www.pianoplayingdave.com

Things are going a lot better with the computer now. Some things still aren’t working right, but I was able to press through a couple of the problems I was having, and I just put together a song in Logic Pro (my music composition program) on Sunday that sounds totally professional and really excites me.

I was seriously ecstatic after I put the song together and realized I now have the tools and know-how to actually compose/record/mix music that is good enough to go in a professional movie score. I feel like I’m on the verge of a whole new world right now. I’ve been building up to this day for the past four years – learning about Logic Pro, investigating music gear, recording techniques, and software instruments, and just generally building up and preparing to set up my own small-scale recording studio. And on Sunday, it was like the day finally arrived. I was able to put all of my gear and knowledge to work, and the end result was a song that I would actually want to stick on my iPod and listen to over and over. I know I have so much more to learn about music composition and recording techniques, but the prospect of learning it excites me. It just feels like the dawn of a new day, and I get animated any time I talk about it – it excites me that much.

I know I said in my last blog entry that I just want to write and direct some day (instead of edit and compose too), but in the end I know I could never leave editing and composing out of the mix – I love them too much. I was just so unbelievably angry and frustrated at the technical problems I was having last Saturday, that it seemed like I should steer clear of computers in the future. But even as I wrote those words, I knew they were not true. I will always be an editor and composer.

I’m just frustrated when computers don’t work, and I’ve always known that technical problem-solving is not my greatest gift or passion. So the moral of the story is that I simply need to get to a place where I can edit and compose on my computer, but where I am not the person who has to trouble-shoot problems when they come. I don’t know how I will ever get to that place, but I at least know what to aim for now…

In the mean time, I simply press through the problems, and try to keep my eyes focused on what I really love doing, which is the creative work at the end of the tunnel.

-Dave

If you think of it, please shoot up a quick prayer for me regarding technical problems on my computer.

The urban myth which states that Macs never crash is a lie. I am right now in the middle of a complete software reinstall after a crash, and it is not going smoothly. Some software is not reinstalling the way it is supposed to. I am getting extremely frustrated.

I am a videographer and composer, and Macs have the best integrated software for video and music editing. However, given that I spend more than half my time on my Mac, when it does not function the way it is supposed to, it makes me very, very angry. It drains me, it frustrates me, and it makes me want to just be a writer/director at some point in the future (instead of a writer/director/editor/composer), so that I don’t have to deal with all the technical computer problems that irk me every day as an editor.

In the end, I know editing is one of my strongest gifts, and music composition is too…and so I desire to press on through these computer problems in order to get back to what I’m good at. But I would just ask for prayer on the current problem I’m facing.

A piece of software will not reinstall after the latest crash/hard drive replacement no matter how hard I try…I run the installer, it tells me it’s installed, and then nothing. I have tried installing it twice to no avail.

Thanks.

-Dave

“One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles.” (Luke 6:12-13)

It’s easy to read these verses and not really register the significance of what is being stated. I don’t know how many times I’ve read through the book of Luke and just passed these verses over without a second thought. But as I have reflected on them recently, the story they tell totally inspires me.

Here’s the situation: Jesus is a little ways into his 3-year ministry on earth. He’s been baptized by John the Baptist, has begun performing miracles and preaching about the Kingdom of God, and he has called out many disciples to follow him (Luke 5).

However, as we all know, Jesus was not to be on earth forever, and within a couple years, he was going to die, rise again, return to Heaven, and leave the movement he had started in the hands of his disciples and followers.

And so there comes a point in Jesus’ ministry where he needs to appoint some of his followers to be the leaders of the movement after he leaves – he needs to choose out from among his followers twelve apostles that will be given spiritual authority and wisdom to take the Church forward and lead it after He ascends to Heaven. This is no small decision. 2,000 years of Christian history ride on the foundation that Jesus was to lay in choosing these early Christian leaders. They went on to write many of the books that make up the New Testament, they went on to spread the gospel message throughout most of the Roman Empire, and they helped lay the very foundation of the church that was to come. “On this rock will I build my church.” (Matthew 16:18)

And so there is no doubt that the stakes are high. In a lot of ways, the decision of the twelve apostles is do or die. Appoint the wrong ones, and everything Jesus lived, preached, and rose for dies when He dies. But appoint the right ones, and God will empower them to change the world after He leaves in ways that are almost unfathomable.

