In many cities in America, universities are often the single largest employers. This suggests we place, as well it should be, high value on the learning that can be accomplished in such environments. I certainly placed great value on this kind of learning myself; having done course work in three doctoral programs and three masters programs in addition to an undergraduate program. And at least as important was the opportunity to finance these great institutions. I paid on at least six student loans forever. I felt my real passage into the fruits of adult life came when these were finally paid off.
A number of well-designed studies suggest much of what we learn in academic institutions is forgotten in a surprising short period of time. A notable one of these studies indicates that on the day newly-minted physicians are graduated from medical school, 94% of the factual information acquired in four years of training has been lost. I am certain I have also forgotten at least 94% of what I learned in medical school, despite doing well in my course work and national board exams. One might legitimately wonder about the merits of an educational process which appears to have an 'efficiency' of retention at graduation of only 6%. If I took my aggregate student loans and divided by this 6%, the cost per factoid retained in my brain is horrific.
There is no really effective or even fair way to assess the true knowledge output of a university. Those of us who have sat through ten or fifteen years of post-secondary education are probably full of ideas about how best to de-construct American education and rebuild something new which has a lower co-efficient of torture for students and at the same time makes learning a more effective process. Happily, a number of our best institutions are experimenting with new forms of learning and radical changes in curriculum design. Unfortunately, I went through too early and now have a fatigued overfull brain, filled mostly with forgotten trivia. Perhaps the main benefit from having lived on seven campuses is the inculcation of the wonder of learning and the magic of new vision for how our world works.
Yet, there is a quiet, unsettling question which hangs on the fringes of my consciousness. Did I gain any wisdom by spending seventeen years in universities, or did I merely gain some expensive factoids? The Book of Ecclesiastes suggests the writing of many books is endless and that excessive study of books is wearisome to the body and soul. In both dental and medical school, we were quite happy and eager to point out the theological merits of this passage to our course masters. They didn't bite. All nighters and blood-shot eyes were normative for years.
It has been more than ten years now since I last sat in lecture halls grinding away at a degree of some sort. And it has been a blissful six years since being rid of some very thick student loan coupon books. From this vantage point I suspect the real lessons for me did not even happen in the lecture halls of America's great universities. Looking back I realize much of the learning which imparts wisdom and has real staying power is found in some of the most unlikely of venues. In fact, real learning can occur in almost any place where we live out the fabric of our daily lives. The key to this learning doesn't derive from earning degrees, or making loan payments; it simply requires paying attention and being open to the most unorthodox of teachers.
Ten years ago I face the prospect of a neurologic disease that could cut me off below the knees about fifty years early. I suddenly, without any great virtue on my part, became an attentive student to what really matters most in life. If the truth be known, fear can be a powerful motivator and it sure was for me. As the saying goes: when the student is ready a teacher will appear. They came out of the wood work and it wasn't the woodwork of fine paneled lecture halls in ivy-covered Gothic buildings. For ten years I have had teachers show up in the most unlikely places.
Consider the battered kitchen of a state park group lodge. In this ignominious white plywood structure a teacher of the greatest stature humanely taught me of the awfulness of a critical spirit. In wonderment I sat in awe as this gentle giant taught me of the great merit in withholding judgement of others. After two days in "His Kitchen" I felt I had earned a degree in humility. Sometimes lessons require repetition to be learned properly. In my own kitchen I had a "Second Chance" to learn that judging people will only result in alienation and in many cases the loss of magnificent friendships. I also learned that I am really thankful that close friends cannot read my mind.
For as much time as we spend in automobiles in our car-dependent culture, it only makes sense that major learning might occur in the garages of our life. My employer provides a garage and in there I have had numerous near-epiphanies of learning. One day while looking for "Parking Spaces" I discovered that I have been on a moral and ethical slippery slope for years. There are things I do now that I would not have dreamed of doing twenty years ago. There are things our culture now accepts for our children that biology teachers once wouldn't accept for their frogs.
Another time while observing the proliferation of new "S.U.V." trucks in the hospital garage it occurred to me those of us who have elected to travel by faith rather than by sport utility vehicle will be given the opportunity to exercise an option on a one-way ticket to the most exotic and fabulous of all destinations, a city where the foundation blocks are made of priceless stones and the streets of transparent gold. By keeping our minds on the race before us and not being distracted, we will win the grand prize that doesn't depreciate and lasts for all Eternity.
In the garage there are many vehicles with personalized license plates. These often proclaim very loud messages that may not have been intended. Whether intentional or not, we all make declarations with our lives each day. We have the conscious choice of declaring where we place our trust. We trust God or money. We can't serve both.
Airplanes have proven to be high places of learning, figurative and literally. A dear friend learned of "A Greater Power" while flying through level IV thunderstorms and dodging a swarm of tornadoes. She learned of the quiet peace that can allow slumber in the midst of the storm. My impotence to come to her aid was all too apparent. All I could do was pray. I was to later learn this was more than enough. With several hundred flights to my credit, I also know there is nothing of greater value than peace in the eye of the storm. Eventually we will all make a "Final Flight" from this world and we can have faith that we will have a safe landing on the far side.
Perhaps the grandest place of higher learning is the back hall of your nearest nursing home. There is no pretense in a nursing home. One can find immense pain, drools, profound loneliness, long nights, and opportunities to receive the greatest of wisdom. One learns what really counts. In my daily journeys on those days numbered "1531-1641" since the last lost-time accident among the nursing home employees I have learned of the priceless value of memory and the inestimable value of a day. I have started to learn to live each day as though it might be my last.
Desks in banks and offices are not generally considered places of higher learning; higher finance perhaps. I found an exception to this on my "Blotter" one day when I returned from a local bank. In an instant I realized that our security does not come from the corporate world or top management. I understood that security, and even lunch, comes from the unseen, unnamed benevolence of others, often from the One unseen in the day to day frenzy of material life.
Each of us is given myriad opportunities to learn the important lessons of Life. The important issue is whether we are willing to be life-long students. Each day I encounter people who remain closed to the lessons of life and end up paying tuition of a magnitude they had never imagined; divorce, disillusionment, bankruptcy, failed health, loss of integrity, broken dreams, even early death. They got the same opportunities as the rest of us. They just weren't in a learning mode.
We often don't have a choice about the challenges life presents to us but we do have free-will in deciding how to respond to them. We can embrace the One who gives Wisdom to live life abundantly. May these vignettes inspire you to find the pearls of learning and wisdom to be harvested from the depths of your own life.
"Acquire wisdom! Acquire understanding! Do not forget, nor turn away from the words of my mouth. Do not forsake her, and she will guard you; Love her, and she will watch over you. The beginning of wisdom is: acquire wisdom; And with all your acquiring, get understanding. Prize her and she will exalt you. She will honor you if you embrace her. She will place on your head a garland of grace; she will present you with a crown of beauty. Hear my son, and accept my sayings, and the years of your life will be many, I have directed you in the way of wisdom ..."
Proverbs 4:5-11
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Musings Part 1
Below Grade
At one time I lived in Chicago for some six years. Each day I walked about eight blocks from the subway station to my laboratory in a high-rise research tower. The short journey on foot was made most interesting for about eighteen months by the fact my route took me past the construction site of what was to become the tallest reinforced-concrete building in the world. For many months it seemed armies of construction workers were building in the wrong direction, if their goal was to build a structure reaching to the clouds. For months the site was nothing but a progressively deeper pit which was warmed by the sun only at the height of mid-day. In mid-winter the depths of that abyss remained in permanent frigid shadow. It seemed these workers were going to a vast amount of trouble and expense to build something that did not add any height to the structure and would be quite unseen in the finished spire.
One day I observed that there seemed to be a turning point at the site. Suddenly, a rather gangly set of steel reinforcing rods began to emerge from that vast chasm in the earth. Eventually, those ferrous towers began to pierce the low-lying cloud often shrouding the shores of Lake Michigan. With time, all those iron rods were well hidden inside footings, caissons, piles, columns. A prickly crown of plywood and steel forms slowly inched its way towards Heaven. About once every week to ten days another concrete floor was added about eleven feet above the previous one. In the end, more than seventy-five floors rose nearly nine hundred feet above street level.
In the past twenty-three years that tower has been buffeted many times by hundred-mile-an-hour gale force winds, shaken by myriad unnoticed earth tremors, struck by lightning hundreds of times, and punished by the unrelenting cycles of searing heat of summer and brittle cold of midwestern winter. Yet, today that concrete and glass tower continues to safely harbor luxurious homes in the sky and a virtual hanging garden of Babylon in a seven-level atrium lobby, all because more than two decades ago those many arduous months were spent in preparation, doing un-glamorous unseen work below ground.
I recall that work went on day and night, year round during the construction of that vast monolith. At $200 million and counting, one does not wait for a nice day to work. Its builders knew intimately what the long-term challenges would be. Iron walkers balancing on an eight-inch beam a fifth of a mile up knew intimately the potential hazards of strong winds in view of the unrelenting pull of gravity. Cement finishers understood the power of sub-zero temperatures to destroy concrete. Fabricators knew the power of intense sun to warp and distort finely crafted, close fitting structural elements. Glaziers discovered the potency of gales to knock out glass walls and send deadly shards raining down.
Building a successful life of faith is much like the erection of a modern skyscraper. It takes a long time, often has a high price attached to it, requires building a solid foundation, and demands a willingness to persevere in adverse conditions. For a long time, the life builder can expect to see few visible results above grade.
We are promised that days will come in which the winds of life will howl, the rains will lash, and our very foundations will be challenged. Gentle May days are forgotten. Death, divorce, illness, unemployment, and financial failures are part of life's recipe. Hearing your boss say "We don't need you any longer" can make one feel exactly like an iron walker, seventy floors up, who walked eight inches too far to one side or the other. Anyone who has been told by a physician "I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do" instantly knows what his foundation is made of.
If we have taken the time in decades past to build our spiritual foundations on bedrock, we need not fear. If we instead cut costs and failed to dig deeply enough, building quickly on shifting sand, seeking short term results, we can expect a calamitous failure of our faith. I once heard a physician tell me horrendous words of doom. I found out the hard way that sand is good for little more than sandboxes. I discovered that I was on the wind-swept end of an I-beam looking down into a vast abyss, without benefit of a safety line.
Yet, we are told the very adversities of life can work to our benefit, actually enabling us to retrofit a solid foundation under our lives. In the New Testament, we find a short letter James wrote to his brethren promising them that if they persevered under the hardships of life they would receive the Crown of Life, not a man-made one of splintered plywood and rusted pipes. He further promised them that by living a life of faith in the difficult times, they would be lacking in nothing. St. Paul cited the example of Abraham who, by faith, knew to be "looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God."
The winds of adversity blow for but a season, if we but have faith. The Crown of Life includes a deed to a home far above the clouds where we no longer need fear the winds of adversity.
"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the men of old gained approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible."
End of the Road
Have you ever gotten caught in a massive traffic jam at an unusual time of day and had curiosity nearly kill you as to what calamity had occurred beyond the horizon? As to what it was that was costing you time away from ESPN or Mystery theater?
When returning home this summer from an inspiring week-long series of meetings on personal empowerment at Radford University, exactly this occurred for me. It was a fine cerulean Saturday afternoon, unusually cool and refreshing for a August day in the deep South. I was flying with the breeze. Suddenly, the emerald Shennandoah world ground to a halt. A shimmering wave of red brake lights disrupted my revere. I came to an immediate stop and for thirty minutes wondered what could have disrupted such a splendid day.
A sobering answer soon presented itself to me. A large motor home and a car had intersected in Einstein's space-time continuum at exactly the wrong time and space. The quantum result was a spectacular fiery immolation of both, leaving only smoldering burnt ruins and having turned the future dreams of several travellers to ashen death. For them, the emerald wonders of the Shennandoah were no more. With ample discretion of spirit, I pressed the accelerator when officials advised it was permissible to continue my journey towards my aureate future.
I completed the journey home in safety. In fact, I have been granted opportunities to continue my learning on further journeys. On Friday I was walking through the large cemetery near the Queen Elizabeth Hospitals in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It's one of those grand old cemeteries with a vast forest of granite and marble obelisks and spires in myriad shades of gray, white, and pink. I couldn't but help wondering what all of those thousands of silent people now residing there would tell me about their lives and motivations, if by some miraculous means, they could suddenly do so. Would they tell me the same things the helpless people in the Virginia motor home might have said just a bit earlier on that last Saturday?
In the center of that vast Halifax cemetery is a view to the south east that gives clear vision of a very busy boulevard. As I stood among those silent sentinels of stone, it suddenly occurred to me that all roads don't lead to Sears; rather, they all lead here to this silent stone forest, or others just like it. Would we make different choices in charting our life courses, in choosing our itineraries, our goals, if we really knew where all roads lead? It's not likely those home-bound evening commuters were thinking of the cemetery or what it represents. Most likely, their thoughts were focused on traffic signals and what was for dinner.
Today, one of the most glamorous ever of the world's women, one who had it all, joined the silent ranks of those forever consigned to the cold granite forest. She will forever remain in a frigid granite crypt, in a small lonely church, never again seeing the autumn sun of her beloved Wales, never experiencing the joys of her sons growing into their own. A mere week before, dancing with the ultra rich in the City of Lights, all possibilities before her, profound darkness descended on Princess Diana. In a moment, which will be the most documented speck of time in decades, Diana's world was irrevocably shattered. She died at the hands of her out-of-control drunk driver who slammed her Mercedes limousine into eternity. Would she have made different choices in life if she had but known her future? We can only conjecture.
Another of the most famous of the world's women also journeyed into the granite forest this week. Her passing was eclipsed by the passing of the glamorous princess and none of the tabloids paid the paparazzi to capture her moment of departure. Mother Theresa quietly left this world in far better condition that she found it when she arrived eighty-seven years before. Her life of selfless service was an inspiration without peer and her award of the Nobel Peace Prize is one of the great satisfactions for the Stockholm prize committee. I suspect Mother Theresa died without regrets. She probably would have done nothing different with her life, if the facts be known.
While walking in the Halifax cemetery, leaden clouds parted to reveal a brilliant late afternoon sun in the northwest, far beyond that marble and granite forest. In a moment, I realized that all our roads in life do lead to this cold stone grove, yet there is a single road leading out of the forest on the far side; a Road of Hope, promising more than a frigid crypt for those that wish to embrace it, a Road paved by the ultimate Sacrifice, one that Mother Theresa understood better than most.
Christian tradition teaches that when Jesus returns to Earth for the Second Coming he will appear at the Eastern Gate of the old walled city of Jerusalem. Just east of the walled city and this gate is a very large cemetery, much larger and older than the Halifax burial ground. In late afternoon, standing in this ancient ossuary, one sees the sun in exactly the same orientation as one does standing here in the Halifax cemetery. Perhaps it is not an Einsteinian accident that if we look with the right kind of Light, we will be able to see the Son on the far side of the granite spires, with outstretched hands, guiding us to an unseen narrow Road, beyond death, paved with transparent gold.
The mere pavement of this slender Way is beyond purchase with even the vast riches of Royalty, yet a free gift to those who will simply receive it.
Cleaning
Today I had one of those relatively rare opportunities to be under bright lights and be the complete center of attention. I did not like it at all. No, those bright orbs were not glowing Kleig lights hanging over a magical stage set in the community theater where I often work, rather they were harsh bright white operating room lights in a dental operatory. Every six months I go and actually pay someone to do something to me that I find really quite unpleasant; allowing someone who is almost a complete stranger to put me in a position of nearly complete vulnerability.
Sherry 'invites' me to sit in the reclining chair in her windowless cell and using hands-free foot controls, she tilts me head down. Having then turned on several power supplies, the hum of Sherry's ominous machines reminds me that she is in a position to cause me true pain, if she elected to do so. I have to trust that she has my well-being at heart, even if it hurts in the near term. I have to exercise faith. I open up.
Using some new-fangled electrical cavitator, she proceeds to explore the depths of every root in my head. I feel like I have stuck my tongue into an electrical socket and started sucking out the electricity in it. And I pay for the privilege of doing this? Sherry insists electrocution really does produce a better and faster cleaning job than the old style ultrasonic microwave cleaning I have had in the past. I think the operative word here is 'faster', not 'better'. It allows more victims to pass through her chamber of horrors in a given period of time.
Finally, this is over and she takes very sharp, very pointy dagger-like things and picks up with them where my electrocution left off. I have no uncertainty as to the fact that my supra-alveolar nerves are in truly excellent condition and able to inform me of even the slightest of insults with those stainless steel and titanium weapons. At last, this punishment passes and I think purgatory is nearly over for another six months.
Alas, I have yet to be sand blasted. Another one of Sherry's humming machines has the ability to fire glass micro beads embedded in a jet of cold water into my head and provide me with yet another opportunity for me to use up some more neurotransmitters. Fortunately, Sherry got a new chair with arms with her new torture equipment. I can hang on with white knuckles. Finally, at last, a quick floss. I'm done. I'm declared clean. Once again, time moves forward.
Actually, I am grateful for the opportunity to live in a time and place where I can get proper dental care; expecting that I will be able to keep all of my teeth well into old age. My father was not so fortunate, and he had lost all his teeth by the time he was thirty. In my field hospital work in the Third World we often saw the tragic consequences of poor dental hygiene; occasionally putting beautiful young women to sleep and pulling out a mouthful of rotting stubs so as to spare them a catastrophic septicemia that could easily kill them.
There is another kind of hygiene that is far more essential to our well-being, that of the soul. In the scheme of things we humans seem to get into some pretty deep stuff and fairly often at that. We so easily contaminate our souls with the likes of "immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions,, factions, envyings, drunkenness, carousings, and things like these." We are told "that those who practice such things shall not inherit the Kingdom of God." I understand Heaven is supposed to be a really clean place and that people can't go there if they are soiled with the likes of this stuff. Halitosis of the soul just doesn't play well there.
Repentance is more than a bit like going to the dentist or the hygienist. First we have to admit we have a need and are soiled. I don't get my teeth cleaned unless they need to be cleaned and I don't get them cleaned unless I first acknowledge they are crusted up with plaque and other rock-like concretions. In repentance, I first acknowledge that my soul has concretions all over it and is in need of ultrasonic forgiveness. It is rather unpleasant to review our failings, weaknesses, and contradictions. This can be overwhelming. But it is a necessary step in the soul-cleansing process which will ultimately declare "It is finished!"
Repentance is a turning about, a going back in a different direction. I have to turn around and get in the chair for an hour to get my teeth cleaned. But in the case of soul cleansing, it is a bit easier on our part. Jesus turned around and was nailed down on two crossed pieces of splintery wood for three hours and from there was able to say on our behalf "It is finished!" For certain, Roman spikes are a whole lot harder to take than Sherry's electric cavitators.
One day we will all be in a position of complete spiritual vulnerability. For we shall "all stand before the judgement seat of God." It is written "that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, of those who are in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." Wouldn't we rather do this as Children of God who can confidently take our places in the Kingdom of God, knowing we have been through the ultimate cleaning?
does
dies
The difference is minuscule; one vowel for another. An accidental typo on a standard key board. But, what totally different meanings. To do. To die. A single mistrike and one dies instead of does. Does the universe do the same thing to us; giving us death instead of the opportunity to do, to live?
