Simple, Meaningful, Fun...

Bunch of us from church (a baker's dozen) volunteered last night to help out El Modena Community Center provide some 200+ turkey dinners to the community at their parking lot.  Thanks to Sun Yu's research on our community (more on this later), we found out that this very active community service organization was trying to put together an open community dinner.  And we volunteered to do the dessert, but were able to help out in several other ways as well.

300+ pieces of pie and 300+ awesome mini pumpkin cheesecakes were prepared (cheesecakes by Nadia. Couple of hours later, they were all gone!  On a nearly perfect California Fall evening, it was a simple, meaningful, and fun service opportunity.  Smiles all around, and I think pretty much everyone said to me "let's do this again soon!"

Great job to Jery, Ray, Deb, Sorina, Jong, Joshua, Madeleine, Marcus, Karyn, Mike, Alice & Nadia!

Thanks to Teresa at El Modena Center and the staff for letting us take part in this cool event!

85% Lean or 15% Fat?

Imagine you are given fifty dollars, and told you have to decide between two options.  In the first option, you can gamble all or nothing for the fifty, and you are told there is a 40 percent chance that you will keep the fifty, and a 60 percent change you will lose everything.  The second option is a sure thing -- trade the Ulysses Grant and you get to keep twenty dollars.
     What would you do?  Most people (62%) go for the safe bet, the sure thing.  Free money is free money, right?
     Now, let's do play the game again -- the game stays exactly the same, except instead of gaining twenty dollars, you are told you will lose thirty dollars.  What would you do?
     Well, reading this, you think, wait, that is exactly the same deal as the first one, why would things be different?  And you would be right.  Except that worded in this way, a significantly fewer people (42%) go for the sure money.  What happened?

This is what psychologists call the framing effect, a well-known characteristic of the human decision making process. It is what makes people much more likely to choose the ground beef labeled 85% lean over the one labeled 15% fat, or choose surgery when the doctor tells us there is 80% chance of recovery as opposed to 20% chance of death.  Retailers do this all the time by emphasizing your savings, versus looking at your spending.  This is why percent off coupons are so tempting, and yet so meaningless.  (All of this is from Jonah Lehrer's book How We Decide.)

Now, the reason why I bring this up...

We've been learning on Sundays about making plans, and choosing wisely. And the key, I think is to remember the correct framing for our decisions.

If our framework is that our future is only about what we do with our choices, that is a scary, risky perspective -- and our tendency will be to choose a more passive, conservative approach toward life.  Our range of choices will be limited by our fears.  We are doomed before we even start.

If on the other hand our framework for our decision-making is about guessing at ("divining") God's choices for us -- one specific, secret, choice that gets us to the end, kind of like a cosmic "choose your own adventure" book -- then you will forever be looking for "signs" rather than exercising/developing godly wisdom.

God wants us to be wise.  And stop looking for short-cuts.  Sometimes the short-cuts will come; but we don't get to demand it, not when wisdom will do.

Read Kevin DeYoung's clear and marvelously concise book on this subject.

100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do...

This New York Times article lists 100 things (well, 50 for now) that a good restaurant should never do.  Some of them are obvious--though often overlooked--such as:
1.  Do not let anyone enter the restaurant without a warm greeting (as opposed to the "why are you here?" look I sometimes get).

and

21. Never serve anything that looks runny, or creepy or wrong (duh! especially 'creepy').

Some items on the list are more subtle, like:
2. Do not make a singleton feel bad; do not ask "are you waiting for someone?" (although assuming that you are probably alone might not be good either).


and

6. Do not lead the witness with "Bottled water, or just tap?" Both are fine.  Remain neutral.  (And in particular, don't push that stupendously overpriced imported 'artesian' water -- the one that comes in a bottle that looks nicer than the vase I just bought at Mikasa.)

Two reasons for bringing this up.  First, because I think most of us have an opinion on this.  Try this with your friend-group; ask them if there is anything that waiters do that "drives them crazy."  I don't know why, and I don't know when it happened, but complaining about restaurant service has become an art.  I suppose this is because it is a not-so-subtle way of saying how sophisticated we are.

More on that at another time.  But the second why I bring this up is because I kinda feel like people go to  churches with lists very similar to this one...  I suppose some of this isn't a bad expectation to have (like being greeted warmly), but there is this 'I want great service' mentality that people have that might not be congruous with worship.  Churches bending over backwards to make people feel comfortable, 'be a guest' -- in some ways -- might not helpful in dislodging the mistaken understanding of what we are doing when we gather for worship.  (Hint: it's not about you; it about Him!)

Trust me, I want our church to be warm, friendly, inviting, non-exclusive, and do everything in reasonable means to make people feel genuinely welcomed.  But we ought to remember the difference between what makes for a good church and what makes for a good restaurant.