Short messages of Insight and Inspiration

2007 - Series 2

1.  A “time out” for young children is one of the better forms of correction for their misbehaviors, and are especially effective when parents have lots of good “time ins” with our kids. In other words, the more a child values the good relationship and quality time he or she enjoys with a parent, the more impactful it is when that attention is removed. The recommended total time in a time out chair is normally no longer than a minute per year of age, so it certainly isn’t some kind of cruel and unusual punishment, and it’s also one that’s likely to work better when parents do some practice with their children ahead of time, when they’re not in the middle of some misbehavior, in order to teach the child what’s expected, and to remind the child that the time doesn’t begin until the he or she settles down and cooperates with the parent’s sentence. In one kindergarten class I read about, a teacher calls it a "better choice" chair, a time for a child to think through what he or she had done that was unacceptable and to think about the behaviors that would be more appropriate. Students sit in the "better choice" chair until they can tell the teacher what they did to get themselves in trouble and how they could have made a better choice.
In this way, instead of experiencing discipline as simply something that has children feeling resentful and angry, they hopefully learn to process and own their behavior and to consider ways of improving. That, after all, is the goal of all correction, to learn to do better.

2.  In a recent blog by Amy Ard of the District of Columbia called, I'm Harboring an Undocumented Person, she writes, “It'll feel good to get this off my chest: I'm harboring an undocumented person. Growing at the rate of half a pound each week, somewhere between my rib cage and my bladder, this interloper is preparing to make his/her grand entrance sometime in the next four to seven weeks - and for the life of me, I can't figure out whether he or she is a true-blooded U.S. citizen. Unlike many of our uninvited, hardworking guests currently in the United States, this little stowaway doesn't have so much as a library card for documentation. And what about this meaningless "birth certificate" I'll sign with the aid of my coyote (okay, midwife)? I've looked that document over, and as far as I can tell it doesn't offer any guarantee that this new citizen will be productive, good looking, or give a hoot about U.S. foreign policy. Do we really want such an unpredictable kid running wild on the streets of Washington, D.C.?”
Most of us feel conflicted about what our response should be to undocumented workers in this country, most of whom are here because their situation is so desperate that they feel they have no viable choice but to go wherever they can in order to find work to support their families. But until we have been in similar circumstances, it may be better not to rush to judgment on this issue, but to look for humane solutions that can respect the dignity and respond to the desperation of these neighbors in need. (on Jim Wallis and friends website)

3.  My Pittsburgh-based singer-songwriter son Brad wrote the following about a personal and family friend who took his own life after a losing battle with severe depression:
I know you saw no way out, but you didn't have to leave like this,
your soul consumed with pain and doubt, but you didn't have to leave like this,
  you didn't have to leave us wondering
  what we could've done, if anything?
I know you were suffering, but you didn't have to leave,
didn't have to leave like this.

you shone bright as any light, why'd you have to leave like this?
I see you when I close my eyes, why'd you have to leave like this?
  why'd you have to leave us mystified?
  we didn't even get to say good-bye,
how can so much life just die?  you didn't have to leave,
  didn't have to leave like this...
   
trade all colors in for black,
we love the one we can't get back, 
  I know you could've laughed again,
  it's not all right, I won't pretend,
I know this sickness killed you, friend, but you didn't have to leave,
  didn't have to leave like,
  didn't have to leave us wondering
  what we could've done, if anything?
I know you were suffering, but you didn't have to leave,
  didn't have to leave like this...