One hears of people who are killed by the most unlikely events. A teenage girl just beginning to live her dreams died when she sat down in a hot tub and the suction of the return drain held her to the bottom and she could not get back to the surface for air. No one could figure out how to turn off the pumps that held her down. The assistant fire chief here in my city was electrocuted a few weeks ago when a water heater he was repairing in his basement suddenly released it water and shorted him to a portable work light. A mother who recently left Texas for a fresh start in Florida was just found murdered with her twenty-month old quadruplets crawling about in her blood.
Last week a construction worker in North Carolina fell off a roof and dropped thirty feet, only to be impaled on a two by four sticking straight up from the ground. The board went entirely through his mid section. He survived to tell about it and is expected to make a full recovery. Many years ago a stewardess fell 35,000 from a disintegrating Russian jet liner and survived by landing on a steep mountain slope covered with deep snow. An American man has been struck by lightning some six times and is still living to tell about it.
These stories are haunting for their impossibility, for their unlikeliness. People die who it seems shouldn't be dying. Others beat absolutely impossible odds. One might almost get a sense that the outcomes are rigged in advance. Life has some truly tortuous twists and turns to it, sometimes ending in premature death, other times ending in stupendous miracles.
If we are to believe that the universe is nothing but the decay products of a random big bang, life could be truly frightening. Indeed, one could easily become driven by fear of a misstep, a mistrike; of being cast into free fall without a snow bank to ease the hard landing. A secular concept of the universe views everything as a big crap shoot, a stochastic process where 'stuff' just happens, some of it good, some of it bad. There is little comfort to those of us trying to hit on the 'o' instead of the 'i'.
Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. Why? In his visceral, often haunting stories, Camus had captured a vision of the angst that had begun settling heavily on the soul of European man in the 1930s and 1940s. Europeans had just been through the horrors of The Great War and then the deprivations of the Great Depression. Then the atrocities of the Second World War shattered the soul of Europe. A crisis of meaning had befallen much of Europe. The political and financial worlds had ruptured and there was nothing to fill the void.
For most of human history, mankind had a theological interpretation of his world. Personal tragedies, miracles, natural disasters, life, and death were nearly always re-interpreted as acts of an array of capricious and sometimes benevolent gods. Even if gods were capricious, humanity felt it possible to appease these gods in a variety of ways. At least there was a psychological relief valve in place. In much of the Western world, these events were often viewed as the overt or covert acts of a single benevolent God who had our best interests at heart.
In the mid 19th century Charles Darwin developed his theories of natural selection and evolution. About the same time in some of the leading seminaries of western Europe, a School of Higher Criticism developed which generated massive suspicion about the reliability of the Christian scriptures. A massive paradigm shift occurred in the natural sciences while at the same time, erosion of theological foundations was beginning to take place. Prior to this time, any variance between scriptures and science was viewed as resulting from a defect in the experimental methods of science rather than a failing of scriptures. With the growing erosion of confidence in scriptures, variance between science and scripture came to be viewed as a failure of the religious mythological documents rather than any flaw in experimental design.
In the early 20th century Albert Einstein came up with his General Theory of Relativity. It was not very long before the scientific community was experimenting with atomic weapons and Hitler was exterminating God's chosen people. The explosion of theories and experimental data in quantum mechanics has only reinforced a secular view of a godless universe that is little more than a cosmic crap shoot. Complexity science and chaos theory do suggest that the universe, or parts of it, can be blindly self-organizing and give rise to stuff like life on earth. This is not much consolation to man in search for his soul and ultimate meaning. Camus had no shortage of material to write about.
Anxiety, panic attacks, depression, fear, and meaninglessness seem to be endemic and of epidemic proportions throughout much of the Western World. It would seem that science in its grandiose quest for the Grand Unified Theory has not helped man find his soul or the meaning to life.
Does science explain why some people die and some people live? Sure. Some win. Some lose. It's all probability they say. This writer suggests otherwise. I have been spared death nine times that I know about and have far exceeded the scientific probabilities of survival. Science cannot explain how I survived a 2,000 year flood in the French Alps AND the all-time worst hotel fire disaster AND being hit by lightning while in a plane AND three cars being totalled AND a diagnosis of fatal disease by a neurologist AND other incidents involving fighter planes, rifles, tractor-trailer rigs, and lethal infections.
Archeological research during the past forty years is beginning to create a re-emergence of respect for Christian scriptures and the wisdom contained in them. In the past few weeks, several highly significant archeological finds have contributed to an ever increasing body of evidence, suggesting the scriptures might be just what they claim to be; a message, from a Creator who is outside the constraints of the Big Bang, with assurance that the outcomes of life are not determined by the roll of cosmic dice.
In the book of Ecclesiastes, we are told there is a time and a season for everything; a time to give birth, a time to die, a time to plant, a time to uproot what is planted, a time to tear down, a time to build up, a time for war, a time for peace. The Gospel of John tells us that there is an appointed time in which "an hour is coming in which all who are in the tombs shall hear His voice, and shall come forth: those who did the good deeds, to a resurrection of life."
Physicists describe the creation of the universe as little more that a stellar accident on the carpet of the cosmos. With the certainty of His eternal promises, I can transcend the uncertain fear of getting dealt a bad hand by the quantum universe. I can rest in the greater assurance that before the foundations of time He was and I will be.
At one time I lived in Chicago for some six years. Each day I walked about eight blocks from the subway station to my laboratory in a high-rise research tower. The short journey on foot was made most interesting for about eighteen months by the fact my route took me past the construction site of what was to become the tallest reinforced-concrete building in the world. For many months it seemed armies of construction workers were building in the wrong direction, if their goal was to build a structure reaching to the clouds. For months the site was nothing but a progressively deeper pit which was warmed by the sun only at the height of mid-day. In mid-winter the depths of that abyss remained in permanent frigid shadow. It seemed these workers were going to a vast amount of trouble and expense to build something that did not add any height to the structure and would be quite unseen in the finished spire.
One day I observed that there seemed to be a turning point at the site. Suddenly, a rather gangly set of steel reinforcing rods began to emerge from that vast chasm in the earth. Eventually, those ferrous towers began to pierce the low-lying cloud often shrouding the shores of Lake Michigan. With time, all those iron rods were well hidden inside footings, caissons, piles, columns. A prickly crown of plywood and steel forms slowly inched its way towards Heaven. About once every week to ten days another concrete floor was added about eleven feet above the previous one. In the end, more than seventy-five floors rose nearly nine hundred feet above street level.
In the past twenty-three years that tower has been buffeted many times by hundred-mile-an-hour gale force winds, shaken by myriad unnoticed earth tremors, struck by lightning hundreds of times, and punished by the unrelenting cycles of searing heat of summer and brittle cold of midwestern winter. Yet, today that concrete and glass tower continues to safely harbor luxurious homes in the sky and a virtual hanging garden of Babylon in a seven-level atrium lobby, all because more than two decades ago those many arduous months were spent in preparation, doing un-glamorous unseen work below ground.
I recall that work went on day and night, year round during the construction of that vast monolith. At $200 million and counting, one does not wait for a nice day to work. Its builders knew intimately what the long-term challenges would be. Iron walkers balancing on an eight-inch beam a fifth of a mile up knew intimately the potential hazards of strong winds in view of the unrelenting pull of gravity. Cement finishers understood the power of sub-zero temperatures to destroy concrete. Fabricators knew the power of intense sun to warp and distort finely crafted, close fitting structural elements. Glaziers discovered the potency of gales to knock out glass walls and send deadly shards raining down.
Building a successful life of faith is much like the erection of a modern skyscraper. It takes a long time, often has a high price attached to it, requires building a solid foundation, and demands a willingness to persevere in adverse conditions. For a long time, the life builder can expect to see few visible results above grade.
We are promised that days will come in which the winds of life will howl, the rains will lash, and our very foundations will be challenged. Gentle May days are forgotten. Death, divorce, illness, unemployment, and financial failures are part of life's recipe. Hearing your boss say "We don't need you any longer" can make one feel exactly like an iron walker, seventy floors up, who walked eight inches too far to one side or the other. Anyone who has been told by a physician "I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do" instantly knows what his foundation is made of.
If we have taken the time in decades past to build our spiritual foundations on bedrock, we need not fear. If we instead cut costs and failed to dig deeply enough, building quickly on shifting sand, seeking short term results, we can expect a calamitous failure of our faith. I once heard a physician tell me horrendous words of doom. I found out the hard way that sand is good for little more than sandboxes. I discovered that I was on the wind-swept end of an I-beam looking down into a vast abyss, without benefit of a safety line.
Yet, we are told the very adversities of life can work to our benefit, actually enabling us to retrofit a solid foundation under our lives. In the New Testament, we find a short letter James wrote to his brethren promising them that if they persevered under the hardships of life they would receive the Crown of Life, not a man-made one of splintered plywood and rusted pipes. He further promised them that by living a life of faith in the difficult times, they would be lacking in nothing. St. Paul cited the example of Abraham who, by faith, knew to be "looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God."
The winds of adversity blow for but a season, if we but have faith. The Crown of Life includes a deed to a home far above the clouds where we no longer need fear the winds of adversity.
"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the men of old gained approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible."
End of the Road
Have you ever gotten caught in a massive traffic jam at an unusual time of day and had curiosity nearly kill you as to what calamity had occurred beyond the horizon? As to what it was that was costing you time away from ESPN or Mystery theater?
When returning home this summer from an inspiring week-long series of meetings on personal empowerment at Radford University, exactly this occurred for me. It was a fine cerulean Saturday afternoon, unusually cool and refreshing for a August day in the deep South. I was flying with the breeze. Suddenly, the emerald Shennandoah world ground to a halt. A shimmering wave of red brake lights disrupted my revere. I came to an immediate stop and for thirty minutes wondered what could have disrupted such a splendid day.
A sobering answer soon presented itself to me. A large motor home and a car had intersected in Einstein's space-time continuum at exactly the wrong time and space. The quantum result was a spectacular fiery immolation of both, leaving only smoldering burnt ruins and having turned the future dreams of several travellers to ashen death. For them, the emerald wonders of the Shennandoah were no more. With ample discretion of spirit, I pressed the accelerator when officials advised it was permissible to continue my journey towards my aureate future.
I completed the journey home in safety. In fact, I have been granted opportunities to continue my learning on further journeys. On Friday I was walking through the large cemetery near the Queen Elizabeth Hospitals in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It's one of those grand old cemeteries with a vast forest of granite and marble obelisks and spires in myriad shades of gray, white, and pink. I couldn't but help wondering what all of those thousands of silent people now residing there would tell me about their lives and motivations, if by some miraculous means, they could suddenly do so. Would they tell me the same things the helpless people in the Virginia motor home might have said just a bit earlier on that last Saturday?
In the center of that vast Halifax cemetery is a view to the south east that gives clear vision of a very busy boulevard. As I stood among those silent sentinels of stone, it suddenly occurred to me that all roads don't lead to Sears; rather, they all lead here to this silent stone forest, or others just like it. Would we make different choices in charting our life courses, in choosing our itineraries, our goals, if we really knew where all roads lead? It's not likely those home-bound evening commuters were thinking of the cemetery or what it represents. Most likely, their thoughts were focused on traffic signals and what was for dinner.
Today, one of the most glamorous ever of the world's women, one who had it all, joined the silent ranks of those forever consigned to the cold granite forest. She will forever remain in a frigid granite crypt, in a small lonely church, never again seeing the autumn sun of her beloved Wales, never experiencing the joys of her sons growing into their own. A mere week before, dancing with the ultra rich in the City of Lights, all possibilities before her, profound darkness descended on Princess Diana. In a moment, which will be the most documented speck of time in decades, Diana's world was irrevocably shattered. She died at the hands of her out-of-control drunk driver who slammed her Mercedes limousine into eternity. Would she have made different choices in life if she had but known her future? We can only conjecture.
Another of the most famous of the world's women also journeyed into the granite forest this week. Her passing was eclipsed by the passing of the glamorous princess and none of the tabloids paid the paparazzi to capture her moment of departure. Mother Theresa quietly left this world in far better condition that she found it when she arrived eighty-seven years before. Her life of selfless service was an inspiration without peer and her award of the Nobel Peace Prize is one of the great satisfactions for the Stockholm prize committee. I suspect Mother Theresa died without regrets. She probably would have done nothing different with her life, if the facts be known.
While walking in the Halifax cemetery, leaden clouds parted to reveal a brilliant late afternoon sun in the northwest, far beyond that marble and granite forest. In a moment, I realized that all our roads in life do lead to this cold stone grove, yet there is a single road leading out of the forest on the far side; a Road of Hope, promising more than a frigid crypt for those that wish to embrace it, a Road paved by the ultimate Sacrifice, one that Mother Theresa understood better than most.
Christian tradition teaches that when Jesus returns to Earth for the Second Coming he will appear at the Eastern Gate of the old walled city of Jerusalem. Just east of the walled city and this gate is a very large cemetery, much larger and older than the Halifax burial ground. In late afternoon, standing in this ancient ossuary, one sees the sun in exactly the same orientation as one does standing here in the Halifax cemetery. Perhaps it is not an Einsteinian accident that if we look with the right kind of Light, we will be able to see the Son on the far side of the granite spires, with outstretched hands, guiding us to an unseen narrow Road, beyond death, paved with transparent gold.
The mere pavement of this slender Way is beyond purchase with even the vast riches of Royalty, yet a free gift to those who will simply receive it.
Cleaning
Today I had one of those relatively rare opportunities to be under bright lights and be the complete center of attention. I did not like it at all. No, those bright orbs were not glowing Kleig lights hanging over a magical stage set in the community theater where I often work, rather they were harsh bright white operating room lights in a dental operatory. Every six months I go and actually pay someone to do something to me that I find really quite unpleasant; allowing someone who is almost a complete stranger to put me in a position of nearly complete vulnerability.
Sherry 'invites' me to sit in the reclining chair in her windowless cell and using hands-free foot controls, she tilts me head down. Having then turned on several power supplies, the hum of Sherry's ominous machines reminds me that she is in a position to cause me true pain, if she elected to do so. I have to trust that she has my well-being at heart, even if it hurts in the near term. I have to exercise faith. I open up.
Using some new-fangled electrical cavitator, she proceeds to explore the depths of every root in my head. I feel like I have stuck my tongue into an electrical socket and started sucking out the electricity in it. And I pay for the privilege of doing this? Sherry insists electrocution really does produce a better and faster cleaning job than the old style ultrasonic microwave cleaning I have had in the past. I think the operative word here is 'faster', not 'better'. It allows more victims to pass through her chamber of horrors in a given period of time.
Finally, this is over and she takes very sharp, very pointy dagger-like things and picks up with them where my electrocution left off. I have no uncertainty as to the fact that my supra-alveolar nerves are in truly excellent condition and able to inform me of even the slightest of insults with those stainless steel and titanium weapons. At last, this punishment passes and I think purgatory is nearly over for another six months.
Alas, I have yet to be sand blasted. Another one of Sherry's humming machines has the ability to fire glass micro beads embedded in a jet of cold water into my head and provide me with yet another opportunity for me to use up some more neurotransmitters. Fortunately, Sherry got a new chair with arms with her new torture equipment. I can hang on with white knuckles. Finally, at last, a quick floss. I'm done. I'm declared clean. Once again, time moves forward.
Actually, I am grateful for the opportunity to live in a time and place where I can get proper dental care; expecting that I will be able to keep all of my teeth well into old age. My father was not so fortunate, and he had lost all his teeth by the time he was thirty. In my field hospital work in the Third World we often saw the tragic consequences of poor dental hygiene; occasionally putting beautiful young women to sleep and pulling out a mouthful of rotting stubs so as to spare them a catastrophic septicemia that could easily kill them.
There is another kind of hygiene that is far more essential to our well-being, that of the soul. In the scheme of things we humans seem to get into some pretty deep stuff and fairly often at that. We so easily contaminate our souls with the likes of "immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions,, factions, envyings, drunkenness, carousings, and things like these." We are told "that those who practice such things shall not inherit the Kingdom of God." I understand Heaven is supposed to be a really clean place and that people can't go there if they are soiled with the likes of this stuff. Halitosis of the soul just doesn't play well there.
Repentance is more than a bit like going to the dentist or the hygienist. First we have to admit we have a need and are soiled. I don't get my teeth cleaned unless they need to be cleaned and I don't get them cleaned unless I first acknowledge they are crusted up with plaque and other rock-like concretions. In repentance, I first acknowledge that my soul has concretions all over it and is in need of ultrasonic forgiveness. It is rather unpleasant to review our failings, weaknesses, and contradictions. This can be overwhelming. But it is a necessary step in the soul-cleansing process which will ultimately declare "It is finished!"
Repentance is a turning about, a going back in a different direction. I have to turn around and get in the chair for an hour to get my teeth cleaned. But in the case of soul cleansing, it is a bit easier on our part. Jesus turned around and was nailed down on two crossed pieces of splintery wood for three hours and from there was able to say on our behalf "It is finished!" For certain, Roman spikes are a whole lot harder to take than Sherry's electric cavitators.
One day we will all be in a position of complete spiritual vulnerability. For we shall "all stand before the judgement seat of God." It is written "that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, of those who are in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." Wouldn't we rather do this as Children of God who can confidently take our places in the Kingdom of God, knowing we have been through the ultimate cleaning?
does
dies
The difference is minuscule; one vowel for another. An accidental typo on a standard key board. But, what totally different meanings. To do. To die. A single mistrike and one dies instead of does. Does the universe do the same thing to us; giving us death instead of the opportunity to do, to live?
One hears of people who are killed by the most unlikely events. A teenage girl just beginning to live her dreams died when she sat down in a hot tub and the suction of the return drain held her to the bottom and she could not get back to the surface for air. No one could figure out how to turn off the pumps that held her down. The assistant fire chief here in my city was electrocuted a few weeks ago when a water heater he was repairing in his basement suddenly released it water and shorted him to a portable work light. A mother who recently left Texas for a fresh start in Florida was just found murdered with her twenty-month old quadruplets crawling about in her blood.
Last week a construction worker in North Carolina fell off a roof and dropped thirty feet, only to be impaled on a two by four sticking straight up from the ground. The board went entirely through his mid section. He survived to tell about it and is expected to make a full recovery. Many years ago a stewardess fell 35,000 from a disintegrating Russian jet liner and survived by landing on a steep mountain slope covered with deep snow. An American man has been struck by lightning some six times and is still living to tell about it.
These stories are haunting for their impossibility, for their unlikeliness. People die who it seems shouldn't be dying. Others beat absolutely impossible odds. One might almost get a sense that the outcomes are rigged in advance. Life has some truly tortuous twists and turns to it, sometimes ending in premature death, other times ending in stupendous miracles.
If we are to believe that the universe is nothing but the decay products of a random big bang, life could be truly frightening. Indeed, one could easily become driven by fear of a misstep, a mistrike; of being cast into free fall without a snow bank to ease the hard landing. A secular concept of the universe views everything as a big crap shoot, a stochastic process where 'stuff' just happens, some of it good, some of it bad. There is little comfort to those of us trying to hit on the 'o' instead of the 'i'.
Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. Why? In his visceral, often haunting stories, Camus had captured a vision of the angst that had begun settling heavily on the soul of European man in the 1930s and 1940s. Europeans had just been through the horrors of The Great War and then the deprivations of the Great Depression. Then the atrocities of the Second World War shattered the soul of Europe. A crisis of meaning had befallen much of Europe. The political and financial worlds had ruptured and there was nothing to fill the void.