This decision is huge. And so what does Jesus do before he makes it? “Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God.” And then in the morning He appointed the apostles.

Now I have no idea how long Jesus was praying that night, and I have no idea how late he stayed up. But being a night-owl myself, I’d like to think that Jesus was up until at least 2:00 or 3:00 AM praying.

But really, how late Jesus stayed up isn’t what inspires me most about these verses. What inspires me most is this trend I see in Jesus’ life of going up to a mountainside and spending concentrated times of prayer the night before any major and important life/ministry decisions. He did it here before choosing the twelve apostles. He did it a couple chapters later when He revealed himself in his full Heavenly glory to three of those apostles (Luke 9:28-36), and He did it in the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives the night before he was crucified. (Luke 22:39-46)

What did these nightly times of prayer look like? Often we are not told what Jesus said during them, but the night before He was crucified, we are told what He prayed: “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” (Luke 22:42) Jesus tells his requests to God, and yet at the same time submits His will to God. It is a two-way conversation. Asking and listening.

I believe that for many people, prayer is not all that it could and should be. So many of us just relegate it to asking for things, and a sort of talk-a-mile-a-minute, get-comforted-as-we-hear-our-own-voice self-therapy. But for Jesus, prayer was the very life and bread he lived off of. He craved it, he sought it for direction, and when He prayed, he didn’t just ask for things, but asked for guidance. He submitted himself in prayer, stopped to listen to the Father’s voice, and in full sincerity said, “Not my will, but yours be done.” And in the morning, he acted on God’s will that He heard at night.

I haven’t studied this in depth, but I just get this sense that for Jesus, prayer was what kept him grounded, kept him going. It was the driving central relationship in His life from which everything else sprung. It was a time when He was united with His Heavenly Father, and came out with direction and spiritual empowerment. It was a time to submit his will, be filled, and then let the well-spring outpour from his soul during the rest of his hectic ministry on earth.

I want to be that kind of a praying person. I want my times in prayer and submission to God at night to be the central place in my life – to move my heart to beat His very heartbeat – to lay down my life, and be filled with His spirit – and then to go out and to act on His imparted wisdom and direction in the morning.

Jesus was a night-owl, and I want to be one too.

-Dave

P.S. There is so much more I could say about this – about my own experiences along these lines in the past couple months – of various revelations I have had about prayer and Scripture recently….but I’ll have to save that for a later post, as it’s well after 3:00 AM, and this night-owl is getting tired.

A couple months ago, one of my friends passed along a very startling newspaper article to me which stated that in a recent poll, 90% of the Americans polled could not identify Afghanistan on a map.

Check out the article here:
U.S. youth are still geography dunces

Was I one of the 10% or one of the 90%? While I generally knew the area of the world Afghanistan was in, to be perfectly honest with you, I don’t think I could have definitively distinguished it from the other “Stans” in the area, and as I reflected more and more on my sore lack of geographic knowledge, I became convicted that this had to change once and for all. If I was a person who cared about this world and the people in it, I needed to know more about it. I wanted to be someone who could actually hear about Ghana and Kosovo in the news, and not think I was learning about Asia.

And so my geography knowledge quest began. I started learning all the countries in Latin America, then moved on to the Middle East, then Sahara Africa, then Sub-Sahara Africa, then Asia, then the East Indies, then the Caribbean, then the South Pacific Islands, then Eastern Europe, and then finally wrapped it up with Western Europe and all the random island nations that didn’t fit into the previous categories.

All in all, this took me about 2 months…spending about 20-30 minutes per night focused on either learning or reviewing one of the above areas each night. Of course I could have just test-crammed all these countries into my brain in a couple days, but that would have resulted in me quickly forgetting them. I wanted to not just cram the country names into my head, but actually learn about the countries too, and thus internalize a bit of the ethos of each nation.

So for instance, rather than just memorizing all the Eastern Europe countries, I instead decided to focus on learning all of the former members of the U.S.S.R. at the same time (Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan), and as I learned them, I studied the history of the U.S.S.R. at the same time to flesh out my understanding of these nations and what they’ve been through – how the U.S.S.R. was formed, how it broke up, who led it, who it’s allies were in the Cold War, who joined NATO in a united front against it, etc.

