U.S. skier Lindsey Vonn is a picture of exhilaration and exhaustion at the end of her gold-medal winning downhill run in Vancouver.
I’ve seen interesting responses so far by athletes depending on how things went for them in the last week and a half. First, you have Lindsey Vonn, who at the end of the downhill competition, knowing she’d scored a Gold Medal, wept and spoke from the heart about the difficulty and joy involved in winning. Her comments came in response to an NBC interviewer and I’m sure NBC is very happy to have that piece of footage in the archives.
On the other end you have Evgeni Plushenko, the disgruntled Russian figure skater, who so disliked the outcome in the men’s competition (he won silver, American Evan Lysacek won gold), that he fabricated a “platinum” medal which he said he really won for his performance in Vancouver. There was a picture of Plushenko on his web site holding the fantasy medal. It has since been removed.
Then you have Canadian women’s figure skater Joannie Rochette, who’s 55-year-old mother died suddenly in Vancouver, just two days before her daughter skated the short program. Her performance was characterized as courageous and stunning, especially because the grief-stricken skater posted her best scores of the year and put herself in contention for a medal.
The responses of humans to tragedy and success are unpredictable at times. It usually takes extreme situations, like putting it all on the line in a tense, high-stakes situation as with these athletes, to bring to the surface what’s really going on inside a person.
Biblical Job wasn’t an athlete, but he was a famous man of his day. Job 1:3 says “He was the greatest man among all the people of the East.” When disaster hit, everyone knew. Stripped of wealth and children, he is “comforted” by friends who infer that Job probably had done something evil during his life to warrant God’s wrath. Reading Job gives you a very intimate look at the heart of an ancient man. But you truly see what he’s made of. And so it is with our Olympic heroes and villains, who’s stories are played out on television for a worldwide audience.
Why is it that God takes us to such extremes, as in the case of Job? What good comes of it? Perhaps we become more in touch with our humanness. We are usually humbled – nothing like everyone seeing the deep underbelly of our emotional life to bring you to the earth. And more than that, it shows what fragile vessels we are, vessels that God desires to fill up with treasure for all the world to see. As long as we’re unbroken vessels, no one can see the beauty and power of what we possess. See 2 Corinthians 4:7-12 for more.
I have no idea if Vonn, Plushenko or Rochette are Christians, but we have gotten a glimpse into the inner life of remarkable people. Part of the legend of such people is the way they’ve allowed all of us into their lives. In smaller ways, each of us has that same choice. But will we allow God to take us into places where others might see our frailty and his greatness? The way we answer that question will determine whether we live Gold Mettle lives.
It’s been constantly overcast in the Midwest since mid-January so I was hunting on youtube for the Electric Light Orchestra’s Mr. Blue Sky to cheer things up a bit. Youtube is organized to offer other songs you might enjoy related to the thing you were searching for originally. So that’s how I came upon this song from the Discovery Channel, which is absurd, funny, touching and true, all in one little 60 second package. That’s hard to do so I tip my hat to the director, video editors and songwriter.
The commercial sings the praises of the earth and all that is in it, on it and above it. One of the things I really like is that, in sync with the overall mission of the Discovery Channel, they not only praise the majestic and awesome, but the not-so-grand, which includes stuff that often gets missed or purposefully ignored: creepy crawlies that some people prefer did NOT exist; destructive forces like tornadoes, hot magma and man – note the guy shooting a bazooka; “dirty things” which encompasses just about everything else. There’s video of fireworks over some barren plain and a great whale arcing and crashing into the ocean, so there’s the ooh and ahh factor too.
(By the way, I didn’t put the little ad at the end of the song about an energy drink – not my thing and I’m not recommending)
This cable channel promo inspired me to look up Scripture that acknowledges the wonder of creation. There’s good old Psalm 19,
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.
There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard. (v.1-3)
Then there’s Psalm 8,
O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
above the heavens.
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him? (v.1, 3-4)
But like most things in life, I started zigging in the middle of my zag. I thought about the tendency of man to praise the creation and forget all about the creator. It’s our default setting: “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.” (Romans 1:25, NIV)
I think the creation is magnificent. My son Mark always (and I do mean always!) thinks it cool whenever we see a grey squirrel on our porch although grey squirrels are as common as copper pennies. It’s the creation he appreciates and I have to admit, squirrels fascinate me too.
We see whitetail deer near our house. I know, some of you are thinking, “Deer – yummy!” and yes, venison burgers are part of God’s provision, but I’m thinking more about how they leap, run and glide, all with such effortless ease, like a leaf swept along by a breeze.
