The philosophy of Kaizen is at the root of this improvement. Toyota makes it easy for little things to be improved. Maybe a parts picker thinks that things will work better if a certain part is placed in a certain location on the shelf. Maybe the receptionist at the front desk says that the welcome sign’s color clashes with the building’s paint. Rather than being a top-down company where these small requests would be lost in a bureaucratic jungle, Toyota has built itself around a bottom-up philosophy where changes like these can get done. Do they all work? No, but the net result is continual improvement.

So, the word ‘kaizen’ stuck with me. Obviously it applies to my workplace and others’, where businesses could be substantially improved by focusing on the small improvements over the big splash (granted, though, that if you can do both successfully, the better for you). But I think it also applies to our personal lives, our churches, and our relationships.

Benjamin Franklin once decided to follow a system of continual improvement when he laid down his Thirteen Virtues. He would reflect daily on how well he was doing in regards to each and would often take a full week and focus on only one virtue. If we ever want to be successful in life or in death, we must have the same mentality. We must seek to always progress within ourselves and within Christ.

I also felt strongly that this Kaizen philosophy could makes its home in my church. As a caveat, you should know that I love my church and think it wonderful with wonderful people. However, just like in businesses, it is the small things that all too often slip through the cracks. I think a system that encourages the people to spot small, needed changes that would effect continual improvement would allow our leaders to focus on the bigger things. It’s something I want to think further about.

Kaizen. Continual Improvement. Are you better today than you were yesterday? What will you do today to insure continual improvement in your life?

It is now 6:18, and I here my son awake in his room. I didn’t see him all day yesterday, so I’m off to go give him some attention. How’s that for improvement? =)

The Word of God is so prevailingly clear in wanting us to take care of people that need help. Particularly the poor, the orphaned, the hungry, the oppressed, etc. Why do you think that James tells us that pure religion is “to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world”?

I did some self-examination this morning regarding this. I believe that I do well, relatively, in keeping myself unpolluted by the world. I’m not meaning that bragadociously, as my pastor would say, but just that if you break the pure religion quote up you get two areas; take care of others and take care of yourself. Those areas are not equally balanced in my life.

This is why there is a yearning to fill a void in my life. I’ve not completed the picture, so to speak. I’ve spent the last several years working on myself, and I can see the progress that Jesus has affected in my life. However, I believe that none of us can ever reach that 100x Christian that Jesus speaks of if we don’t seriously consider the other side of pure religion; to visit the fatherless and the widows in their distress.

To take it further, I don’t believe that it stops with only the fatherless and widows. There are many passages in the Word that talk about helping people, such as that above, that use more groups, so I’m going to assume that it is a general concept. We need to take care of people. And just as the title of an earlier poem of mine says, this is a message to myself.

No, it wasn’t I. Nooooooo, not me. It seems that while my wife was busy on the computer, he gets an “idea”. This might even be  a “good idea”. At least it might if you lived in a garbage dump and were rich.

He takes a full gallon of milk and POURS IT ALL IN THE GARBAGE CAN! There was no explanation forthcoming. Only a creamy trash receptacle.

All is quiet through the day and I arrive home. We eat dinner, play some, and then start our bedtime routine. Dessa goes into the bathroom to run the bath water for him and finds two, count them 2!, rolls of toilet paper in the trash. Both are thoroughly soaked. Reagan had followed her into the room and she asked him, “What is this?”

At this point he starts shaking with either fear or amusement (I’m not so sure which one), because he knows he was not supposed to do that and he’s still remembering the Milk (as an aside, that’s a website to remember daily tasks - www.rememberthemilk.com). He tells her, “I tried to let the water run through it in the sink.”

Then, as the bath water is running, Dessa finds in his room about a 2 square foot section of the wall that he’s decided looks like a good piece of paper for his markers. Believe me. After a couple years of being told not to do that, he definitely knows.

He ended up going to bed without a story or a song (he usually gets a story of his choice, Bible reading, and then he asks for 2 songs. Typically Jesus Loves Me and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star).

As I said. He was in rare form today. Also, I truly do love being a dad. Always an adventure. Good thing I’m not a mom, though. A bit too much adventure.