4.  Our second oldest son, away at work most days, is usually the one who gets to tuck his little daughter Madelyne into bed at night. From about two years of age onward one of the strange lullabies she’s requested most often has been Ave Maria, a beautiful Latin piece by Franz Schubert her father had learned for a Class Voice performance many years earlier in high school, with the words “Ave María, grátia plena, Dóminus tecum. Benedícta tu in muliéribus, et benedíctus fructus ventris tui, Jesus,” taken in part from God’s message to the young virgin Mary by way of the angel Gabriel, as recorded in Luke’s gospel, chapter one. Translated it is “Greetings, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women,” with the addition of Mary’s cousin Elizabeth’s words “and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.”
As the grandfather here, I’m pretty impressed by this nightly liturgy at my granddaughter’s bed, with her father conveying this profound kind of blessing, “Ave--Greetings--Madelyne, you, too, are full of God’s grace. May you, also, like Mary, be blessed among women, and may the fruit of every part of your life be a blessing to all the world.” That would be my greatest wish and fervent prayer for every child and grandchild in the world--to be loved and graced in such a way that blessings can flow from them to make the whole world a place filled with more of God’s love and light. So “Ave, every child, Good night and live well.”

5.  Our son and daughter-in-law took their young family on their first extensive vacation trip in late spring of 2007, when their first born was 2 1/2 and their second child only 7 months old. Along with their spending time with some of our daughter-in-law’s family in Alfred, New York, and with our daughter and husband and their two-year-old in Rochester, they visited a zoo, an aquarium and spent some time at Niagara Falls, where they had a spectacular view of the Falls from the multistoried Embassy Hotel. Upon their return, we were all shown the narrated video version of the trip. At the end of their little documentary, 2 year old Madelyne is interviewed as to what she liked most about their vacation. Was it seeing the elephants at the zoo? No response. How about the big fish at the aquarium? No answer. Then was it going on the Sky Wheel at Niagara Falls, a giant ferris wheel with  box seats and a breathtaking view of both the U.S. and Canadian falls? Still no response. So was it getting to play with cousin John Mark at aunt Joanna and uncle Chad’s? Still no answer. Finally she said just three words that summed up what she liked most about vacation, “Having Daddy home.”
When all is said and done, what children may value most is not where they get to go to, but who they get to go with and be with, and about enjoying more uninterrupted time with their parents, having Daddy and Mommy with them instead of away at work or elsewhere so much of the time.

6.  Among a rash of recent books opposing the idea of any faith in God is one written by an atheist, Christopher Hitchens, called, God is Not Great--How Religion Poisons Everything. In his view, and those of numerous other anti-religious writers and speakers, Muslim extremists, Jewish Zionists and activist members of the Christian right are all cut from the same cloth. Their violent behavior and intolerant ideas, Hitchens says, bolstered by their fundamentalist forms of religion, are behind some of the most dangerous global conflicts we face. “Religion kills,” Hitchens says, “pure and simple. Get rid of it and we’ll all be better off. “
In light of the Inquisitions and Holy Crusades some believers have engaged in, I can partly understand why some people feel that way, but I also wish that before they simply dismiss the Christian faith, that folks like Hitchens would reflect on the fact that its founder, Jesus, even though living in a land occupied by a hated foreign power, radically opposed the use of violence and commanded his followers to love their enemies--all of them--with no exceptions. And that his early followers, for example the outspoken New Testament writer Paul, who was converted from a life committed to killing people who didn’t believe as he did, became a mouthpiece and martyr for Jesus’ way of peace and reconciliation. And that all of the church fathers during the first centuries of Christian history spoke out against taking part in war and abortion and other other forms of violence. I’m thinking that if we Christian believers today are to have anything of worth to say to turned off atheists, we’d better get back to some of these basic and historic tenets of our faith.

7.  Gerald and Marlene Kaufman, authors of a great little book called, Monday Marriage--Celebrating the Ordinary, believe that much of the advice about marriage offered these days is misleading and even harmful, in that it creates expectations that are unrealistic and may be impossible for most couples to achieve in this life. The titles of the two sections of this down-to-earth book sum up its main points, Part One being about “Expecting Less,” and Part Two about “Giving More.” In my mind, that is a truly countercultural message in a day when we are told that pretty much everything we want should be fun, fulfilling, and easy to get, and that we can have all of this now, with little or no effort. The Kaufman’s write, “Our book is about marriage, to be sure, but it is more than that. Perhaps more than anything, it invites sacrifice, humility, and honoring God by serving our spouse, our children, and others.” They believe that expecting less in the way of instant gratification and focusing more on making others happy is the best way to experience a deeper and more satisfying life, and that happiness is really a byproduct of a life focused on living unselfishly. To experience that kind of maturity, they say, we may need to slow  down our pace, reduce the volume of the noise around us and focus on the things that really matter, like loving God and nurturing the well-being of our partner and others.