One year at the beach we found all kinds of sand dollars – whole sand dollars, not the ones you normally see crushed into shards by the waves. I felt like I’d discovered genuine treasure. There were hermit crabs congregating in tide pools left by the receding ocean. I had never seen hermit crabs outside of pet stores. My kids played with them, collected them, released them, recollected them, made mini-environments for them in sand buckets and thoroughly enjoyed them for a whole afternoon. It was amazing.
Even as someone who knows the creator, I can focus perhaps too much on what’s made versus the Maker. So I find this last Scripture ironic and beautiful in what it says: instead of receiving the praise, creation deflects it back where it belongs. And so, in closing, I offer one last psalm:
Praise the LORD from the earth,
you great sea creatures and all ocean depths,
lightning and hail, snow and clouds,
stormy winds that do his bidding,
you mountains and all hills,
fruit trees and all cedars,
wild animals and all cattle,
small creatures and flying birds,
kings of the earth and all nations,
you princes and all rulers on earth,
young men and maidens,
old men and children.
Let them praise the name of the LORD,
for his name alone is exalted;
his splendor is above the earth and the heavens. (Psalm 148:7-13, NIV)
Take some time to revel in the creation today, then revel in its creator. Blessings.
A couple days ago my reading plan had me going through Matthew 11. Lots of stuff in there: John the Baptist sending a delegation of disciples to check if Jesus really was the Messiah; Jesus praising John the Baptist; Jesus commenting on how people talked smack about John for being too strict and about him because he was supposedly too loose; Jesus not praising some Galilean towns where he did miracles but people didn’t respond to him and then finally his statement about the tired and weary coming to him and finding rest.
Tucked into this chapter, in three verses, is the truth that intersected with my other reading: “At that time Jesus said, ‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure. All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him’” (v.25-27, NIV).
People who study religious belief and faith in God have known for years that it’s much easier for a child to grasp and believe the truth about Jesus than it is for adults. According to Christian pollster George Barna (www.barna.org), about half of all Americans who ask Christ into their lives as savior do so before their teenage years (43%). Two-thirds of born-again Christians (64%) made that decision before they turned 18 and one of eight made a profession of faith between 18 and 21. These figures have stayed pretty constant in the twenty years Barna has studied Christian conversion.
But now enter the world of science. One of the books at my bedside the last couple months has been Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist’s Journey into Seeing in Three Dimensions. This is the autobiographical story of Susan Barry, a neurobiology professor at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass. It is not a spiritual book, but a personal book with a scientific context.
For the first 50 years of her life Barry could only see in two dimensions. She used other cues to figure out if something was near or far, say the height of an object compared to other objects in her view i.e. the bigger something was, the closer; smaller, than farther. But she had no sense of the space between things, near to far, up to down. Her other senses worked fine: she could feel three dimensions, smell, hear, taste, but as far as vision, everyone was a Flat Patrick . . . or Flat Annie or Flat Joey or flat microwave or flat map. Well, all maps are flat, but you get the point.
In her 40s Barry started experiencing new problems with her sight which led eventually to the office of Dr. Theresa Ruggiero, a developmental optometrist who specializes in vision therapy. Long story short: through the exercises she learned from Dr. Ruggiero, Barry’s eyesight transformed and suddenly she entered the strange and exciting world of sight that most of the rest of us take for granted. Barry’s eyes “opened” in a new way to grasp the wonder and beauty of creation, even in very simple things like snow falling, or the complexity of layers of tree branches. Barry’s joy in such sights is enough reason to read the book all by itself.
While Barry discovered that change is possible for adults, she did learn there is a difference in receptivity to change. She notes, “An infant nervous system may change its connections in response to any stimulus as along as it is very strong or repeated sufficiently” (p. 158). She cites an experiment with barn owls whose vision is altered with prisms. Barn owls use both hearing and seeing to hunt. The study showed that young barn owls automatically made adjustments to the conflicting data between their ears and eyes, whether they were being fed or forced to hunt. Adult barn owls would only make the adjustment if they had to hunt. Based on this and other studies, and her own experience, Barry concludes that the adult brain can be rewired, but only if there’s a significant behavioral motivation. And that takes me back to the Gospel.