For most of human history, mankind had a theological interpretation of his world. Personal tragedies, miracles, natural disasters, life, and death were nearly always re-interpreted as acts of an array of capricious and sometimes benevolent gods. Even if gods were capricious, humanity felt it possible to appease these gods in a variety of ways. At least there was a psychological relief valve in place. In much of the Western world, these events were often viewed as the overt or covert acts of a single benevolent God who had our best interests at heart.
In the mid 19th century Charles Darwin developed his theories of natural selection and evolution. About the same time in some of the leading seminaries of western Europe, a School of Higher Criticism developed which generated massive suspicion about the reliability of the Christian scriptures. A massive paradigm shift occurred in the natural sciences while at the same time, erosion of theological foundations was beginning to take place. Prior to this time, any variance between scriptures and science was viewed as resulting from a defect in the experimental methods of science rather than a failing of scriptures. With the growing erosion of confidence in scriptures, variance between science and scripture came to be viewed as a failure of the religious mythological documents rather than any flaw in experimental design.
In the early 20th century Albert Einstein came up with his General Theory of Relativity. It was not very long before the scientific community was experimenting with atomic weapons and Hitler was exterminating God's chosen people. The explosion of theories and experimental data in quantum mechanics has only reinforced a secular view of a godless universe that is little more than a cosmic crap shoot. Complexity science and chaos theory do suggest that the universe, or parts of it, can be blindly self-organizing and give rise to stuff like life on earth. This is not much consolation to man in search for his soul and ultimate meaning. Camus had no shortage of material to write about.
Anxiety, panic attacks, depression, fear, and meaninglessness seem to be endemic and of epidemic proportions throughout much of the Western World. It would seem that science in its grandiose quest for the Grand Unified Theory has not helped man find his soul or the meaning to life.
Does science explain why some people die and some people live? Sure. Some win. Some lose. It's all probability they say. This writer suggests otherwise. I have been spared death nine times that I know about and have far exceeded the scientific probabilities of survival. Science cannot explain how I survived a 2,000 year flood in the French Alps AND the all-time worst hotel fire disaster AND being hit by lightning while in a plane AND three cars being totalled AND a diagnosis of fatal disease by a neurologist AND other incidents involving fighter planes, rifles, tractor-trailer rigs, and lethal infections.
Archeological research during the past forty years is beginning to create a re-emergence of respect for Christian scriptures and the wisdom contained in them. In the past few weeks, several highly significant archeological finds have contributed to an ever increasing body of evidence, suggesting the scriptures might be just what they claim to be; a message, from a Creator who is outside the constraints of the Big Bang, with assurance that the outcomes of life are not determined by the roll of cosmic dice.
In the book of Ecclesiastes, we are told there is a time and a season for everything; a time to give birth, a time to die, a time to plant, a time to uproot what is planted, a time to tear down, a time to build up, a time for war, a time for peace. The Gospel of John tells us that there is an appointed time in which "an hour is coming in which all who are in the tombs shall hear His voice, and shall come forth: those who did the good deeds, to a resurrection of life."
Physicists describe the creation of the universe as little more that a stellar accident on the carpet of the cosmos. With the certainty of His eternal promises, I can transcend the uncertain fear of getting dealt a bad hand by the quantum universe. I can rest in the greater assurance that before the foundations of time He was and I will be.
Musings Part 2
Reach Out and Click Someone
Stories abound about the social perils of the Internet. Public libraries, especially here in the Bible belt, face heated philosophical debates and community uproars about the provision of Internet access. Should librarians be censors of who accesses any particular material on the Internet? Should censor programs be installed that keep young boys from looking at women's breasts and also keep not-so-young men from finding out optimum treatment strategies for their wives who just got a diagnosis of breast cancer?
Many commentators suggest that the youth of America are losing their relational skills because they confine themselves in dim basements and roam about in the bizarre dis-reality of Internet chat rooms where reality is uncertain at best. Adolescents disappear into the cyber-fantasies of violent on-line role-playing games and virtual-reality combat.
For a little more than two years I have had Internet access. Prior to that time I could only contact distant people by phone or by the postal system. At one time it took about two weeks for me to send off written correspondence to a colleague in Canada and get a response from her, if she responded at once. If she is like me and my mail got buried in her desk or brief case, several more weeks could easily elapse before it re-emerged and a response was made. Since the advent of the Internet, we now can have three iterations of response in less time than it took me to write the few paragraphs on this page. This has resulted in our having splendid interactions weekly rather than yearly. It has also enabled me to have fine 'conversations' with her son who is more than 1,000 miles from both of us, at no cost.
It seems to be my lot in life that many of the people who are most important to me live great distances from me. Fortunately, many of these are 'wired' and are accessible via the Net. I have found that my favorite aspect of going to work in the morning is checking my in-box to see who has clicked on 'send' during the night and sent me a message. Happily, this happens a lot. After getting a fine message from a Scottish friend on Friday, I pondered how fortunate I was to be able to communicate with my dear friends irrespective of distance or potential cost. I greatly relished the warm inner glow I experienced after I double-clicked on 'open.'
What has made the Internet so compelling and popular to millions is its geographic independence. Distance simply doesn't matter. I can reach out to someone in Australia as quickly as I can to someone in the next room. Equally compelling is the low-cost or free communication possible through the Net. A number of providers will give users free e-mail in exchange for their tolerance of on-line advertising.
Larry Dossey has made a life work of studying the nature and efficacy of prayer in its many forms. In several of his books he cites research studies that clearly show prayer operates independently of distance, and often of time. Prayer is much like the Internet, we can cover the vast gulf between Heaven and Earth in an instant. Even here, distance doesn't matter.
On-line providers make e-mail available to us at no cost as advertisers have pre-paid the costs of providing e-mail service. God has made communication channels between Earth and Heaven available at no expense to us as the costs of these links were pre-paid nearly twenty centuries ago on a gloomy Friday afternoon. So gloomy, in fact, that afternoon brilliance was replaced with the coldness of an ebony night sky.
Without the heavenly access paid for and obtained on that Good Friday, I would be like those adolescents lost in virtual-reality wars. I would be like others trapped in windowless dungeons exchanging meaningless drivel on-line with unseen unnamed entities, without possibly of seeing them in the light of day. If the events of that fateful Friday had not happened, I would be forever getting a "Waiting for Reply" message when I tried to connect with http://www.Heaven.org.
Mankind has created a huge array of virtual sites. Some of these are inspirational, educational, and most beneficial to humanity. Others are decadent beyond measure and destructive to the soul. It is my choice where I click. Because of the brilliant Sunday that followed that dusky Friday afternoon, I have a greater choice of sites to visit.
Presently, I can only visit sites on the screen of my computer monitor, but I know that God's server will never give me a busy signal or bump me off-line. All I have to do is find a quiet place and connect. His web site is fabulous beyond imagination. In fact he challenges us to explore it often. "Call to me, and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know ... and this is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us, and if we know that he hears in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests we have asked from Him." What is truly entrancing to this computer user is the promise that one day, like the stuff of sci-fi techno-thrillers, I will be able to travel in His site and it won't be fiction.
If God sends you an e-mail, be sure to open it before it gets deleted from the system.
Parking Spaces
Robert Ornstein wrote a landmark book, New World New Mind, in 1989 which demonstrates the human mind is not programmed to respond to "slow-motion disasters" such as the arms race, global warming, deficit spending, and overpopulation. He claims that in the biological world before the advent of Industrialization, the only dangerous phenomenon occurred with the speed of light; most creatures being remarkably suited to respond effectively to fast-action disasters. In a fraction of a second, a shadow on the cave wall could be interpreted and a determination made as to whether dinner was about to get away or if a huge carnivore was about to bump an unwitting hominid further down the food chain. Flash flood, tornadoes, lightning, avalanches, land slides, and falling trees. These all happen real fast.
I was quite amazed when I took my present hospital position more than six years ago to learn that one of the employee benefits included free parking in a conveniently located subterranean garage. For several years I could plan on easily finding a space therein, irrespective of my arrival time at work. For years my car has basked in the cool shadows of the garage, even in the searing days of August in the deep South. Spared the assault of relentless solar radiation, my nearly adolescent car looks far younger than its almost twelve years
Several weeks ago Ornstein's hypothesis was confirmed in my own experience. One day I arrived later in the morning for work than usual, and to my amazement, found a space in the lower level of the garage. In fact, there were quite a number of spaces available. The hospital just opened another nearby facility and many of our workers were moved to it from the main campus, thus freeing up space in the garage. For three weeks now I have again enjoyed the luxury of a parking space, regardless of when I arrive at the hospital.
In an instant I realized that I had been outwitted by a slow phenomenon and had forgotten how it once was before a slow "disaster" took place. Reflecting back, I realized that over the past three years the competition for parking spaces had, indeed, become rather keen, requiring me to arrive progressively earlier each morning to gain refuge from the sun's inflammatory insults. Yet, in spite of my best efforts, a number of times I was forced to park out in an open lot. I would then make a mid-day bid for a place in the garage when other workers left at lunch time to hurry off for a frantic trip through a fast food drive-up. On those rare occasions when I would go out at lunch time, I would have to time my absence to insure getting a space before the competition returned. Alas, it got to the point where even this strategy would fail me and my car would end up spending an afternoon roasting on an expanse of incendiary asphalt.
I wondered how it was that I once had the freedom to come and go when I wanted, yet always find ample refuge from the sun. I never had to worry about a cool place to leave the car and I could walk to the hospital in refreshing shade, even in July. More importantly, I wondered how it was that I forgot so completely how it had been, when there was once no competition. Fierce competition had become the order of the day. Competition has become the hallmark of virtually every aspect of our society. It was because of fears of competition in the marketplace that the hospital opened up the new facility.
It appears that cultures are also refractory to Ornstein's biological "slow-motion disasters" as well as a number not mentioned in his text. The American culture seems to be refractory to many of the dangerous social and moral trends taking place.
Sociologists claim that when illegitimate births constitute 25% of all births, an important critical mass of family values is lost to the collective population. We now have 70% of babies being born outside of marriage in large parts of the population. Many children have no contact whatever with a father figure. A huge number of children live with a single over-worked stressed-out parent barely keeping above water. A large number of us reached adulthood with no concept of Dad.
A hundred years ago ten percent of marriages would ultimately fail. Within the evangelical church world a mere fifteen years ago, divorce was almost unknown. Now more than two out of three marriages ultimately fail and the failure rate within conservative churches is little different from the larger secular culture.
In the 1960s a few thousand babies would be aborted each year in clandestine abortion mills south of the border or in the back alleys of America. Now, more that a million and a half (one out of three American babies) are put to death by saline injection, extirpation, or pithing (partial birth abortion). At one time the only thing pithed in America were frogs in high school biology classes, and even that was bothersome to many. A clinic in the north piths some 1,500 babies each year. Since 1973, thirty-seven million American children have been denied the opportunity to draw their first breath.
When an income tax was first proposed earlier in the century, the proponents feared a national revolution if the maximum tax rate was over one percent. Many cities alone now assess this much and state and federal taxes can exceed fifty percent. The average American works about five months out of twelve just to pay direct and indirect taxes.
When my mother was hospitalized with a complicated pregnancy, of which I was the result, her total hospital bill for several weeks was a mere $150. Today, a complicated pregnancy can cost $250,000. A liver transplant can exceed $300,000. Fifty million of our citizens are under or uninsured for medical expenses and live in fear of illness induced financial calamity. Academic papers discuss the ethical considerations of giving organ transplants to people, if the result is to destroy their quality of life because of the financial consequences of transplantation.
Ornstein wrote his landmark book only nine years ago. Yet, another best seller written some twenty centuries earlier indicates the author clearly understood the inherent dangers of not paying attention to the slow phenomenon in our lives. St. John admonished his readers "Walk while you have the light, that darkness may not overtake you; he who walks in the darkness does not know where he goes." He knew what dark shadows on the wall could mean. He knew even better what dark shadows in the soul always meant; separation from God.
A cultural darkness has the insidious ability of encroaching so slowly as to go quite undetected. Ornstein and John are both correct. Ornstein understands the adaptive biological responses to fast and slow phenomenon. John understood the needed spiritual responses to the encroaching darkness of soul that all cultures seem to face. He knew it was time to get moving. He realized that the larger darkness of the culture could easily come to infect the souls of inattentive individuals.
The rampant prosperity and economic expansion of the past eight years continues to dazzle and blind us. America is in a twilight and unaware that absolute darkness is close at hand. In a consumer society awash in abundance, it's nearly effortless for erosion of moral and ethical foundations to go unnoticed. I too am subject to the realities of Ornstein and St. John. I was outwitted by the unseen forces of darkness at work among us. There are things I do now that I would not have dreamed of doing twenty years ago. There are things the culture now accepts for our children that biology teachers once wouldn't accept for their frogs. Yet, there is hope for us.
"It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper shall not come to you; but if go, I will send Him to you. And He, when He comes, will convict the world concerning sin, and righteousness, and judgement."
Return
How did i get back here,
hugging my doll, shedding a tear?
Babbling.
Drooling.
Isn't childhood fine,
but at eighty, a bad sign?
Cooing.
Fooling.
Wondering aloud with infantile squeals,
all i do is push against the wheels?
Hoping.
Dreaming.
Do i have to eat my spinach?
S.U.V.
In recent years there has been an explosion of wishful thinking in America. Evidence of this is to be found on every highway, surface street, and Interstate in the land. While driving about town the past few months I have noticed two new high-end sport utility vehicles competing for market share with several other best sellers that have been on the road several years. What I have observed all of these to have in common is the implication made by their names. "Discovery", "Navigator", Expedition", and "Explorer" are names given to these rugged and expensive $30-50,000 heavy-duty gasaholics, which with light trucks now make up forty percent of the American vehicle market.
Throughout time there has been romance and adventure associated with exploration, discovery, expeditions, and navigation. Many of us carry glamorous images of a very privileged few visiting exotic places that most of us will only see through the pages of National Geographic. We believe these elite adventurers will enjoy an intoxicating esprit de corp as they share grand challenges, make great discoveries, and achieve their lofty goals while guided by the stars. The producers of high-profit S.U.V. vehicles know this about us and use this against us when marketing theses dream carriers to us.
What we fail to admit to ourselves is that owning and driving one of these chariots will not take us to the stars, or to new lands. They will never facilitate the celebration of shared vision and fulfillment with other enlightened seekers. What they will do is allow us to get hopelessly in debt while attempting to pay them off over seventy-two months at $600 a month or more. Some of these vehicles yield more that $16,000 in pure profits for their builders and it is not at all unusual for payments and insurance on these to exceed monthly housing costs. These vehicles, more often than not, transport people on long arduous commutes to an oppressive unfulfilling job rather than to an alpine vista or a transcendent journey of the soul.
There is a great discontentment in the land and a vast restlessness of soul that has people looking for satisfaction and fulfillment. Countless surveys would suggest there is a collective angst in our midst that is only growing in spite of a white-hot economic expansion that has been underway for eight years now. In spite of our lives being filled with vast material abundance, our souls are empty voids longing to be filled with destiny, calling, and purpose.
There is a sense that if we keep moving and keep looking we will eventually find a way to scratch the inaccessible itches in our souls, those deep longings to find our spiritual home. The problem is we keep looking in all the wrong places and keep picking the wrong ways to get there. The only places we seem to end up in are the malls, fast-food drive-up windows, drive-thru tellers, and commercial ghettos of assorted auto repair shops and parts stores. This year nearly two million of us will add bankruptcy court to our 'to-do' lists. Millions more will end up in the valley of despair when they realize each month seems to last longer than the paycheck. A beautiful woman I shared Thanksgiving with ended up in the unknown when she committed suicide because her life lasted longer than her paycheck.
Some centuries ago a best-seller travel guide described the ultimate urban travel destination which I found quite beyond comprehension, and I have been in thirty-one countries and enjoyed many of the world's greatest cities.
What I found most compelling about this guide Book was the delineation of the journey itself. Just like the romantic images we have of the great expeditions of old, the adventure is limited to a hardy few willing to make a trip of faith into uncertain territory. For certain, no utility vehicle, not even the opulent Lincoln Navigator, will transport us to this grand mecca of pleasure.
The Apostle Paul tells us that "the Lord Himself will descend from Heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first, then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we shall always be with the Lord." One day those of us who have elected to travel by faith rather than by sport utility vehicle will be given the opportunity to exercise an option on a one-way ticket to the most exotic and fabulous of all destinations, a city where the foundation blocks are made of priceless stones and the streets of transparent gold, where no immigration officers check visas.
"And the material of the wall was jasper; and the city as pure gold, like clear glass. The foundation stones of the city wall were adorned with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation stone was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, chalcedony; the fourth, emerald; the fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, topaz; the tenth, chrysoprase,; the eleventh, jacinth; the twelfth, amethyst. And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; each one of the gates was a single pearl. And the street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass."
Stories abound about the social perils of the Internet. Public libraries, especially here in the Bible belt, face heated philosophical debates and community uproars about the provision of Internet access. Should librarians be censors of who accesses any particular material on the Internet? Should censor programs be installed that keep young boys from looking at women's breasts and also keep not-so-young men from finding out optimum treatment strategies for their wives who just got a diagnosis of breast cancer?
Many commentators suggest that the youth of America are losing their relational skills because they confine themselves in dim basements and roam about in the bizarre dis-reality of Internet chat rooms where reality is uncertain at best. Adolescents disappear into the cyber-fantasies of violent on-line role-playing games and virtual-reality combat.
For a little more than two years I have had Internet access. Prior to that time I could only contact distant people by phone or by the postal system. At one time it took about two weeks for me to send off written correspondence to a colleague in Canada and get a response from her, if she responded at once. If she is like me and my mail got buried in her desk or brief case, several more weeks could easily elapse before it re-emerged and a response was made. Since the advent of the Internet, we now can have three iterations of response in less time than it took me to write the few paragraphs on this page. This has resulted in our having splendid interactions weekly rather than yearly. It has also enabled me to have fine 'conversations' with her son who is more than 1,000 miles from both of us, at no cost.
It seems to be my lot in life that many of the people who are most important to me live great distances from me. Fortunately, many of these are 'wired' and are accessible via the Net. I have found that my favorite aspect of going to work in the morning is checking my in-box to see who has clicked on 'send' during the night and sent me a message. Happily, this happens a lot. After getting a fine message from a Scottish friend on Friday, I pondered how fortunate I was to be able to communicate with my dear friends irrespective of distance or potential cost. I greatly relished the warm inner glow I experienced after I double-clicked on 'open.'
What has made the Internet so compelling and popular to millions is its geographic independence. Distance simply doesn't matter. I can reach out to someone in Australia as quickly as I can to someone in the next room. Equally compelling is the low-cost or free communication possible through the Net. A number of providers will give users free e-mail in exchange for their tolerance of on-line advertising.
Larry Dossey has made a life work of studying the nature and efficacy of prayer in its many forms. In several of his books he cites research studies that clearly show prayer operates independently of distance, and often of time. Prayer is much like the Internet, we can cover the vast gulf between Heaven and Earth in an instant. Even here, distance doesn't matter.
On-line providers make e-mail available to us at no cost as advertisers have pre-paid the costs of providing e-mail service. God has made communication channels between Earth and Heaven available at no expense to us as the costs of these links were pre-paid nearly twenty centuries ago on a gloomy Friday afternoon. So gloomy, in fact, that afternoon brilliance was replaced with the coldness of an ebony night sky.