And then when I learned the African nations, I tried to learn a bit about each country as I went, and spent time really internalizing which countries were in the Sahara desert, which were considered a part of Western Africa, etc.

All in all, this took quite a while, but the end result is that I have totally internalized all of these countries, and have learned a ton about 20th century history at the same time.

I went through the UN listing of nations the other day and could identify all 192. And whenever I read the news now, I know every country that is mentioned.

This newfound knowledge and my sharing of it with you could be a form of vanity (i.e. “Look at me. I know every country in the world. Aren’t I smart?”) But really, the primary motivation is and should be love. Because in knowing and understanding the world, I can more easily pray for it and empathize with those in it. If I recognize that someone I meet in a store has a thick foreign accent, I can ask them where they’re from and actually know the country they tell me. It can start a conversation, rather than cut one off.

If any of you are convicted to learn the countries of the world as I was, my biggest suggestion is to break it up into the world regions I mentioned above and focus on a different world region each night. It makes the 192 countries much less daunting when you focus on 10-15 at a time, rather than all 192. Feel free to contact me with any further questions on how I went about learning the countries if you’re interested in doing it yourself.

And in all of this, Wikipedia is your friend. It is a great free resource for learning about all these countries and their history.

Happy Studying!

-Dave

P.S. And regarding the title of this post, San Marino is a small nation within the country of Italy.

Ever seen a Jackson Pollock painting and wished you had a couple dozen gallons of paint to dump and splatter around too? It’d be a lot of fun, but such a pain to clean up…

Well, let me introduce you to www.jacksonpollock.org – the world’s premiere digital canvas. Have some fun. Splatter some digital paint. And then clean up instantly by simply closing the window…

-Dave

I wrote out the following thoughts earlier this year after paging through a National Geographic Atlas and being absolutely filled with awe and wonder at God’s creation and power as I looked at the satellite photos of the universe.
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When I look at the charts of the universe in the National Geographic atlas, I see that the entire earth in nothing but a speck in our solar system.

And then I flip the page and see that our entire solar system is nothing but a speck in the middle of our galaxy.

And then I look at the next page and see the millions and billions of galaxies that make up the universe…

And I am just absolutely floored at how small each and every one of us truly is in proportion to the entire universe that God has created. It is like all of planet earth is nothing more than a tiny ant colony in the middle of a vast, ever-stretching desert…only earth’s space is even infinitely smaller in proportion to the universe than that. I cannot even fathom the degree to which everything I have ever seen, known, and experienced is nothing more than a tiny particle within an infinitely huge creation of God.

And then I think, when everything that we physically see and know here on earth is so miniscule in the scope of the universe and in the scope of eternity, how pathetic is it really for us to try and do things for our own glory here on earth? Glory?! Is there anything we can possibly do that really is that impressive in and of itself in the scope of that infinitely huge, infinitely glorious universe? It really is such a futile and laughable notion to try and make a name for ourselves. So we’ll establish our name in a little sphere of influence within a little ant colony, as the rest of the universe goes on unaware, displaying only the name and glory of its Maker.

No, doing things for my own glory is an exercise in futility. I want to get on board with the maker of the universe. I want to tie in my every action with what HE is doing, and what HE wants to do. For then rather than just making my little prick of self-promotion in the scope of the universe, I’m adding my prick to the millions and billions of pockets of influences in which God is working, and in a sense I am just playing my part in God’s glorious, universal symphony. My little prick of influence gets magnified as it ties in and works alongside all the other little pricks that God is making through other people who are willing to set aside their own egos and glorify Him.

When I see how big the universe is, and how small we are, and then when I know how much bigger God is even than the universe….I just sit there and say, “Why, why, why would I ever want to promote myself? What a waste of time and energy?! It’s like a little ant dragging a few pebbles into a pile right in front of the Empire State Building and then gloating about his accomplishment to the architect and contractor. What is the ant thinking? Does he not realize how stupid it looks for him to actually gloat in his accomplishment? But if somehow Michaelangelo was to magically direct the work of a billion ants to drop their pebbles in such a way that they formed an immaculate sand sculpture, now that would be a site to be seen. I want to be at the whim of the master sculptor, and let him have his way with me…so that instead of just creating a stupid little pile of pebbles, I can be a part of his eternal masterpiece. To God be the glory. I am just his servant.