By the time we get to adulthood our thinking is pretty well fixed about what’s important in life and how to best function. It takes something significant to get us to think otherwise or to consider a different point of view. My friend Mark said that his mother’s death when he was in his late 20s opened his mind to search for answers about the meaning of life and whether there was an afterlife. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that God has set “eternity in the hearts of men.” We have this vague notion that somehow we are eternal beings and that our deepest needs will only be satisfied by something eternal. But instead, we choose to fill the endless void with the temporary and ultimately unsatisfying. It takes something big to knock us loose of this way of functioning.
The New Testament book of Romans, chapter 1, verse 20, indicates that evidence of the existence of God is plenty available to anyone willing to look closely at creation. But, instead of acknowledging God, we would rather bury this evidence in the back of our minds somewhere and not deal with it. Or we actively seek to cover up the evidence with “worship” of anything but God – money, things, other people, career – and orient ourselves around this other thing instead of the Lord who made us.
In John 16, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit is working on the hearts and minds of every person in the world to convince them that they have done wrong, that their standard of goodness is not the same as God’s, and that there is a judgment for the gap between our goodness and God’s. It does matter. However, it takes the Holy Spirit to help adults see that the coming judgment is “behaviorally important stimuli” to borrow Barry’s phrasing.
To turn from our sophisticated adult pursuits and look to God for answers appears to us as “childish.” The “wise and learned” don’t really get the Gospel. Its old-timey, simplistic, archaic. But children don’t perceive the Gospel through that lens. They have open hearts and minds to hear the story of Christ as it is – the story of God’s incredible act of love toward mankind – without all kinds of American cultural baggage attached to it. If we can suspend our pre-judgments for just 10 minutes or so and read Jesus’ story and hear what the writers were saying something marvelous may happen – God may reveal his secrets to us. We may discover something that is not only satisfying to our emotions and spirits but also to our minds. We might gain a new level of sight, a 4-dimensional vision really, that gives genuine depth and fullness to our 3D lives.
Most of us are familiar with the traditional Christmas story, if at least because we’ve watched the Charlie Brown special since childhood. We know this story: a young woman (more likely a young teenager) is greeted by an angel who says she will have a baby even though she’s not married and has never been with a man. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you,” the angel announces. “So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35, NIV).
She and her husband-to-be travel to Bethlehem, the ancestral home of Joseph’s family, because the Romans are conducting a census. Mary goes into labor, but they can’t find a room, so they end up in a stable, more likely a grotto, where she gives birth to a son. Angels announce the birth to shepherds who visit baby Jesus. Three wise men from the east, known as magi, follow a star to the place where the little family is staying.
Herod pretends interest in the baby only to destroy him and tells the magi to report his location. An angel intervenes, telling the magi to go home by a different route. Another angel warns Joseph that Herod is sending men to find and kill Jesus and urging him to escape. Joseph heeds the warning and takes his family to Egypt till Herod is dead.
This is the Christmas story we know so well. Supernatural, hopeful, dangerous, wonderful. While Luke and Matthew do a splendid job of narrating the wonder and the peril of Jesus’ birth, two other versions of the Christmas story put in grander relief the cost and the risk.
The New Testament book of Philippians started as a letter written to a church in northern Greece. In chapter 2, Paul is addressing the behavioral code that ought to guide their thinking as they interact with each other. That code is simple to state and difficult to live: follow the example of Christ. As he explains what this looks like, Paul refers to the costly love of Christ, but in doing so he has to pulls the lens way back from the cross all the way to before the dawn of time:
Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped (i.e. held onto),
but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness. (Philippians 2:5-7, NIV)
I asked a group of junior high kids if any of them would want to become babies again. One kid said, “Yes, because of the freedom” to which the other kids responded, “What freedom? When you’re a baby you go wherever your parents want you to go!” All the rest said, “No way.” Here they were, 12 and 13 years old, and none of them really wanted to return to infancy, even though they had all been infants at one time. At age 47, as much as I sometimes want to curl up in a fetal position, I really would not choose a return to babyhood.
Imagine then that you’re God, endowed with infinite power, living in a perfect environment of love, good health and no danger, possessing a fullness of life and glory we can’t imagine. And He chooses to take on our form, which, as for all of us, started out dependent on his parents, unable to sit up or speak, naked. He chose to limit the use of his own powers as a man, so he didn’t turn himself invisible when Herod’s thugs appeared. He counted on Joseph and Mary to get him out of Bethlehem. How costly and risky was this move by God to come down here that first Christmas.
