If We’ve Only Got One Life…

Desiring God

So people keep telling me I should blog, and that I should blog about being in MN, so here it goes…

1. I get to go to Bethlehem Baptist Church and hear John Piper preach every Sunday.
2. My walk to church is shorter than the walk down Ho Plaza.
3. I get to hang out in the BBC book store, which is basically what I’m always secretly hoping Borders will be every time I walk in.  Imagine (almost) every good Christian book, in one room.  (Not too many very dead guys, though there is a good number.)  I will probably come home with ~$500 of new books.
4. I get to go to real old-people Sunday School, which is something I’ve never gotten to do before in my life.
5. I get to go to BBC’s prayer meetings and evangelism times.  Last Tuesday we went street-EV’ing downtown, and we think a handful of people got saved!
6. I get to work at Desiring God.
7. I get to work at Desiring God whenever I want to, since they gave me keys :-).
8. DG gives us free Mountain Dew.
9. I get to work doing web programming, which is basically what I do with my free time during the summers anyway.
10. Job == Hobby => amazingness
11. I get to work with a team of godly Reformed Christian Hedonistic men and women wiser and more mature than I who treasure Jesus and the Bible and are working tirelessly for your joy and mine for the sake of the Gospel.
12. I get to work with Daniel and hang out with Joe and Liang, who are also here with me.
13. I get to meet and hang out with and learn from people who are doing things I want to be doing eventually, like going to TBI, planting churches, doing campus ministry, etc.

The project I’m working on is simultaneously very exciting and very daunting.  Objectively, it’s very clearly one of those “if this succeeds at all, it’s completely by God’s grace” things.  It can consume whatever time I’m able to throw at it, which so far has been a lot.  Like I said above, they’ve given us keys to the building, so we’ve been going home later and later each day.  Soon we’ll be keeping I-Banker hours.  Pray that the work would be done in active reliance on Jesus for wisdom and strength, and hope and joy in Jesus, not simply pretty code or solved problems.

There is one project that I can talk about - our accountability web application.  I’ll talk more about it in a later post.  Daniel’s been hard at work for the last few days writing it while I’ve been learning Ruby On Rails (he already knew it) and working on some administrative/environment stuff.  I thank God for him, the heart God’s given him, and his willingness and ability to serve the Body of Christ in building this tool.

I’ll give a more subjective analysis later.  Maybe I’ll get back into the habit of blogging often.  We’ll see…

-Ben