My favorite line in the movie The Usual Suspects is the one where Kevin Spacey says “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.”

This Christmas, the world has got some issues to deal with. Families living in poverty and starving for lack of a milk goat. The aftermath of Hurricane Patricia. But what are Christians upset about? 

The Starbucks red cup.

I have a message for my fellow Christians – quit it. It is NOT Starbucks' responsibility to remind people that Christ was born to save us from our sins and reunite us to God. That responsibility belongs to the church and its members. It belongs to you. So really, you're upset that Starbucks isn't doing your job for you.

The red cup, to you, is a symbol of the fact that everywhere you look people are trying to avoid the story of Jesus, to take away its relevance. Guess what? That is not new. The world has never embraced Christ. John 1 says “10 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.”

As Christians, we will always have to fight to keep the gospel relevant. Getting angry over the Starbucks red cup is not how you do it. It is a distraction. Distraction comes from the devil to keep you out of the real fight.

In Matthew 23, Jesus rebukes the teachers of the day by saying that they clean the outside of a cup, but leave the inside full of greed and self-indulgence. That they strain out a gnat, and swallow a camel. In other words, they were all about appearances, and because of that they were missing the point.

If you are upset about the Starbucks red cup, you are missing the point. Instead of focusing on the outside, think about what's on the inside. A four dollar cup of coffee that you can make for 20 cents at home. What if you took that money and instead bought a goat for a needy family in Botswana. Packed a shoe box for Operation Christmas Child. Donated to disaster relief. Here's a link to Samaritan's Purse, where you can do just that.  http://www.samaritanspurse.org/ 

Instead of focusing on all the ways the world ignores the gospel, be a keeper of the gospel. Read the story of Christ's birth to your kids to remind them why you are celebrating this special season.

Don't let Satan distract you with little gnats when you've got camel-sized problems to deal with. Instead, keep your eyes on the work that God has tasked you to do.

“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

Surgery as a metaphor

Sometimes, in the process of self-discovery, we discover things about ourselves that we do not like.

Maybe it's an obsession, a pet peeve, a love or hate, a habit, a moral...

Maybe it's nature, maybe it's nurture... regardless of where it came from, it's there. And it's a part of who you are.

Like a bad bowel.

When you have a bad bowel, you can't eat very much. You have little energy. Everyone tells you "it's normal, it's stress, it'll go away."

It doesn't go away.

You go to a doctor with a long, Indian last name who pokes and prods your abdomen and and asks you, with a wooden-sounding accent, to describe your bowel movements.

When you have a bad bowel, they stick cameras up and down your various orifices, take your blood and signature, give you pills and directions, and then send you to a surgeon in San Francisco to have the bad bowel removed.

It's a strange thing, actually. Something you were born with is bad for you. It is harming you, and in order to preserve the rest of yourself, it must be removed from you....


...BY A COMPLETE STRANGER?!?

That's right, sports fans. A complete stranger is going to take a knife to your person. They don't know who you are. They don't know your religion, your mother or father, your past relationships, your collection of vintage playing cards. They know neither the nature or nurture that brought you to their operating room.

They just know how to take bad bowels out of good bodies. You can't help, you can't even watch. You have to take a nap and trust them to not kill you while you're asleep.

You wake up with three scars and a lot of pain. It takes three days before you can walk without someone to support you. At the end of a week, you go home. At the end of a month, you are reveling in the freedom to eat and do and live as you couldn't before.

What a metaphor.

Pick an issue. It could be of the heart, the mind, the personality type. You've found it. It makes you sick. It is a natural part of you that threatens the rest of yourself.

However, all efforts on your own part to get rid of it fail. What now? Do you just accept it? Learn to embrace it as part of your person?

Bob Marley was right. You can't run away from yourself.


So if you can't change yourself... WHO CAN?

It goes against our grain to ask for help in a society where independence is the golden rule. We suffer our diseases for the sake of pride and privacy. Sometimes our glorified sense of independence becomes the ugly force that keeps us who we are.