Then there’s one other telling of the story, in Revelation 12:
A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. (v.1-5a)
In general, scholars don’t really believe the woman in this passage is Mary, but that she represents the people of God, who in the Old Testament were the Jews, and in our day is the church, which is made up of people from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds. But the occasion is the same: from his people, God brings forth a son, an event we celebrate as Christmas. But immediately, the fate of this child is endangered by the dragon. It sheds new light on the action of Herod, who was plenty paranoid and hungry for power anyway, but who was also influenced by the enemy of God to attack Jesus. Later in Rev. 12, John identifies the dragon as the devil or Satan, the one who leads the whole world astray.
This is a frightful picture. Why would God, who created Satan in the first place, put himself in the line of fire like this? Satan hates God. Satan didn’t start out bad but he chose arrogance and pride over following the Lord. But God, because of his great love for us, made himself vulnerable to his greatest enemy. There’s nothing more vulnerable than a baby, and this is the way God chose. On Christmas day. There is a mystery to this, and I must be honest, I don’t fully comprehend that level of love. It’s hard for me to make myself vulnerable for the sake of those I know and love well, let alone my biggest adversary.
I pray these other perspectives on the Christmas story inspire you this season to reflect on the astonishing generosity and sacrifice of Jesus to join us in our humanity. One more reason to join with the angels, who broke out in uncontrolled praise, saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests” (Luke 2:14, NIV). Peace to you and Merry Christmas.
God has a million ways to remind us that he’s the one who knows what’s really going on. In the last few months he used my mother-in-law’s 15-year-old car to teach me that lesson afresh.
Last year we gave our oldest son a car. Granted, it’s an “ancient” car by current standards, a 1994 Ford Taurus. It belonged to my mother-in-law Lois and when she died in 1997 we inherited it. But until we gave the car to David my wife Julia drove it between home and work for many years.
There’s rust along the wheel wells and the engine has a whirrr-putt-putt . . . whirrr-putt-putt rhythm when it idles, like a person with lung problems catching his breath after going to the mailbox. Once David puts the engine in drive, it hums along pretty well, and for his purposes – mainly getting to school and back home again – it gets the job done.
Then a few months back Old Bessie wouldn’t start in the morning. I watched nearby as David put the key in the ignition and tried to turn it over. Absolutely dead. Here was a chance to teach David about using jumper cables, I concluded. I showed him how to attach the cable clamps on the battery terminals; we waited a few minutes and grandma’s sedan turned over just fine.
The 1994 Ford Taurus. In 1992, the Taurus became the best-selling car in the U.S.
David then showed me how his driver side door wasn’t closing all the way unless he really slammed it. The vinyl interior was separating from the metal frame. I chalked the dead battery up to that, said goodbye and told him to call me if the battery croaked again.
Later that afternoon I got a cell phone call near the end of David’s school day. Off to the high school I went for another lesson in attaching jumper cables. Once home again, I drilled holes and drove screws between the vinyl interior into the driver side door, thinking this would solve the drained battery problem.
Next morning: kaput again. Hmm, was the door not closing right? No, the screws were still in place. This process of charging and recharging went on for at least another day before I had enough. At that point we took the battery out, had it tested and decided to buy a new one.
David and I installed the new battery on a rainy afternoon. A totally rusted and obstinate hold-down bolt made the job more involved than it should have been but I’ve come to expect that with any car repair or house fix-up project. It’s the old 1.5 rule: multiply the time you think a project will take by 1.5 and that will be the actual time required. I chalked it up to a good father-son experience.
Things went OK from the end of the week to the following Tuesday. But then David popped in the front door that Tuesday morning, exhaling a familiar huff-sigh sound that means he’s getting frustrated. We jumped it again and I vowed we’d take it to Dye’s Auto Care if she died again in the afternoon. Which she did.
The friendly folks at Dye’s checked her out. Bill Dye said the alternator looked like it had suffered a heart attack. Finally, a solution. They replaced the alternator. Problem solved. Good feelings emanating. Mission accomplished.
Then, about a week later . . . well, you know already. Back to Dye’s in the afternoon. They tested it and tried to get it to fail, even keeping it overnight to see if it would conk out on them and they could deal with the issue. Nope. They didn’t charge by the way, so grateful for that. How come cars will work just fine sometimes when they’re at the mechanic? Is it like the kid who suddenly starts feeling better on the way to the doctor because they know what’s coming? OK, yeah, I was beginning to lose my mind.
Confident Dye’s had done everything they could, and trusting in their knowledge and expertise, we took the car back home. And the next morning Old Bessie was lifeless.