8.  My recent “insight of the month” is about the simple conclusion that every life decision is a love decision, that is, whatever we choose to do, or to say, or to buy, reflects what we truly love the most, what we consider most important to us at a given time. By instinct we all tend to be ego-centered, which means we love ourselves, and therefore love what gives us pleasure and happiness, that makes us feel most special and worthwhile. Nothing wrong with that except we’re tempted to put our own interests above those of others, and want to be seen as better than, as superior to, other people around us. We are also constantly being bombarded by message after message, ad after ad urging us to indulge in more and more things that appeal to our senses, to have us immediately buy the things we’d love to get our hands on, would love to own, and to have us think of our own needs and our own self-enhancement as ultimately important and being our perfect right. Jesus, along with many of the prophets before and after him, came to show us another way. Blessed, thoroughly happy, he says, are those who are poor, who are merciful, who love God with their whole being, above every other love, and who love their neighbor in need just as they love themselves, equally. All of which leaves me convinced that, for all of us, every life decision is a love-based decision, made on the basis of what and whom we love, and how much.

9.  Sara Glick, in a letter to the editor of our Daily News-Record of June 9, 2007, wonders whether we’ve been asking the wrong question in the debate over creation versus evolution, that we ought to be asking more about how we humans developed in ways other than just physical. For example, Where do our concepts of good and evil come from? In the animal world, killing occurs primarily for food and protection, she notes. Humans, on the other hand, seem to kill for greed, sometimes for the pleasure of it, or in the heat of anger. Why? On the other hand, she  asks, where does goodness come from? What is the source of ideals like justice... and self-sacrifice, beyond what is instinctual for survival? And where does creativity come from...an interest in painting, music and sculpture? Animals often communicate in quite lovely tones, she observes, but nowhere are these behaviors based on sheer aesthetic motivation. And where do our concepts of story telling and poetry come from, our concepts of God? the desire to know and understand history and of our origins? Even the highest order of animals is preoccupied with matters of present survival, not about what happened in the past, or about about developing creative visions of a new and better future. And where does our sense of conscience come from, our feelings of shame or guilt, our desire to do good, to be good men and women? All of these beg for explanation as to our origins as truly human beings.

10.  In an e-mail newsletter I get called the Ivy Jungle, there is a piece in the June 2007 edition called "Porn Driven, Look-at-Me Culture,” based on an Associated Press release, which says,  “The evidence of the mainstreaming of pornography is not hard to find in our culture today - from the provocative videos on YouTube to Myspace pages for adult film stars.  Some researchers and observers continue to express concern over the impact this may have on young people - particularly girls.  "Sexiness" has become very important to girls, the report notes, with an increasing push into outright raunchiness.  High school counselors frequently find themselves consoling teenage girls who have undressed and more in front of web cams.  Employers are increasingly implementing dress codes, and the American Psychological Association recently published a paper expressing concern about the sexualization of girls.  One of their observations is that while boys tend to use pornography and other aspects of sex for their own pleasure, most of the increasingly young women who exhibit provocative behavior are doing so to try to get attention and acceptance from others, and for the pleasure of someone else - often someone they don't know well (or perhaps not at all, thanks to the internet).  Some women claim this gives them more power with their sexuality, but many researchers are seeing a very negative impact - especially among teenage girls.  (AP June 4, 2007)