Can you let go of a part of yourself?
Can you find someone who knows how to help you?
Can you trust them with your disease?

Can you learn to live without it.

The recovery is difficult and the scars are forever. But the pain is nothing compared to the joy of freedom.

Trust me.

Checking IN or Checking OUT?

Everyone has a right to their own opinion, but that does not make all opinions equal.

What do you think?

-Cheers

Gotcha videos VS real journalism

My background in Journalism may have lent a personal annoyance to this soapbox.

"Gotcha" videos are entertaining, but you have to watch out for gotcha artists that are going for clicks instead of fairness or truth.

This video does not reflect my personal opinions of Nancy Pelosi, Lois Lerner, the NSA or NBC. I am not defending either side of either controversy.

The point I'm making is in defense of REAL journalism.

I am not defending American news networks, I am not attacking civilian journalism. This rant is just a Socratic encouragement to analyze content objectively.

When it comes to news, go for education. Not entertainment.

check the mirror

What are the things that make you the most angry about the state of our government?

• They can't manage a budget
• They only care about their money and power
• They lie, steal and cheat

Really, we get mad at our government because we feel that it does not represent us, the people.

RIGHT?

Think about the fact that the economy crashed because the public can't manage a budget. That our prisons are overcrowded with people who lie, steal and cheat - things that I'm certainly not innocent of. Are you?

 Sadly, they represent us very well. 

How many laws do we need?

The astronomical number of laws in America - from building codes to taxes - is growing all the time. Is it helping to make our world a safer, more peaceful place?

Is there a ceiling to how many laws can be created?

Are lawmakers searching for that final law that transforms the Earth into Utopia?

If we could pare the number down, would 10,000 be enough to keep everyone in line?

Lets look at the numbers.

The nation of Israel began with ten laws

only six of which were social (the rest were religious)

which Jesus narrowed down to two laws

one religious and one social, which was

"Love your neighbor as yourself"


1 (one) law. That is all it would take to have world peace.

                     Think about it

Discover THIS

Self-discovery is underrated in society.

"What? No it's not," you say. "Look at all the ways people express themselves in music, clothing, hair color, and bumper stickers."

That's not what I call self-discovery. More like identity indoctrination.

Self-discovery is not for the timid.

You will find things you do not like, but cannot change, about yourself. You will like things that you're not supposed to. You will cross boundaries into stereotypes you do not belong, or maybe you will fit comfortably and predictably into an established stereotype and vanish to the public eye.

Congratulations if, when people look at your playlist and raise an eyebrow, you can say "What? I like that music."

Congratulations if, when people look at what you're eating and hold their breath, you can say "What? It's delicious."

Congratulations... and keep it to yourself.

Because when you turn to the person next to you with your latest insight into your personality and say "This is the thing about me" ... they may look interested.... but most of us are just being polite.

I sat at a bar one time and kept a tally of how many times a guy said "that's just how I am, people get upset because they don't understand that."

Really? Good job discovering that you are a rude person by nature.

I'm sure you'll have great success teaching the rest of the world to accept that about you and overcome their own natures to love you just the way you are. INSTEAD of learning to be polite.

It's very important to figure out who you are as a person. But the reward is private.

 Your next challenge is to understand the world... not make the world understand you.

Look at it this way: if someone cares, they'll ask. If you find yourself holding public lectures on the inside workings of your own psyche... your audience probably doesn't care.

Just so you know.

Twin types of separation

I once was nanny to twin boys, who I'll call Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum. Dee and Dum were not even two years old when they taught me an important lesson about Stuff. Since previous blogs have explored the nature of "Stuff Theory", this one is about the spirituality of Stuff.