There comes a moment after I’ve hit a wall for say the fourth or eighth or twentieth time, depending on my stubbornness level, that I actually experience a strange sense of peace. I completely attribute this to my relationship with Christ. By the time I’ve tried half a dozen approaches to something and there’s still no answer I realize I’m in the middle of a God moment and the only thing I can do is sit and wait. I’ll let one of my favorite authors, Watchman Nee, explain:
Most Christians make the mistake of trying to walk in order to be able to sit, but that is a reversal of the true order. Our natural reason says, If we do not walk, how can we ever reach the goal? What can we attain without effort? How can we ever get anywhere if we do not move? But Christianity is a [strange] business! If at the outset we try to do anything, we get nothing; if we seek to attain something, we miss everything. For Christianity begins not with a big DO, but with a big DONE. (Sit, Walk, Stand, p.14, Tyndale House, 1977)
Of course Nee is not talking about automobile repair, but about how salvation takes place, that it isn’t a matter of doing anything, like going to church faithfully, putting money in the plate every week, or saying nightly prayers. None of that makes us Christian. We have to simply welcome Jesus into our lives, like opening the front door and saying, “C’mon in,” and believe his death takes care of our very real sin problem.
Even though I decided well over 20 years ago to welcome Jesus in, I continue to have experiences where God reminds me to “sit,” to trust in him to provide a solution where there is none, to create a highway through my current Red Sea. Now, a constantly dying Ford Taurus may not seem like much of a Red Sea, but these lessons come in small and large packages.
On the morning David’s car conked out again, I realized I was helpless to resolve this. I had prayed about this Taurus trouble before but I put the situation in God’s hands in a different kind of way this time. This is You Jesus is where I landed. That’s a humble, surrendered and dependent place, not just a solve-my-problem place.
That afternoon, after driving to Beavercreek High School for the umpteenth time and retrieving David and Old Bessie, David and I looked again at the car door. Well, the screwheads had popped off and the vinyl interior was a little loose again. But that wasn’t the problem. David, hunting around the dash, discovered the real problem: Abraham Lincoln. There was a penny wedged into the base of the car’s cigarette lighter. “Do you think this is the problem,” David asked. “Yeah David that could be the problem,” I answered, realizing God had shown us a problem where no one, especially me, had thought there would be a problem. David attempted to dislodge the penny with a long, thin stick but sparks flew. I tried. Same result. It began to dawn on me that a penny stuck where this penny was stuck could slowly drain a car’s battery. Epiphany.
Eventually, between sparking and non-sparking times, David and I got the penny loose. I offered a tentative, “This might be it David” but in my heart I knew God had shown us the real trouble and the simple solution. Now, that doesn’t mean we didn’t solve some other very concerning problems with his car. But I guess it was a reminder that God is ultimately the one who knows what’s going on. Just like it says in Proverbs 3:5-6:
Trust in the LORD with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make your paths straight. (New International Version)
A lot of times he lets us go on and work things out without much regard for him. But on this one little issue he reminded me he’s in charge even of 15-year-old beater cars driven by my teenage son. He knows better than me.
The leave-a-comment contest: I’m trying to build traffic on my web site so I’m asking anyone and everyone I know to leave a comment when you visit my site. I’ll be notified if you do and will respond. You can leave comments after blog posts or on any of my pages i.e. at the end of the ”Articles” page or at the end of one of the chapters of my book. The 100th person to leave a comment will win an autographed copy of my book, What Does God Want Me to Do? If you already have an autographed copy, then I’ll come up with something else Thanks.
For the last two days (Nov. 16, 2009 at 1:30 p.m. to Nov. 18 at 2:30 p.m.) I’ve taken a cyber-vacation . . . from Facebook. Because of this pause I’ve been able to step away and think a little more clearly about Facebook and how I’m interacting with it.
I’m a fairly gregarious person and so I tend to thrive in situations where I can interact with a number of people, so Facebook is readymade for a guy like me.
I’m also a writer. I love (OK, maybe “like” is a better word) to express myself through the written word. Facebook is all about the written word, with some visuals tossed in.
Last, I’m a leader of a Christian small group ministry where understanding what’s going on with folks is really helpful in caring for them. Facebook taps into three of my key areas. If it were possible to download coffee from Facebook and run laps on Facebook (not virtual ones) I’d never leave home.
As a people person and a communicator, Facebook intrigues me. First, without trying hard at all I get an inside view of people’s lives. People share information on Facebook that it might take months to learn the hard way (i.e. face to face communication).