Without the heavenly access paid for and obtained on that Good Friday, I would be like those adolescents lost in virtual-reality wars. I would be like others trapped in windowless dungeons exchanging meaningless drivel on-line with unseen unnamed entities, without possibly of seeing them in the light of day. If the events of that fateful Friday had not happened, I would be forever getting a "Waiting for Reply" message when I tried to connect with http://www.Heaven.org.
Mankind has created a huge array of virtual sites. Some of these are inspirational, educational, and most beneficial to humanity. Others are decadent beyond measure and destructive to the soul. It is my choice where I click. Because of the brilliant Sunday that followed that dusky Friday afternoon, I have a greater choice of sites to visit.
Presently, I can only visit sites on the screen of my computer monitor, but I know that God's server will never give me a busy signal or bump me off-line. All I have to do is find a quiet place and connect. His web site is fabulous beyond imagination. In fact he challenges us to explore it often. "Call to me, and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know ... and this is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us, and if we know that he hears in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests we have asked from Him." What is truly entrancing to this computer user is the promise that one day, like the stuff of sci-fi techno-thrillers, I will be able to travel in His site and it won't be fiction.
If God sends you an e-mail, be sure to open it before it gets deleted from the system.
Parking Spaces
Robert Ornstein wrote a landmark book, New World New Mind, in 1989 which demonstrates the human mind is not programmed to respond to "slow-motion disasters" such as the arms race, global warming, deficit spending, and overpopulation. He claims that in the biological world before the advent of Industrialization, the only dangerous phenomenon occurred with the speed of light; most creatures being remarkably suited to respond effectively to fast-action disasters. In a fraction of a second, a shadow on the cave wall could be interpreted and a determination made as to whether dinner was about to get away or if a huge carnivore was about to bump an unwitting hominid further down the food chain. Flash flood, tornadoes, lightning, avalanches, land slides, and falling trees. These all happen real fast.
I was quite amazed when I took my present hospital position more than six years ago to learn that one of the employee benefits included free parking in a conveniently located subterranean garage. For several years I could plan on easily finding a space therein, irrespective of my arrival time at work. For years my car has basked in the cool shadows of the garage, even in the searing days of August in the deep South. Spared the assault of relentless solar radiation, my nearly adolescent car looks far younger than its almost twelve years
Several weeks ago Ornstein's hypothesis was confirmed in my own experience. One day I arrived later in the morning for work than usual, and to my amazement, found a space in the lower level of the garage. In fact, there were quite a number of spaces available. The hospital just opened another nearby facility and many of our workers were moved to it from the main campus, thus freeing up space in the garage. For three weeks now I have again enjoyed the luxury of a parking space, regardless of when I arrive at the hospital.
In an instant I realized that I had been outwitted by a slow phenomenon and had forgotten how it once was before a slow "disaster" took place. Reflecting back, I realized that over the past three years the competition for parking spaces had, indeed, become rather keen, requiring me to arrive progressively earlier each morning to gain refuge from the sun's inflammatory insults. Yet, in spite of my best efforts, a number of times I was forced to park out in an open lot. I would then make a mid-day bid for a place in the garage when other workers left at lunch time to hurry off for a frantic trip through a fast food drive-up. On those rare occasions when I would go out at lunch time, I would have to time my absence to insure getting a space before the competition returned. Alas, it got to the point where even this strategy would fail me and my car would end up spending an afternoon roasting on an expanse of incendiary asphalt.
I wondered how it was that I once had the freedom to come and go when I wanted, yet always find ample refuge from the sun. I never had to worry about a cool place to leave the car and I could walk to the hospital in refreshing shade, even in July. More importantly, I wondered how it was that I forgot so completely how it had been, when there was once no competition. Fierce competition had become the order of the day. Competition has become the hallmark of virtually every aspect of our society. It was because of fears of competition in the marketplace that the hospital opened up the new facility.
It appears that cultures are also refractory to Ornstein's biological "slow-motion disasters" as well as a number not mentioned in his text. The American culture seems to be refractory to many of the dangerous social and moral trends taking place.
Sociologists claim that when illegitimate births constitute 25% of all births, an important critical mass of family values is lost to the collective population. We now have 70% of babies being born outside of marriage in large parts of the population. Many children have no contact whatever with a father figure. A huge number of children live with a single over-worked stressed-out parent barely keeping above water. A large number of us reached adulthood with no concept of Dad.
A hundred years ago ten percent of marriages would ultimately fail. Within the evangelical church world a mere fifteen years ago, divorce was almost unknown. Now more than two out of three marriages ultimately fail and the failure rate within conservative churches is little different from the larger secular culture.
In the 1960s a few thousand babies would be aborted each year in clandestine abortion mills south of the border or in the back alleys of America. Now, more that a million and a half (one out of three American babies) are put to death by saline injection, extirpation, or pithing (partial birth abortion). At one time the only thing pithed in America were frogs in high school biology classes, and even that was bothersome to many. A clinic in the north piths some 1,500 babies each year. Since 1973, thirty-seven million American children have been denied the opportunity to draw their first breath.
When an income tax was first proposed earlier in the century, the proponents feared a national revolution if the maximum tax rate was over one percent. Many cities alone now assess this much and state and federal taxes can exceed fifty percent. The average American works about five months out of twelve just to pay direct and indirect taxes.
When my mother was hospitalized with a complicated pregnancy, of which I was the result, her total hospital bill for several weeks was a mere $150. Today, a complicated pregnancy can cost $250,000. A liver transplant can exceed $300,000. Fifty million of our citizens are under or uninsured for medical expenses and live in fear of illness induced financial calamity. Academic papers discuss the ethical considerations of giving organ transplants to people, if the result is to destroy their quality of life because of the financial consequences of transplantation.
Ornstein wrote his landmark book only nine years ago. Yet, another best seller written some twenty centuries earlier indicates the author clearly understood the inherent dangers of not paying attention to the slow phenomenon in our lives. St. John admonished his readers "Walk while you have the light, that darkness may not overtake you; he who walks in the darkness does not know where he goes." He knew what dark shadows on the wall could mean. He knew even better what dark shadows in the soul always meant; separation from God.
A cultural darkness has the insidious ability of encroaching so slowly as to go quite undetected. Ornstein and John are both correct. Ornstein understands the adaptive biological responses to fast and slow phenomenon. John understood the needed spiritual responses to the encroaching darkness of soul that all cultures seem to face. He knew it was time to get moving. He realized that the larger darkness of the culture could easily come to infect the souls of inattentive individuals.
The rampant prosperity and economic expansion of the past eight years continues to dazzle and blind us. America is in a twilight and unaware that absolute darkness is close at hand. In a consumer society awash in abundance, it's nearly effortless for erosion of moral and ethical foundations to go unnoticed. I too am subject to the realities of Ornstein and St. John. I was outwitted by the unseen forces of darkness at work among us. There are things I do now that I would not have dreamed of doing twenty years ago. There are things the culture now accepts for our children that biology teachers once wouldn't accept for their frogs. Yet, there is hope for us.
"It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper shall not come to you; but if go, I will send Him to you. And He, when He comes, will convict the world concerning sin, and righteousness, and judgement."
Return
How did i get back here,
hugging my doll, shedding a tear?
Babbling.
Drooling.
Isn't childhood fine,
but at eighty, a bad sign?
Cooing.
Fooling.
Wondering aloud with infantile squeals,
all i do is push against the wheels?
Hoping.
Dreaming.
Do i have to eat my spinach?
S.U.V.
In recent years there has been an explosion of wishful thinking in America. Evidence of this is to be found on every highway, surface street, and Interstate in the land. While driving about town the past few months I have noticed two new high-end sport utility vehicles competing for market share with several other best sellers that have been on the road several years. What I have observed all of these to have in common is the implication made by their names. "Discovery", "Navigator", Expedition", and "Explorer" are names given to these rugged and expensive $30-50,000 heavy-duty gasaholics, which with light trucks now make up forty percent of the American vehicle market.
Throughout time there has been romance and adventure associated with exploration, discovery, expeditions, and navigation. Many of us carry glamorous images of a very privileged few visiting exotic places that most of us will only see through the pages of National Geographic. We believe these elite adventurers will enjoy an intoxicating esprit de corp as they share grand challenges, make great discoveries, and achieve their lofty goals while guided by the stars. The producers of high-profit S.U.V. vehicles know this about us and use this against us when marketing theses dream carriers to us.
What we fail to admit to ourselves is that owning and driving one of these chariots will not take us to the stars, or to new lands. They will never facilitate the celebration of shared vision and fulfillment with other enlightened seekers. What they will do is allow us to get hopelessly in debt while attempting to pay them off over seventy-two months at $600 a month or more. Some of these vehicles yield more that $16,000 in pure profits for their builders and it is not at all unusual for payments and insurance on these to exceed monthly housing costs. These vehicles, more often than not, transport people on long arduous commutes to an oppressive unfulfilling job rather than to an alpine vista or a transcendent journey of the soul.
There is a great discontentment in the land and a vast restlessness of soul that has people looking for satisfaction and fulfillment. Countless surveys would suggest there is a collective angst in our midst that is only growing in spite of a white-hot economic expansion that has been underway for eight years now. In spite of our lives being filled with vast material abundance, our souls are empty voids longing to be filled with destiny, calling, and purpose.
There is a sense that if we keep moving and keep looking we will eventually find a way to scratch the inaccessible itches in our souls, those deep longings to find our spiritual home. The problem is we keep looking in all the wrong places and keep picking the wrong ways to get there. The only places we seem to end up in are the malls, fast-food drive-up windows, drive-thru tellers, and commercial ghettos of assorted auto repair shops and parts stores. This year nearly two million of us will add bankruptcy court to our 'to-do' lists. Millions more will end up in the valley of despair when they realize each month seems to last longer than the paycheck. A beautiful woman I shared Thanksgiving with ended up in the unknown when she committed suicide because her life lasted longer than her paycheck.
Some centuries ago a best-seller travel guide described the ultimate urban travel destination which I found quite beyond comprehension, and I have been in thirty-one countries and enjoyed many of the world's greatest cities.
What I found most compelling about this guide Book was the delineation of the journey itself. Just like the romantic images we have of the great expeditions of old, the adventure is limited to a hardy few willing to make a trip of faith into uncertain territory. For certain, no utility vehicle, not even the opulent Lincoln Navigator, will transport us to this grand mecca of pleasure.
The Apostle Paul tells us that "the Lord Himself will descend from Heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first, then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we shall always be with the Lord." One day those of us who have elected to travel by faith rather than by sport utility vehicle will be given the opportunity to exercise an option on a one-way ticket to the most exotic and fabulous of all destinations, a city where the foundation blocks are made of priceless stones and the streets of transparent gold, where no immigration officers check visas.
"And the material of the wall was jasper; and the city as pure gold, like clear glass. The foundation stones of the city wall were adorned with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation stone was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, chalcedony; the fourth, emerald; the fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, topaz; the tenth, chrysoprase,; the eleventh, jacinth; the twelfth, amethyst. And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; each one of the gates was a single pearl. And the street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass."
Musings Part 3
1531-1614
You probably don't know it, but there is an employee's notice board down at the far end of the hall. Each day someone marks on it the running total of the days since a lost-work-time accident. I remember the first time I came to visit you, I saw it as I looked for your room. Why I remembered there being 1531 days since the last accident is a mystery to me. I seem to be good at remembering trivial things that have little usefulness. Did you know there are 123 steps from my parking place in the hospital garage to my office?
I don't usually see the running total of days as I have found a short cut through the new wing to your room. Today I had to go the long way round, as the short cut has been ravaged by a bright yellow backhoe being used for some kind of renovation work. The notice board told me that 1614 days have quietly slipped by since the last accident. It occurred to me that eighty-three days have elapsed since I first came to visit you. More disconcerting, I realized nearly a quarter of a year had slipped by for you and me, putting us both that much closer to Eternity. Four times as long and a year will be gone and only forty-five times that and more time will have slipped by than my Dad lived in his whole life. Somehow that notice board told me that life IS REALLY SHORT after all.
It would be a truly tragic accident, much worse than missing some days from work because of injury, if the numbers on that board were to rise significantly and we could not account for what happened in the intervening days. Nothing is a greater loss than a day spent rather than invested. I think of how you have invested your days so well for eighty-five years now. Only in Eternity will you find out just how great your return on the investment was. In the eighty-three days we have shared the count, I have seen you share divine love with those around you who have grown tired and weary from their long journeys to life's winter. You have shown them that Eternal Spring is just beyond, just for the asking. You have shown me staying the course is worth far more than any detours I might encounter along the way. By your example, maybe I can increase the return on my remaining days.
Your neighbor, Gertrude, doesn't remember who I am anymore. Tonight I went down her hall on the long way out and found her standing outside her room. She thinks her husband is coming tomorrow to get her out. She has thought that for eighty-three days I know of. I've never seen the guy. She's got a fine house in New Jersey, she says. I didn't tell her about the board. She asked me what I was doing there; was I an investigator with the police? Did I own the place? I told her 'No, just visiting people.' Sixty days ago she remembered my comings and goings. No more. Again, she asked why do I come? I wonder what I will remember eighty-three days from now. Will I take her place? I know you pray for both of us.
Tomorrow I will go to your sister Elsie's funeral and burial. On day 1531 we would have never guessed it. Ignorance about some things is true bliss. On day 1607 I fed Elsie a bit of chicken noodle soup, sans noodles, with a small spoon. The noodles were too much for her to handle. I don't know that she ever ate anything else before she left us. I wonder if one day, further up on the count, someone will be feeding me chicken noodle soup in a small spoon, sans the noodles.
I know that someone is going to go out there tomorrow and change the count. I want day 1615 to have counted for both of us. You prayed for me. It expect it will probably be a good day because of that. I seem to have more of them since I got on your prayer list. A couple of other people pray for me a lot. I wish I prayed as much as you and these others do. The possibilities are endless.
I stopped to see Janie at the other end of the hall. She seemed in better spirits today. She remembered me today and wasn't crying. Perhaps she doesn't remember today that her husband died last year. I wonder what I have forgotten already.
It's very late and I need to get some rest if I want to beat the guy who changes the numbers on the notice board. He just might have my number and I want to be ready, just in case.
"Come now, you who say, today or tomorrow, we shall go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit. Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away."
"Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance, and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."
Encounter II
You called to me by name.
I could hear your deep pain.
Last year, you looked great.
I wonder what changed your fate.
You submit to a neoplastic blast.
I hope for you, peace will last.
May One who is more than dear,
to your now spent soul stay near.
Your weary face covered in blue;
for you, may His message be true.
There's no cancer in Heaven.
Blotter
Today I went into the nearby branch of a large multi-state bank to close out an IRA account. When I opened this account some time ago the facility was the main office of a family-owned locally-operated institution consisting of one hundred twenty-five happy employees in about ten offices scattered throughout the county. Alas, management finally figured out it could make a fortune if it went public and then got itself picked off in a corporate buy-out. The dreams of management came true as did the nightmares of those one-hundred twenty-five workers. The Savings and Loan went public, its stock doubled, it was bought out, and most of the employees were let go. It didn't matter that most of them had given decades of friendly loyal service to the community. For certain, I did not want to add to the profits of the corporate raider which bought out the local family bank, hence my being there to withdraw all my funds.
While sitting with one of the few surviving employees of the original savings and loan, as she filled out the sheaf of paperwork required to close my account, she lamented how different it now was working for this multi-state predator. I wondered out loud at how the management of the locally-owned family business could have been so heartless and greedy as to even consider an Initial Public Offering, knowing most of the people who made the S & L prosperous in the first place, would lose their jobs in a buy out. Cathy certainly had no answers and was hardly free to speak as the multi-state behemoth is now writing her paychecks. It is hard to tell who deserves the harsher judgement; the original management that sold out its workers or the predator banking giant that picked off our small town bank and then fired the employees.
This uncertain Banking Representative IV expressed dismay at how nothing remains stable any more. I went back to my office wondering what the future holds for both of us. Cathy may yet get re-engineered right into unemployment. My own situation is little better. The politics of my own work place could cast me into the same hand-out line with Cathy. I went back to work and had what is without question the worst day of my tenure at the hospital. I came within seconds of standing up in a meeting and announcing my intent of resigning. A meeting with two vice presidents, the controller, my boss, and a director turned quite uncivil. My nemesis immediately found cause to attack me and essentially tell me my work was worthless and of no effect. On top of that, a number of Internet financial reports revealed many of the world stock markets had their single largest declines ever in today's trading sessions. It would seem that much of the world is about to go over the edge of some kind of financial abyss. It certainly seems to have already slipped passed the realm of civility.
Somewhere in the midst of my ominous thoughts about corporate recklessness I pondered what to do about something mundane: lunch. I was not really in the mood to buy lunch after having seen a cyber-vision of the dark side of the corporate global economy. I was not feeling especially prosperous as a nearly unemployed person. I decided I could simply skip lunch. As I walked into my office I found on my desk blotter a zip-lock bag containing a large piece of banana bread and yet another grocery bag containing several large bags of dried soup mixes. No names. I had lunch after all, from an unnamed benefactor who thought I had some worth. That radiant anonymous blessing reminded me there is goodness in the world even if ever rarer and buried under corporate raids, management abuses, and growing incivility.
In that instant I realized that our security does not come from the corporate world or top management. It is safe to say top management does not really care about my dreams or Cathy's dreams. It certainly did not care about the dreams of Cathy's now-unemployed colleagues. It certainly has not cared about my own professional growth or life journey. I realized that security, and even lunch, comes from the unseen, unnamed benevolence of others, often from the One unseen in the day to day frenzy of material life.
"Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Therefore do not fear; you are of more value than many sparrows."
Reunion II
Spectral wonders colorize life's long winter,
driving old-age desolation into forgotten drifts.
Bees gather aureate pollen, preparing for darkness.
We harvest warm recollection, facing shared uncertainty.
Vestiges of summer heat igniting dull memories,
renewed remembrances energize exhausted souls.
Inured to growing miracles about us, we huddle,
seeking tenuous safety in our long lost youth.
He has made Himself known through the handiwork
of His Creation.
Declarations
In most, if not all states, car owners can pay an extra annual fee for what is often called a 'vanity plate.' This customized license plate allows drivers to make some kind of statement about their dreams, personalities, motivations in life, even their financial stations in society. In addition to the highly-abbreviated life statements found on the leeward end of cars, slightly longer ones are found on the windward end, where restrictions on the number and color of letters do not apply. I have been amazed at how many volumes can be written into one, two, or three words, given the right context. I suspect much of the message the rest of us get from these words is unintended.
On the forward end of a new Lincoln Town Car that is left in the hospital garage during the day, one finds in gold letters "You Can Have Some 2". What is it I can have? Monstrous $600 lease payments that will leave me empty handed in twenty-four months? Consumer debt that will keep me awake at nights? An asset that is depreciating faster than almost anything else I could possibly buy? Insurance premiums that resemble interest payments on the national debt? Gasoline credit card bills that would sink a super tanker? An opportunity to create envy in other drivers?
For more than a decade, GM's Chevrolet truck division has played on the American obsession with cars and trucks in its advertising slogan "The Heartbeat of America." It is said that where your money is, there your heart is too. This seems especially apt in a country where many citizens often spend more for their wheels than their walls, for a land where low-level employees spend the entirety of their take-home income to maintain obscenely expensive heavily-chromed pick-up trucks, in a land that has the lowest savings rate in the Industrial World. I can't help but wondering if some of these Chevy truck buyers have a heart rusting inside, corroded by the eternally toxic acids of materialism and consumerism.
