the movie was "Babel". He had no idea...so I explained to him the reference to the Tower of Babel in the Bible. At the time, I had thought of the movie as a message showing how miscommunications and misunderstandings result in misfortune. But what causes these miscommunications and misunderstandings?

What popped into my head during my flashback was that all of us have our own tongues...different frames of reference. We learn to speak different tongues when we interact with other people...taking on things like lingo, experiences in similar hobbies, and maybe personalities. At work, I have separate tongues that I use for different teams and I'm currently learning a new tongue in my new job:

Mentor: Ok...so just build that suite, do a conversion, and generate the lists. Make sure your targetting and pruning are correct."
Me: Ok. Wait...hmmm....uhhhhhhhhhhh.

And we keep creating new tongues as we go along in everything we do. I don't even really know what half my friends do at work because of the amount of specialization we have in the workforce. I'm an avid snowboarder but I have no idea what the sportscasters are talking about during the ESPN Winter X Games Snowboarding Superpipe competition. Between the distractions of friend updates on Facebook (I'm avoiding Twitter for now) and networks of friends moving all over the world, I don't remember the what, where, and why of everyone anymore. If the building of the Tower of Babel had even a fraction of the specialization that we see today, I can see why it failed.

But...everything that we do in partnership with other people should also help us understand them in part. One of the easiest ways to connect with and understand other people is to have similar experiences. We come up with our own models for how people act and react. We create personality tests to better understand each other. Are we going to have increasing specialization in personality types or is the full diversity of personality already in existence? Whatever happens, we have this balance between the increasing amount of specialization in life and the extent to which we can experience that specialization.

Maybe we will figure out better ways of profiling people. But when I think about the ability of that one guy to make girls cry at retreat (albeit in a healing way) without having had the time to get to know them, I wonder if perhaps we can keep up with the increasing demands of people by embracing the Holy Spirit.

Conversation on a plane

On an Intel Shuttle flight from Portland to San Jose, I sat next to an Indian man. I was reading a book called "LEMON Leadership" as part of missions training. He saw me reading it and asked me what it was about...and thus started an hour-long conversation.

So for those of you wondering what the heck am I reading...the book profiles different leadership styles into 5 categories. It is intended to be a way for us to profile the business owners that we minister to and to help them see their strengths and weaknesses in terms of leadership. It is pretty interesting so far but at the same time the engineer in me compels me to verify the profiles against people I see in real life.

After a brief overview of the book, I start talking to my neighbor about why I am reading the book and we get into a long conversation on religion and philosophy. He does not see why there is so much strife between different religions in this world because he thinks that they espouse many of the same beliefs. My limited experience with Hindu people is that they are very tolerant of other religions. One of my Hindu friends in college desribed Hindu religious tolerance to me in this way: the Hindu way is a circle that intersects with the circles of other religions around the world. However, my neighbor seemed to have more than a passing familiarity with Christianity. As it turned out, his wife is Christian.

He does mathematical proofs for chip designs, using different methods to verify their intended function. If you're wondering why this is important, consider when the first Intel Pentium chips came out:

From Wikipedia:
"The Pentium FDIV bug was a bug in Intel's original Pentium floating point unit. Certain floating point division operations performed with these processors would produce incorrect results. According to Intel, there were a few missing entries in the lookup table used by the divide operation algorithm.[1]

The flaw was independently discovered and publicly disclosed by Professor Thomas Nicely, then at Lynchburg College, in October 1994.[2]

Although encountering the flaw was extremely rare in practice (Byte magazine estimated that 1 in 9 billion floating point divides with random parameters would produce inaccurate results),[3] both the flaw and Intel's handling of the matter were heavily criticized. Intel ultimately recalled the defective processors."

His work prevents these types of design errors. Anyway, he is a results-oriented type of guy. So we discussed religion in terms of tangible results: how do they affect the well-being of practitioners?

Forgiveness vs Letting things go
He talked much about how Hinduism affected the way he lives life. We only have so much control over our own lives and so those things we have no control of...we need to let go. We let go of those things for our own well-being because the other person who is wronging us does not have the same priorities. It sounds very similar to the concept of forgiveness. I won't go into what constitutes forgivenesss here but here's some current research: http://www.learningtoforgive.com/research.htm

Relaxation comes with knowing how to live life
Now that you've gone out and forgiven everyone, how does that affect your life? Well, from our collective experiences, we are both more creative when there is no pressure involved. He often comes up with solutions to problems when he is not focusing intently on the problem and is relaxing. If I'm trying to improvise music on violin, I notice that I am way more creative when I'm just jamming with friends for fun. I also realized that I compete much better when I am relaxed. It took me several years of competing in single elimination kendo tournaments to come up with ways of relaxing myself under pressure.

In addition, having a way to live life does give you some sense that you will be able to handle the future. My seatmate also happens to teach classes/mentors younger kids to give them that type of guidance. This is one way in which he expresses love for people.

Meditation vs Being in a state to hear God
A lot of people spend time with God in a prayerful, meditative way. My seatmate also happens to teach classes in meditation. He said that half an hour of deep meditation could be comparable to 6 hours of deep sleep. His comments piqued my interest since this is an area where I have not really focused at all. I do see warnings against New Age Christianity mixing meditation practices in with faith. In the case of my seatmate, it sounds like a way for him to center and prepare himself to meet the challenges of life. If I try it, I will need to judge any new insight by the fruit it bears.

Similarities and Differences
From the standpoint of tangible results, I cannot say that my seatmate was that different from other good Christian people I know. He follows his beliefs with action. These actions, teaching classes for the well-being of others, are an example of the love and concern he has for other people. His way of life gives him joy and he gains additional joy out of sharing it with others.

The main difference I saw occurred when I asked him: What is the purpose of your life? While I don't know what my true purpose in life is either, I do have the drive to find it. So I wonder if that is one thing that might separate God worshipping religions from others...that the lack of a creator might dilute the enormity of purpose.

But to be fair, a lot of Christians don't have a sense of purpose either.