Author Archives: AJ Bourg

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve really let you all peek into my day to day life. Life has gotten very busy on several different fronts and taking the time to write about it publicly felt both too time consuming, and too vulnerable.

• My boss at work has been out on paternity leave for the past several months, and it’s been busy filling in all the places he was contributing. But in some ways it’s been really nice to have a slightly freer hand to approach projects my own way.
• My eldest son and I are preparing to go to Uganda to lead a Vacation Bible School (VBS) with our favorite organization. I’m co-leading this trip with a good friend, and we’re taking 30 people. (!!) It’s been a VERY busy season preparing cultural trainings, making lists of supplies, and coordinating all the logistics.
• My youngest has experienced a number of mental health challenges lately which included a bit of time in the hospital. Our relationship has grown by leaps and bounds and we have overcome a lot together the past several months and I am so proud of him, and proud of us for how we’ve navigated this season with him.
• The church youth group has been wonderful but also challenged my time management skills. We’re now meeting high school and middle school on separate nights and I’m writing content for both small groups and trying to fill in the gaps where we don’t have a point leader in place.
• I’ve been loving being back on the bike, but I’m only getting the time to ride a couple of times a week. The weather here has been wonderfully cool, and unseasonably wet which I will take but it has limited when I can ride pretty significantly.

I got a new bike recently! I have not had as much time riding it as I would like but it has been awesome the miles I’ve put on it so far. 💙

I’m not entirely sure when I first really thought about foster parenting but I am sure it had to do with my love for super hero stories.

Whether it was Kal-El fleeing his home planet and being found by Martha and Jonathan who raise him to become the hero earth needs.

Or Bruce Wayne who loses both parents in a brutal murder and dedicates himself to fighting for justice. Or Peter Parker who loses both parents and is raised by Aunt May and becomes a crime fighting hero in NYC.

The idea of a kid who can endure such significant adversity but can overcome it to become a hero has always been a common theme in super hero movies. And while flying, x-ray vision and vigilante justice all sound fun, I always thought the part where people were loved into being the best they can be was something I could actually do.

I have always thought that everybody deserves to have someone who really believes in you, never gives up on you, and loves you towards healing. And I have always been dumb enough to think why not me.

Somewhere along the way I encountered foster care. And I didn’t really understand it, and I definitely asked a lot of dumb questions and made even dumber assumptions. But seeing in real life people believe in and love and root for kids was amazing. This is what I want to do with my life.

So I went and did it. There’s commitment. There’s scrutiny. There should be scrutiny. I’m raising someone else’s kid. I should try my best, and learn from my failures, and be able to explain every decision to a whole team of people.

I should cherish the victories — because they are few and so very delayed — but so sweet when they come.

I am stubborn — you have to be. I have wanted to quit nearly fifty-million times. I would love to quit, I would love nothing more than to walk away and never do this again. It is a burden to come alongside someone hurting and to share in their pain (even in such small ways). And when it is too much and all I can think about is quitting — I think about how this kid didn’t choose the pain in their life and I can’t quit on them. I think about what a wonderful future they will have if they just don’t give up.

And if they can’t give up — neither can I.

Honestly. It’s the best worst thing I have ever done. My kids’ stories are not mine to tell but if there’s anything I could do to go back and ensure they never had to deal with what they did, I would do it without hesitation. The next best thing I can think of is to show up, never give up, and always love them towards healing.

May is foster care month, and many people reading this are going to have different experiences with foster care ranging from the ignorant, to the abusive, to the positive to everything in between. I don’t think everyone should be foster parents — there are too many bad ones as it is — but goodness gracious could we ever use a lot more good ones. And, in my opinion, being good is mostly about not quitting, not being too self-interested, and loving kids towards healing.

