This section lists all blog posts, regardless of topic.
On Living Organ DonationSeptember 26, 2013
Many of us will be familiar with the concept of organ donation that happens after someone passes away, but more recently I have been learning about the need for living organ donation. In January 2013, I read the story of Craig Dunbar from Ottawa. He is a 41 year old man who was afflicted with kidney failure in 2007. Four years ago, he was given the opportunity to have a kidney transplant, but the transplanted kidney went septic (not rejected), and had to be removed. This event was especially tragic because it caused Craig’s antibody sensitivity to skyrocket from a more typical 30% all the way to 98%. What this means is that while he would have previously been compatible with 70% of potential kidneys of matching blood type, he is now compatible with only 2% of potential kidneys. This makes finding a kidney extremely difficult. If that wasn’t bad enough, Craig’s access points for receiving dialysis are rapidly failing, and it is very likely that he will die within a year if he can’t find a kidney. Canada has something called the Living Donor Paired Exchange, which increases the odds greatly, but currently only 2 people have been successful at joined the exchange program on Craig’s behalf. A few dozen people were tested, but Craig has had bad luck with the proportion of people who have been rejected. Unless more people are willing to join on his behalf, the odds aren’t looking good.
This situation strikes me as being a very rich one for Christians to discern about. As I have personally reflected on the greatest commandment Jesus gave us, to love God with our whole being, and to love others as we love ourselves, I ask myself the question: If the roles were reversed, would I want Craig to donate a kidney to me. The answer is yes, and I suspect the answer would be “yes” for most of us. But in talking with other Christians, it quickly becomes apparent that most of us aren’t willing to donate a kidney to someone like Craig, especially since he isn’t someone that we have a strong personal connection with.
The second Biblical reference that comes to mind is the story of the good Samaritan. In this story, the Samaritan was willing to act even though the person in trouble wasn’t a beloved family member or acquaintance. How do we understand this? I think it goes back to Jesus’ commandment to love others as self. Each human life is uniquely valuable to God, regardless of whether they are our family of friends. If we are to surrender our selfish perspective on the world, then we must recognize God’s perspective, and in desiring to love God with our whole selves, me must be willing to act in a way that celebrates all human life as beloved by God. Craig’s life is as valuable to God as my life, and as valuable as your life.
There are many other ways in which living organ donation is relevant to our Christian dialogue:
Stewardship: We often acknowledge that stewardship is more than money -- that we are also privileged to manage the time and talents that God has entrusted to us, and that Jesus is to be Lord of all. Can we consider it good stewardship that hundreds of millions of Christians keep an extra kidney while people are dying or have very compromised health for lack of one? Looked at from a different angle, 20 years of dialysis for a person costs around $1.2 million dollars of taxpayer money. It's quite possible that kidney donation is also good stewardship of a country's medical resources.
Witness: As we endeavour to demonstrate to the world the beauty of loving others as self, situations like Craig’s are a wonderful opportunity -- an opportunity to demonstrate who God has called us to be. But if we turn away, we send a confounding message to the world. As Shane Claiborne often reminds us, we don’t want the church to be known for what it’s against, but rather what it’s for.
Christian Formation: As we sit around tables and talk about how to form faith in our youth, considering this curriculum or that, we must remember that it is actually how we choose the live, and the hard decisions that we make, that are most formative for our children.
Peace: As we have read in previous months about the imminent threat of war with Syria, we sometimes wonder in what helpful ways we as a non-violent people can respond. Although humanitarian aid is a good and right response, it is only treating the surface problem. As followers of Jesus we know that the seeds of peace are best sown long before conflict erupts. Sacrificial love for one another is one of the most beautiful seeds of peace that I know of.
These are a few areas that come to mind, but I’m convinced that there are many more rich ways in which this topic intersects our faith.
When we get to heaven and God asks us how we responded to the hungry, the thirsty, and the naked, we should also be prepared to account for how we responded to those who needed a kidney. Were we like the priests who saw the robbed and beaten man and walked to the other side of the road, or were we like the Samaritan who stopped and helped? Certainly this topic evokes much fear and emotion, and this is something we do need to be careful and wise about. Donating a kidney won’t be a good choice for everyone. But if it is fear and uncertainty that is holding us back, we need not be afraid, because what we’re about is love, and love drives out all fear.
