Swaziland (part 4).

We had our Swaziland open house on Sunday.  I've previously said some things about the trip.  I said some similar things there..

Here's another video that I made for this last weekend.  I expect to make a few more before the footage gets archived for good, so you can look forward to that.  Or, you know, not.  That's cool, too.

Swaziland (part 3).

Here's the first video I made for our Swaziland trip.  I'm currently working on putting together something more full.





For more stories about Swaziland, check out part 1 and part 2.

Swaziland (part 2).

(This is part 2 of this post.  I split it up because long blog posts are annoying.  And I hate being annoying.)

It's funny how forgetful we are.  I came back on a Wednesday.  The next day, new students arrived at work.  And I've been going ever since.  The few conclusions I made have been buried by two months of doing, creating, teaching, leading.  After chewing on his questions these last couple of weeks, I remembered.

The Swazi people believe in prayer.  Like, really believe it.  If they pray something, they know it's going to happen.  Period.  Full stop.

Most of our days were spent doing home visits.  We'd go to the homesteads of families in the church (and several neighbors), bring some gifts of food and hygiene items, share some scripture and pray with them.  It was awkward.  Swazis are difficult to read, so half the time, it felt like we were being invasive and rude.  Pastor Maziya had to continually comfort us that people were happy and appreciated our presence.

Anyway.  On one home visit, we talked to guy that explained his faith in prayer.  He said that he rarely knew where his next meal was coming from.  He was incredibly poor.  No family to take care of him.  No job prospects.  No good land.  And yet, he had never gone hungry.  He had never gone a day without some kind of food.  When he would pray, God would answer that prayer.

Boom.  Do I have that faith?

Perhaps a more telling story of this was on our very first home visit.  His name is Sofiso.  He was a deacon and leader in the church and lived on his homestead with his mother and sister.  When we visited with him, we shared some verse and talked about life for about 30 or 40 minutes.  He and his mother worked at the hospital in town.  In fact, his  mother should be coming home from work any minute and we could meet her, too.  We decided to stick around a while longer.

She was probably 20 minutes late when we decided we should probably move on.  So we asked Sofiso what we could pray for with him.  He said that his brother was very sick.  He was in the hospital where his family worked, but they had been faithfully praying for him and he was getting better.  In fact, they were hoping he would come home some time that week, so we could come back and meet him, too.  We prayed something fierce for him.  These people see enough death.  God would heal this man.

As we walked down the driveway, Sofiso got a call.  It was his mother.  His brother had just died.

Literally as we were praying for this man's recovery, God was taking him home.  Down to the minute.

Sofiso didn't cry.  Swazis don't.  Our team did.

Later that week, we were blessed to be able to provide most of the funeral costs.  It was too close to our hearts for us not to be able to help in some way.

But just think about Sofiso's faith.  Maybe the severity of his brother's condition wasn't communicated to us.  Maybe he took a sudden turn on that day.  Either way, Sofiso, just minutes before, was laughing and smiling and confidently trusting that God would heal him.  Despite numerous prayers for healing and provision not being answered in the past, he believed and trusted that God would heal his brother. 

When do I have that faith?  When, if I pray something, do I believe it's going to happen?  And when, after I've prayed something and the exact opposite happens, have I continued praying and praising God for his goodness?

If that man from my church asked me again today, I would tell him this story.  This faith, that I've so quickly forgotten, challenges me to trust my God.  I want that faith, darn it.  I want to, despite numerous disappointments before, still believe that God will answer my prayers when I ask something in his name and with his heart.  My hope is to not forget that faith as I have for the past several weeks, but to have that kind of faith.

Swaziland (part 1).

Last week, after church, one of our members took me aside and asked me, "Tell me about Swaziland.  Tell me about your experience."  I guess it's really more of a demand than a question.

So I told him some of the generic stuff.  Stuff I've told so many people about the trip (though I realize I've never written about it on here).  It was great to see believers around the world.  It was an awesome opportunity to explore possibilities of a ministry partnership across the globe.

The slightly longer version is that I'm not sure how Swaziland was.  As most of you know (maybe?), I went primarily as documentarian.  My job was to capture the story of our team's experience and to tell of God's faithfulness.  It was to capture the story of the Swazis.  What is God doing there?  Who are these people?  How do they follow him?  How can we be blessed by them as we have blessed them (We sent several thousand dollars of funds ahead of us)?

To develop a functional ministry partnership, our people needed to know their people.  I took a camera, a decent mic, and my laptop to log and edit footage in country.  The whole trip, my mind was consumed with questions: What's the story here? How can I tell that story best?  How will it cut with other footage?  What's the best framing?  How's the lighting?  Is the audio coming in clearly?  Am I holding the mic so that the cables aren't making noise?  What questions can I ask to get deeper into this story, this emotion?  What's my battery life?  How much time do I have left on my card?  How likely am I to need the battery and the card space later?

