Writings

I’ve been thinking about scarcity and abundance this week, and wanted to share some of those thoughts! To start, I’ve been slowly listening through Bible Project’s 15 hour course about Genesis 1. One thing I noticed come up a few times is the idea that, in the creation narrative on page 1 of the Bible, Elohim forms creation with a goal of setting up a place for humanity to thrive. He couldn’t call creation "very good" until humanity was given abundant food, meaningful work, a commission to have kids and raise families, and a purpose in the form of the commission to steward the world and all its inhabitants. ...

I don’t want to be a part of an “us” that makes a “them” of the world’s most vulnerable people. ~ John Green in Why Are Poor Countries Poor?

TL;DR: Those SMS authentication codes SUUUCK when you’re an expat who doesn’t always have access to the same phone number. TOTP is a fix to that, allowing you to access your accounts without needing to be able to receive SMS texts. The tutorial video below teaches what TOTP is, how it works, and how to use it. I use and recommend a paid Bitwarden plan for less than $1/month to manage my TOTP codes. ...

I just wanted to quickly highlight a really cool thing that happened in the world this week. Whether you know it or not, there’s a pretty decent chance you have come across something created by brothers John and Hank Green at some point. They are insanely prolific siblings, both having written several books, running several companies, building educational content that is being used around the world, and helping build medical infrastructure in impoverished countries like Sierra Leone… among many other things. ...

“You don’t need to catch up. You just need to show up.” ~ Ryder Carroll, creator of the Bullet Journal

The Project 📹 A couple years ago I got connected with Andrew Case, the co-creator of Aleph with Beth, a YouTube channel with the goal of making top-quality Biblical Hebrew educational resources available to everyone who wants them. They’ve created hundreds of really well produced videos — lessons, practice stories, quizzes, songs, and more. Their videos are designed so that anyone, of (nearly) any age, with any educational, cultural, or linguistic background can learn Biblican Hebrew by watching and studying their videos. ...

I love personal websites and blogs. The idea of having a little chunk of the internet that is wholly yours, where you can post, and create, and make completely on your own terms is really cool to me. I’ve loved creating content that way the last few years. And I’m also finding that I really like consuming content from people who create that way. A blog on a personal website tends to feel so much more deep and well-thought-through than a Tweet, or Mastodon/microblog, or any other social media content. It feels very high signal, which I value. ...

I subscribe to a LOT of email newsletters. I haven’t counted specifically, but I’m guessing there are roughly 40-50 newsletters that I’m purposefully subscribed to and actually want to read (not just spammy marketing emails that I haven’t yet opted-out of, but actual, real content I’m interested to read and consume). Because I don’t consume traditional social media feeds, I’m left getting updates about stuff I care about from other sources. Email newsletters have been one of those sources. ...

When it comes to communication, there’s two extremes we can take: We can hope that those we’re interacting with just magically are in tune with us; we can communicate as little as possible, hoping that they’ll fill in the blanks with what we meant… or… We can put in the effort to be crystal clear about what we mean to say. To say things that we might think are obvious, but may indeed not be. To realize that the person we’re communicating with has lived a different life than we have, and so, brings different assumptions to the table. To think through where ambiguities about what we’re trying to communicate might pop up, and rephrase/reformulate our message until it’s as receivable as possible. We can either under-communicate, or we can over-communicate. ...

A friend showed me this video yesterday. I really, really appreciated it. Seems like a reminder that’s needed in a lot of places around the world in this season.