Tweedle-Dee required several items in order to feel comfortable: pacifier, blanket, pillow, and sometimes a toy. When I read to him or carried him, I had to wrap my arms around the entire bundle of Dee and a combination of two or three of his necessities. You can imagine how difficult it sometimes was to tickle him. Just moving from the living room to the kitchen took extra time because I had to wait for him to gather all his things, which often tripped him up when he walked.

Tweedle-Dum, on the other hand, was extremely attached to only one tiny security blanket, a faded yellow square about 8 inches wide with the head of a bear at one corner. It didn't encumber his hands or feet because he carried it on top of his head. As he toddled around the house, sometimes it would slip down over his eyes and he would run blindly into things. When I picked him up, he would place the blanket on my shoulder and then lay his head down on it.

How much does that resemble we the stuff-lovers.

Sometimes we are held-up by a long list of things that we require to feel comfortable.
Sometimes it's just the one thing that we can't let go of.

How much do we look to God like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, running around holding onto our silly stuff that blinds and trips us when our greatest security is just being held in his arms.

A pacifier won't feed you, a tiny blanket won't protect you, a toy won't love you. God will, the rest is just stuff.

Confession of a blogger

You knew it was coming. Eventually bloggers would run out of things to blog about and then they would blog about blogging.

Blogging is like a new toy that the world got excited about, but few ever learn how to use effectively and most fall out of love with over time.

Remember the beginning of cell phones? When if your cell phone rang you HAD to answer it because you had a CELL PHONE and people could CALL you anywhere and WERE calling you and you could TALK to them right NOW.

Now, most often you see people reach into their pocket for their ringing device, check the number, and put it back. Eventually, we realized that the cell phone was freedom from one thing and tether to another.

Blogging is much the same. Blogs spring up from people who are eager to publish their thoughts, only to run out of thoughts within a year. Almost immediately, a blog begins to feel like a giga-pet.

Unfortunately, this doesn't stop people from continuing to blog anyways.

I began "New Eyes" as a class assignment, and kept it up out of the same self-absorbed sense that I was uniquely clever and the world was just waiting for me to share my thoughts. Of course, college can do that to you. So can being an American. So can being 20 years old.

Graduation arrived with speeches about soaring high, spreading the wings of our unmatched talent and wisdom that will carry us to whatever ends we can dream of now that we have overcome that hardest of all life's challenges: college.

And then the crash into the reality that not only does the world sail on without us at the helm... but we can't even get a job swabbing the deck.

It's not so bad, actually, to realize that you are not so smart. Or clever, or funny, or insightful. It's like catching a fairy and realizing that it is only a lightning bug... and you have squished it.

But the let-down is so quickly over shadowed by the incredible things that squished me, the bug who thought I was a fairy. Like a lunar eclipse on a freezing morning. Adele's perfect voice. A TED.com video about technology that can shoot mosquitoes out of the air with lasers. My own friends and family astonish me with their courage and determination.

Instead of enlightening my reader, I find that the one who needs new eyes is myself.

So after some time away, I am picking up this blog again, but now with the humility that comes from knowing that anything I say has been said better, and most of what I know I learned from you.

Looking back, moving forward

Looking back, I think, is a great way to move forward.

I'm sitting in a classroom, waiting for the kids to come in and scare me. Because I'm the new sub and they don't know what I'm doing here. And that only scares me because I don't exactly know either.

On the back wall there is a green chalkboard, on the side walls are cork-boards, and at the front of the class is a white wipe-off board next to a smart board. I wish I could use the smart board, but because the computer is down it's serving as a backdrop for the overhead projector. Progress. 

When I was a little kid, my mom set up a little school room in the basement of our house and hung a chalk board up on the wall. I remember being in fourth grade and thinking it was the cutest chalkboard ever. It was about five feet square, with a wooden frame painted a nice color - maybe blue, or yellow - and had a small lip at the bottom to hold chalk.

When Mom was hanging the chalkboard, it had chalk drawings on it already. Big round head-bodies that had crude faces and four long appendages stretching straight out where the ears and chin should be. There were also a few flowers and a sun. I thought the technique was ugly and ridiculous.