It is not infrequent that we raise our eyes to heaven and ask for a miracle. As we do so, we must remember that God has also placed miracles within us that are ready to blossom if we are willing.
My hope is not only that Craig’s life will be spared, but that this article may be a seed that encourages Christians and whole churches to think seriously and deliberately about the wider issue of living organ donation.
For more information on Craig Dunbar, or to communicate with him, please see:
www.facebook.com/groups/Kidney4Craig/A great resource is Carol Penner’s blog, where she writes of her experience donating a kidney:
http://anundesignateddonor.blogspot.ca/2011/12/making-call.htmlI am also very happy to answer any questions that I can, and to continue the discussion:
[mailto: daniel.bigham@gmail.com]
Troubling DreamsSeptember 26, 2013
I don’t have bad dreams too often, at least that I can remember. Among the worst dreams I’ve had are ones where I accidentally hurt someone I love. I think in one case my dream was that I was home alone at night, when suddenly I heard someone walking up the darkened staircase from our basement. Thinking it was an intruder, I struck out at them with a weapon at an opportune moment as they reached the top of the staircase, only to realize it was a loved one. The most visceral version of this dream involved a loved one who was in pain. In the dream, I had a strong impulse that the loving and right thing to do was to knock them out so that they wouldn’t be suffering. In the dream, I was straddling them on the ground, holding them down, repeatedly striking them on the head with my fist to knock them out. But to my horror, with each blow the person simply become more badly hurt, and fully conscious. And the more hurt they become, the stronger the impulse to knock them out, which compelled me to continue striking them. On and on it went. Truly a nightmare. Terrible.
On my bike ride today this dream popped back into my head, but I saw it from a new light. The two actors in the dream were countries, or perhaps religions. The one country felt that the good and right thing to do was to act out in violence against the other country -- that somehow a violent act could be used to neutralize pain and suffering. There would be losses, but it was the greater good that was being sought. Tragically, we know that all too often wars leave both countries badly harmed.
The second layer to my thought was an analogy to the victim being a loved one. Perhaps there are deeper truths to the concept of loving one’s enemy than we realize -- that at some spiritual level, it is like we are murdering our own children. That maybe some day, when all is revealed, we will see that our enemies were actually as our own children to us, and we will have to account for how we savagely beat them. A perspective on peace.
10 Things I Love (And Dislike) About BB10 DevelopmentAugust 24, 2013
I haven't found much time for BB10 development in the last few months, so it has been wonderful to get about 35 hours of it in over the last three weeks. I had a very enjoyable hour today and am inspired to share some aspects of BB10 development that I really like.
1. | The UI looks great! The UX team at Blackberry did a wonderful job on all of the widgets and various UI features of Cascades, and it makes it a real pleasure to create apps. BB10 is perhaps my favorite mobile OS in terms of appearance and UI functionality. I'm not sure the UI always lives up to 60 fps like the designers had hoped, but it runs well, and UI interaction is typically nice a smooth. |
| 2. | QML: Being able to quickly put UIs together using a declarative language like QML is great, and being able to call into C++ fairly simply is also great. |
| 3. | QML preview: Being able to get a real-time preview of the UI you're working on is super helpful and makes building a UI so much more efficient. (The unfortunate limitation is that this doesn't work with custom controls -- I wish there was a way for that to work) |
| 4. | Qt: Building Cascades on top of Qt was a pretty good choice, I think, if you're going to build on C++. Qt has a good set of classes, plus their signals/slots mechanism, which make building apps much more straightforward than raw C++. |
| 5. | IDE: Building the IDE on top of Eclipse was a good idea, and the IDE has gotten noticeably better with 10.2. |
| 6. | Sample code: Having a rich set of sample apps that are fun and well-written is always helpful. BB has done a great job with their sample apps. Thank you! |
| 7. | Documentation: BB's website for BB10 documentation is well laid out and looks great, making it a joy to use. |
| 8. | Developer relations and forums: BB means business when it comes to helping developers. They're on the opposite end of the spectrum as compared to Google... if you have any serious issue, just send them an email and they're right on it. This is frankly amazing. Good work developer relations! |
| 9. | Blogs: It's helpful that BB maintains a good developer blog. This makes it fun to continue to learn and be motivated by |
| 10. | Events: BB's "jam" events have been fun to attend, and a good way to meet people and get excited about Blackberry's vision. |
Now, to be fair, I'll also list the things that are painful about BB10 development.