Anyone can help. Everyone can do something. You need not turn your world upside down and become a foster parent, but can you do something simple for those who do? Here are a few ideas:

• Find your local CASA organization. Offer them toys, backpacks, school supplies, tickets to your local water park, or a donation. Our kids’ CASAs have been amazing and have connected them to awesome experiences that let them just be kids.
• Find a local foster closet and sign up to be notified when families need clothes, school supplies or even furniture like beds and dressers.
• Check to see if there are any kids nite out programs where you live. You can hang out and provide childcare for families so they can have a night away and know their kids are well-cared for.
• Support the expansion of Medicaid by calling your state legislators. It’s literally been a life-saver for us and we’ve spent a total of something like $4 in out of pocket medical costs since we started fostering. No family should wonder how they will pay for expensive medical costs.
• Check with your local agency or county to see if there are things they need help with, especially for things like supermarket/gas gift cards. With food and gas so expensive, sometimes families can be right on the edge of making it and a little help on gas can make all the difference.
• If you know a foster family, offer to hang out with their kids, bring them food, mow their lawn or other practical help. We are (or at least, I am) often very bad at allowing other people to help, but you never know when it could be so timely.

And finally, if you do want to foster, I couldn’t recommend it more. Work on yourself, prepare for a roller coaster that won’t let you go, and just never give up and you’ll make it. And, please, don’t overlook the older kids. Their behaviors and histories will sound scary, but fostering teens has been the highlight of my life. And while I have spent a few sleepless nights worrying about my boys, or sitting in an ER waiting for the doc, I’ve gotten way more sleep and changed far fewer diapers then most parents.

When I set up this blog I told myself I wouldn’t let it devolve into constant complaining and bellyaching like so much of my social media experience.

Don’t get me wrong, I love complaining. And it’s cathartic. But sometimes all I see on social media is just complaint after complaint after complaint and sometimes it is too much.

But sometimes it you just gotta complain. And today will hopefully be one of those rare times.

I am really starting to get sick of Apple software. I don’t know if there’s a better experience, but my experience with Apple software has severely degraded in recent years. Let me get some of it off my chest:

A recent software update completely changed how my work Macbook Pro handles my external monitor. I have a USB-C hub on my desk to give me a single cord to my work laptop, I can plug my laptop into this one cord and it gets power, my external web-cam, my wireless keyboard (which is not bluetooth), and my external display. For a year this worked perfect. After the most recent Mac update, if my Mac wakes up before my display, all the text and images are blocky. It’s like the resolution is turned down way low but the display is blowing it up, but I’ve checked (and tried changing) the resolution a few times and it never fixes it. The only solution has been to unplug the USB-C dock, let the Mac go back to sleep, then wake up the Mac again before the display sleeps. Sometimes this takes a few tries.

I haven’t even been able to get this to work by turning the display on first. The past 2 or 3 weeks I have been consigned to trying to get this to work by spending the first five minutes of my day fiddling with cables and trying to get the timing right.

Heaven forbid I should leave for a bit and come back to my Mac going to sleep or I get to do this all over again.

My AirPod Pros are stalking me. If I take my AirPod Pros anywhere, when I arrive home I get a notification that someone else’s Airpods are being used to follow me. I appreciate the privacy alert, but these are my AirPods.

I think there may be something wrong with how they are set up. When I go to ‘Find My’, it tells me it can’t locate my AirPods (even when they are in my hand, connected to my phone and Find My tells me they are ‘with you’) and that my setup may be incomplete. If I follow the support article for how to ‘complete’ my setup, the button it tells me to push does not exist.

AirTags are great but please for the love of all that is holy allow us to share location with family members. We have an AirTag on the dog, it’s awesome. It’s on my wife’s account. I take my dog for walkies every day, and every day when I get home I get a notification that someone can track me with a stray AirTag. I know! We share our phone’s locations. It’s not a big deal.

If you’re not going to give me AirTags that are feature complete with the rest of the Find My devices (I can see locations of all of her devices, and she can see mine) at least allow me to disable this notification for this AirTag. I’m only allowed to disable this notification for 1 day, which means the next time we go for walkies I get the notification again. Apple if you are going to say that you know best — well, you just don’t.

Speaking of USB-C and displays, an update broke my Dell USB-C display, then another update fixed it. I have another display on my desk that I recently got from Dell which is natively USB-C. I put my personal MacBook Air on this next to my work display. When I first got it, the USB-C cable worked great. It delivered power, connected the ports on the display, and connected the display.

