Back when I first started realizing that God wanted to use me in campus ministry, I developed a prayer exercise that, sadly, I have gotten away from. I would sit and pray each night for a student that God was going to put into my life. Who they were, when I would know them, and what my role would be in their life was a mystery. But I wanted to know that when I did eventually know them, that God had already heard earnest prayers on their behalf.

What's interesting to know is that this is exactly the kind of praying Jesus Christ did for me. As he prayed in John 17, he spoke to God about me. He asked God to keep ME from Satan. He asked God to sanctify ME. He told God that he was consecrating himself for ME. He asked God to help ME believe in him.

A lot of time has elapsed, and I have now appeared on the earth. God has stopped, looked down, and gotten to know me. A light went off over his head and he suddenly had that familar look as he said "Hey, YOU'RE that one my Son told me about! He asked me to show you some things..."

Somehow I ran myself into a mental corner with this blog, so I'm going to back up and start a little bit fresh with this entry.

I hope that I'm not running around in life just doing what other people want me to do. Every now and then I get that odd feeling. Once in about every thousand thoughts I sometimes think that's why I'm in Abilene now. Abilene is a place where I can go for a while and supposedly gain a greater insight into my own faith. That, or become a religious wheel-spinner. I haven't even started classes and I've already picked up on a Graduate School of Theology culture - spent hours sitting around with some guys diving into the depths of the theological mind, church culture, historical intricacies of a world movement, philosophical ponderations - all of which I seem to be able to do - and ultimately nothing is different. A bunch of guys just spent three hours trying to impress each other with how much they could come up and how learned they can sound. So, here I am, willingly participating in all of this. But is this really what I want to be doing? And for another three and half years? My only solace in this thought is that when I first started OU I couldn't shake the feeling that I was doing the totally wrong thing. Fortunately, God used it to change my life completely.

So, on top of that is the fact that I've been traversing the country this year so that I can join in the joy of my friends getting married. This is awesome - I've been very honored to be asked to be in the wedding party of several marriages lately. But here I am back in Tulsa right now, sitting in a week and a half holding pattern so that I can be a part of two different weddings. Then I head to Norman for several days of the 49th annual National Campus Ministries Seminar. This is a great life - and I praise God for every bit of it - but I'm realizing that through the past several months I have participated in almost nothing of my own design, even on a daily basis. Even having been handed that kind of freedom by going to Abilene the first part of July has really only resulted in me immediately becoming a program director of sorts for one of the big campus ministries in town. I know that it sounds like I'm complaining about all this - and believe me I know that every single one of the things I have mentioned are fantastic and amazing opportunities. I think my frustration lies in the feeling that I haven't harnessed the time that I have had away from all these things to really design my own course; to really sit with God and search my passions. I think that I'm running on the steam of a lot of formerly developed passions right now and not throwing new coal on the fire. So, what do I do when I'm "away" from all those other things? Pretty much nothing right now. I literally sit and do nothing. I need to work on a renewed fire, or the next month, year, three years.....

Help me have faith that God gives us exactly what we need exactly when we need it.

For all of my loyal readers who routinely drive between Norman, OK and Abilene, TX, check out the game of Hypotenuse. Thanks to April Brickell for sharing the fun.

Walking with Lena

For fourty-five minutes every Tuesday and Thursday, the afternoon sun streamed through the 16th story communist-era apartment window and onto the time-worn solid wood table that sat between me and a young, fresh faced, blue-eyed Ukrainian girl named Lena. She usually had just sat her small purse down and had apologized for her tardiness as she swept her neck-length sandy-blonde hair behind her ear and quickly opened the English workbook to the previous week's lesson.

It usually took her a minute to get settled and catch her breath, because she and her friend Polina had always just spent the last two hours catching passenger trains from their small country village into the heart of Ukrainian capital of Kiev, then rushing to the red metro line stop that connected with the underground train that brought them to the edge of the Harkivsky district. From there it was onto a crowded bus that dropped them near the intersection where our aging building loomed over the dirty street.

She knew my drill well - talk about the day, the week, new developments with her father, how she felt, etc. But she always had a special eagerness to get back into the stories we were discussing - stories straight from the book of Luke that tracked the development of Jesus Christ and his life. I always started the lessons by having my readers recount what they remembered from last week and the significance of the story. With Lena, this almost always included a reference to something she had experienced in the meantime. She would tell in wide-eyed wonderment of something she had seen that demonstrated the principle of the story we had talked about before.

Lena was best Friends with Polina, the sixteen year old daughter of Natasha, the volunteer interpreter for the Harkivsky church. Natasha and Polina had been bringing Lena to church for several months, much to the disapproval of Lena's family, specifically her father. Her excitement about Christ had been growing astronomically and was hungrily devouring everything she could get her hands on that would teach her more about the Christian faith. But she stopped short of making an outward commitment because of the intense fear of a family backlash. In their eyes, what we were doing was indoctrinating her into a cult. Often this would reduce her to tears in our sessions together, an epic struggle raging in her mind between becoming a Christian and the fear of ostrcization from the family she loved so much. Eventually a good portion of our sessions together would be devoted to nothing but passionate prayer together about her situation. She wanted it so badly, but desperately wanted the blessings of her family in the process. To God we went, over and over.