| 1. | Developer productivity with Cascades (for me, right now) is about 2x-3x slower than it was with Adobe AIR. Part of this is my own fault for being rusty on C++ and new to Qt, whereas I had relatively more experience with JavaScript upon which AIR is built, and partly it's because I write more polished code (and more substantial apps) when doing Cascades work, whereas I was happier to hack things together in AIR, but all this said, that makes a huge difference. Some of my top-grossing apps for PlayBook took 8 hours, 2 hours, even 1 hour, to create, whereas my BB10 efforts have been more in the 30 hour range to create something. What this means for hobbiest developers is that it's harder to "focus" on an app, because you might have a week or two where you have some free time, and that only gets you started on an app, it doesn't start and complete the app. Then you lose focus and forget what you created, and you get out of the groove of BB10 development, and it feels like starting from scratch when you pick it back up a few weeks later. I hope that as I progress my productivity will increase. Part of the issue here is C++/Qt. They're good languages, but they're just not as productive as languages like C#, Java, or JavaScript. Qt hags a fair bit of "cruft". Having to maintain .h and .cpp files slows you down. Adding methods is more painful, etc. |
| 2. | My first big time investment in a Cascades app took about 25 hours of my time and 25 hours of a friends time to get close to completion. Then, the app started crashing randomly if I repeated an action. Ugh. The stack trace didn't even involve my code. I must have been doing something wrong in terms of Qt and its memory management, or something, but after staring at the code endlessly I couldn't come up with any solutions to the crashing. This was super-disheartening, and frustrating for a seasoned developer. Writing programs in languages like C++ carries with it this added risk over languages like C# and Java... if you screw something up which has a very indirect affect later on in the execution of the program, and it might take you eons to solve it. This obviously makes development much less fun. I still have yet to solve my issue, and I'm low on patience to go back and spend hours trying to figure it out. Solving those kinds of issues isn't really what someone wants to be doing with their hobby time. |
| 3. | I find QML + C++ to be quite a compelling combination, but it also feels a bit "brittle" at times. If you want to do the common things, it's fairly straightforward, but sometimes I'm trying to do something that seems slightly out of the ordinary, and I'm just clueless how to pull off the plumbing to make it happen. For example wanting to send a pointer to an object from QML to C++, and it gives some cryptic answer. It seems so simple! I think the answer I found on the web was that your method should accept a QObject*, not the actual pointer type you're trying to send. Uhhh, OK, whatever. That's the joy of using a rich, built-up framework, but not having a depth of experience with it. ie. Steeper learning curve. Again, nice when hobby development isn't a steep learning curve. |
| 4. | I really wish deployment to the device was faster. Not including compile time, it takes about 10 seconds to deploy and run the app over USB. This seems silly to me. Surely that shouldn't take more than 1 second if optimized: The app isn't very large -- what takes so long!? Having to wait this long slows down development time and scatters my concentration. |
| 5. | The IDE can feel buggy at times. Currently, if I press "Run" too quickly after the compile finishes (and it is done), it gives me a NullPointerException in the IDE as a popup. Super annoying. Also, it can't currently find the simulator, even though it was working fine previously, and I haven't made any changes to the simulator. And sometimes it can't see the device over USB even though it is connected, or can't see if over Wi-Fi, even though it is there. Little bugs and unreliabilities make developers cranky. I've also had headaches with the keys that RIM issues you to sign your apps -- using them, managing them, etc. |
I'm having a hard time thinking of anything else to complain about, so that's a good sign :)
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