Facebookers post pictures of themselves, talk about families and friends, share about vacations and significant events, join interest groups, tell you about books their reading and reveal their angst, joy and inanity through status updates. It used to be said that certain people were “open books.” In other words, they shared about anything and everything in their heads and hearts, from facts to feelings. But now, because of Facebook, even “closed book” people are “open book” people.
I may be struggling with the way Facebook tries to reorganize my relationship categories. Typically I think about my social network in terms of family, friends, neighbors, co-workers. There are sub-groups of course: old friends, new friends, sports friends, blue friends (whoa! went Seuss-al for a moment, sorry about that).
Facebook is pushing my boundaries and, I must confess, I’m not sure what to think about that. Nowadays I’m connecting with classmates who, honestly, I didn’t know that well, or at all. Not that it’s been bad. I’ve discovered many followers of Christ in my graduating class. That’s good.
I’m reconnecting with friendships I thought were lost to antiquity. You know what I mean: there are some folks you manage to stay in some kind of rare but occasional contact with. But there are others who exist only as snapshots in your mind.
One of my Facebook friends is a guy like that. I’ve known him since elementary school. I hadn’t talked to him in 10-15 years. Now, however, I can look at current pictures of him and his two grown-up daughters. This isn’t right. He still should only be about 12 or 13 with a boyish face not a middle-aged guy with a mostly-white beard. I haven’t aged so why should he (insert smiley face emoticon here).
Then there are the friends of friends. In the good old days, you might meet Harvey at Joe’s cookout, exchange a few pleasantries, talk about what you do for a living, and that was about it, until Joe’s next cookout or maybe never. Now, if I agree to be Harvey’s Facebook friend, I can learn all kinds of deep, personal things about this guy who I had assigned, rightly or wrongly, to the “oh yeah, I remember that guy” category or, to be honest, “Harvey? Doesn’t ring a bell” category.
Because of Facebook I find myself communicating more with friends and neighbors than I normally would. I wouldn’t normally call up Fred if I’m figuring out what’s wrong with the car. But now, if I mention that I’m working on the car in a status update, he can send me the name and number of his mechanic or offer me advice about what to do. I don’t normally stop by and visit with George on a Monday afternoon but now we can have a whole conversation without either one of us ever leaving our homes. It’s kind of cool but kind of odd too.
One of the things that’s bothered me about Facebook is a sense of artificial closeness with certain people. I just wouldn’t hang out with some of these people that much if it weren’t for Facebook so why am I talking about how bad my back hurts with them now? Is that necessarily bad? Hmm, the jury’s still out.
There’s a new friend of mine, who I met in the real world first, who I’ve gotten to know better because of Facebook. I count that as a positive. I guess Facebook enables you to take off the mask with people, which I have to think is mainly a good thing. It allows you to get down to stuff you might not otherwise if you were seeing people just occasionally.
One of reasons I took time off was this sense that somehow, and I’m not 100 percent sure why, that Facebook was messing with my ability to concentrate. I don’t have a lot of insightful analysis here but I know this: I was right. I felt a tangible sense of calm after I wrote my status update announcing the break. We choose how much and in what ways to interact with social media, so I blame myself. Maybe I was getting overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of information available and allowing myself to get distracted, without really knowing it, from the things God wanted me to concentrate on. This doesn’t mean I’m getting off Facebook altogether but I’m thinking taking a time out now and then would probably be a good idea.
Out of my hiatus came this one certain thing, which I knew even before I took it: I need to pray each day before I get on Facebook. The tendency to just spill the beans, let out stuff that you might not otherwise, is very strong on Facebook. Whether it’s by phone, in person, email or through online social networking, this truth remains:
Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone. (Colossians 4:6, NIV)
I need God’s help making sure my status updates and responses are full of grace and an honor to God. I can still be real and express frustrations and hurts, but to do it guided by the Holy Spirit rather than by my desire to vent, be charming or look smart. Cause even on Facebook, one of the most temporal this-moment sources of information anywhere, my words have eternal significance, for good or bad.
You may not remember the Schoolhouse Rock videos but they were a staple of my Saturday morning cartoon diet. There, stuck between Scooby Doo, The Pink Panther, Land of the Lost (OK, I’m dating myself) and other great entertainment of my youth were these little educational ditties that have stuck with me to this day.
One of my favorites is the song My Hero, Zero.
Here are a few of the lyrics:
What’s so wonderful about a zero?
It’s nothing, isn’t it?
Sure, it represents nothing alone.
But place a zero after 1
And you’ve got yourself a 10.
See how important that is?
When you run out of digits,
You can start all over again.
See how convenient that is?
