September 7, 2008
Political Angst
I am truly dismayed by the whole political process. So many people I love are doggedly on one side of the political spectrum or the other. I am not. I want to hear the real issues and solutions, but they are buried so deeply that I cannot hear them or trust them and it cuts both ways. As long as I can remember, my solution has been to avoid politics altogether. Like the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand, I have chosen to ignore all the rhetoric and all the news. Today, I ventured out and read some of the political articles in the newspaper. Yikes! There seem to be three varieties of articles:
- Promises from each side saying that they have the answers that will save this country (or continue to keep it safe).
- Attacks on the “other side” saying that they are lying or deluded. Their way won’t work, or their record shows that they don’t mean what they say or… The underlying message is that you’d be stupid to vote for them.
- Exposure of the untruths in the promises and attacks from previous days whether unfounded promises, out-and-out lies or comments one side has taken out of context against the other side.
Of the three, the last category is the most believable, but not very helpful in reaching a decision. These “He/she said… but this is what the record shows…” articles merely add to my skepticism. Clearly the goal of each side is to get into the White House. Whatever it takes seems to be the rule. I wish I knew better how to project the future of one side’s getting in over the other.
Before I put my head back in the sand, dear readers, please tell me how you cope with the difficulty of getting to the heart of the matter. Do you have a single issue burning in you that overshadows everything else? Do you know how grandma would have voted and make sure you don’t stir up her wrath? Do you have friends or family who tell you what to think? Do you have a way of cutting through the crap to get to the heart of the real issues facing our country and our world today? I especially hope to hear from those who answer yes to the last question.
September 5, 2008
The Solution
Yes! After much wrestling with the puzzle of life, I have now figured it all out. In case you were wondering, you will observe from the accompanying Rubic’s Cube , the puzzle is now solved. I have the whole Jimazing answer. There is nothing else to say.
Now I will have to think of something else to write about.
September 3, 2008
John Brown
I just finished reading Patriotic Treason, John Brown and the Soul of America . Before reading it, all I knew about John Brown was that he was this guy who was an abolitionist around the beginning of the Civil War and that he was hanged for some violent acts that he commtted while working towards freeing the slaves, but that’s all I knew. I didn’t know where he fit in history. Was he a good guy or a bad guy? He must have been a good guy because he was anti-slavery and yet he must have done something pretty bad to be tried and hanged.
I have written before here how much I am enjoying reading biographies these days. I don’t know if it is an “old guy” thing or just a “biography phase”, but I find that I am enjoying history as I learn about a single historical figure. It is as if I am living the history through their eyes. Sometimes while I am reading, my mind will wander… While I was reading this book, I was thinking about why I like biographies so much. You wouldn’t think that I would like them because I love surprise endings. With a biography, I know the ending before I even start the book. and yet, somehow I enjoy them. Learning where the subject comes from, what drives them, who loves them, what they care most about is fascinating. Usually I pick a person who I admire to some degree. With Brown, I truly wasn’t sure. So why John Brown?
When we went to Charlestown, WV a few weeks back for a family reunion, we visited Harpers Ferry, which is just a few miles away. There, I became a little better acquainted with John Brown’s story. Harpers Ferry is where he led an assault on a National armory, captured and held it for a short time for which he was tried and hanged. When you enter the John Brown Museum, at Harpers Ferry, you are greeted with a life size tapestry of John Brown as this wild-eyed man with a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other. That portrait more than any other one piece drove me to want to know more about this man. I believe the message of Jesus to be a message of peace. To see a man depicted as spreading violence in the name of God was very disturbing to me.
It is unfair for me to sit on my couch in the comfort of my home and criticize John Brown’s actions of 150 years ago based on 2008 mores. While I still find much of his methodology to be disturbing, I enjoy life in a society where people with dark skin are allowed the same liberty that I enjoy; very different from John Brown’s world. He recognized the gross injustice of slavery. I don’t have to do anything to help free the slaves. It has already been accomplished. John Brown was a great catalyst towards the end of slavery. He didn’t stop slavery, but the work that he did pushed people to get off the proverbial fence. Was his way the “right way”? Could there have been another way to end slavery than a war? Who knows? We don’t get to replay history and try different means. We only get one shot at it and that’s the way it played out.