I tell people that it was pretty lonely.  Not in the "Wah, I miss home.  I wish I had a girlfriend." kind of lonely, but I constantly felt like I was holding a council of one.  Every artistic decision, every technical difficulty, every question I asked was my idea and I decided if it was good or bad.  No one to help with sound or to interview while I worry about tech.  I've told most people that I'm never doing video on a missions trip again unless I have at least one more person to help.

At no point did I feel like what I was doing was not ministry.  I was keenly aware of video's power to do ministry to peoples' hearts while shooting every day.  Video has the amazing power to stir peoples' hearts in such a way that they experience, in some small measure, what our team experienced while we were there.  With a good video, they will love the people as much as we did.

Really, my ministry was not to the Swazis.  It was to Impact, my home church.

I can't wait to share the fruits of that work, but it made for a pretty unemotional trip to Africa at times.  (There are plenty of emotional stories, too.  Maybe another time...)

But this guy at church wasn't content with that answer.  He kept pressing.  In retrospect, I'm really glad.  Very few others have.

He said, "Traveling overseas, serving others, going on missions trips... it changes you.  How did God change you?  What was not the same about you when you came back?"  I kept trying to BS some answer, but he kept rephrasing, kept asking, kept pushing.

(There's much more to tell, but I hate long blog posts.  I'll continue this next posting.)

Work.

Since I'm on Blogger at work, I figure I might as well talk about it for a moment.

Currently, I work at Cornerstone University. (Coincidentally, I also graduated from here in 2009.) My job title is "Media Technology Coordinator," but all that really means is Studio Technician. I keep all the gear running smoothly in the department, teach students how to use the gear safely and effectively, and administrate all the post-production workflows for our film students.

Unsurprisingly, this is not what I wanted to do with my life. In college, though I was a film major, I worked largely in pre-production and writing. I want to be a game writer and designer. But you know what? I love my job.

One of the reasons why is the phenomenal progress we are making as a department as far as skill and quality of output goes. We finally started a Vimeo account a few weeks ago and we're sharing what we've done with the world. I'm really proud of what our students have done.

This is one of our music videos from last Fall semester. It just won Cornerstone's Creative Arts Festival (which is pretty cool) and will be making the festival circuit soon.

The sheer improvement over the music videos from the last time the class ran is unbelievable. (I was in that class and, frankly, I won't upload the video we made out of embarrassment.) And all of it - from the music writing and performing, the recording, the concept, the pre-production, the filming, the editing, and, now, the distribution - was done by Cornerstone University students.

I'm quite proud of where we've come from and I'm excited to be a part of where we're going.

(That being said, my passion still burns for video games and I'm working quite actively to get there. See the cool sidebar to the right about what I'm working on now to achieve that goal!)

So... did I mention that you should watch our videos on our Vimeo account? You should.

I suppose...

So I'm really bored right now.

Not sure what to do with myself, so I figured I'd update this here blog thing.

Umm... Is blogging without significance bad? Should we endeavor to respect the privilege of being able to freely share our thoughts with others by sharing only thoughts of worth?

One of the current trends in, well, life, is the democratization of various forms of industry. With the Web 2.0 phenomenon and websites like YouTube popping up everywhere, it is more and more feasible to create our own anything.

With that, however, comes the reality that not everyone is a trained film maker (using YouTube as an example). We see hoards of filth, both morally and artistically, invading the internet and filling our servers. We hope that by submitting our work to the masses, we would be able to find what truly appeals to people. But what truly appeals to people? Sex. Low comedy. Popular music (There's lots of music videos being checked out on YouTube...).

Very little is real people trying to put together real stuff. It's mostly just people saying, "Wouldn't it be funny if...", pulling out their HandiCams, and uploading.

Which brings me to my point: should my posting here be all about me? Should it be about meaningful thoughts? Or should it be whatever I can think up at the time? Is blogging a useful activity after all?

Just some thoughts that came from having nothing to talk about. (I've always wanted a "meta" tag!)

The Fruits of Our Labors

A Post and a Posted Item

Hey... remember that one time I had a blog? And I updated it every once in a while?

Yeah.... I remember that.

There's really not much to say at this point. I have had no profound insights into the meaning of life since coming back to college... no difficult trials to endure... not really much of anything...

So yeah, I guess this is your standard, run-of-the-mill "I should update" post.

Also, this is a cool video:

Even Christian would appreciate this

Beauty (with voice acting, no less)