That’s why with only ten digits including zero,
You can count as high as you could ever go…
Forever, towards infinity,
No one ever gets there, but you could try.
Historians aren’t even quite sure when zero began life as a real-life digit. It’s beginnings are shrouded in mystery.
But how important nothing has come to be. Because of zero we can organize things in 10s and 100s and 1000s. We don’t have to keep coming up with a new symbol and number name for every number after 9. That’s pretty convenient. I’d even say brilliant. Computer language is made up of two numbers: zero and one. That’s it. Zero represents the absence of anything. “That guy’s a big zero.” Everyone knows what that means.
Zero is the ultimate servant. It’s nothing on its own but when it comes alongside another digit it adds value. Yeah, you knew this was heading for some kind of spiritual angle. Here goes:
Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himselfnothing, taking the very natureof a servant, being made in human likeness. (Philippians 2:5-7, NIV)
The New American Standard version says instead that Jesus emptied himself. The Greek word kenoo (keh-nah-oh) which is key to the whole phrase can be translated in the following ways:
to empty or make empty
to make void, deprive of force, render vain, useless, of no effect
to make void, cause a thing to be seen to be empty, hollow, false
The Apostle Paul was landing on the first two meanings. Theologians call this the doctrine of kenosis (there’s the Greek word again), which means that when Jesus became man he voluntarily gave up the use of his divine powers. This explains some of those puzzling passages like Matthew 13:58,
And he did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith.
Or in John 14:10,
Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.
Jesus chose a life of dependence on the Father just as his followers would in order to do anything of eternal, heavenly value. From ultimate power to voluntary self-limitation, Jesus opted for “zero” because of what that choice would do for us: forgiveness of sins, love forever, the Holy Spirit in our lives, God’s acceptance, adoption as God’s children, an intimate bond through the Holy Spirit with all others who have accepted God’s gift of love through Christ. His choice to zero himself out gave us access to riches beyond belief. See 2 Corinthians 8:9,
For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.
So, to circle around to where we started (kind of like a zero . . . hmm, I’m sensing a theme), I go back to the lyrics of the Schoolhouse Rock song,
Et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad astra, forever and ever,
With zero, my hero, how wonderful you are.
Jimwinkle? General Jim? Mooseketeer? The many sides of Jim Jinkins.
One of the upsides of doing a story is all the leftover stuff that never gets in the story. I may use 10 to 30 percent of an interview or use about the same percentage of all research I’ve dug up. That doesn’t mean the material left out is bad stuff. It’s often times great stuff but it doesn’t fit the focus of the article or the audience its intended for.
For instance, I’ve been writing a story for Thriving Family, a new publication of Focus on the Family. The story is on the role of humor to bring healing in family life. The target audience is parents with children ages 4-12. Well, I’ve talked to some wonderful people over the last month or so and gotten some great thoughts on this topic. One of those folks is my friend Jim Jinkins.
Jim is the creator of the cartoon, Doug, which appeared on Nickelodeon and then jumped to ABC. True secret: I loved watching Doug as much as my oldest son David. I’ve always been a sucker for animation. Along with business partner and long-time freind David Campbell he put together PB&J Otter and a bunch of other shows which you can check out at Cartoon Pizza. Pinky Dinky Doo is on the schedule at Nick Jr. right now and you and your kids can catch it there. Jim and his wife Lisa were kind enough to offer their thoughts on why humor in family life was a good idea.
In the course of their comments, Jim shared some hilarious stuff on how he used humor to get through the “Wonder Years”. I include some of that material here for your enjoyment:
When I was a kid I felt very much like the cartoon character Doug (No coincidence there!). I was not the smartest or the best athlete or the snazziest looking kid in school but I began to notice that I could get people to laugh. It quickly grew to become a favorite way to get in trouble with my teachers. Fellow classmates would get me to make up a new soundtrack to the boring health movies or revise the captions in our history books.
It also became my primary defense (and sometimes weapon) to protect me in the treacherous jungle of elementary and junior high school politics (and really throughout life!). In 3rd grade lunch period, Dennis Taylor bet me his ice cream that I couldn’t make Barry Schwartz laugh so hard he’d do a milk spit-take. I ate free ice cream everyday. Once I got Schwartz laughing so hard at some random comment about mystery meat that milk came out of his nose. For a brief time this elevated me to rockstar status at our table.