I still don’t quite know what to do with John Brown, but I understand a couple of things about him. He was a man who took his relationship with God very seriously. Until the very end, he was driven by the teachings of Jesus to do unto others as you would have them to do unto you, that God was not a “respecter of persons” and that whatever we do unto the least of these, we do unto Him. For good or for ill, it seems to me that John Brown’s fatal flaw was that he answered to no one. Ultimately, the buck stopped with him and that seems like a dangerous position for any of us. I highly recommend this book to you.
August 20, 2008
Bent Objects
There are a few blogs that I follow that are just plain fun. This is one of them. It is called, Bent Objects because the author takes common household objects and personifies them with a little wire and a lot of imagination. Hope it makes you smile too. Here are a few of my favorites:
Prehistoric Citrus Were Very Clever Hunters
Paper Training Our Little Dog, Frank
August 18, 2008
Kicks
What’s more Jimazing than seeing your grandbaby’s picture? It’s feeling your a grandbaby kicking. Danae is 23 weeks now. Read the photos with her blog entry here.
August 3, 2008
Sorting Life
On Peace
The men’s group where I am a member was discussing Romans chapter 8 this morning. We were talking about what it means to have God’s peace. Several in our group are going through tough times; some family issues and others business problems. They were asking why they aren’t experiencing God’s peace. It is easy in the middle of a problem to point to someone who is not having the same problem and attribute God’s peace to them. If I am experiencing a problem that is causing turmoil in my life, and I see someone who is not experiencing the same problem, it is easy to assume that she must have God’s peace unlike me. Sounds silly when you say it like that, but it is an easy leap to make when you feel life crashing down around you… at least it is for me. That leap is not fair for many reasons. The reason I want to focus on now is that life happens; whether as a result of our own actions and decisions or things that are completely out of our control. It’s easy to fall into the trap of measuring our spiritual status by our physical status. Are we prospering? We must be “right with God”. Are we failing in life? We must be out of God’s will. I don’t believe that our physical circumstances and our spiritual circumstances are that easily related… I’ll try my hand at an un-parable. Jesus might have introduced it like this, “The Kingdom of God is not like this…”
A farmer planted corn and the corn did well. Later others can come by and saw acres of corn. They knew merely by virtue of the plants they saw that the farmer planted corn.
Not so spiritually speaking. It would be judgemental and wrong for me to look at my friend whose business is not doing well and say that he’s not right with God. And it would be just as presumptuous to look at my friend whose business is prospering and conclude that he must be close to God. It just doesn’t work like that. Yes, there is a sowing and reaping, but it’s dangerous to look at the physical and make spiritual judgements.
In my own journey, when I relate the peace of God with my own prosperity, I tend to want to fix the physical in order to address the spiritual. I create “places of peace” that are really nothing about following God. They are merely my own “happy places”. I create peace in my life when I plan, work and succeed. Am I saying this is wrong? Please hear me on this: This post is not about good and bad, nor is it about right and wrong. I am merely doing a bit of sorting. What is spiritual and what is physical? What is peace and what is God’s spiritual peace? Nothing wrong with creating happy places in my life, but I don’t want to confuse them with the Peace of God that is present even when I’m not in a happy place… In John 9, the disciples asked Jesus why a man had been born blind… well, not quite. What they asked was whose sin caused him to be blind. They were connecting his physical condition to his spiritual condition. Jesus rightly called foul on their presumption. Just because I do A and then get B does not mean my doing A causes B. In fact, that line of thinking leads to superstition and superstition merely confuses the situation.
On Grattitude
Continuing the sorting process… Later today, a podcast of Speaking of Faith on prayer got me thinking of multiple levels of thankfulness and grattitude. A little girl read this poem by Mary Oliver (emphasis is mine)…
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
How wonderful to stroll through the fields, to play in the grass all day. I could be thankful for that. But the grass must be tended to. What about mowing the grass? Can I be thankful for that too? What about the daily work and grind that saps all my energy and seems to be for nothing. Can I be thankful for that? There must be multiple levels of grattitude. For instance, there’s a “childish” grattitude for simple things (generally selfish) and a deeper “adult” grattitude for what’s behind those simple things. I say “adult”, but it doesn’t come automatically at any age.
