Do You Know Stephen Harper?

Oh, so that's who this guy is! This week while I'm in Florida for Christmas vacation, I've been reading a book entitled "Stephen Harper and the Future of Canada." (Here's a review from the London Free Press.)

I've only become interested in Canadian federal politics in the past few years thanks to Abe and Joel's challenging views. I voted for the Liberals in my first two federal elections but I switched to a Conservative vote in the last election. Early on, my knowledge of the leadership of the Conversatives was based on Preston Manning caricatures and Stockwell Day stunts. Stephen Harper came along and assumed leadership in recent years and he has generally been characterized as being reticent with the media and public with "hidden agendas" assigned by Liberal opponents.

This book gives me a very different picture of Harper. It's obvious enough that the author likes Harper but it provides me with a context for Harper's career in politics. I'll highlight a couple of things that I learned.

1) He's not a new-comer to politics. He's been involved since he was a university student in the early 1980s and he's been an MP several times since then. (See this timeline.)

2) Echoing some of our recent blog discussions, he was also very unsatisifed with the choice of political parties in Canada while he was in university. Rather than complain about it or refuse to vote, he opted to create a political party of his own. He drew up his ideal platform for a conservative political party and eventually founded the Reform party in western Canada as the Chief Policy Officer under Preston Manning. Lofty goals indeed.
3) Harper is a "policy wonk." He prefers to stay behind the scenes and deal with the issues, rather than the Ottawa-bred political fighting. The conservative party was falling apart under Stockwell Day and he was forced to step in as the leader to save the party from itself. So yes, he is reluctant to give the media what they want and he isn't prone to photo-ops and revealing personal interviews.

4) Harper believes that "moral issues" like abortion and homosexuality should not be in the policy platform of his party. Rather, he has stated since early in his career that such issues should be handled with a free vote according to the conscience of each MP and their constituencies' preferences. (And yes, that means that poverty is not lumped in with "moral issues" and should be handled as part of the party policies.)

5) Back in the day, the Meech Lake accord was promoted to help relations with Quebec and stuff. Each MP was supposed to have 20 minutes to debate the issue. Harper was assisting the lone, first Reform MP at the time (Deborah Grey) and in the end, the three leading parties pulled a fast one. The leaders of each party gave one speech and then they closed off the debate.

Last year, the Liberals pulled a similar stunt by pushing through the redefinition of marriage, and one Liberal MP actually resigned because of these poor tactics. Harper stated at the beginning of the current election campaign that he wants a new vote taken with everyone free to vote as they see fit. So no, he's not a fan of quickie political maneuvers.

6) Harper has always been the toughest opponent on the issue of Quebec's secession form Canada. He was the one that has continually insisted that Quebec cannot secede legally from Canada back in the early 1990's and he proposed Bill C-341, which established how secession could happen legally and what Canada should do in the case of illegal secession. This was the clearest response to Quebec's referendum back during Jean Chretien's regime but it was never passed. Instead, Chretien opted for a vague response in parliament with a last-minute rah-rah rally in the last two weeks, and we escaped a major quandary by the skin of our teeth.

All in all, I found this book to be quite fascinating. I'm sure that doesn't do much for my reputation as a nerdy geek but I certainly know more about Harper (and the Conservatives) than I did before. And yes, I am voting conservative in the upcoming election.

Who Needs A White Christmas?

I'm leaving London at around 2:00 pm today and I'm driving down to Florida with my dad and my brother (collectively known as "the David Grants"). The original plan was to bring the three South Korean boys down to meet their parents in Florida but as I learned late last night, that plan was cancelled several weeks ago. In any case, we three men will play a lot of cards with my dad's parents, go to many buffets and play much golf. It's like early retirement!

As for this past week, I just finished a whirlwind schedule. Monday night, we had our final Christmas choir/drama presentation at church. I now have a DVD recording of the final presentation, which went perfectly. For the record, I remembered the words for my solo five out of six nights. Apparently there's a DVD of the second presentation when I messed up my lyrics and I plan to get a copy of that in January, if only for the sake of the ongoing joke.

On Tuesday evening, I spent four hours with Ariel Terry recording various worship songs. 'Twas excellent. We recorded the first version of one worship song that I wrote and Ariel layed down guitar and piano tracks for two more songs that I had started. We also did a set of four familiar worship songs. The next day, I edited five of the tracks for length and spit 'em all out to a CD. I created a nice little CD label and I prepared numerous copies for my various extended family members. (Anyone that is interested can ask me for a free copy and I'll get one to you in January.)

