We were talking the other day about the StrengthsFinder assessment in class so I went back and dug out my results. I think where I am today makes perfect sense when you look at what my strengths are. Have you taken the StrengthsFinder? What were your results?

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Strategic

The Strategic theme enables you to sort through the clutter and find the best route. It is not a skill that can be taught. It is a distinct way of thinking, a special perspective on the world at large. This perspective allows you to see patterns where others simply see complexity. Mindful of these patterns, you play out alternative scenarios, always asking, “What if this happened? Okay, well what if this happened?” This recurring question helps you see around the next corner. There you can evaluate accurately the potential obstacles. Guided by where you see each path leading, you start to make selections. You discard the paths that lead nowhere. You discard the paths that lead straight into resistance. You discard the paths that lead into a fog of confusion. You cull and make selections until you arrive at the chosen path—your strategy. Armed with your strategy, you strike forward. This is your Strategic theme at work: “What if?” Select. Strike.

Empathy

You can sense the emotions of those around you. You can feel what they are feeling as though their feelings are your own. Intuitively, you are able to see the world through their eyes and share their perspective. You do not necessarily agree with each person’s perspective. You do not necessarily feel pity for each person’s predicament—this would be sympathy, not Empathy. You do not necessarily condone the choices each person makes, but you do understand. This instinctive ability to understand is powerful. You hear the unvoiced questions. You anticipate the need. Where others grapple for words, you seem to find the right words and the right tone. You help people find the right phrases to express their feelings—to themselves as well as to others. You help them give voice to their emotional life. For all these reasons other people are drawn to you.

Input

You are inquisitive. You collect things. You might collect information—words, facts, books, and quotations—or you might collect tangible objects such as butterflies, baseball cards, porcelain dolls, or sepia photographs. Whatever you collect, you collect it because it interests you. And yours is the kind of mind that finds so many things interesting. The world is exciting precisely because of its infinite variety and complexity. If you read a great deal, it is not necessarily to refine your theories but, rather, to add more information to your archives. If you like to travel, it is because each new location offers novel artifacts and facts. These can be acquired and then stored away. Why are they worth storing? At the time of storing it is often hard to say exactly when or why you might need them, but who knows when they might become useful? With all those possible uses in mind, you really don’t feel comfortable throwing anything away. So you keep acquiring and compiling and filing stuff away. It’s interesting. It keeps your mind fresh. And perhaps one day some of it will prove valuable.

Connectedness

Things happen for a reason. You are sure of it. You are sure of it because in your soul you know that we are all connected. Yes, we are individuals, responsible for our own judgments and in possession of our own free will, but nonetheless we are part of something larger. Some may call it the collective unconscious. Others may label it spirit or life force. But whatever your word of choice, you gain confidence from knowing that we are not isolated from one another or from the earth and the life on it. This feeling of Connectedness implies certain responsibilities. If we are all part of a larger picture, then we must not harm others because we will be harming ourselves. We must not exploit because we will be exploiting ourselves. Your awareness of these responsibilities creates your value system. You are considerate, caring, and accepting. Certain of the unity of humankind, you are a bridge builder for people of different cultures. Sensitive to the invisible hand, you can give others comfort that there is a purpose beyond our humdrum lives. The exact articles of your faith will depend on your upbringing and your culture, but your faith is strong. It sustains you and your close friends in the face of life’s mysteries.

Futuristic

“Wouldn’t it be great if . . .” You are the kind of person who loves to peer over the horizon. The future fascinates you. As if it were projected on the wall, you see in detail what the future might hold, and this detailed picture keeps pulling you forward, into tomorrow. While the exact content of the picture will depend on your other strengths and interests—a better product, a better team, a better life, or a better world—it will always be inspirational to you. You are a dreamer who sees visions of what could be and who cherishes those visions. When the present proves too frustrating and the people around you too pragmatic, you conjure up your visions of the future and they energize you. They can energize others, too. In fact, very often people look to you to describe your visions of the future. They want a picture that can raise their sights and thereby their spirits. You can paint it for them. Practice. Choose your words carefully. Make the picture as vivid as possible. People will want to latch on to the hope you bring.