11.  According to a June 6, 2007, piece in the  Chicago Tribune, the prevalence of cheating among high school and college students may be at an all time high.  74% of business school undergraduates, according to one study, admit to having cheated at some point in college, compared with the 68% of the general student population. Students recognize that cell phone cheat sheets and writing answers on the insides of water bottle labels are obviously wrong.  However, some forms of cheating have become so common that many students don’t even recognize it.  In 2002, in another study, 40% of college students did not think "cut and paste" plagiarism from the internet was even moderate cheating.  47% of high school students do not think it is wrong to try to find out answers from others who may have taken a test previously.  While students become more creative in their cheating, many researchers say the problem lies beyond the classroom, with students simply emulating what they see as working in the "real" world. It looks like we nay have our work cut out for us as parents if we expect to produce a generation of young people who demonstrate consistent integrity across the board. For a start, we need to be sure we model it in the most consistent way possible, every day and in every situation, whether with people with whom we do business, our employers or employees, or the IRS. (Chicago Tribune June 6, 2007 sec. 1 p. 4)

12.  In my old age I think about the eternal realm more, not always with so many of the easy answers I once had, but with a sense of great mystery--as being about something simply “too good not to be true,” and about Someone whose universal presence is too obvious to be ignored, while at the same time as one too great to be fully known and fully comprehended in this life. I’m reminded of a cartoon in which two fleas are making their way through a jungle of dense hair and the one says to the other, "Do you ever wonder if there really is a Dog?" Maybe that’s a little like the perspective we have in pondering the mystery of what seems so imponderable from our earthbound perspective. After all, any Creator and Lord of the universe who could be easily known and all figured out would probably not measure up as one worthy of being named God.
I recently reread some of Kathleen Norris's book, Amazing Grace, in which she quotes Karl Rahner, "If God's incomprehensibility does not grip us in a word, if it does not draw us into his superluminous darkness, if it does not call us out of the little house of our homely, close-hugged truths... we have misunderstood the words of Christianity."
I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on that incomprehensibility, that superluminous darkness. I’m trying to ponder more of what that might mean when it comes to the mystery of faith, and how I can experience more of it.
 

13.  In her book Amazing Grace, Kathleen Norris, one of my favorite authors, writes the following about her reaction to a middle class white clergywoman she heard pontificating on how we should just forget the part of the Christmas story that had to do with a divine birth and interpret the story of the angel's visit to Mary as simply being about God telling Mary that being an unwed, pregnant teenager was “okay.”
Norris’s response was, "I realized that my own anger at the woman's arrogance had deep personal roots. I was taken back to my teenage years, when the 'demythologizing' of Christianity in a misguided study of modern theology had led me to conclude that there was little in the religion for me. In the classroom, at least, it seemed that anything in the Bible that didn't stand up to reason, that we couldn't explain, was primitive, infantile, ripe for discarding. So I took all my longing for the sacred, for mystery, into the realm of poetry, and found a place for myself there. Now, more than thirty years later, I found myself in this room full of Christians thinking, My God they're still at it, still trying to leach every bit of mystery out of this religion, still substituting the most trite language imaginable. You're okay, the boy you were in bed with when you were both too drunk to stand is okay, all God chooses to say about it is, it's okay."
Which reminds me of how easy it is to try to create gods in our own image and to our own liking, instead of seeing it the other way around.

14.  Our friends Mark and Marie Lenker, who live in Arlington, Virginia, have gone through a kind of bonding experience few couples ever get close to. Marie had been on dialysis for some years due to kidney failure, and Mark, miraculously, was found to be a compatible donor, the odds of which were described to them as being like winning a multimillion dollar lottery. On top of that, one of Mark’s kidneys had a rare extra blood vessel attached to it that made it an even more effective in the function it performed in his body. While that kidney was undesirable as a transplant, it was great for being his single remaining one after donating his normal kidney to his beloved. Needless to say, there were lots of anxieties and many prayers going into their decision to go ahead with the double surgery they went through in June of 2007. Fortunately, Marie’s new kidney has performed well, and Mark’s remaining one has, as expected, functioning more than adequately.
Most of us will never have that kind of opportunity to give of ourselves for the life and health of our spouse or other loved ones, but I find the Lenkers’ a kind of wonderful story, as some kind of metaphor for how we all need to find ways of giving of ourselves for each other’s emotional and spiritual--and even physical--health and well-being. How can we all find creative ways of becoming ever more united in heart and spirit, while still maintaining our own separateness and uniqueness?