Before the lesson started, I served donuts and water to the class and let them tell me about their weekend experiences.  They had gotten back that morning from the Spring Youth Retreat and they were all excited.  They were also all tired.  This is where I learned my first lesson of the day; the donuts were not fresh.  In fact, they were one day old because I had gotten the morning before.  I had eaten one myself that morning, but it turns out that some were a bit too hard for the youth’s liking.  Next time, fresh donuts for all!

The lesson was on Joseph, and it went fairly well but for one exception.  The class was unusually rowdy.  I chalk this up to three reason.  1) They had been up all weekend.  2) We had 9 people, which is more than we typically have in our small Sunday School room.  3) I was incorporating Bible sword drills into the lesson.

For those who don’t know, a sword drill is where I call a book, chapter, and verse out and they have to find it and be the first to stand and read.

Starting the week after next, we will begin a 6 week competition on sword drills.  Each week they have to bring their own Bible to compete.  If they win that day, they get some candy.  If they are the one that wins overall, I’m going to give that person $25.  The whole reason for the competition is to get them to bring their Bibles.

Well, I spread the sword drills throughout the lesson on Joseph, so every few minutes I would call the reference and the class would go nuts with activity.  The pro was that they were paying attention to me.  The con was calming them down after each time.  It worked well, though, in my opinion.

During the lesson, I learned another lesson myself.  Key needs sleep.  Key is a girl in my class.  Very nice and well-behaved, but very, very hyper when she is sleep deprived.

Overall, the class was good.  I’ll just remember to bring fresh donuts the next time we have them.  Also, other than the sword drills, this lesson lacked interactivity, which I don’t want to do very often.  They respond much better when they are doing more than listening.

I while back I had a dilemma. Through a year or two of annoying people with constant flashes, I had accumulated around 15 Gigabytes of pictures. These pictures are very important to me, and I really didn’t want to lose them, so I would periodically back up to DVD. However, I was always aware that if my stuff was stolen or if there was a fire, that backing up to DVD didn’t really do me a whole lot of good.

That’s when I went looking for an online solution and found Mozy.com, which I recommend if you run into a similar conundrum. For $4.95 a month, you can back up an unlimited amount of data. I currently have around 20 GB stored online. Then, if you need a file, you can either go to the networked drive that shows up in My Computer, download the files in a zip file, or you can pay extra and have the files burned to DVD and FedExed to you.

If you are worried about security, you have two options. You can use Mozy’s 448-bit encryption key (which is what I use) or you can enter one of your own. What those choices mean is that the data is encrypted either way, but if you use Mozy’s key then they would be able to get into it if you ever needed them to. If you use one of your own, then if you lose the key your dead in the water if you needed to get to your data. The former is less secure, but easier to manage.

I’ve also had good experience with tech support. Granted that is as a business customer at work, where we also use Mozy.

Of course, Mozy hasn’t been without its share of issues. For instance, with the business version at work I’ve found that if you have a single file then you have to have 130% the size of that file in free space so that it can encrypt the file. So if you have a 1MB file, then it will use 1.3MB of disk space to create the temp file during encryption. Once it is uploaded and sent online, the the temp file is erased. Well, that’s fine for a small file, but when you have an 18 Gigabyte Exchange .edb file, then it’s not so good. So, if you have a single file that is very large, you’ll need to have the free disk space to back it up.

Also, I do run into the occasional server error where Mozy’s connection messes up.

For me, though, Mozy has been a great security blanket to have. I don’t worry so much about my data because it’s backed up elsewhere. You should still do your local backups, though, so don’t neglect that. If you want to learn more, check out Mozy.com. They offer a free version that will give you 2 gigabytes of storage.

Well, we generally discourage that kind of behavior. Aside from the whole modesty issue, I figure that anything you can get arrested for as an adult should be weeded out before that point. So, with this in mind my wife proceeded to tell Reagan that we shouldn’t do that and explained to him the reasons.

This was an injustice greater than he could handle, for he looked back at her an protested, “But __________ did it!” One of his friends did it and he should have the same fun, I suppose =) .