Last week a woman, with a cell phone implanted in the left side of her head, passed me in a new $68,000 emerald green BMW 750iL. Her parting word to me was "Images1." Does she really want me to pay attention to her because of what she drives instead of for who she is? Does she really want to draw attention to herself in a town where car-jacking specialists have a strong appetite for new Beemers? Does this image broker really want me to think she is about image rather than substance? What happens when she gets old and wrinkled or her Bimmer is totaled and she along with it?
"Mpulsive" on a white Ford Thunderbird probably tells me much more than this driver wanted me to know about her. I say 'she' as more than 80% of the cars in the hospital garage are driven by women and the odds are in my favor 4:1. She has told me she is willing to waste $35 a year to tell me, as a total stranger, of a personality flaw, of a lack of personal discipline in her spending habits. A woman in the hospital admitted to me she went out for a $3 item at the drug store and came home instead with a new car and a fresh payment book. So far this woman has traded cars at least four times during the last six years, and every year she pays extra to put the evidence on the back end of her car.
For about a month now, I have been seeing a new Cadillac Seville left in the hospital parking lot during the evening shift. On this $45,000 car one finds the words "God's Property" stenciled in black and gold on a piece of plate mirror. I can't help but wondering if God is actually making the monthly payments on an outlandishly expensive car that a shift worker could not possibly afford to make herself. I speculate why someone would be so reckless with their finances, merely to impress a stranger at a red light. I wonder if God will trade it in before the loan is paid out or if God himself will ever even bother to drive the thing. I can't figure out why God would buy a Seville when a whole lot of kids in His world starve to death every day.
"Buckle up With Jesus" is quite common on cars here in South Carolina, being as we are the buckle of the Bible belt. There are a number of these competing with my eleven year old Toyota for space in the parking garage. I wonder if Jesus is riding with you when you cut me off at the pass? Is he looking when you flip me your middle finger because you are in a bigger hurry than I am? Is Jesus holding on with white knuckles because you are eating, drinking, telephoning, reading, talking, playing with the CD, and putting on your make-up instead of paying attention to your driving?
The biggest industry in America is devoted to building and maintaining more than a hundred million cars and trucks. For many of the millions of people who buy these vehicles, they are making a declaration about who they are, that their status is enhanced by driving a new car, that they merit greater respect and attention. Curious. From what I recall, the last time Jesus rode into town, it was on the back of a borrowed donkey. I don't remember anything about the back seat of a Town Car. Next time he will have His own horse and He won't be headed for Detroit.
"And I saw heaven opened; and behold, a white horse, and He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True ...and the armies which are in heaven, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, were following Him on white horses ... and on His robe and on His thigh He has a name written "KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS ... and He shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there shall no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away ... It is done, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost. He who overcomes shall inherit these things and I will be his God and he will be My son."
You probably don't know it, but there is an employee's notice board down at the far end of the hall. Each day someone marks on it the running total of the days since a lost-work-time accident. I remember the first time I came to visit you, I saw it as I looked for your room. Why I remembered there being 1531 days since the last accident is a mystery to me. I seem to be good at remembering trivial things that have little usefulness. Did you know there are 123 steps from my parking place in the hospital garage to my office?
I don't usually see the running total of days as I have found a short cut through the new wing to your room. Today I had to go the long way round, as the short cut has been ravaged by a bright yellow backhoe being used for some kind of renovation work. The notice board told me that 1614 days have quietly slipped by since the last accident. It occurred to me that eighty-three days have elapsed since I first came to visit you. More disconcerting, I realized nearly a quarter of a year had slipped by for you and me, putting us both that much closer to Eternity. Four times as long and a year will be gone and only forty-five times that and more time will have slipped by than my Dad lived in his whole life. Somehow that notice board told me that life IS REALLY SHORT after all.
It would be a truly tragic accident, much worse than missing some days from work because of injury, if the numbers on that board were to rise significantly and we could not account for what happened in the intervening days. Nothing is a greater loss than a day spent rather than invested. I think of how you have invested your days so well for eighty-five years now. Only in Eternity will you find out just how great your return on the investment was. In the eighty-three days we have shared the count, I have seen you share divine love with those around you who have grown tired and weary from their long journeys to life's winter. You have shown them that Eternal Spring is just beyond, just for the asking. You have shown me staying the course is worth far more than any detours I might encounter along the way. By your example, maybe I can increase the return on my remaining days.
Your neighbor, Gertrude, doesn't remember who I am anymore. Tonight I went down her hall on the long way out and found her standing outside her room. She thinks her husband is coming tomorrow to get her out. She has thought that for eighty-three days I know of. I've never seen the guy. She's got a fine house in New Jersey, she says. I didn't tell her about the board. She asked me what I was doing there; was I an investigator with the police? Did I own the place? I told her 'No, just visiting people.' Sixty days ago she remembered my comings and goings. No more. Again, she asked why do I come? I wonder what I will remember eighty-three days from now. Will I take her place? I know you pray for both of us.
Tomorrow I will go to your sister Elsie's funeral and burial. On day 1531 we would have never guessed it. Ignorance about some things is true bliss. On day 1607 I fed Elsie a bit of chicken noodle soup, sans noodles, with a small spoon. The noodles were too much for her to handle. I don't know that she ever ate anything else before she left us. I wonder if one day, further up on the count, someone will be feeding me chicken noodle soup in a small spoon, sans the noodles.
I know that someone is going to go out there tomorrow and change the count. I want day 1615 to have counted for both of us. You prayed for me. It expect it will probably be a good day because of that. I seem to have more of them since I got on your prayer list. A couple of other people pray for me a lot. I wish I prayed as much as you and these others do. The possibilities are endless.
I stopped to see Janie at the other end of the hall. She seemed in better spirits today. She remembered me today and wasn't crying. Perhaps she doesn't remember today that her husband died last year. I wonder what I have forgotten already.
It's very late and I need to get some rest if I want to beat the guy who changes the numbers on the notice board. He just might have my number and I want to be ready, just in case.
"Come now, you who say, today or tomorrow, we shall go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit. Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away."
"Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance, and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."
Encounter II
You called to me by name.
I could hear your deep pain.
Last year, you looked great.
I wonder what changed your fate.
You submit to a neoplastic blast.
I hope for you, peace will last.
May One who is more than dear,
to your now spent soul stay near.
Your weary face covered in blue;
for you, may His message be true.
There's no cancer in Heaven.
Blotter
Today I went into the nearby branch of a large multi-state bank to close out an IRA account. When I opened this account some time ago the facility was the main office of a family-owned locally-operated institution consisting of one hundred twenty-five happy employees in about ten offices scattered throughout the county. Alas, management finally figured out it could make a fortune if it went public and then got itself picked off in a corporate buy-out. The dreams of management came true as did the nightmares of those one-hundred twenty-five workers. The Savings and Loan went public, its stock doubled, it was bought out, and most of the employees were let go. It didn't matter that most of them had given decades of friendly loyal service to the community. For certain, I did not want to add to the profits of the corporate raider which bought out the local family bank, hence my being there to withdraw all my funds.
While sitting with one of the few surviving employees of the original savings and loan, as she filled out the sheaf of paperwork required to close my account, she lamented how different it now was working for this multi-state predator. I wondered out loud at how the management of the locally-owned family business could have been so heartless and greedy as to even consider an Initial Public Offering, knowing most of the people who made the S & L prosperous in the first place, would lose their jobs in a buy out. Cathy certainly had no answers and was hardly free to speak as the multi-state behemoth is now writing her paychecks. It is hard to tell who deserves the harsher judgement; the original management that sold out its workers or the predator banking giant that picked off our small town bank and then fired the employees.
This uncertain Banking Representative IV expressed dismay at how nothing remains stable any more. I went back to my office wondering what the future holds for both of us. Cathy may yet get re-engineered right into unemployment. My own situation is little better. The politics of my own work place could cast me into the same hand-out line with Cathy. I went back to work and had what is without question the worst day of my tenure at the hospital. I came within seconds of standing up in a meeting and announcing my intent of resigning. A meeting with two vice presidents, the controller, my boss, and a director turned quite uncivil. My nemesis immediately found cause to attack me and essentially tell me my work was worthless and of no effect. On top of that, a number of Internet financial reports revealed many of the world stock markets had their single largest declines ever in today's trading sessions. It would seem that much of the world is about to go over the edge of some kind of financial abyss. It certainly seems to have already slipped passed the realm of civility.
Somewhere in the midst of my ominous thoughts about corporate recklessness I pondered what to do about something mundane: lunch. I was not really in the mood to buy lunch after having seen a cyber-vision of the dark side of the corporate global economy. I was not feeling especially prosperous as a nearly unemployed person. I decided I could simply skip lunch. As I walked into my office I found on my desk blotter a zip-lock bag containing a large piece of banana bread and yet another grocery bag containing several large bags of dried soup mixes. No names. I had lunch after all, from an unnamed benefactor who thought I had some worth. That radiant anonymous blessing reminded me there is goodness in the world even if ever rarer and buried under corporate raids, management abuses, and growing incivility.
In that instant I realized that our security does not come from the corporate world or top management. It is safe to say top management does not really care about my dreams or Cathy's dreams. It certainly did not care about the dreams of Cathy's now-unemployed colleagues. It certainly has not cared about my own professional growth or life journey. I realized that security, and even lunch, comes from the unseen, unnamed benevolence of others, often from the One unseen in the day to day frenzy of material life.
"Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Therefore do not fear; you are of more value than many sparrows."
Reunion II
Spectral wonders colorize life's long winter,
driving old-age desolation into forgotten drifts.
Bees gather aureate pollen, preparing for darkness.
We harvest warm recollection, facing shared uncertainty.
Vestiges of summer heat igniting dull memories,
renewed remembrances energize exhausted souls.
Inured to growing miracles about us, we huddle,
seeking tenuous safety in our long lost youth.
He has made Himself known through the handiwork
of His Creation.
Declarations
In most, if not all states, car owners can pay an extra annual fee for what is often called a 'vanity plate.' This customized license plate allows drivers to make some kind of statement about their dreams, personalities, motivations in life, even their financial stations in society. In addition to the highly-abbreviated life statements found on the leeward end of cars, slightly longer ones are found on the windward end, where restrictions on the number and color of letters do not apply. I have been amazed at how many volumes can be written into one, two, or three words, given the right context. I suspect much of the message the rest of us get from these words is unintended.
On the forward end of a new Lincoln Town Car that is left in the hospital garage during the day, one finds in gold letters "You Can Have Some 2". What is it I can have? Monstrous $600 lease payments that will leave me empty handed in twenty-four months? Consumer debt that will keep me awake at nights? An asset that is depreciating faster than almost anything else I could possibly buy? Insurance premiums that resemble interest payments on the national debt? Gasoline credit card bills that would sink a super tanker? An opportunity to create envy in other drivers?
For more than a decade, GM's Chevrolet truck division has played on the American obsession with cars and trucks in its advertising slogan "The Heartbeat of America." It is said that where your money is, there your heart is too. This seems especially apt in a country where many citizens often spend more for their wheels than their walls, for a land where low-level employees spend the entirety of their take-home income to maintain obscenely expensive heavily-chromed pick-up trucks, in a land that has the lowest savings rate in the Industrial World. I can't help but wondering if some of these Chevy truck buyers have a heart rusting inside, corroded by the eternally toxic acids of materialism and consumerism.
Last week a woman, with a cell phone implanted in the left side of her head, passed me in a new $68,000 emerald green BMW 750iL. Her parting word to me was "Images1." Does she really want me to pay attention to her because of what she drives instead of for who she is? Does she really want to draw attention to herself in a town where car-jacking specialists have a strong appetite for new Beemers? Does this image broker really want me to think she is about image rather than substance? What happens when she gets old and wrinkled or her Bimmer is totaled and she along with it?
"Mpulsive" on a white Ford Thunderbird probably tells me much more than this driver wanted me to know about her. I say 'she' as more than 80% of the cars in the hospital garage are driven by women and the odds are in my favor 4:1. She has told me she is willing to waste $35 a year to tell me, as a total stranger, of a personality flaw, of a lack of personal discipline in her spending habits. A woman in the hospital admitted to me she went out for a $3 item at the drug store and came home instead with a new car and a fresh payment book. So far this woman has traded cars at least four times during the last six years, and every year she pays extra to put the evidence on the back end of her car.
For about a month now, I have been seeing a new Cadillac Seville left in the hospital parking lot during the evening shift. On this $45,000 car one finds the words "God's Property" stenciled in black and gold on a piece of plate mirror. I can't help but wondering if God is actually making the monthly payments on an outlandishly expensive car that a shift worker could not possibly afford to make herself. I speculate why someone would be so reckless with their finances, merely to impress a stranger at a red light. I wonder if God will trade it in before the loan is paid out or if God himself will ever even bother to drive the thing. I can't figure out why God would buy a Seville when a whole lot of kids in His world starve to death every day.
"Buckle up With Jesus" is quite common on cars here in South Carolina, being as we are the buckle of the Bible belt. There are a number of these competing with my eleven year old Toyota for space in the parking garage. I wonder if Jesus is riding with you when you cut me off at the pass? Is he looking when you flip me your middle finger because you are in a bigger hurry than I am? Is Jesus holding on with white knuckles because you are eating, drinking, telephoning, reading, talking, playing with the CD, and putting on your make-up instead of paying attention to your driving?
The biggest industry in America is devoted to building and maintaining more than a hundred million cars and trucks. For many of the millions of people who buy these vehicles, they are making a declaration about who they are, that their status is enhanced by driving a new car, that they merit greater respect and attention. Curious. From what I recall, the last time Jesus rode into town, it was on the back of a borrowed donkey. I don't remember anything about the back seat of a Town Car. Next time he will have His own horse and He won't be headed for Detroit.
"And I saw heaven opened; and behold, a white horse, and He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True ...and the armies which are in heaven, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, were following Him on white horses ... and on His robe and on His thigh He has a name written "KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS ... and He shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there shall no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away ... It is done, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost. He who overcomes shall inherit these things and I will be his God and he will be My son."
Musings Part 4
Thief II
For you, it rains,
stars hidden in fear.
Radiance of Hope fractures,
your tears frozen in pain.
He offered you azure worlds.
You feared His price.
Heir to endless riches, yet,
bankruptcy haunts your soul.
Rare vintages in Baccarat?
You opt for TV dinners.
Order the special.
After all, it's Easter.
Ignorance II
Several years ago I was in the very difficult situation of knowing that I would have to tell my dear friend, Jan, of the sudden death of someone very important to her, but would be unable to do this for about an hour because of circumstances at the time. During that interminable hour in which I followed Jan home in my car, as she drove her own, I could study the back of her head. It occurred to me during my dark musings that I had knowledge of which she was quite unaware. I knew this information would be profoundly traumatic to her.
Yet, it was within my power to defer her trauma for a brief season; to allow her ignorance to truly be bliss. Her not knowing was not a source of additional injury to her and deferral of this bad news did not compound the pain when it finally did arrive like a force five hurricane. And it did arrive like a Pacific typhoon, despite my great efforts to gently ease her into this horrific intelligence.
Today I am in a rather different position. In about an hour I will make the ultimate surrender of control and allow myself to be put under general anesthesia by a man I have never once seen or spoken to. I have a pre-conceived idea that this surgeon has my best interest at heart and is competent to be successful with his efforts on my behalf. But 'stuff' does happen. I could have an idiopathic reaction to the anesthesia and never wake up. Some years ago I did see this happen to a patient, Juan. This young twenty-one year old man slipped into coma, never to regain consciousness. In my ignorance of the future, I assume I will wake up, perhaps a bit sore, but awake and 'fixed.' The odds are in my favor, as they were for Juan. Juan and I both had the same expectation of the future. His odds turned into a dark certainty. My odds are stilled yet to be played out. I may win. I may loose.
It is a curious thing to realize that odds only have any meaningful conception when in the presence of ignorance. Before a roulette wheel is spun, I am ignorant of the outcome. If I wasn't ignorant of the outcome, probability would be made obsolete by certainty. I would be worth billions. I would win every round of roulette and every one of my investments in the stock market would be highly profitable.
It is the nature of the human experience that uncertainty, that ignorance of the future are inherent and substantial dimensions of life. Throughout history, mankind has attempted to find ways to rend the veil of uncertainty and ignorance; to tell fortunes, predict the future, gaze into crystal balls, make time machines, cast runes, read Tarot, read palm lines. As yet, the veil is nearly intact.
Nearly? It has occurred that some predictions were made of the far future which came to pass with uncanny accuracy. The birth, life, times, and death of Jesus of Nazareth were accurately forecast centuries in advance. We have ancient manuscripts written centuries before the events they foretold. The fates of entire civilizations; of grand opulent cities were ordained hundreds of years in advance. The archeological records suggest the predictive powers of the prophets were unwavering.
Nothing has been written down in advance to suggest that I will wake up here on the other side of the darkness before me. Yet, if One is able to give to the Prophets of Old vast wisdom and predictive ability; to show His ordering of the affairs of mankind, then perhaps I would do well to trust this same One with the undertakings of my own life, whether they result in my going to the undertaker late in the day or waking to fifty years of fulfilled dreams.
This same One who granted powers to the ancient prophets says it is best for us to not know everything in advance. Would I want to anticipate the advent of a heart attack for forty years? Would I relish the joys of parenting if were to know that twenty-two years from now my only son will be murdered by a homicidal maniac? Would I want to plan for the future, knowing that in six years a nuclear weapon would vaporize my dreams? In the absence of knowledge of these morbid certainties, I have the unbounded freedom to dream and plan for something far different, undistracted by the sometimes harsh realities of life.
The one event that entrances more Western people that any other and gives them more hope than any, is one that has a powerful element of certainty attached to it; the predicted Second Coming of Jesus to establish His millennial reign. Even though one is required to jump by faith out of present certainty into the sometimes tenuous uncertainty of predictions made thousands of years ago by the Prophets and by Jesus Himself, we do have the validation of thousands of years to know that our one glimpse into the future is one of aureate possibilities in a heavenly kingdom paved with streets of transparent gold.
By faith, it doesn't really matter if I wake up today or if I go to the undertaker. I ultimately will end up in exactly the same place. If I'm lucky, I might just get to do a bit more living first. I really can't lose on my spin through life as I know my number is written in the Book of Life.
"Be faithful unto death,and I will give you the crown of life."
His Kitchen
Many self-help and self-improvement books describe the vast importance of making a good first impression. Their authors claim these all-important first impressions, made in a mere fifteen seconds, will color one's perceptions of other people for a life-time. I have found this does seem to be true, but only some of the time. I have discovered that I often react too quickly to these first impressions and then realize, only later, my sense of another person to be completely wrong. A most unusual teacher just gave me a rather powerful two-day lesson in how very very wrong and destructive first impressions can be, especially if influenced by a critical judging spirit that looks for the worst in people.
Several weeks ago an e-mail appeared on my monitor, from an unknown party, inviting members of the environmental community to participate in a three-day leadership workshop in another state. Judging this to be of interest, I found myself in a pristine state park this past week-end for training in conservation and ecology issues. The well-prepared training workshops and break-out sessions did prove to be well worth the investment of three days. Yet, another opportunity for learning in that state park was worth the investment of a lifetime and the subject had nothing to do with environmental issues or conservation.