On Wednesday, my family "officially" celebrated Christmas with a full turkey dinner and the opening of presents. Since my and my sister will be at my mom's parents during Christmas while we're in Florida, we had to get everything in early. I managed to get the first copy of my worship CD done about fifteen minutes before I stuck it in the CD player for my mom as her Christmas gift. Talk about a race to the finish!

As usual, my family had a nice set of new DVDs (TV seasons and movies) by the time we were done. La piece de resistance was the boxed set of Calvin & Hobbes that I received from my family. It has immediately become the centrepiece of my entire comic collection, and that's saying a lot.

Following our family Christmas on Wednesday, I then finished the night off with not just one but two parties. I had a party with my cell group and then I hit the second half of the wrap party for my Christmas choir. Busy, busy. On Thursday afternoon, I capped off my week by picking up various Terry kids from various places and having dinner with them at their house. (Thanks for the gifts, everyone!) I had to drop up another pile of presents for them, which is the main reason I made that trip. Richard even showed up later on so he, Joel and I got the chance to catch up on things.

Even with all of this hustle and bustle, I still had an opportunity to donate to Take It Or Leave It. I wrote about this before and I'll say it again, they do amazing work. In this case, the people involved in that program had heard about a single mother with one child under a year old and another on the way. They were delivering something to this woman's house this past week and it was almost entirely bare.

On Wednesday night at the wrap party for the choir, they spoke to a few people privately and now they'll be buying this woman various major necessities and they'll deliver it just in time for Christmas. Since they give 100% of their donations (either financial or material) to people that need it, I love working with them. I encourage you all to check the main website and to donate something that is listed there. Many thanks.

News & Links

And now for something completely different...

Here's a gangsta rap parody from SNL this past week that has been making the rounds on the internet: The Chronic of Narnia.

Here's another parody video: The Me Church. We played this during our weekend services a couple of months ago at my church.

Did you hear about the computer virus that caught a child porn offender?

There's nothing like 40 drunken Santas to get your point across.

And for the scientifically inclined (i.e. boring), we have Buffy the Theory Slayer. We keep finding large orbiting objects in our solar system that shouldn't be there. Heh.

Swim Deeper

Let me give you a word picture based on a dream that I had this morning. Imagine yourself at an idyllic cottage area just after noon on a calm and bright summer day. There's just enough of a breeze to cool you down but not enough to make you cold if you're in the water. There's a small lake with a few people swimming or boating. You have swum out from the shore to a small floating platform, the small square kind made of wood with a simple ladder up the side. It's the kind of platform that tires you out when you swim to it but it's fun to dive from it or sunbathe a while and then eventually swim back to shore.

God was telling me, "Don't swim further, swim deeper."

In our lives, we gradually discover our main calling. The purpose or focus to which we love to devote ourselves, that inspires us and keeps us going. For me, my two main areas are worship and discipleship, possibly in that order. For others, it may be teaching or pastoring or being a parent.

Once we have found our calling, our lake, we are not meant to move to other lakes. There may be other lakes nearby or other rivers. These lakes and rivers may be very pleasant and attractive themselves. Other people may be there already or people may move from your lake to the other ones. Even so, we're to stay in the lake that we found.

The purpose of this instruction is not to hinder us from moving. The purpose is not to limit us, to put borders around us or to stop us from learning. Instead, the purpose is that we fully explore this lake that we have found.

We can walk along the shoreline of the lake We can explore by boat. We can swim around along the surface, maybe even shallow dive off a platform. We can enjoy our time with others as we do these things. We can even just stop and sunbathe. That may be great at first and it may be great at different times when we need a break.

We should not be satisified with swimming around the surface, though. We need to swim deeper. We need to swim down past the depths that others swim. We need to go down by ourselves into the soundless areas below, finding the secrets that others cannot find. In these places, looking up at the surface, it's just between us and God. He'll show us what we're looking for.

And once we have found these secrets, these treasures, we can swim up and bring them back to the surface. We can bring the pearls that God has shown to us and give them to others. For me in particular, this means deepening in worship and bringing back songs that everyone can share. (Once in a while, there may be a pearl of great value that I won't want to share with anyone.)

Don't swim further, swim deeper.

Humility & Humiliation

I wrote about humility this past week and now it's time to write about humiliation. Last night was opening night for our Christmas presentation at my church. I have a solo and it went flawlessly. Tonight, not so much.

My solo is for the song O Little Town of Bethlehem, which we all know so well. I have the first verse to myself, so let's see how it goes...