Inextricably after a Mac update, the display stopped working. Power delivery worked, but not the display. I’d get a notice on the display that there was no signal detected. As a work around, I connected two cables, the USB-C one for power, and another HDMI->USB-C adaptor so I could still use the display.

Fortunately another Mac update a few weeks later fixed this so I’m back to my single cable glory, but I am really starting to worry about applying software updates.

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There is more I could say but this has been cathartic enough. Maybe I’m just getting old but the thought of trying to switch to Windows or Linux just sounds too much. I’ll just pray that Apple gets their crap together.

So, picture this. A particularly devout religious group with a fairly strict sexual ethic that pushes a fairly particular moral viewpoint currying favor as a loud and sizable but minority political group. They shun outsiders and those who do not share the same ethical or moral framework and actively work to punish those with differing views. Viewpoints are polarized, everyone is at each other’s throats — it looks like civil war is about to break out.

Am I summarizing politics across the US, with the recent fights over book bans, transgenderism, and abortion? You would be forgiven for thinking so, but I am actually thinking of life when Jesus walked on the scene. But, as they say, history may or may not repeat, but it definitely rhymes. And I can’t help but think that our present moment rhymes a lot with what life looked like when Jesus walked onto the scene.

I was reading some threads on a couple of local sub-reddits absolutely denouncing religion in general, and Christian churches in particular. And I kind of nod my head along. I think the criticism leveled can sometimes be quite spot on.

I identify as someone who follows Jesus and I look at a lot of churches and Christians and just think, how did we get so far off track?

Over and over again Jesus conflicted with people who, I think, were very well meaning and wanted to show their love, devotion and piety towards God but they did it by hurting the people that God loves. Which, turns out, at least according to Jesus, is not a good way to show your love, devotion and piety towards God.

When Jesus’ cousin John was beginning to wonder if Jesus really was everything he thought — John sent messengers to Jesus to ask. And Jesus’ response I think is telling: Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me. (Luke 7:21-22)

When Jesus is directly asked whether or not he is the One, his answer is: look at all the good I am doing for marginalized people.

Not look at how many sinners are turning from their sins.

Nor look at how many adulterers have been beaten.

Nor look at how many lost people we told to go to hell. (literally)

Not even: I am the one prophesied of old, the one predicted to come.

But: we are taking care of and helping the least. The people the world is forgetting and trampling down upon are receiving a new life. Jesus hangs his hat entirely on how well he takes care of people.

And with that in mind, the early church spread like wildfire. The church had a very particular (and peculiar for the day and age) ethic for most things, especially sexually — but what it never lost sight of was the blind receiving sight, the lame walking, lepers healing and more. Roman Emperor Julian famously denounced Jesus’ followers in the 300s as “impious Galileans” who take care of not only their own poor but Rome’s as well:

These impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also; welcoming them into their agape, they attract them, as children are attracted, with cakes… Whilst the pagan priests neglect the poor, the hated Galileans devote themselves to works of charity and by a display of false compassion have established and given effect to their pernicious errors. See their love-feasts and their tables spread for the indigent. Such practice is common among them and causes a contempt for our gods.

So if history rhymes, and if the greatest error the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Zealots, and all the other religious groups of the day committed was to focus too much inwardly on their own piety, and outwardly on the sins of the people around them: what does that say about us today?

Is it possible, just possible, that we who follow Jesus are just a little too focused on the sins of our communities? Should we listen to Paul who asks, rhetorically, “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church?” (1 Corinthians 5:12) Answer, none.

Should we listen to God who sent his people into exile in Babylon and then commanded them to seek the prosperity of Babylon? (Jeremiah 29:7)

What would it look like to let our good deeds shine before others? (Luke 5:16)

Listen. Dragging people out in front of Jesus for their sins and asking him to condemn them didn’t work the first time, and it’s not going to work today. Let us instead of blasting people for their shortcomings instead build people up, especially the poor and marginalized, and never give up in working towards the peace and prosperity of where God has planted us.

Maybe we will have a few less complaints about us on reddit.

And maybe God will do something really big like transform all of human history.

Again.

That would be good news, wouldn’t it?

Rode my road bike for the first time this year yesterday, and again this afternoon. Gosh I love bikes so much. And am I out of shape after a winter of reduced activity!