It turns out the leadership of the conference had arranged for a retired military cook to come in and prepare the meals on Saturday with the participants assisting him in food preparation as needed. We were responsible for making our own group meals on Friday and Sunday. Saturday morning, after completing a two-mile hike to the group shelter, we found the cook just finishing up an elaborate hot country breakfast for us. We dug in.
During the meal, several of the participants made some negative comments about the food. In the secret recesses of my dark mind I added a few more of my own. I allowed this tiny episode to set off a cascade of belief and attitude in me that was horrifying.
The workshop areas, dining space, and kitchen were all contained in a single large room so it was rather easy to see all the doings in the kitchen while sitting in the workshops or at the tables for meals. Throughout the day I made an 'assessment' of this fellow in the kitchen: a stereo-typical mess hall cook, big, over weight, a bit lazy, perhaps a bit slow, and not an especially good cook. I continually found trivial bits of 'evidence' in his behavior and activities to confirm my initial findings.
The whole of the day I wondered if I should assist him and show him how to really make a kitchen work. I had heard much of the material in the workshops before and figured I might instead show this guy how one could really produce gourmet wonders out of thin air. It turns out Carlton proved to be the very reason I was 'supposed' to come to these meetings and I didn't teach him a thing. He instead taught me the wisdom of the ages and he never had to open his mouth to do it.
I was scheduled to assist in food preparation for the evening meal and figured I would get my chance at him then. He got his chance with me. He first asked me, graciously, to open three different cans and to put them into each of three different pots he had on the stove. He commented to me that he had suffered a service disability and had lost use of his right hand. He could not open the cans himself. I felt a tiny prick inside my soul in some unnamed place.
He then asked me to run carrots and cabbage through a food processor for cole slaw. The carrots had already been cleaned and trimmed, the cabbage cleaned and cut down for processing. While I was doing this processing for Carlton, he dumped in several large unmeasured quantities of relish, mayonnaise, and spices. I wondered what kind of mess he was concocting. I mixed it all together. In gentle fashion, he asked me to taste it and tell him what I thought it needed. I tasted it. Without a doubt it was the best cole slaw I've ever eaten. With a bit of wonderment, I told him it was perfect. Another gentle prick. Something wasn't quite lining up.
Earlier in the day I had seen Carlton sitting at one of the tables doing nothing. Not reading. Nothing. I wondered why anyone would waste his time in such a lazy fashion. I critiqued and judged. I wondered if we were going to have to finish the evening meal ourselves. He had gotten up earlier and disappeared for the afternoon. I figured he was off taking a long nap some place. Wrong!! It turns out he had gone back to his house and spent the afternoon making four cheese cakes from scratch for us. This gentle giant had spent his time making a culinary wonder for us while I was back sitting in judgement of his laziness. In spite of a severe disability, he had given of himself all afternoon. A sharp prick this time.
I had even wondered earlier why anyone would put out a couple of cans of cherry pie filling in a bowl for dessert without bothering to make a pie out of it. A strong pang of shame erupted inside when I recognized the ruthlessness of my judging spirit, after later realizing that the pie filling was a topping for his surprise treat.
During the course of processing carrots and cabbage, opening cans, and doing other things for Carlton, he told me about himself. I learned that he had cooked for five generals, had prepared meals for Eisenhower, had provided fine dining for the Secretary of Defense, had served in twenty-three countries including the Asian theaters of war, had been through fifteen military cooking schools, and had received the highest possible rating as a certified master chef. I learned of the extent of his service disability and how in spite of countless surgeries and pain he had pushed on in his service to our country. I learned that in spite of his severe limitations he had come out to our campground to make his meals as a gift to us, not accepting any compensation for his efforts. I learned that he had brought all of his own equipment and many of the ingredients used in our meals.
I had judged Carlton as a stereo-typical mess hall cook, big, over weight, a bit lazy, perhaps a bit slow, and not an especially good cook. What I found instead, once I set aside my critical spirit, was a gracious diplomat who was bigger in spirit than I could ever hope to be, one who pushed through despite the weight of his service disability, one who was slow to judge, one who knew his limits, one who gave of himself without pretense or expectation. I learned Carlton is a happy family man, a doting grandfather. I learned Carlton is a committed churchman and that one of his sons is a committed Christian minister. Carlton is genuinely interested in the lives of others. He invited me to visit in his home with his wife, to go hunting and fishing with him. He even asked me if I would consider moving to his area so we could do these things together.
His graciousness, learned in his decades of service to generals, was in such sharp contrast to the harshness of spirit in which I sat in judgement of him all day long. It became powerfully evident to me in that kitchen that a judging critical spirit will only produce pain and loss. I stood in that kitchen in wonderment at how this gentle giant was able to embrace me in friendship and total acceptance in spite of the rotten stench emanating from my soul to co-mingle with the delightful fragrances wafting up from his ovens and pots. For certain, I in no way deserve this man's friendship. For certain, he deserves better than the likes of me. It will be with some discretion of spirit that I call on him. It was with some shame that I sat and ate a meal that was fit for generals and presidents.
My experiences in Carlton's kitchen were an all powerful life study of the most important wisdom to be found in the New Testament. In Matthew the words of Jesus are recorded. "Do not judge lest you be judged yourselves. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it shall be measured to you. And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' and behold, the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to take the speck out of your brother's eye."
I learned that if I am judged before the Throne of God by my own measure, then there is no place in the depths of hell hot enough to burn off the harsh hateful spirit with which I judged this dear soul who came into our midst this week. Because Another is sitting in Judgement, and not I, Carlton will gain his place in Eternity. If I am really fortunate, and can learn His secret recipe for unconditional love, than I might just get to join Carlton there for the ultimate meal. "Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb." I suspect Carlton will be given the ultimate honor and asked to assist in the preparation of a meal fit for the King of Kings.
I would be happy to wash the dishes.
Constrictor
There are several families of large snakes that capture dinner by wrapping themselves around the main course and holding on until such time as the quarry of the hunt becomes a willing participant in the reptilian repast. Some of the largest of these slithery giants, such as the Burmese python and the Anaconda, come dressed for dinner in highly decorated skins with elegant diamond patterns worked into their sleek scales. The largest known specimen of these serpents weighed in at 348 pounds and was thirty-seven feet in length. These reptiles were once widely found through out tropical rain forests. They have, in recent years, found themselves to be the object of a different kind of hunt, having been killed off, nearly to extinction, in many regions.
I was visiting a distant city to attend the wedding of a friends's daughter. While the family was frantically attending to pre-nuptial demands, I had a quiet day by myself, wandering in a fine interactive museum of natural history and science. In my visits to museums around the world, it has been at least as fascinating for me to observe the two-legged species on the outside of the glass as it has been to observe those rare species on the inside.
While standing inside a magnificent rain forest exhibit, observing a pair of Burmese pythons behind glass, a lady, unknown to me, standing next to me simply commented "It would make a beautiful wallet." I realized in those few words that we simply don't get it. We humans really do believe that all other animals and materials on this planet are simply present for us to harvest and consume as we wish. We can be in a magnificent recreation of an endangered rain forest, costing millions and yet, completely lose sight of the take-home message.
Many people will never have the opportunity to walk beneath the arboreal canopy of a tropical rain forest and experience the surreal magic of the dynamic web of life found there. Their only experience of the Emerald Kingdom will be in the computer-controlled environment of a science-museum display. I have had the great fortune to walk beneath the leafy canopy in the Amazon rain forest. But like most people, I also have to go to science museums or zoos to see the great snakes or cats. It seems poachers also think that these majestic denizens of the forest would make fine wallets and tourist trinkets. I never have seen a great cat or constrictor snake in the wild.
It is well acknowledged by thoughtful people that experiencing wild places with their grand diversity of species can be truly enriching and healing for the soul of humans. Constrictors can only constrict their dinner. Humans have the greater and more dangerous capacity to constrict the spirit of the earth, if they choose to do so. It is only humans that presume all other species and resources exist for the convenience of others. If humanity continues to consume and extinguish the diverse species of life that flourish on our emerald and cerulean orb, we will experience an irreversible constriction of our collective spirit that will cause us to envy those few fortunates safely sequestered behind museum glass.
For then desolate wilderness will be found on our side of the glass.
Stretching
Several months ago, in a moment of weakness, I was talked into buying an expensive ticket for a fund-raising oyster roast. This past Saturday afternoon I finally went to cash in on my investment. As it turned out, torrential rains that seemed to have lasted for months, gave way to an afternoon that was merely cloudy and ominous. I found myself competing with seven hundred other denizens of the food chain. As luck would have it, I was able to carry out a canvas bag full of those pearl-making critters, still encased in their stone packaging. It pays to know people in high places.
For the better part of a year I have been spending time nearly every day with a quadriplegic and his wheel-chair bound mother. Knowing how much Ron likes any thing on the food chain that comes out of any ocean, I allowed less than five minutes to elapse between the time those molluskan delights came hot out of the roasting pits and my arrival at his house. Walking in, I said "Ron, you're going to Heaven early" and proceeded to stuff about forty or fifty of these into him. He certainly did feel closer to that ethereal realm after becoming the beneficiary of the ultimate sacrifice of those forty or fifty molluskan souls. Alas, even Ron couldn't eat them all.
The grand scenario of the universe included my attendance at a party a couple of hours later that same day, where I knew no one except the hostess. It so happened that the remaining fishes and loaves from Ron's recent repast were still in the car. Some people use ice breakers to facilitate interaction at parties. It occurred to me to use oysters to do this. And so I did. And did it work! But, not in the way I expected.
Standing in the kitchen, I offered a woman, a stranger to me, a succulent morsel, just liberated from its stony refuge. She made a face of utter despair and disdain, certain the tidbit would be the culinary horror of a life time. I again implored her to open up; to broaden her horizons. Mind you, I had already installed this tasty marine wonder on the end of a fork and had baptized it in a fine cocktail sauce. Time stood still. She hesitated. I waited. I encouraged her again. She held her breath. Again, encouraging. Ah! In a moment of uncertainty, I got it in.
I waited for her to anoint me with an unmentionable repudiation of my offering. She didn't. Instead the most amazing thing happened. A radiant smile of delight erupted on her tortured face and her surprise surprised me. She absolutely loved it and was instantly transformed. She was hooked. She had to have more. What had I done? What would I do? I fed her habit.
Arlene's fear and repugnance gave way to joy and delight, but only after she exercised her faith to believe me when I told her it would be a most positive experience for her if she but took this tiny risk. On the down-side she would have suffered for no more than the time it would have taken her to sprint the eleven feet to the bathroom and make a private disinheritance of my gift to her. On the upside she would embrace one of the culinary wonders of the world that she could enjoy for years. Fortunately, I judged her character right. Actually I was just lucky. I didn't know the first thing about her.
But God knows our character. The writer of the Epistle James told us "the one who doubts is like the surf of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. For let not that man expect that he will receive anything from the Lord." Faith seems to be the element that transforms fear into joy and belief.
In the grand scheme of things, it does not matter if Arlene had liked or not liked oysters. I could always have washed my shirt if it had been that bad for her. But it does matter if we exercise and stretch our faith to believe that what God offers to us is good for us and healing and pleasing to the soul. The anonymous writer of Hebrews said that faith is essential on our part if we want to be pleasing to God and enter into all that He has for us. "And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him."
Jehovah God has made the ultimate sacrifice for us and freely offers Him to us. All we have to do is open up. It's that simple. "Behold I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him, and will dine with him, and he with Me."
For you, it rains,
stars hidden in fear.
Radiance of Hope fractures,
your tears frozen in pain.
He offered you azure worlds.
You feared His price.
Heir to endless riches, yet,
bankruptcy haunts your soul.
Rare vintages in Baccarat?
You opt for TV dinners.
Order the special.
After all, it's Easter.
Ignorance II
Several years ago I was in the very difficult situation of knowing that I would have to tell my dear friend, Jan, of the sudden death of someone very important to her, but would be unable to do this for about an hour because of circumstances at the time. During that interminable hour in which I followed Jan home in my car, as she drove her own, I could study the back of her head. It occurred to me during my dark musings that I had knowledge of which she was quite unaware. I knew this information would be profoundly traumatic to her.
Yet, it was within my power to defer her trauma for a brief season; to allow her ignorance to truly be bliss. Her not knowing was not a source of additional injury to her and deferral of this bad news did not compound the pain when it finally did arrive like a force five hurricane. And it did arrive like a Pacific typhoon, despite my great efforts to gently ease her into this horrific intelligence.
Today I am in a rather different position. In about an hour I will make the ultimate surrender of control and allow myself to be put under general anesthesia by a man I have never once seen or spoken to. I have a pre-conceived idea that this surgeon has my best interest at heart and is competent to be successful with his efforts on my behalf. But 'stuff' does happen. I could have an idiopathic reaction to the anesthesia and never wake up. Some years ago I did see this happen to a patient, Juan. This young twenty-one year old man slipped into coma, never to regain consciousness. In my ignorance of the future, I assume I will wake up, perhaps a bit sore, but awake and 'fixed.' The odds are in my favor, as they were for Juan. Juan and I both had the same expectation of the future. His odds turned into a dark certainty. My odds are stilled yet to be played out. I may win. I may loose.
It is a curious thing to realize that odds only have any meaningful conception when in the presence of ignorance. Before a roulette wheel is spun, I am ignorant of the outcome. If I wasn't ignorant of the outcome, probability would be made obsolete by certainty. I would be worth billions. I would win every round of roulette and every one of my investments in the stock market would be highly profitable.
It is the nature of the human experience that uncertainty, that ignorance of the future are inherent and substantial dimensions of life. Throughout history, mankind has attempted to find ways to rend the veil of uncertainty and ignorance; to tell fortunes, predict the future, gaze into crystal balls, make time machines, cast runes, read Tarot, read palm lines. As yet, the veil is nearly intact.
Nearly? It has occurred that some predictions were made of the far future which came to pass with uncanny accuracy. The birth, life, times, and death of Jesus of Nazareth were accurately forecast centuries in advance. We have ancient manuscripts written centuries before the events they foretold. The fates of entire civilizations; of grand opulent cities were ordained hundreds of years in advance. The archeological records suggest the predictive powers of the prophets were unwavering.
Nothing has been written down in advance to suggest that I will wake up here on the other side of the darkness before me. Yet, if One is able to give to the Prophets of Old vast wisdom and predictive ability; to show His ordering of the affairs of mankind, then perhaps I would do well to trust this same One with the undertakings of my own life, whether they result in my going to the undertaker late in the day or waking to fifty years of fulfilled dreams.
This same One who granted powers to the ancient prophets says it is best for us to not know everything in advance. Would I want to anticipate the advent of a heart attack for forty years? Would I relish the joys of parenting if were to know that twenty-two years from now my only son will be murdered by a homicidal maniac? Would I want to plan for the future, knowing that in six years a nuclear weapon would vaporize my dreams? In the absence of knowledge of these morbid certainties, I have the unbounded freedom to dream and plan for something far different, undistracted by the sometimes harsh realities of life.
The one event that entrances more Western people that any other and gives them more hope than any, is one that has a powerful element of certainty attached to it; the predicted Second Coming of Jesus to establish His millennial reign. Even though one is required to jump by faith out of present certainty into the sometimes tenuous uncertainty of predictions made thousands of years ago by the Prophets and by Jesus Himself, we do have the validation of thousands of years to know that our one glimpse into the future is one of aureate possibilities in a heavenly kingdom paved with streets of transparent gold.
By faith, it doesn't really matter if I wake up today or if I go to the undertaker. I ultimately will end up in exactly the same place. If I'm lucky, I might just get to do a bit more living first. I really can't lose on my spin through life as I know my number is written in the Book of Life.
"Be faithful unto death,and I will give you the crown of life."
His Kitchen
Many self-help and self-improvement books describe the vast importance of making a good first impression. Their authors claim these all-important first impressions, made in a mere fifteen seconds, will color one's perceptions of other people for a life-time. I have found this does seem to be true, but only some of the time. I have discovered that I often react too quickly to these first impressions and then realize, only later, my sense of another person to be completely wrong. A most unusual teacher just gave me a rather powerful two-day lesson in how very very wrong and destructive first impressions can be, especially if influenced by a critical judging spirit that looks for the worst in people.
Several weeks ago an e-mail appeared on my monitor, from an unknown party, inviting members of the environmental community to participate in a three-day leadership workshop in another state. Judging this to be of interest, I found myself in a pristine state park this past week-end for training in conservation and ecology issues. The well-prepared training workshops and break-out sessions did prove to be well worth the investment of three days. Yet, another opportunity for learning in that state park was worth the investment of a lifetime and the subject had nothing to do with environmental issues or conservation.
It turns out the leadership of the conference had arranged for a retired military cook to come in and prepare the meals on Saturday with the participants assisting him in food preparation as needed. We were responsible for making our own group meals on Friday and Sunday. Saturday morning, after completing a two-mile hike to the group shelter, we found the cook just finishing up an elaborate hot country breakfast for us. We dug in.
During the meal, several of the participants made some negative comments about the food. In the secret recesses of my dark mind I added a few more of my own. I allowed this tiny episode to set off a cascade of belief and attitude in me that was horrifying.
The workshop areas, dining space, and kitchen were all contained in a single large room so it was rather easy to see all the doings in the kitchen while sitting in the workshops or at the tables for meals. Throughout the day I made an 'assessment' of this fellow in the kitchen: a stereo-typical mess hall cook, big, over weight, a bit lazy, perhaps a bit slow, and not an especially good cook. I continually found trivial bits of 'evidence' in his behavior and activities to confirm my initial findings.
The whole of the day I wondered if I should assist him and show him how to really make a kitchen work. I had heard much of the material in the workshops before and figured I might instead show this guy how one could really produce gourmet wonders out of thin air. It turns out Carlton proved to be the very reason I was 'supposed' to come to these meetings and I didn't teach him a thing. He instead taught me the wisdom of the ages and he never had to open his mouth to do it.
I was scheduled to assist in food preparation for the evening meal and figured I would get my chance at him then. He got his chance with me. He first asked me, graciously, to open three different cans and to put them into each of three different pots he had on the stove. He commented to me that he had suffered a service disability and had lost use of his right hand. He could not open the cans himself. I felt a tiny prick inside my soul in some unnamed place.
He then asked me to run carrots and cabbage through a food processor for cole slaw. The carrots had already been cleaned and trimmed, the cabbage cleaned and cut down for processing. While I was doing this processing for Carlton, he dumped in several large unmeasured quantities of relish, mayonnaise, and spices. I wondered what kind of mess he was concocting. I mixed it all together. In gentle fashion, he asked me to taste it and tell him what I thought it needed. I tasted it. Without a doubt it was the best cole slaw I've ever eaten. With a bit of wonderment, I told him it was perfect. Another gentle prick. Something wasn't quite lining up.
Earlier in the day I had seen Carlton sitting at one of the tables doing nothing. Not reading. Nothing. I wondered why anyone would waste his time in such a lazy fashion. I critiqued and judged. I wondered if we were going to have to finish the evening meal ourselves. He had gotten up earlier and disappeared for the afternoon. I figured he was off taking a long nap some place. Wrong!! It turns out he had gone back to his house and spent the afternoon making four cheese cakes from scratch for us. This gentle giant had spent his time making a culinary wonder for us while I was back sitting in judgement of his laziness. In spite of a severe disability, he had given of himself all afternoon. A sharp prick this time.