This is why I get so excited about getting churches/non-profits/missionaries to use great design in getting their message out rather than just text. Takes talent but is so much more compelling.

All my Uganda pics are finally up and on flickr.  I just finished going through tagging and adding descriptions to them.  All total there ended up being like 316 photos.  It takes a while to upload that many to flickr even on my fast cable connection.  Anyway, I hope you enjoy them!

I’ve felt a little weird since coming back but I’m not sure it is really reverse culture shock.  It is almost the lack of it that has me feeling strange.  In some ways, I feel like I should feel different now that I’m back in the US after going to Otino Waa and the fact that I don’t feel terribly different feels weird.  I think part of what makes trips like this one a little different for me is the fact that I’m not really shocked to encounter suffering.  Between my general world view and my knowledge of current events, I realize that most of the rest of the world leads a truly horrible existence between wars, famine, and disease.   Now, Otino Waa struck me as exciting because of the fact that most of those things exist outside of the school.  The kids are all well fed, well educated, and sleep in relatively nice accommodations.  Still, the way that everyone was telling me about how different I would be after coming back I think has thrown me a little.

Even while we were in Africa I was telling someone that it is kind of funny that I ended up on the trip considering I don’t really have any interest or sense of calling when it comes to global missions.  I just like to travel and take pictures.  I should point out that I’m grateful for the chance I had to go and I believe we did a really great thing while we were there (building the house).  Yet, I also feel oddly “normal.”  I’m not really any more or less passionate about missions than I was before we left.

Anyway, I guess all of that is to say that I’m still mulling over how I feel about the trip and what God was trying to teach me now that I’m back stateside.  I haven’t had much time to do any thinking though as I’ve been terribly busy with work since getting back.  Hopefully after this next week things will calm back down just a little and I can take stock of life.  Getting together to share photos this Friday will be good too.  Well, I think that is it for now.  I hope you enjoy the photos.  Later!

I’ve got the first 50 pics up on flickr.  I have 311 total to upload which is about 10% of the 3000 or so that I took.  That puts me right about where I thought I would be.  I still have a few to go through so the 311 number may grow a little but it will be right around there.  I’ve got a few pics to edit in Gimp before they are completely finished and I’m running everything through neat image (which only handles batches of 50 photos at a time) so it might be Tuesday or Wednesday before I’ve got them all up there but they’ll be there for sure by mid-week.  Hope you enjoy!

So if you’ve been wondering where I’ve been the last two weeks that I haven’t been posting, the answer is that I have been in Lira, Uganda.  I spent 9 days working at an orphanage called the Otino Waa Children’s Village.  Since it is hard to try to sum up the entire experience in one post, I’ll instead just post some short thoughts and then the rest of the story will get filled in over on my flickr and over the next few weeks here.  So, in roughly chronological order, here we go. . .

- We crossed the Nile River yesterday.  I have never seen so much water moving with so much power.

- The power is out as I write this, who knows when it will come back on.

- My body is not adjusting well [to the time change], I feel sick and exhausted and I’m still not sleeping well.  I will have to be careful in the heat.

- Our 6 hour bus ride yesterday took about 10 hours.  A good 2-3 hours of that spent on dirt roads.  Even what was paved could only be generously described as such.

- Otino Waa is a much more impressive facility than I imagined.

- Posho [what we had for lunch every day] really does taste like good cardboard.

- The fruit here is amazing [especially the bananas]

- The house I had lunch with yesterday was really fun but it was awkward sometimes too.  The house mom was telling me about how lucky I am to live in the US.  I didn’t know how to respond because everything I could think of either sounded tacky or arrogant.   The difference between my life in America and their lives in Uganda is so profound it is almost hard to imagine.  It would take them months to make the money I make in one day at my “low paying” job.

-I wanted to tell them yesterday that al the extra “stuff” we have makes our lives complicated too, but again I realized how arrogant that would be.  Some of these kids ran for their lives through the bush or watched their parents die from AIDs.  How can I compare bad traffic and the difficulties of the Christian dating scene to that?