As spring comes, here’s your reminder to get outside. You’ll be glad you did.

Recently got lost on this really cool map of electricity generation across the world. I had no idea Brazil was so far along in renewables. My service area is more carbon intense then I realized, and solar doesn’t make up as much system-wide generation as you’d expect. But wind is a lot more stable then I expected, and it is close to the number #1 power generated for us, consistently dangling around 48%.

Okay, in slightly less life-or-death news, March was a busy month for us.

• Got a new washing machine. In February our dryer broke which prompted me to buy a new one, and this month we decided to go ahead and get the matching washer.
  
  We always had to run our clothes through the dryer a couple of times to get them fully dry, and the new washer has solved that problem. Apparently it uses less water in general, but it also gets more water out of the clothes before going to the dryer. This is a nice upgrade as it means less wear and tear on our clothes, and less use of the dryer electrically.
• Also we redid our bathroom floors. We found some marvelous hex marble tiles. It turned out great! We embarked on this project because the previous owners had used some stick and peel vinyl and it’s starting to come up in both the bathroom and the kitchen. We felt the bathroom was the priority fix because of all the moisture, we wanted to prevent any rotting of the subfloor or structure.
• While we were at it, figured might as well get a new toilet. So I got the Swiss Madison Classe after reading so many reviews online of people who love Swiss Madison toilets. The dual flush system should save a bit of water, though I doubt we will ever notice much of a difference on our water bill, it’s nice to conserve wherever we can. Lowe’s has it for like $300.
• In non-house projects, Noah had his spring break and he and I stayed a long weekend up in Leadville and went skiing. So much fun!
• Completed my state/federal taxes and got the refunds back. Our refunds are substantial every year and I know people say that you’re just giving the government an interest-free loan. But I feel like our tax situation has been so fluid I have never wanted to take the risk and end up owing.
• Took the whole family to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. It was the first time for our 14 year old, and he loved it. It gave me a great opportunity to take lots of pictures. I love photography and need to get out more and shoot more often.

I hate that at this point, just reading the title of this post, I’ve already lost ~40% of you because of presumptions one way or another about what I’m going to write. I don’t like that we as a society have just decided to be angry with each other and that we can’t find ways that we can reduce violence and increase the well being of people. This post will not be well written or well organized, it’s just my raw thoughts from the past several months of reading and absorbing what people are saying and my thoughts on each.

I reject that we are unable to find common ground. I reject that we can’t do anything. I reject this idea that we are as a society stuck and powerless to do anything about the very real prevalent gun violence in this country.

“Shall not be infringed.” This was trending on Twitter earlier and I watched an old Penn and Teller video where Penn is going off about this phrase in the 2nd Amendment. People were going off about this because the idea is that nothing should infringe our right to get a gun.

Knowing that I’m not a constitutional lawyer, I have often looked at the earlier phrase “a well regulated militia being necessary to a free state” and thought the “well-regulated” part strongly hinted at the need for regulations. AKA laws. AKA limitations. Is not being able to own a tank an infringement to bearing arms? Should private citizens get to own nuclear weapons? F-16s? Missiles? Canons? Machine guns? Turrets? Where do we draw the line? Nowhere?

“Three fifths of all other persons.” Honestly, even if legal scholars decide that “shall not be infringed” means that we can’t restrict people from owning certain weapons such as nuclear weapons, tanks, missiles and automatic weapons—none of which were envisioned by the founders when this amendment was written—we can change the constitution. The constitution is not a divine document, and I’m tired of treating it like it is. It counted each black person as 3/5ths a person. We decided to change that.

Twenty Five Amendments. In fact, we’ve changed it twenty five times. There’s a built in mechanism to change the constitution when we decide that it no longer is suiting us. We’ve done things like prohibit alcohol, then oopsie daisy, maybe that was a bad idea. We’ve changed how the Vice President is elected. We changed how Senators are elected. Etc. We should change the constitution to work for us.

Is this working for us? More than one mass shooting a day so far. I watched an interview from a state law maker who said he’s not going to do anything about this, and when asked about his own kids he said he homeschools them to avoid violence. This has been a common attitude in my family. Why can’t we work to make the outside world safe? Why accept that you just gotta stay home, in your cocoon, and that’s the only safety you will ever get?