O little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by
Yet in...la lananana
The everlasting light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight

Yep, that's how it goes. *sigh*

Caution: Humility At Work

This past weekend, there was a high priority problem at my workplace. I had dealt with it initially on Friday morning but I decided that we could wait to fix the software bug until the following Monday. Unfortunately, a customer contacted us over the weekend and one of our other programmers had to come in on Saturday to fix the issue. Several people received an e-mail this past Monday explaining what had happened and suggesting that this should have been corrected on the previous Friday.

As the project manager, I had made the call to delay the fix. So, I sucked it up and sent an e-mail back to everyone, apologizing for my decision and apologizing for the fact that another developer had to waste part of their weekend on the problem.

One person wrote me back in a bit of amazement, saying that they had never heard anybody apologize at anyplace they had ever worked.

The way I see it, an apology is my first course of action once I have been shown that I was wrong. Granted, everyone expects an apology if they themselves were wronged. We'll have arguments with someone about how they hurt us or whatever and at some point we'll gleefully add the comment, "And you haven't even said that you're sorry."

On the other side of that coin, though, it takes a fair amount of pride-swallowing to easily offer a meaningful and sincere apology. It can be difficult to counteract the automatic desire to defend ourselves. The only thing that makes it easier is to practice, I suppose. In any case, I find it amusing that certain marks of maturity are so often missing from our workplaces but I'm glad that God showed up in that simple e-mail exchange.

Earthly Treasures

I ordered my new sound equipment for my laptop a week and a half ago through eBay and two of my packages arrived today. I received Sonar Home Studio 4 and M-Audio Mobilepre USB. I also ordered two new Rode NT1A mics, which will be arriving next week.

I'm planning to use the new equipment to record several different sets of songs. My first priority is to prepare a short worship CD for Christmas, for my parents and my co-workers. I did that two years ago and it really worked out well. After that, I want to record a few other songs that I've been writing. I also want to record a complete worship CD with Arial and perhaps a french worship song or two for ma grandmama. Here I go...

As for other material goods, I told a few of my friends that I would prepare a proper Christmas wish list and I've finally gotten around to doing that. If'n you weren't one of those people then by all means, ignore the rest of this post.

1) Simpsons Hit & Run for the PS2 (link)
2) Foxtrot (link) Note: I already have most of the other treasury-sized collections.
3) Any recent worship CD - I haven't bought any in the past year.
4) Wizard subscription (link)
5) Blank CDs (Heh.)
6) Clothing, since I rarely buy anything for myself.
7) MP3 Player
8) Family Guy Season 3, Simpsons Season 4 and 5, Futurama Season 2
9) Alarm clock with ten-minute snooze button, battery/plug options, small enough for trips.
10) Somethin' else. Be creative, thoughtful or cheap, whatever you prefer.

Last Week & Next Week

This past week was pretty brutal. Christmas choir practice was fine, hanging with my Little is always fun and I even got together with E* for an impromptu lunch. Even so, my entire week was overshadowed by one major event at work.

My best "work friend" resigned this past week, completely out of the blue. He's moving on to a better job that will definitely work out nicely for him. For me, though, it was like an emotional sucker punch. I've worked quite closely with him for more than three and a half years. We bounce ideas off of each other as we develop our code and we tend to think alike regarding our approaches to software design. More than that, I always played him two games of chess every day at work and we have even hung out a few times outside of work.

I've had this black cloud about me ever since I found out about it, which is uncharacteristic of me. I was actually a little surprised at how deeply this effected me but as I said, I'm sure things will themselves out. Good times we had, good times.

My focus for the upcoming week is my Christmas production at my church. I've been practising with my Christmas choir since early October and pay off is coming next weekend. We have six days for everyone to come and see our free presentation. It falls on Saturday-Sunday-Monday on December 10/11/12 and December 17/18/19, at 7:00 pm every night.

The play was written from scratch and directed by one of our church members and the music was arranged and recorded by our worship leader. I've seen the early versions of the whole production and it's pretty funny. It relates to the story of Mary and Joseph but this year it's told from the point of view of the shephards. Aaron and Derrick Ross play two central roles as shephards and since they're brothers in real life, their bickering and relationship comes off as both hilarious and believable. (Plus, Tara is in it!) I'm sure everyone will enjoy it.

As for me, I do have a solo for one of the songs. On the whole, the songs fit quite nicely into the play and a couple of them will have a nice emotional impact. I hope y'all decide to take one night to come out and enjoy yourselves.