I had even wondered earlier why anyone would put out a couple of cans of cherry pie filling in a bowl for dessert without bothering to make a pie out of it. A strong pang of shame erupted inside when I recognized the ruthlessness of my judging spirit, after later realizing that the pie filling was a topping for his surprise treat.
During the course of processing carrots and cabbage, opening cans, and doing other things for Carlton, he told me about himself. I learned that he had cooked for five generals, had prepared meals for Eisenhower, had provided fine dining for the Secretary of Defense, had served in twenty-three countries including the Asian theaters of war, had been through fifteen military cooking schools, and had received the highest possible rating as a certified master chef. I learned of the extent of his service disability and how in spite of countless surgeries and pain he had pushed on in his service to our country. I learned that in spite of his severe limitations he had come out to our campground to make his meals as a gift to us, not accepting any compensation for his efforts. I learned that he had brought all of his own equipment and many of the ingredients used in our meals.
I had judged Carlton as a stereo-typical mess hall cook, big, over weight, a bit lazy, perhaps a bit slow, and not an especially good cook. What I found instead, once I set aside my critical spirit, was a gracious diplomat who was bigger in spirit than I could ever hope to be, one who pushed through despite the weight of his service disability, one who was slow to judge, one who knew his limits, one who gave of himself without pretense or expectation. I learned Carlton is a happy family man, a doting grandfather. I learned Carlton is a committed churchman and that one of his sons is a committed Christian minister. Carlton is genuinely interested in the lives of others. He invited me to visit in his home with his wife, to go hunting and fishing with him. He even asked me if I would consider moving to his area so we could do these things together.
His graciousness, learned in his decades of service to generals, was in such sharp contrast to the harshness of spirit in which I sat in judgement of him all day long. It became powerfully evident to me in that kitchen that a judging critical spirit will only produce pain and loss. I stood in that kitchen in wonderment at how this gentle giant was able to embrace me in friendship and total acceptance in spite of the rotten stench emanating from my soul to co-mingle with the delightful fragrances wafting up from his ovens and pots. For certain, I in no way deserve this man's friendship. For certain, he deserves better than the likes of me. It will be with some discretion of spirit that I call on him. It was with some shame that I sat and ate a meal that was fit for generals and presidents.
My experiences in Carlton's kitchen were an all powerful life study of the most important wisdom to be found in the New Testament. In Matthew the words of Jesus are recorded. "Do not judge lest you be judged yourselves. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it shall be measured to you. And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' and behold, the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to take the speck out of your brother's eye."
I learned that if I am judged before the Throne of God by my own measure, then there is no place in the depths of hell hot enough to burn off the harsh hateful spirit with which I judged this dear soul who came into our midst this week. Because Another is sitting in Judgement, and not I, Carlton will gain his place in Eternity. If I am really fortunate, and can learn His secret recipe for unconditional love, than I might just get to join Carlton there for the ultimate meal. "Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb." I suspect Carlton will be given the ultimate honor and asked to assist in the preparation of a meal fit for the King of Kings.
I would be happy to wash the dishes.
Constrictor
There are several families of large snakes that capture dinner by wrapping themselves around the main course and holding on until such time as the quarry of the hunt becomes a willing participant in the reptilian repast. Some of the largest of these slithery giants, such as the Burmese python and the Anaconda, come dressed for dinner in highly decorated skins with elegant diamond patterns worked into their sleek scales. The largest known specimen of these serpents weighed in at 348 pounds and was thirty-seven feet in length. These reptiles were once widely found through out tropical rain forests. They have, in recent years, found themselves to be the object of a different kind of hunt, having been killed off, nearly to extinction, in many regions.
I was visiting a distant city to attend the wedding of a friends's daughter. While the family was frantically attending to pre-nuptial demands, I had a quiet day by myself, wandering in a fine interactive museum of natural history and science. In my visits to museums around the world, it has been at least as fascinating for me to observe the two-legged species on the outside of the glass as it has been to observe those rare species on the inside.
While standing inside a magnificent rain forest exhibit, observing a pair of Burmese pythons behind glass, a lady, unknown to me, standing next to me simply commented "It would make a beautiful wallet." I realized in those few words that we simply don't get it. We humans really do believe that all other animals and materials on this planet are simply present for us to harvest and consume as we wish. We can be in a magnificent recreation of an endangered rain forest, costing millions and yet, completely lose sight of the take-home message.
Many people will never have the opportunity to walk beneath the arboreal canopy of a tropical rain forest and experience the surreal magic of the dynamic web of life found there. Their only experience of the Emerald Kingdom will be in the computer-controlled environment of a science-museum display. I have had the great fortune to walk beneath the leafy canopy in the Amazon rain forest. But like most people, I also have to go to science museums or zoos to see the great snakes or cats. It seems poachers also think that these majestic denizens of the forest would make fine wallets and tourist trinkets. I never have seen a great cat or constrictor snake in the wild.
It is well acknowledged by thoughtful people that experiencing wild places with their grand diversity of species can be truly enriching and healing for the soul of humans. Constrictors can only constrict their dinner. Humans have the greater and more dangerous capacity to constrict the spirit of the earth, if they choose to do so. It is only humans that presume all other species and resources exist for the convenience of others. If humanity continues to consume and extinguish the diverse species of life that flourish on our emerald and cerulean orb, we will experience an irreversible constriction of our collective spirit that will cause us to envy those few fortunates safely sequestered behind museum glass.
For then desolate wilderness will be found on our side of the glass.
Stretching
Several months ago, in a moment of weakness, I was talked into buying an expensive ticket for a fund-raising oyster roast. This past Saturday afternoon I finally went to cash in on my investment. As it turned out, torrential rains that seemed to have lasted for months, gave way to an afternoon that was merely cloudy and ominous. I found myself competing with seven hundred other denizens of the food chain. As luck would have it, I was able to carry out a canvas bag full of those pearl-making critters, still encased in their stone packaging. It pays to know people in high places.
For the better part of a year I have been spending time nearly every day with a quadriplegic and his wheel-chair bound mother. Knowing how much Ron likes any thing on the food chain that comes out of any ocean, I allowed less than five minutes to elapse between the time those molluskan delights came hot out of the roasting pits and my arrival at his house. Walking in, I said "Ron, you're going to Heaven early" and proceeded to stuff about forty or fifty of these into him. He certainly did feel closer to that ethereal realm after becoming the beneficiary of the ultimate sacrifice of those forty or fifty molluskan souls. Alas, even Ron couldn't eat them all.
The grand scenario of the universe included my attendance at a party a couple of hours later that same day, where I knew no one except the hostess. It so happened that the remaining fishes and loaves from Ron's recent repast were still in the car. Some people use ice breakers to facilitate interaction at parties. It occurred to me to use oysters to do this. And so I did. And did it work! But, not in the way I expected.
Standing in the kitchen, I offered a woman, a stranger to me, a succulent morsel, just liberated from its stony refuge. She made a face of utter despair and disdain, certain the tidbit would be the culinary horror of a life time. I again implored her to open up; to broaden her horizons. Mind you, I had already installed this tasty marine wonder on the end of a fork and had baptized it in a fine cocktail sauce. Time stood still. She hesitated. I waited. I encouraged her again. She held her breath. Again, encouraging. Ah! In a moment of uncertainty, I got it in.
I waited for her to anoint me with an unmentionable repudiation of my offering. She didn't. Instead the most amazing thing happened. A radiant smile of delight erupted on her tortured face and her surprise surprised me. She absolutely loved it and was instantly transformed. She was hooked. She had to have more. What had I done? What would I do? I fed her habit.
Arlene's fear and repugnance gave way to joy and delight, but only after she exercised her faith to believe me when I told her it would be a most positive experience for her if she but took this tiny risk. On the down-side she would have suffered for no more than the time it would have taken her to sprint the eleven feet to the bathroom and make a private disinheritance of my gift to her. On the upside she would embrace one of the culinary wonders of the world that she could enjoy for years. Fortunately, I judged her character right. Actually I was just lucky. I didn't know the first thing about her.
But God knows our character. The writer of the Epistle James told us "the one who doubts is like the surf of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. For let not that man expect that he will receive anything from the Lord." Faith seems to be the element that transforms fear into joy and belief.
In the grand scheme of things, it does not matter if Arlene had liked or not liked oysters. I could always have washed my shirt if it had been that bad for her. But it does matter if we exercise and stretch our faith to believe that what God offers to us is good for us and healing and pleasing to the soul. The anonymous writer of Hebrews said that faith is essential on our part if we want to be pleasing to God and enter into all that He has for us. "And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him."
Jehovah God has made the ultimate sacrifice for us and freely offers Him to us. All we have to do is open up. It's that simple. "Behold I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him, and will dine with him, and he with Me."
Musings Part 5
Second Chance
It's human nature to think more of ourselves than is sometimes warranted, particularly in our performance-driven image-oriented culture. We like to consider ourselves fast learners, loving, intelligent, accepting, and on top of life. It's a real struggle to admit that something eludes us in our learning and growth, especially if we had been thinking we already had it 'in the bag.'
Several weeks ago I had one of those benevolent near-epiphanies of self discovery in which I was eased into a great self-awareness; one in which I learned I have a real problem with a critical spirit that quickly slices and dices anyone failing to pass first muster. I learned I'm often anything but loving and accepting. It was a hard bit of learning but I thought I had it nailed at last. Wrong! My contentment and smugness were short-lived.
Last week my very cherished and gentle friend Janice came a great distance to South Carolina for opening night of a musical comedy I helped produce. Janice is a great champion of my writings and my efforts at creating theatrical illusion and fantasy. Happily, I provided her hospitality in my wannabe B & B for the weekend. In spite of her being run off the road by a rather aggressive and mean-spirited driver of an eighteen-wheeler and getting quite disoriented in unfamiliar terrain, she had a splendid time here and pronounced the highway terrors a small price to pay.
During the past week I had noticed a wrist watch in the kitchen on the back of the sink. Assuming Janice had left it here during the weekend, I figured to return it to her by mail. I was cleaning up a week's worth of neglect in the kitchen this morning and happened to look more closely at this timepiece while moving it to my catch-all table in the den. I realized I would probably have to return it to her by armored car. I was astounded when closer examination revealed it to be a woman's diamond-studded Rolex time piece.
Was I happy that she had an opulent possession like this? Was I happy that someone unknown to me had gifted her with this? No! In my own secret way I was far meaner that the truck driver that ran her off the road on a ominous foggy night. To the driver Janice was an anonymous stranger in the night, in the way of his quest for faster profits. To me, Janice has been a well-known joyous source of happiness and encouragement. Yet, in my well-rehearsed self-righteous way I drew all manner of conclusions about Janice's integrity, her recklessness with money, her willingness to sacrifice her welfare on the high altar of consumerism. I wondered about her duplicity in agreeing with my pronouncements about the need for all of us to consume less while wearing a $20,000 portable clock. How could someone really want to encourage little kids about simpler living while teaching them piano and yet be caught wearing this ostentatious symbol of reckless consumption?
It is indeed fortunate for unnamed defendants that I have never been called to serve on a jury and that I never picked a career in investigative journalism. In my critical modus operandi I never bothered to get all the evidence before passing judgement and nearly imposing sentence on Janice. I learned again today in another brilliant flash of scrutiny that I have really learned almost nothing about reserving judgement until all the facts are in. I have learned less than nothing about the fact that judgment isn't for me to make, even with all the facts. Only God has the wisdom and mercy to pull that off.
There have been those times when I would have given anything to be able to touch fingers with another's thoughts, to have performed a Vulcan mind-meld. Then there are those times, like this one, when I am grateful beyond measure that the dark rancid thoughts of our foul spirits can be safely locked beyond the reach of our unwitting victims. Happily, Janice was spared even knowing the offensive thoughts that I allowed to become embedded in my life for a day. She certainly deserves far better than those she got from me yesterday in my dark musings. She certainly deserves better friends.
Today I called Janice. I casually mentioned I had found an opulently expensive Rolex in my house and wondered if it could possibly be hers since she had not inquired about it. I, of course, would expect someone who has lost a $20,000 pearl of great price to be frantically seeking it out. So would Janice, it turns out. She broke out in gales of hysterics. Her $20,000 Rolex museum piece turns out to be a $40 'knock-off' her son had picked up for her in New York. I had been completely duped and I thought I knew the real thing when it came to fine arts and the like. Wrong again. Happily, we shared much amusement and laughter over this and she told me of the truly hilarious acts of theater she has been able to pull off with this $40 imposter. I asked her to have her son round me up a Rolex of my own, for $40. After all I do theater as a hobby.
But, there was no laughter when I got off the phone with this dear friend. I had the horrific realization that I had condemned her in my thoughts, had sentenced her, and was ready to impose my self-righteous penalty. What was absolutely convincing to me as a 'case' against her proved to be, in fact, without merit or fact. What is merely a bit of costuming for some happy theater in her life was for me a basis for a groundless indictment.
In the past I have often been left in wonderment at how rapidly people have disappeared from my life. Did something I have or something I said lead them to a groundless indictment of me? Did they treat me exactly the same way that I nearly treated Janice. More importantly, did some of these people make a correct read on my true nature and simply spare themselves the heartbreak of false condemnation? Smart people if they did.
I was duped by a $40 imposter. Worse yet, I have been duped by a condemning attitude that could have cost me something far more valuable that the grandest museum piece in the world. I only hope that Janice is what she seems, far more charitable than I and a whole lot more accepting of people, warts and all.
Peter was making inquiry of Jesus one day and asked him just how many times we should forgive people. Matthew's gospel records this snippet of dialog between them. "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?" Jesus told him "I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven."
For my sake, I hope my patient gentle friend has read this part of the book and isn't counting.
Puzzles
This morning while dressing for work, I was digging through a dresser drawer in desperate search for a safety pin. I never found one but I did come across something probably more important in the long run; a fine post card from the French Alps that had been cut up into a twenty-piece jigsaw puzzle. I had not looked at this card in years as the assorted parts were scattered in the bottom of one of those drawers containing what mathematicians would call a 'strange attractor.' There were a lot of weird archeological curiosities from my past mixed in with those puzzle pieces. I had long forgotten who the card was from but had saved the fragments for inexplicable reasons of sentimentality that were once logical.
Today on impulse I took the two minutes required to reassemble the pieces to see who the message had been from. It turns out that some fifteen years ago a missionary friend had sent me a splendid hand-written missive of encouragement on the back side of an action photo of an Olympic alpine skier. It made a nice memento and contained more than a bit of this young woman's soul. It certainly did merit being archived in my drawer during this past decade and a half. However, there was a small problem with the card today. The twenty-piece card was now made up of only nineteen pieces. One of the corner pieces had slipped off into a cosmic discontinuity and is now lost to me. The message was all there but the card is incomplete. All I could see was that which was not there.
This got me to thinking about how people so easily focus on deficiencies and imperfections. One time last summer I was riding on a train through Georgia and saw a Baptist Chu ch. I well remember this chu ch but have no memory of the other churches I must have seen that sultry day on my three-hundred mile journey. That small lack had made an unforgettable impression in my memory.
I was in Florida five years ago and one day while wearing one of my very favorite shirts, a red ink pen leaked in the pocket. I was aghast. All I could see of that shirt was a vast vermilion ocean of unwanted indelible ink. Making a typical dress shirt requires some two yards of material or approximately 2,600 square inches. That crimson ink spot covered approximately a half inch circle, or less than 1/15000th of the total area of cloth on my shirt, yet I saw nothing of the remaining 14999/15000ths of my shirt. My first impulse was to view the shirt as ruined and a total loss. Certainly, if I had $150 invested and lost but one cent I would not feel financially ruined. The proportions are exactly the same. Why the puzzling difference in response?
Have you ever bought a new car and for months parked it at the far edge of vast parking lots so as to avoid getting a 1 mm by 4 mm nick from some self-absorbed, thoughtless, inconsiderate, clumsy fool driver lacking in basic appreciation of the unspoiled beauty of your fifteen-coat lacquer job? You finally tired of the long summer trek across the incendiary asphalt and started parking closer. You came back out to your car one blistering August day and finally found that vast 1 mm by 4 mm nick installed on the driver's door and you were suddenly oblivious to the remaining perfection of the other 99.99999999% of the painted surface. Your world melted down. Why?
At one time I lived in an elegant condominium with perfect white carpets. Being the hospitable type, I gave a Christmas party one year to which an uninvited drunk stranger showed up. He promptly spilled a large glass of burgundy wine in the center of the living room carpet. Do you think I saw anything else the rest of that night besides that maroon insult on my sensibilities? It didn't help at all that this sotted party breaker laughed following his mis-adventure.
The Old and New Testaments are just that, testaments to the fact that humanity has gotten itself into a whole lot of trouble during the past several millennia. The world's newspapers chronicle the fact that this is only getting worse. Uncounted hundreds of millions of people have been put to death in this century alone merely because they were judged as missing something, being of the wrong color, having different beliefs, being damaged goods. As I write, millions in Algeria live in abject fear of the hideous genocide going on in that country to kill those that are different or lacking in some proscribed trait. Neo-Nazis in Germany kill people in wheelchairs. Whites kill blacks because they are blacks.
It seems to be the nature of people to find flaws in things and each other. I can do this with the best of them. I once lost interest in a woman because her hair was thinning in front. It didn't matter that she was probably one of the most ethical and moral people I had ever met. Fortunately, she is now happily married to someone more accepting than I was. A woman colleague of mine recently met a man through a dating service and told me she found him "really quite nice" but unacceptable because he had too much space between his teeth!
In our fallen state we throw away shirts with a small spot in a large expanse of unstained cloth. We insult the integrity of a stranger's mother when we find an unintended tiny nick on the door of a new car. We throw away a 1,500 piece jigsaw puzzle of a magnificent alpine vista because a single corner was lost. In our consumer culture we throw away an entire TV in a fine cabinet rather than finding and replacing the failed ten-cent diode in its power supply. A neighbor discards her microwave oven because she doesn't want to clean it. We abandon a spouse of many years because of one misdeed.
There is a Kingdom where no deficiencies are to be found, no corners missing, no nicks in the transparent gold. The New Testament assures us there will be no problem with orthodontic alignment or thinning hair in that place. In that Kingdom we can expect perfection. Yet, the only way to get there is to acknowledge and accept the imperfections and deficiencies that exist in this realm and in each other, here and now.
It is a good thing that Someone was able to see beyond the missing corners, crimson spots, and nicks in our hearts and souls, beyond to that in each of us which was made in His image. He came down and was nicked by man. He made a vast crimson stain with His own blood on the earth that we might find the true acceptance for which we long. Perhaps we might learn from his example.
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Provision
Heat of day continuing for a season,
late afternoon promises cool of evening.
Summer's solar fury begins to abate,
shadows extending across incandescent asphalt.
Ascending the serpentine mountain road,
the unseen summit promises breezy refreshment.
Tangled briars give us pause,
photosynthetic magic is afoot.
Reaching in, cautiously, ever so slowly,
pendant clusters of stellar fusion abound.
Taking my cap off to Heaven's bounty,
it become a generous horn of plenty.
With grateful hearts we commune,
giving thanks for fruit of the vine.
Like a blackberry?
Final Flight
Settling in cramped confines, no leg room,
long turbulent flight into night looms.
Turbines powering up for take-off roll,
unseen force weighs heavy on your soul.
Pitching forward into brooding ebony sky,
with apprehension, you ruminate. Why?
Future, forever transposed in elapsed memory;
time's a cruelly inverted present paradox.
