I, Scott Waltz, am part of the Childrens ministry program at Vineyard Christian church in Crystal Lake. I help write our curriculum and am a teacher of our grade school kids.
My day job is a risk analyst at a hedge fund. I spend my days making numbers march in neat lines across Excel spreadsheets. When I was young, I checked math books out of the library for fun. When my mom wanted me to take out the garbage she would say: “Scott are you doing homework or playing, I never can tell.”. I admit I wasn’t above lying. Part of the reason I am attracted to math is because after you get past the basics, the subject is full of wonder. Those of you that know about the proof of why the square root of 2 is an irrational number know what I mean. It turns out I am not that great at math, but I can understand enough to dimly grasp the wonder of it.
We are creatures of wonder. We are capable of truth, justice, mercy and love. We can also be small, grumpy, mean and sometimes downright wicked. I am a Christian in part because Christianity is a wonderful, truthful story that describes who we are. I teach because I want to pass the wonder of Christianity and the wonder of knowing a living God on to others.
I grew up loving computer games, but eventually got tired of them at some point because I figured the people that wrote the games were smarter than the people playing them. I wanted to be the one making the rules creating the worlds not just existing in someone else’s creation. God’s world doesn’t feel like computer worlds to me. We exist in a world where endless creativity is possible. I love that.
Along with math, I love to read particularly, classical fiction (Proust, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Wolf, Shakespeare) and science fiction/fantasy (Banks, Stephenson, Pratchett). I enjoying jogging and practicing yoga.