The weeks rolled by, and our sessions became deeper, the prayer time more desperate, and her passion over the stories of Christ more immense. Her language became rich with Russian-accented superlatives: "That is wonderful." "That is amazing." "I am so happy about that." She would slowly sit back in the wobbly plastic lawn chair, eyes moist with the excitement she just experienced in the discovery of a new idea. Then we would pray, and pray some more. She would then gather her things from the floor around her and carefully read on the other side of the room while Polina and I worked on the books of Acts for an hour. Finally, the two hour commute back to the country side, where she told of constantly watching out the train window, speaking with God about what to do with the new hope she was finding in the power of God's promise.

One warm Thursday afternoon Lena stepped into the apartment, took her seat across the table, laid her belongings in the usual spot on the floor, looked me in the eyes, and with a giant smile that she no longer could suppress and with wide, rosy, eastern European cheeks flushed with excitement, boldly stated "I am to be baptized." Prepared for another emotional session of asking God to throw open this door, I sat forward, somewhat stunned at the delivery of an answer for which we both had been searching. Of course, my only word at the time was "Awesome."

She wanted Rick, the missionary, to help her do this and also wanted Natasha and Polina to be present, which made the following Saturday the only practical time. That morning rolled around and the three of us from OU, plus Rick, his family, Natasha, and Polina gathered with Lena in our apartment to embark on the trek to the local park which had a large pond. Lena was shaking with excitement.

Lena walked by my side for much of the journey. I strode with my hands in my pockets, occaisionally glancing over at her face. Her eyes were mostly fixed on the distance.

"I am going to be baptized."
"Today I am to become a new person."
"This is the greatest day of my life."
"I am so happy. I am so happy."

Suddenly it wasn't her that was welling up with tears. It was me. I kept looking forward, with my hands in my pocket, gazing through the fog of moisture that was coming over my eyes. I had worked so hard to help her come to this point, but for some reason I found myself realizing that I didn't truly know the significance of what was happening to her. But wasn't this what was supposed to have happened to me? Isn't it because of this that I am across the world trying to get other people to discover the grace of God? Why am I not waking up daily realizing the fact that I am a totally new person because of what God is doing right now? Why did I sit up out of the baptistry and think about getting my dry clothes back on? There is a Holy Spirit from God swirling about this girl right now that is touching her with images of a life totally changed. Suddenly I was the one in desperate need of it. Suddenly I was the one being taught what it was like to actually know the power of God. And I realized that was the lesson that Lena was actually teaching me from the moment she first sat across that old table.

God put his spirit in the form of Lena that day. God's spirit, with rosy cheeks and Sandy blonde hair, showed me the power of total change that had never really affected me -- a spirit that wraps around me and wants to radically transform me at every moment. Why had I never found this spirit as a Christian?

As I stood on the muddy shore of the dark pond that sunny Saturday morning, I watched a soul emerge from the water having undergone a total heart transplant before my eyes. I could only look down and wonder how much of my own I had allowed to be replaced.

Ah, the fresh hot blazing sun and beautiful landscape of the west Texas desert... Now begins life in the bustling metropolis of Abilene, Texas. Despite how easy it is to poke fun at the relative non-interestingness of a place like this, I know that this is where God has guided me, and is going to take me on some wild journeys. I'm sure of this because God hasn't taken my anywhere yet that he hasn't shown me some amazing experiences.

So, I'm here, got all my junk arranged in my new house, everything is set up... and now what? I've got pretty much the month of July and a good part of August before I am consumed with classes. I'll be spending some of that time daily doing independent contract work for the company for which I worked in Tulsa, a trip to Oklahoma and Arkansas, and NCMS in Norman, but basically I am back to the old life of me actually deciding how my time is spent. I have tentatively committed to developing a small groups ministry plan for the Southern Hills campus ministry, plus Angela wants me to do a website. Hmm, guess I have more to do than I thought. But the funny thing is that even with all of that, I have the choice to either productively use or waste a significant amount of time.

I often wonder what I would do if I were put in jail for any significant amount of time. I look at people like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., apostle Paul, and (whether you like him or not) Hitler, who were all able to recognize the kind of opportunity being in jail actually afforded them. They had nothing but time on their hands, and used that to feed their minds and produce some of their most influential works. What I'm recognizing more and more is that if nothing else happens first, I have probably about 55-60 more years to be a human. What am I going to do with that time? I struggled with that a lot while I was sitting at a gray cubicle for for five months in Tulsa. I felt like time was being stolen away from me. That's why I ultimately refused to do that for more than 40 hours per week, even when I was asked to stay over. So now, that time has been given back to me again - I want it to count.

I made a commitment to myself when I started blogging that I would not be a poster of other people's words. I still hold to that, but like all great rules, there must be exceptions. These are Steve Jobs' comments to the graduating class of Stanford, June 2005.

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I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky that I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me that I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything that all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.