I have such fond memories of Christmas meals with my dad’s family in West Virginia. So much family in one room that you could hardly move. The aroma of more wonderful dishes than you could imagine. So many that you could hardly taste taste them all in just one sitting. I was thankful for that even then… and I am thankful for the memory of those gatherings now. But I had no thought for (and hence no grattitude for) those who did the work to cook those meals and plan the evening and clean the house and… It’s only as an adult that I can see that side of it. Only as an adult, do I realize that the events like these that set the stage for great memories take great planning and execution. They do not merely happen. That doesn’t lessen my childish grattitude. In fact it enhances it and in a sense, completes it. I can only be thankful for what I have some understanding of.
So, yes, I can be thankful for a walk and a tumble in the grass… and I can be thankful for the ability and the tools that I need to mow that grass. I can be thankful for the family times and thankful that someone has put the energy and planning into creating these times. The more I know, the more I can be thankful for. As I write those words, I hear the dryer tumbling freshly washed clothes and I realize that if my sweetie hadn’t taken care of that, I would be doing laundry instead of blogging. Thanks Honey… Happy Monthiversary… thirty years and 2 months!
July 24, 2008
Amazing Jimazing Memory
Today on my way to lunch, I was carrying on a conversation with my friend, Will. We opened a door to a small elevator waiting area where I saw someone who I had hadn’t seen for a few years. We had a casual work relationship with a few years ago, so I wouldn’t say I ever knew him well. Without missing a single beat, I said, “Hey, Drew. It’s been a long time. How are you doing…” [insert 5 seconds of small talk here]. How did I know his name so quickly? I marvel at the way my brain works so very efficiently sometimes.
I heard a podcast recently in which the speaker was describing how memory and creativity work. In his comparison, he said that storing information in memory was like finding items and putting them on shelves. Creativity happens when someone takes two or more items and sees something new in common between them. In other words, no one really creates anything completely from scratch. I digress.
Right after seeing Drew and remembering his name, I imagined the process my brain went through to pull off this amazing feat… A few years ago, when I met Drew, I stored his name on a shelf somewhere in one of the great empty rooms that is my brain. For a while I visited it regularly as I would see him in the hall and need to use his name. Then I didn’t see Drew for a long time. His name grew dustier as I forgot about it. After all, I wasn’t using it. When I stepped into the elevator lobby, instantly flashing lights went off inside my mind. Sirens started screaming and the memory-librarians in my brain went rushing faster than the six million dollar man to get that name to the front of my mind. Somehow they dusted it off and had it there fresh and solid right when and where I needed it. To me on the outside, it was as if I had just been talking to him or about him. Unbelievable!
A little later, while we were sitting down to lunch, Jeff walked up to me and said hello. Now I don’t know Jeff very well. He’s in a church men’s group that meets at the same time and place that my men’s group meets, but we haven’t spent a lot of time together. I’m guessing that it has been four to six weeks since I last saw Jeff. I looked up, shook his hand and said, “Hey Ken.” (Wrong name!) Ken is another guy in Jeff’s group. Ken and Jeff don’t even look much alike at all. Why didn’t it work right that time. I said something silly to mask my mild embarrasment and went on with my lunch. No big deal, right? Why did my memory work so efficiently for Drew and so close but not quite for Jeff? Who knows. I still think it is fascinating.
Reminds me of a joke…
An elderly couple had dinner at another couple’s house. After dinner, the wives went into the kitchen and the gentlemen went into the parlor to smoke a cigar and talk. One of them said to the other, “Last night we went out to a new restaurant and it was really great. The food was scrumptious and the service was impecable. I would recommend it very highly.”
The other man said, “It sounds great! I would like to take my wife there sometime. What is the name of the restaurant?”
