Wednesday - Prayer Meeting Day
6:45am - 8:00am - Crawl out of bed, moan that it's only Wednesday, get ready, and go to work
8:30am - 6:30pm - Work
Since I haven't talked much about my job, I guess I can spend some time doing that now. I've been at my job here for six months now, and I've gotten a chance to really start to contribute to the team. Even though I was hired on as a software engineer, I actually haven't done much coding in my time here. Though I was kind of frustrated in the beginning with the lack of coding, I'm happy I got a chance to spend a good amount of time testing and messing with the product so that I know how it works. Not only has this been pretty fun, knowing how the product works makes understanding the thousands of lines of code easier to understand.
Today was actually a really special day. For the first time ever, we got to see our product in its fully integrated system. In other words, we got to see and touch the plane that our product goes into. The plane was freaking awesome!!! What surprised me the most was the physical feel of the wings of the plane. One of the guys told us that it was made of layers of polycarbonate. I don't know how better to describe it, but the wings just felt "soft". As one of my coworkers said, it felt like a toy. A military aircraft worth tens of millions of dollars - feel like a toy? It's crazy, but yet. That describes it perfectly.
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| Best day of work ever! |
At this event, a lot of people brought their families. Sometimes, when you work with other people professionally, it's easy to forget that they are people with lives, passions, loved ones, etc. I absolutely love it when coworkers stop being coworkers momentarily and just become friends. It's amazing how when we converse in a group about personal stuff, people who have worked together for years seem to know as little about each other as I do about them. Anyways, it was good today to put a face to many names - well, not names, but "my wife" and "my kids". It was really fun and heartwarming playing with a 6-month old baby and incredibly funny seeing my coworker's 3-year old daugher bounce off the walls while her exasperated parents try to control her. All of a sudden I understand that look of dread and exhaustion in my coworker's eye when he shakes his head and explains to me how he needs to play with his kids when he goes home. It's just nice being able to chill together and not need to talk just about work stuff. Also, babies are funny. It's funny watching grown men playing with a baby and making funny noises and faces trying to get the baby to laugh. Okay. Enough rambling. Next topic.
7:00 - 8:00 - Church Prayer Meeting
I've already written about prayer meetings at Northpark and things haven't changed much, so please go and read it if you haven't already. It should give you a better understanding of where I'm coming from in this next section. (Aside: actually, I got one of the young adults to go with me to prayer meeting today. Could this be the beginning of a culture change?!) Instead, I guess I'll just mention some observations about the prayer culture I've seen around me, and how it's so different from what I'm used to.
How the majority of "prayer" happens in the groups I've been in is as follows. There's usually a "leader" who goes around, asking for people's prayer requests. And so we all go around, talking about random stuff. Sometimes it's more serious, sometimes there's a lot of joking around. Sometimes the prayer requests are deeply personal, and sometimes they are for other people (usually sickness or travel). Rarely are prayer requests for the unsaved. And because the prayer requests are only personal, anything outside of personal or church life is usually out of scope of the prayer session (as mentioned in the post about the prayer meetings). This sharing process usually takes around 20-30 minutes, and after everyone has shared, the leader usually just prays for the whole group. And it's done. Half an hour of sharing for five minutes of solo prayer.
It's not necessarily good or bad, but it's just a style of prayer that I haven't been able to really get used to. To me, there just doesn't seem to be much participation in it. I don't feel like I've prayed because, other than saying "Amen" in agreement, I haven't. But instead of complaining about it, I hope that I can bring something different to the table and be couragous enough to offer suggestions for prayer meetings and prayer in general.
8:00pm - Bedtime - Derp around. Prep food to cook for tomorrow, if needed.
If you are also in this current state of derping as I am, here is an awesome video of what it's like for a plane to take off and land onto an aircraft carrier. Here's a video of a landing at night. Absolutely insane. I learned so much about military planes today! Awesome.
BABIES
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