Well, Lisa Jinkins is pretty funny in her own right. She shared the following story in response to my question, “What do you think of this statement: Being able to laugh helps kids become resilient instead of hypersensitive.” (Thanks Kathy Hoffer for this comment from another interview). Here’s Lisa’s take:
If you can laugh at yourself, the situation, where you are at in life and what’s surrounding you, then you don’t have a chance to focus on just yourself. I remember walking down the street in NYC, pushing my grocery basket (that old lady kind, with wheels) and grumbling, thinking about how I had so much to do, and now I’ve got to go do the shopping, etc, etc., when all of a sudden the front wheels got caught in a crack on the sidewalk and, in almost slow motion, I fell forward over the cart!
I looked up and saw this guy watching me and I could see myself from his view – I must have looked absolutely crazy funny – slowly trying to stop the cart, one leg up in the air, fumbling and trying to catch hold of the air. Priceless! I thought how ridiculous I must look! I started laughing non-stop and of course, that allowed the guy to laugh and he asked if I was okay, etc.
OK, one last thing. I asked this question of Jim and Lisa, “What would you say to someone thinking, ‘Well, Jim Jinkins is funny but I’m not funny. I don’t have a sense of humor like that guy.’ Are there ways for the humor challenged to develop this in their family life?” This is Lisa:
Well, I’m not Jim Jinkins – and I can make him laugh!!! I must say, when I can make Jim laugh, really laugh, it’s so satisfying! Honestly, humor is anything that you find funny – it can be a dry, smart humor, slapstick, being a goofball and a good ol’ flatulence joke can crack up any boy, no matter what age! (and plenty of us girls, too!).
And Jim’s response to the question, “Can you develop a sense a humor?”
No, there isn’t. I’d say just give up. That’s it, I’m done! … You KIDS GET OUT OF MY YARD!!!
And as the saying goes, “B-deep, b-deep, b-deep, that’s all folks!”
Ever have a tune that just pops into your brain from seemingly nowhere and won’t go away no matter what you do? Well, maybe you can’t relate, but for the past couple of weeks one song has been spinning through my head, especially in the morning: Scenes from An Italian Restaurant. It’s classic Billy Joel. This song started out as two songs and then Billy combined them. Great stuff. Two old friends meet in a little Italian restaurant to catch up and reminisce about the old days. It’s the middle part of the song, the ballad of Brenda and Eddie, that has been fixed in my head the last few days. I love the lyrics:
Brenda and Eddie were the popular steadies
And the king and the queen of the prom
Riding around with the car top down and the radio on
Nobody looked any finer
Or was more of a hit at the Parkway Diner
We never knew we could want more than that out of life
How true! As young people it’s all about how you’re doing in the eyes of the crowd, how cool your car is, clothes are. OK, very shallow I know, but pretty simple too. And then life kicks in. What use to be a fun time now is a hard time because we’re not just riding around the diner, we’re trying to make a life together. Then, of course, there are the pressures that come from realizing you’re getting older. Did I make the right choice? Have I lived a good life? Have I made a difference? Enter kids to the equation and those questions get even more complicated: How are my kids’ choices affecting my legacy? What does my kid’s behavior and decisions say about me as a parent? And the older we get, the more those questions weigh on us quite heavily. That’s why the message of biblical Christianity has the potential to be so liberating:
“Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14-15).
Or there’s this from the Apostle John:
“Love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. There is no fear in love” (1 John 4:17-18a).
Lurking below the subconscious of every human being is this fear of what awaits on the other side of this life. We try to cover it up. We try to make life about riding around the diner. But it just won’t work. We know there’s more to it. In the end, Brenda and Eddie can’t keep it together and divorce in the same summer in which they are married. And as Billy croons:
Then the king and the queen went
Back to the green
But you can never go back
There again.
Adam and Eve couldn’t get back to Eden either. The only way forward is . . . forward. Will we go there with confidence in the peace we have with God or will we just keep ridin’ around with the radio on, trying to pretend it’s all fine?
Family life
Biblical Job wasn’t an athlete, but he was a famous man of his day. Job 1:3 says “He was the greatest man among all the people of the East.” When disaster hit, everyone knew. Stripped of wealth and children, he is “comforted” by friends who infer that Job probably had done something evil during his life to warrant God’s wrath. Reading Job gives you a very intimate look at the heart of an ancient man. But you truly see what he’s made of. And so it is with our Olympic heroes and villains, who’s stories are played out on television for a worldwide audience.
God has a million ways to remind us that he’s the one who knows what’s really going on. In the last few months he used my mother-in-law’s 15-year-old car to teach me that lesson afresh. 
Winter Olympics and the complexity of human emotion
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