The first man thought for a moment and thought some more… Finally he asked his friend, “What is the name of that flower you give to someone you love? You know… The one that’s red and has thorns.”
Do you mean a rose?”
“Yes, that’s the one,” replied the man. He then turned towards the kitchen and yelled, “Rose, what’s the name of that restaurant we went to last night?”
I can relate to the poor old guy.
July 10, 2008
Frontline: Jesus in China
I just watched a Frontline video report called Jesus in China, which was about the state of the Christian church in China. The report was about how the Chinese government relates to the modern Christian church in China. They address how the government has created a state sanctioned church and how the government is persecuting underground “house churches” and arresting their pastors. However, it was something else altogether that stirred me. In fact the thing that bothered me was never mentioned in the program. I was bothered by how western the Chinese church looked. If you ignored the obvious language difference, the state sanctioned church might have been any large traditional protestant church in the US, and the underground churches all looked very much like any of a number of more charismatic churches that I have been a part of.
I hesitate to write about this for fear that others will take this as a critisism of how a particular group of people “does church”, but that is truly not what’s on my mind. This not really about how to “do church”. I just expected the Chinese church to seem more… well… Chinese. I was excited by the title to think that I would get to see how the message of Jesus is being lived out by people from a different culture than mine. What I saw was my own culture being lived out in a different group. From the architecture of the church building to the clothing, the state church looked just like First Baptist of Smalltown America. From the the bouncy dancing while singing repititious choruses to the few young folks with microphones leading the singing in a line on the stage… it could have been any one of a thousand trendy new evangelical or charismatic churches. I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with “doing church” like that, I just wonder why church gatherings are not more expressive of the people who are gathered.
God created us as individuals with many varied talents, interests and experience, and I believe that everything we touch and create as Christians should naturally be a unique expression of who we are. “…Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms…” I Peter 4:10. It seems to me that using “whatever gift” would look differently for every believer. Individual church gatherings ought to look very different for people from very different cultures. For me, it just doesn’t add up.
Again, I feel compelled to go overboard in saying that this blog entry is not about the Chinese Church. I think it is wonderful that people who have been oppressed by their government are experiencing a newfound (or newly fought for) freedom to worship God. If anything, I want to see them free to worship God as Chinese, not as westerners. God is God and western society is western society and they aren’t the same thing.
June 3, 2008
1978 to 2008 makes 30 Years!
I wish so much that I could travel in time back to 1978 and have a talk with a certain young man. There is so much I would tell him about life. I would warn him about some really lousy decisions that he was going to make and encourage him that some of them would actually be good decisions. I would tell him that his thoughts and dreams are important. Mostly I would assure him that his decision to ask that the pretty young lady to be his bride was a super good decision. Yes, today is the 30th anniversary of Jeanie’s and my marriage.
I still remember the surreal feeling of standing at the front of the church while she walked down the aisle. I was thinking to myself, “So this is what it feels like to get married.” That says a lot about me. Most guys, when they are making one of the biggest choices in their life, would be getting cold feet and second guessing themselves. “Is she the one? Did I make the right decision?” Not me. I was thinking about the meaning of life… what this experience feels like. I have been like that ever since… (how she could stand to live with me these last 30 years is a mystery to me)… but I’m sure thankful that she has.
June 3rd 1978 started a new chapter in the book of our lives. It has not always been blue skies and rainbows. We have had our share of tragedies and sorrows, but somehow we seemed to get more than our share of joys and celebrations. Now, 30 years later, we have four beautiful and successful daughters, two handsome sons-in-law and our first grandchild on the way? I feel overwhelmed with grattitude to God for giving me such a wonderful life. George Bailey has nothing on me.
Happy Anniversary, Sweetie!
May 20, 2008
I’m gonna be a Grandpa
In case you haven’t heard, I’m going to be a grandpa! Danae and Mark were selfless enough to make a grandchild just for me. How sacrificial of them! She’s due in December, and I am excited… in case it’s not coming through loud and clear! She posted pictures of the little spud here on her blog.
Thanks Mark & Danae!
Jimazing Thoughts 