-Uganda is hot, hot and humid [and it's the dry season]

- I’ve managed to avoid getting burned too bad but I haven’t completely escaped the unrelenting sun.

- They wear fleece hats and coats when it drops below 7o degrees.  I finally start to feel comfortable.

- I’ve been drinking 4-6 500 ml bottles of water every day and I’m still dehydrated.

- Missions is not my calling,, but this has still been a great trip.  Where most stories out of Africa are about disease, war, and famine, we met children who were full of genuine joy and zest for life.

- Our bus driver James has Jedi powers.  He talked bridge guards out of arresting us, talked other guards into letting us though a security checkpoint without showing the right papers, got our room number from the front desk clerk, convinced the drivers of a damaged ferry to come back and pick us up before shutting down to make repairs, and was pretty much awesome all around.

- We saw a lion hunt and kill a small deer.  Coolest thing I saw on the trip.

What is the measure of a man if he gains the whole world but looses his soul?  Ok, so I generally try to avoid using cliches to start my posts but you have to admit, there is a reason cliches get repeated so much.  I stopped by Costco yesterday (just like everyone else in the country does on Sunday afternoon) to check and see if they had and good movies or TV shows on sale.  I ended up picking up the first to seasons of the show House.  If you’ve never seen it before it is about a doctor, Gregory House, M.D., who works at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital.  House tends to be kind of a maverick and, well, an ass.  He presumes he is always right because he always is.  It falls under the category of what I would call “Smart TV.”  Basically that means they use lots of big words that I pretend to understand.  It’s not quite as much fun to watch as Bones, but it gets the job done.  Anyway, the reason I find it blog worthy is it has me thinking about what it means to be great.  As is often stated on the show House is a spectacular doctor but not a good person.  The role, by the way, is played perfectly by Hugh Laurie, if he tried to play it any other way (ie as a self-less, humble humanitarian) it just doesn’t work.  He is mean, manipulative, abusive, condescending, and has almost no bedside manor.  On more than one occasion he storms into a patients room and calls them an idiot for refusing treatment of one kind or another.

What I want to know is how we come to measure greatness, what makes someone great.  Is there a quantitative value that can be used as a measure of greatness?  Is greatness a popularity contest?  For some, like many Presidents, it is basically a popularity contest.  I would argue that there really aren’t that many differences in the leadership abilities of Bush and Clinton but Slick Willy is always going to be viewed more favorably than either his predecessor or his successor.  The main reason for this is the tech bubble which began under Bush Sr, blossomed under Clinton, and then crashed on Bush Jr.  the Bush’s fought wars that were more or less necessary while Clinton preferred to ignore difficult international issues.  So what did Clinton accomplish that made him great?  Prove that by parsing to be verbs you can get away with having an affair?  No, for historical figures, their legacy is as much ruled by the events out of their control as it is by anything they ever manage to do.  So what about other figures, people who don’t seek the spot light.  A few of them have managed to be considered great.  I think Mother Teresa certainly qualifies as some one who’s confidence was sought after though she never wanted to be a world figure.  But, as callous as it sounds, is she really that much “greater” than any other missionary who dedicates their life to helping the poor, the sick, and the outcast?  I think the real reason we seek to classify someone as great is that we want to lift them up as an example for how we want to live, how we want our children to live.  But to that end we focus far to much on numbers and fame.  Greatness and fame rarely go hand in hand.  True greatness is the men and women who take time out of their day to do something for someone else.  That is greatness.  When a parent sits down with a child to help with their home work, or a grand child brings flowers to a grand parent, or a volunteer spends time reading to cancer patients, or a firefighter or police officer gives up their life so that someone else might be saved.  There have only been 43 Presidents of the United States, but I guarantee that each and every one of them had a teacher, or Sunday school leader, or maybe just a good friend, who made a difference in their life at some point.  Every teacher who opens the minds of their students, every coach who encourages a player, every friend who offers a shoulder to lean on accomplishes something great.  That is what greatness is to me.