Air travel continues to get safer. MIT did a study and the statistics are fascinating to me. Worldwide, the risk of death in airplane accidents has been declining by a factor of 2 every decade. Every decade! Millions of people travel and despite the natural fears of flying, it’s one of the safest things you can ever do, even with the residual fears from 9/11, and mechanical problems, and crazy problems.

Air travel got safer through incremental improvement. I think the NTSB is a gift to the world. The National Transportation Safety Board is that rare government bureaucracy that I think about when I pay my taxes and I am head over heels excited to pay my tax bill for. They take a look at every airplane incident and investigate what went wrong, without blame or prosecution, and then make recommendations for how to make things safer. Whether it’s a weird failure from a mechanical component that needs a new inspection process, or new recommendations for how pilots communicate in stressful situations, they are just always looking at what went wrong to try to figure out ways to make it work better.

And it’s working. Turns out that if you put aside ego and ask how to really fix things, you get better ideas. And when you implement those ideas, you can learn from it, and improve those ideas further, and make things better and better.

We’re doing the opposite with violence in America. We just all have our opinions on what will make things better, shout at each other, and then nothing changes, nothing gets better, and we just shout louder and louder.

It’s worth shouting about. No one should be burying their children, especially not because of some crazy person with a weapon. Why can’t we put aside all our other differences and agree on this one thing: people are needlessly dying.

So, what should we do as a society in response? I sincerely don’t have the answer, but I think as a society we should take a less egotistical approach and a more NTSB approach. I think we should be incremental, and we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves.

400 million guns for 330 million people. These are big numbers. This isn’t, even in the best case, going to be solved overnight. We shouldn’t expect that any change we make will lead to zero mass shootings, the problem is too big for that. But can we improve the situation? Can we find ways for there to be only one mass shooting per day? Or one every couple of days? Or for the number to go down?

Not just guns, but not just mental health, either. I get a little frustrated when I read that people want to deflect from guns and say that we have a mental health crisis. Let me generalize only law-makers: why is it that the law-makers who are most likely to defend gun rights and decry mental health challenges are almost to a T the ones who also vote against all mental health support?

I think we need to have a conversation on what we can do as a society to help improve mental health outcomes. There’s a whole host of things we can do, a few that come to my mind immediately:

• incentivizing people to become psychiatrists, therapists, and psychologists.
• funding mental health programs across the country.
• funding outreach services
• funding R&D into better medication
• funding medication so the people who need it most have access to it
• making health care affordable so all people have access
• making life more affordable so fewer people need crippling levels of debt

And probably a hundred more if I spent more than 30 seconds writing down only the things that first came to mind.

“But it’s not the role of the government to …” Says who? The Constitution? Well the government is “We, the People” — so the government does whatever we collectively decide to do. So if, we the people decide we’re finally fed up with a 1700s government in the 2000s, we can change it.

The Bible? Au contraire. Read Leviticus and all about how God uses the people collectively to care for the poor and destitute, especially (but not exclusively) through the jubilee. Then go read the minor prophets (you’re familiar with those, right? Since you’re such a Bible scholar?) and how God is fundamentally pissed off over and over again at the people for their collective sins for not taking care of the least. And over and over again, God connects how they treat the poorest and worst off in their society with how God judges their society.

I don’t think 21st century America would fair very well under that scrutiny. And I worry about my own complicity in my society’s sins.

We have collectively sinned against our children, against ourselves, and against God by not taking this seriously. Like when God told Jeremiah to stop praying because their words and their fasts were many but their lack of concern about the things God cares about angered him. (Jeremiah 14:10-12)

I think God cares about children suffering and dying, about poor people being trampled upon, and sick people being cared for. I think that because God says it over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

I don’t know what God is calling you to do specifically to help correct our collective sins. I felt called to foster care. I feel called to lead young men closer to Jesus. I feel called to be a voice calling for action amidst inaction. I feel called to repent of my own sins and failings.

But I think he’s going to call you to something. Be brave. Do it.