Hourglass sands have nearly fallen,
life's fantasies freeze, fracturing.
He shall raise up His own in the twinkling of an eye.
Scales
In a world where forty million die annually from starvation, tens of millions of Americans will spend a billion dollars this month losing the pounds they gained back last month. This in a country where it has been estimated that half of all food is wasted, spoiled, and discarded and where a quarter of women have severe eating disorders such as anorexia and or bulimia. Many of my friends give testimony to having lost hundreds of pounds over decades of tortured dieting and having spent tens of thousands of dollars to pay for their torments. They describe the complete ruptures to their social lives as a result of obesity.
Once a week many of these agonized souls go to their local Healthy Weigh, Inches-A-Weigh, or Physicians Weight Loss Center for a heavy reckoning: weigh in. With trepidation, they ascend onto the scales to learn if they have fallen off the wagon once more and been duped again by the view that just one little bite won't make any difference. For these defeated beings, toxic shame erodes self-esteem and confidence. Excess so often produces the same barrenness of soul that scarcity yields. The numbers on the scale simply state the facts, not mincing anything.
Scales can give us 'bad news' but they can save our lives. We can take to heart the high numbers as a stern warning that we need to do something to keep the priceless treasure of good health from slipping away. Or we can ignore them and obtain our just desserts. For a large group of heart patients, scales can mean the immediate difference between cheap medicines and astronomically expensive hospitalization or life and death.
Patients in congestive heart failure have the great challenge of keeping their bodies from accumulating too much water. Heart failure disrupts the ability of the kidneys to regulate water retention and victims of this sinister condition sometimes end up retaining huge amounts of water, which makes the heart failure even worse. Most ominous for these hapless patients is the tendency of fluid to collect in the lungs when this condition gets out of control, causing the sufferer to nearly suffocate and drown.
If heart failure patients weigh themselves every morning before eating, they are then able to determine if their bodies are retaining too much water. If the scales indicate this to be occurring, these dear people can become proactive, adjusting their medications and avoiding an acute crisis that could put them into the hospital intensive care unit or worse yet, into that small cold marble room by the back door of the hospital.
Sadly, many victims of congestive heart failure are elderly, quite frail, and often possessed of rather poor vision. They may have scales but lack the ability to safely get onto the scales without falling. They may be able to get onto a set of scales only to find the numbers unreadable, rendering useless their important warnings. It is a tragic reality that many of these patients are aged, living alone, and without anyone to help them get on the scales or to read the numbers. Every year we have hundreds of these people admitted to our hospital for acute heart failure that could have been avoided, if there had been someone to assist them, to heed the warnings in time.
It occurred to me that we are living in an era of desolate prosperity where people have been able to buy privacy and isolation which has resulted in their becoming prisoners and victims to the loss of community inter-dependence. People live alone, not needing each other during the good times. In the bad times, no one is there. The scales go unread. The results are often catastrophic.
In matters of the soul, ignoring the warnings can be horrendous. As with heart patients, there is a period of time when a proactive response is essential. Jesus told us that the light would be on us for but a short time and then darkness would overcome us if we did not move with the light. In the darkness we cannot heed the admonition of the scales.
In the spiritual realm there is a process nearly identical to heart failure that is going on in all of us: sin. It's in our nature to sin and to do this a lot. Scriptures tell us that man is depraved in his soul. The wire service, daily news, and any two-year old child will confirm this to be so. We retain the vileness of sin in our souls. In these times of material prosperity we often delude ourselves into thinking we don't need God. Often heart patients will quit taking their medicines because they feel good. In an acute crisis they find out the error of their ways. So it is with people and God during the good times. They so often stop taking Him seriously. Unexpected death may pre-empt opportunities for obtaining cleansing of their souls. The consequences could last for all eternity.
The Law of God was given before the foundations of time as a measure, as a set of scales, as a basis to judge our merits. The true precarious state of our condition is revealed. The Apostle Paul, acting on high authority, pointed out that every last one of us has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. He got on a roll, and at the risk of causing offense, told us that the wages of sin is death. It would seem that in the eternal scheme of things, we all have earned nothing more than a place in the cold marble room.
But it turns out the Great Physician had another idea. He sent His Advocate to help us find healing for the perilous condition in our souls, if we do it now. Jesus came to read the scales and to tell us what we need to do to avoid an acute crisis in our souls; how to go on to experience ultimate health; to be admitted to Heaven rather the Hospital.
"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life."
It's human nature to think more of ourselves than is sometimes warranted, particularly in our performance-driven image-oriented culture. We like to consider ourselves fast learners, loving, intelligent, accepting, and on top of life. It's a real struggle to admit that something eludes us in our learning and growth, especially if we had been thinking we already had it 'in the bag.'
Several weeks ago I had one of those benevolent near-epiphanies of self discovery in which I was eased into a great self-awareness; one in which I learned I have a real problem with a critical spirit that quickly slices and dices anyone failing to pass first muster. I learned I'm often anything but loving and accepting. It was a hard bit of learning but I thought I had it nailed at last. Wrong! My contentment and smugness were short-lived.
Last week my very cherished and gentle friend Janice came a great distance to South Carolina for opening night of a musical comedy I helped produce. Janice is a great champion of my writings and my efforts at creating theatrical illusion and fantasy. Happily, I provided her hospitality in my wannabe B & B for the weekend. In spite of her being run off the road by a rather aggressive and mean-spirited driver of an eighteen-wheeler and getting quite disoriented in unfamiliar terrain, she had a splendid time here and pronounced the highway terrors a small price to pay.
During the past week I had noticed a wrist watch in the kitchen on the back of the sink. Assuming Janice had left it here during the weekend, I figured to return it to her by mail. I was cleaning up a week's worth of neglect in the kitchen this morning and happened to look more closely at this timepiece while moving it to my catch-all table in the den. I realized I would probably have to return it to her by armored car. I was astounded when closer examination revealed it to be a woman's diamond-studded Rolex time piece.
Was I happy that she had an opulent possession like this? Was I happy that someone unknown to me had gifted her with this? No! In my own secret way I was far meaner that the truck driver that ran her off the road on a ominous foggy night. To the driver Janice was an anonymous stranger in the night, in the way of his quest for faster profits. To me, Janice has been a well-known joyous source of happiness and encouragement. Yet, in my well-rehearsed self-righteous way I drew all manner of conclusions about Janice's integrity, her recklessness with money, her willingness to sacrifice her welfare on the high altar of consumerism. I wondered about her duplicity in agreeing with my pronouncements about the need for all of us to consume less while wearing a $20,000 portable clock. How could someone really want to encourage little kids about simpler living while teaching them piano and yet be caught wearing this ostentatious symbol of reckless consumption?
It is indeed fortunate for unnamed defendants that I have never been called to serve on a jury and that I never picked a career in investigative journalism. In my critical modus operandi I never bothered to get all the evidence before passing judgement and nearly imposing sentence on Janice. I learned again today in another brilliant flash of scrutiny that I have really learned almost nothing about reserving judgement until all the facts are in. I have learned less than nothing about the fact that judgment isn't for me to make, even with all the facts. Only God has the wisdom and mercy to pull that off.
There have been those times when I would have given anything to be able to touch fingers with another's thoughts, to have performed a Vulcan mind-meld. Then there are those times, like this one, when I am grateful beyond measure that the dark rancid thoughts of our foul spirits can be safely locked beyond the reach of our unwitting victims. Happily, Janice was spared even knowing the offensive thoughts that I allowed to become embedded in my life for a day. She certainly deserves far better than those she got from me yesterday in my dark musings. She certainly deserves better friends.
Today I called Janice. I casually mentioned I had found an opulently expensive Rolex in my house and wondered if it could possibly be hers since she had not inquired about it. I, of course, would expect someone who has lost a $20,000 pearl of great price to be frantically seeking it out. So would Janice, it turns out. She broke out in gales of hysterics. Her $20,000 Rolex museum piece turns out to be a $40 'knock-off' her son had picked up for her in New York. I had been completely duped and I thought I knew the real thing when it came to fine arts and the like. Wrong again. Happily, we shared much amusement and laughter over this and she told me of the truly hilarious acts of theater she has been able to pull off with this $40 imposter. I asked her to have her son round me up a Rolex of my own, for $40. After all I do theater as a hobby.
But, there was no laughter when I got off the phone with this dear friend. I had the horrific realization that I had condemned her in my thoughts, had sentenced her, and was ready to impose my self-righteous penalty. What was absolutely convincing to me as a 'case' against her proved to be, in fact, without merit or fact. What is merely a bit of costuming for some happy theater in her life was for me a basis for a groundless indictment.
In the past I have often been left in wonderment at how rapidly people have disappeared from my life. Did something I have or something I said lead them to a groundless indictment of me? Did they treat me exactly the same way that I nearly treated Janice. More importantly, did some of these people make a correct read on my true nature and simply spare themselves the heartbreak of false condemnation? Smart people if they did.
I was duped by a $40 imposter. Worse yet, I have been duped by a condemning attitude that could have cost me something far more valuable that the grandest museum piece in the world. I only hope that Janice is what she seems, far more charitable than I and a whole lot more accepting of people, warts and all.
Peter was making inquiry of Jesus one day and asked him just how many times we should forgive people. Matthew's gospel records this snippet of dialog between them. "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?" Jesus told him "I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven."
For my sake, I hope my patient gentle friend has read this part of the book and isn't counting.
Puzzles
This morning while dressing for work, I was digging through a dresser drawer in desperate search for a safety pin. I never found one but I did come across something probably more important in the long run; a fine post card from the French Alps that had been cut up into a twenty-piece jigsaw puzzle. I had not looked at this card in years as the assorted parts were scattered in the bottom of one of those drawers containing what mathematicians would call a 'strange attractor.' There were a lot of weird archeological curiosities from my past mixed in with those puzzle pieces. I had long forgotten who the card was from but had saved the fragments for inexplicable reasons of sentimentality that were once logical.
Today on impulse I took the two minutes required to reassemble the pieces to see who the message had been from. It turns out that some fifteen years ago a missionary friend had sent me a splendid hand-written missive of encouragement on the back side of an action photo of an Olympic alpine skier. It made a nice memento and contained more than a bit of this young woman's soul. It certainly did merit being archived in my drawer during this past decade and a half. However, there was a small problem with the card today. The twenty-piece card was now made up of only nineteen pieces. One of the corner pieces had slipped off into a cosmic discontinuity and is now lost to me. The message was all there but the card is incomplete. All I could see was that which was not there.
This got me to thinking about how people so easily focus on deficiencies and imperfections. One time last summer I was riding on a train through Georgia and saw a Baptist Chu ch. I well remember this chu ch but have no memory of the other churches I must have seen that sultry day on my three-hundred mile journey. That small lack had made an unforgettable impression in my memory.
I was in Florida five years ago and one day while wearing one of my very favorite shirts, a red ink pen leaked in the pocket. I was aghast. All I could see of that shirt was a vast vermilion ocean of unwanted indelible ink. Making a typical dress shirt requires some two yards of material or approximately 2,600 square inches. That crimson ink spot covered approximately a half inch circle, or less than 1/15000th of the total area of cloth on my shirt, yet I saw nothing of the remaining 14999/15000ths of my shirt. My first impulse was to view the shirt as ruined and a total loss. Certainly, if I had $150 invested and lost but one cent I would not feel financially ruined. The proportions are exactly the same. Why the puzzling difference in response?
Have you ever bought a new car and for months parked it at the far edge of vast parking lots so as to avoid getting a 1 mm by 4 mm nick from some self-absorbed, thoughtless, inconsiderate, clumsy fool driver lacking in basic appreciation of the unspoiled beauty of your fifteen-coat lacquer job? You finally tired of the long summer trek across the incendiary asphalt and started parking closer. You came back out to your car one blistering August day and finally found that vast 1 mm by 4 mm nick installed on the driver's door and you were suddenly oblivious to the remaining perfection of the other 99.99999999% of the painted surface. Your world melted down. Why?
At one time I lived in an elegant condominium with perfect white carpets. Being the hospitable type, I gave a Christmas party one year to which an uninvited drunk stranger showed up. He promptly spilled a large glass of burgundy wine in the center of the living room carpet. Do you think I saw anything else the rest of that night besides that maroon insult on my sensibilities? It didn't help at all that this sotted party breaker laughed following his mis-adventure.
The Old and New Testaments are just that, testaments to the fact that humanity has gotten itself into a whole lot of trouble during the past several millennia. The world's newspapers chronicle the fact that this is only getting worse. Uncounted hundreds of millions of people have been put to death in this century alone merely because they were judged as missing something, being of the wrong color, having different beliefs, being damaged goods. As I write, millions in Algeria live in abject fear of the hideous genocide going on in that country to kill those that are different or lacking in some proscribed trait. Neo-Nazis in Germany kill people in wheelchairs. Whites kill blacks because they are blacks.
It seems to be the nature of people to find flaws in things and each other. I can do this with the best of them. I once lost interest in a woman because her hair was thinning in front. It didn't matter that she was probably one of the most ethical and moral people I had ever met. Fortunately, she is now happily married to someone more accepting than I was. A woman colleague of mine recently met a man through a dating service and told me she found him "really quite nice" but unacceptable because he had too much space between his teeth!
In our fallen state we throw away shirts with a small spot in a large expanse of unstained cloth. We insult the integrity of a stranger's mother when we find an unintended tiny nick on the door of a new car. We throw away a 1,500 piece jigsaw puzzle of a magnificent alpine vista because a single corner was lost. In our consumer culture we throw away an entire TV in a fine cabinet rather than finding and replacing the failed ten-cent diode in its power supply. A neighbor discards her microwave oven because she doesn't want to clean it. We abandon a spouse of many years because of one misdeed.
There is a Kingdom where no deficiencies are to be found, no corners missing, no nicks in the transparent gold. The New Testament assures us there will be no problem with orthodontic alignment or thinning hair in that place. In that Kingdom we can expect perfection. Yet, the only way to get there is to acknowledge and accept the imperfections and deficiencies that exist in this realm and in each other, here and now.
It is a good thing that Someone was able to see beyond the missing corners, crimson spots, and nicks in our hearts and souls, beyond to that in each of us which was made in His image. He came down and was nicked by man. He made a vast crimson stain with His own blood on the earth that we might find the true acceptance for which we long. Perhaps we might learn from his example.
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Provision
Heat of day continuing for a season,
late afternoon promises cool of evening.
Summer's solar fury begins to abate,
shadows extending across incandescent asphalt.
Ascending the serpentine mountain road,
the unseen summit promises breezy refreshment.
Tangled briars give us pause,
photosynthetic magic is afoot.
Reaching in, cautiously, ever so slowly,
pendant clusters of stellar fusion abound.
Taking my cap off to Heaven's bounty,
it become a generous horn of plenty.
With grateful hearts we commune,
giving thanks for fruit of the vine.
Like a blackberry?
Final Flight
Settling in cramped confines, no leg room,
long turbulent flight into night looms.
Turbines powering up for take-off roll,
unseen force weighs heavy on your soul.
Pitching forward into brooding ebony sky,
with apprehension, you ruminate. Why?
Future, forever transposed in elapsed memory;
time's a cruelly inverted present paradox.
Hourglass sands have nearly fallen,
life's fantasies freeze, fracturing.
He shall raise up His own in the twinkling of an eye.
Scales
In a world where forty million die annually from starvation, tens of millions of Americans will spend a billion dollars this month losing the pounds they gained back last month. This in a country where it has been estimated that half of all food is wasted, spoiled, and discarded and where a quarter of women have severe eating disorders such as anorexia and or bulimia. Many of my friends give testimony to having lost hundreds of pounds over decades of tortured dieting and having spent tens of thousands of dollars to pay for their torments. They describe the complete ruptures to their social lives as a result of obesity.
Once a week many of these agonized souls go to their local Healthy Weigh, Inches-A-Weigh, or Physicians Weight Loss Center for a heavy reckoning: weigh in. With trepidation, they ascend onto the scales to learn if they have fallen off the wagon once more and been duped again by the view that just one little bite won't make any difference. For these defeated beings, toxic shame erodes self-esteem and confidence. Excess so often produces the same barrenness of soul that scarcity yields. The numbers on the scale simply state the facts, not mincing anything.
Scales can give us 'bad news' but they can save our lives. We can take to heart the high numbers as a stern warning that we need to do something to keep the priceless treasure of good health from slipping away. Or we can ignore them and obtain our just desserts. For a large group of heart patients, scales can mean the immediate difference between cheap medicines and astronomically expensive hospitalization or life and death.
Patients in congestive heart failure have the great challenge of keeping their bodies from accumulating too much water. Heart failure disrupts the ability of the kidneys to regulate water retention and victims of this sinister condition sometimes end up retaining huge amounts of water, which makes the heart failure even worse. Most ominous for these hapless patients is the tendency of fluid to collect in the lungs when this condition gets out of control, causing the sufferer to nearly suffocate and drown.
If heart failure patients weigh themselves every morning before eating, they are then able to determine if their bodies are retaining too much water. If the scales indicate this to be occurring, these dear people can become proactive, adjusting their medications and avoiding an acute crisis that could put them into the hospital intensive care unit or worse yet, into that small cold marble room by the back door of the hospital.
Sadly, many victims of congestive heart failure are elderly, quite frail, and often possessed of rather poor vision. They may have scales but lack the ability to safely get onto the scales without falling. They may be able to get onto a set of scales only to find the numbers unreadable, rendering useless their important warnings. It is a tragic reality that many of these patients are aged, living alone, and without anyone to help them get on the scales or to read the numbers. Every year we have hundreds of these people admitted to our hospital for acute heart failure that could have been avoided, if there had been someone to assist them, to heed the warnings in time.
It occurred to me that we are living in an era of desolate prosperity where people have been able to buy privacy and isolation which has resulted in their becoming prisoners and victims to the loss of community inter-dependence. People live alone, not needing each other during the good times. In the bad times, no one is there. The scales go unread. The results are often catastrophic.
In matters of the soul, ignoring the warnings can be horrendous. As with heart patients, there is a period of time when a proactive response is essential. Jesus told us that the light would be on us for but a short time and then darkness would overcome us if we did not move with the light. In the darkness we cannot heed the admonition of the scales.
In the spiritual realm there is a process nearly identical to heart failure that is going on in all of us: sin. It's in our nature to sin and to do this a lot. Scriptures tell us that man is depraved in his soul. The wire service, daily news, and any two-year old child will confirm this to be so. We retain the vileness of sin in our souls. In these times of material prosperity we often delude ourselves into thinking we don't need God. Often heart patients will quit taking their medicines because they feel good. In an acute crisis they find out the error of their ways. So it is with people and God during the good times. They so often stop taking Him seriously. Unexpected death may pre-empt opportunities for obtaining cleansing of their souls. The consequences could last for all eternity.
The Law of God was given before the foundations of time as a measure, as a set of scales, as a basis to judge our merits. The true precarious state of our condition is revealed. The Apostle Paul, acting on high authority, pointed out that every last one of us has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. He got on a roll, and at the risk of causing offense, told us that the wages of sin is death. It would seem that in the eternal scheme of things, we all have earned nothing more than a place in the cold marble room.
But it turns out the Great Physician had another idea. He sent His Advocate to help us find healing for the perilous condition in our souls, if we do it now. Jesus came to read the scales and to tell us what we need to do to avoid an acute crisis in our souls; how to go on to experience ultimate health; to be admitted to Heaven rather the Hospital.
"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life."
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