Then a sudden memory, like a dream, of drawing on a chalkboard in our old house when I was five. The dark hallway, a chalkboard so colossal I don't remember the edges, tiny nubs of chalk lined up on the lip like they were trying to fuse together into one useful piece. Stretching up on my toes to spread my imagination as far as I could into the black empty space.

It took months to reconcile the two chalkboards. I knelt down so that the lip was at eye-level, the way I remembered it, and confessed to myself that it was the same board. That I was once that small, and those were my own drawings.

It was humbling, but encouraging.

I am reminded how important it is that we leave evidence to look back on. To journal, to document, to draw, to photograph, to dialogue. When we feel lost, they are the maps that remind us who we used to be and who we are now.

And also give us clues to who we are becoming.

Mouse Traps

My parents had a rodent problem once. One morning, they found a tail in one of their mouse traps. It is not uncommon for a small animal to chew off an extremity to save it's life. Smart, right?

The very next morning, they caught a mouse without a tail. In the same trap. In the same place. With the same peanut butter for bait. The wound from the previous night barely healed.


Sometimes I am that mouse. Making the same mistakes, and then feeling really stupid for not having learned a thing since the LAST time my weakness came up and bit me in the butt.

Stuff Theory - how to corral stuff

"Do you know what the difference is between junk and stuff? Junk is the stuff we throw away and stuff is the junk we keep." 

Now that we've seen the definition of stuff and the reasons we keep stuff, this is just a small insight on how to corral stuff.

Think of stuff like you would dandelions. Endearing, cute, and capable of taking over your lawn. If you leave stuff alone, it will multiply. You can keep that from happening by recognizing where it multiplies and taking action when it starts to multiply.

Where stuff multiplies: Any flat surface not designated for other purposes. 

This includes window sills, chairs, the top of your television, and the corner of a room. Anything flat and unused is a breeding ground for stuff.

Most of the stuff has another place in the house that it can be relocated to. For the few things that don't have a place in the house, it's okay to have designated stuff areas. A basket on your dresser, or a drawer in the kitchen. That way, you know where it all is and how much there is.

HINT: Whatever size the designated stuff area is, it will get full. If you only want a little bit of stuff, only give it a little space. If it's the size of a paint can, that's how much stuff you'll have. If it's the size of a large room...

When stuff multiplies: nip it in the bud.

Choose a place where stuff gathers - like the kitchen counter. Take a mental picture of what the counter looks like when it has no stuff on it. Make it a point to get the counter back to that no-stuff condition on a regular basis. Daily, weekly, monthly, whenever you decide. Now apply that principle to every stuff-prone surface.

HINT: The more often you do this, the less it piles up and easier it is. Also, you will develop stuff-minimizing habits instead of stuff-multiplying habits.

My Father's Foundations

Dad pumped concrete for over twenty years. There was no dinner conversation he couldn't interrupt with "I had a dream last night that I was in my pump..." Often, when we were driving, Dad would point and say "I pumped those foundations over there."

In 20 years, Dad laid a lot of foundations. And being the contemplative kind of guy he is, it wouldn't surprise me at all if sometimes, standing amidst the growl of huge machines and the shouting of foremen, waiting for the next load of mud or inspecting a finished slab, Dad meditated on the concept of "foundations."

It wouldn't surprise me to know that was what he was thinking about when he came home at night - gritty, grimy, soaked with sweat, sunburned, calloused and tired - and ready to sit at the head of the table and teach his kids about politics, history, and business.

Maybe, when he dragged us out of bed before sunrise to water the garden or pull brush, he was thinking about the foundation of work ethic.

When he hammered every one of us with the golden rule, the foundation of respect.

When he prayed with us every night, the foundation of faith.

Three of us are on our own, and three are still at home. As we grow and begin to build our own lives, we can thank Dad for helping us start with a solid foundation to build on.
 
"Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock." -Matthew 7:24