-Dave

Have you ever wondered why the Bible singles out widows and orphans as those who we need to look after?

“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” (James 1:27)

Does the modern working American widow need to be cared for more than the man in Africa whose wife was murdered in a civil war? Does a teenager in the states who loses his parents in a car wreck need to be cared for more than the man whose whole family was swept away by the tsunami?

Why are widows and orphans singled out, and no mention is made of husbands and fathers?

Well, earlier this year, I had an epiphany about this while I was editing my Sudan video. Allow me to paraphrase the words of one Sudanese pastor I had interviewed:

“Very, very few men are alive. So many of them were killed from fighting in the war. The vast majority of the people in our church are women and children….we need to train the women to make money so they can provide for their families.”

While listening to this interview, suddenly it dawned on me… When humanity’s fallen nature kicks in to bring about wars, at those times men are the first to die as soldiers, and so there are a ton of widows and orphans out there – probably more orphans than childless fathers – more widows than widowers. And yet the men are in most parts of the world and were in most stages of history the primary providers. So when the men are killed as they so often are, the women and children are often left with no one to provide for them.

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: that WE provide for those who cannot provide for themselves. That WE look after the widows and the orphans in their distress. After all, is this not what Christ has done for us on the cross? We could not earn (provide) our way to Heaven, and yet Christ provided a way for us. We are all widows and orphans needing someone to look after us in our distress, and Christ stepped up to the plate for us. Let us step up to the plate for others.

-Dave

Friends and Family,

My mind is an interesting place. I really cannot connect with the concept of boredom, as even if there is nothing to physically do at any given moment, I can always occupy and entertain myself by simply thinking.

When I go for runs in the morning, I think the entire time. Stuck in traffic? I think. If you ever catch me staring off into space, chances are that my mind is just analyzing a problem.

Thinking tends to be natural and effortless for me – much like a cloud of bees swarming around a beehive. I simply stick a problem or issue out there like a hive hanging from a tree, and then I let my thoughts loose to swarm and dart around the problem in every which direction. The hundreds of bees orbit and throb around the hive, view it from many angles at once, and chug out observations and creative solutions with hardly any effort on my part. The only thing I really have to do is open the basket to let the bees loose, and from there on, they just swarm and bring back solutions on their own.

Given how comfortable I feel in my own head, it’s of little surprise that I tend towards introversion sometimes. When my mind can keep me so engaged all the time, I don’t always have the pressing emotional need to express what I’m thinking to others.

And yet, is it right for me to keep most of my thoughts to myself? God has given me a mind that can easily and creatively analyze concepts and situations, and I want to be a good steward of that mind. I don’t want to simply hold onto and bury what God has entrusted to me as the foolish servant did in Matthew 25. Rather, I want to invest it, put it to use, and allow it to multiply.

And so my daily reflections on this blog will be just that – an investment and multiplication of my thoughts. I hope that my reflections on faith, current events, social justice, the Bible, art, hope, suffering, and the like will go out into your hearts and hands and do more good than they ever could have done had I just kept them to myself. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I’m always asking questions.

Check back every day or two, and I will do my best to keep the site updated often.

-Dave

Friends and Family,

Welcome to my blog. I have uploaded all of my e-mail updates from the past three years under the category “E-mail Updates” on the right. They are then subdivided into “USC,” “Tsunami,” “Katrina,” and “Sudan.” If you ever have a chance to read through them in chronoloical order, it is cool to see how I have grown and matured since my time at USC in 2003.

Also, I have included new categories called “Daily Reflections” and “Prayer Requests,” which I should be updating every couple days.

And eventually I plan to start distributing my piano compositions via this web site too (alas the name “pianoplayingdave”). However that won’t be for another four to six months, but I will make sure to let everyone know when I start uploading my music to this web site.

In the mean time, enjoy the e-mail updates and reflections, check back frequently, and if you are touched, challenged, and/or encouraged by what you see, please pass along word about the blog to your friends and family too.

-Dave