15.  In my book Lasting Marriage, the Owners’ Manual, I focus on four separate areas of responsibility for improving a relationships. The first is the Problem-Free area, in which partners concentrate on  talking, working, playing and praying together in ways that add to the reservoir of good feelings between them. The second is the Mutual-Problem area, where they work together at becoming respectful and effective problem solvers and decision makers. These are the 50-50 areas of shared responsibility, where it takes two to make them thrive. Then there is the Personal Problem area, where each of us has 100% responsibility for our own personal behavior and, with whatever help is needed, to keep our own emotional, spiritual and physical health in order. And finally, there is the Spouse’s Problem area, over which we have no direct control, 0%, of the other person, but have the responsibility to be supportive and encouraging as he or she works with any of their personal issues that need to be addressed. I’m more and more convinced that a lot of relationship conflicts happen because we want to take shortcuts in our effort to fix things, and begin to invade, control and occupy our Spouse’s Problem area, in what should be considered sovereign space, rather than to invite someone into the mutual problem department to discuss how we avoid having those mar the problem-free areas of our lives.

16. Each summer when we have a dry spell, the grass on our lawn tends to turn brown, with the exception of several strips of green in our back yard where our septic lines are. Reminds me of a comment I heard once regarding marital faithfulness--that one of the reasons the grass may appear greener on the other side of the proverbial fence is because of something septic, a word which comes from the Latin, sepsis, for infectious. I know its a stretch to draw an analogy here, but in real life, things certainly aren’t as healthy and happiness-producing as they often appear at first. That other man or woman may seem like the greatest find of our life in some moment of our weakness and wishfulness, but the chances are great that this has mostly to do with our judgment being impaired by the temporary insanity we are prone to in a time of vulnerability--and based on a bad case of infatuation and foolishness. Of course these other imagined partners are sure to have their good points, but so does your wife or husband, who may in fact appear pretty attractive from the other side of someone else’s fence. The fact is, each human being represents a mix of qualities that range from good to bad, every person comes as a package. So it’s better to stay grounded in reality, and not become too enamored by what appears to be the greener grass on the other side. It might just be the result of some septic lines.

17.  On July 7, 2007, a rash of people went to casinos, bought lottery tickets and got married, all betting their luck on the numeric magic of the date 7/7/07. According to a current issue of Time magazine noting this, hundreds of couples in Las Vegas waited for hours in record heat for marriage licenses. The posh Venetian Resort hosted 77 weddings on that day, and some 500 pairs tied the knot at the Little White Chapel, including groups of seven couples at 7 am and at 7 pm. The Time article noted that Britney Spears had been wed in that same chapel in 2004, but as fate would have it, that marriage lasted a mere 55 hours. But then it wasn’t on a lucky day, which apparently accounts for the difference. Or not.
As is the case with a lot of things, I may be making too much of this. Maybe this was mostly a case of couples, in good fun, simply choosing a memorable date associated in their minds with lucky numbers. But I can‘t help but think that a lot of the effort, time and money invested in planning around the right alignment of numbers could have been better spent in working on the right alignment of some good qualities that truly make for a successful marriage. How about having a good pool of shared values and goals? How about making sure each brings a good supply of personal happiness, patience, kindness, peaceableness, gratitude, joy and unselfishness to the relationship? There you have seven traits that are pretty much guaranteed to make a marriage last.

18.  I recently heard someone say, “Never attribute anyone’s actions to malice that can be explained in some other way,” which sounds like some extremely wise advice to me. In other words, we shouldn’t automatically assume the worst, that another person is intentionally trying to hurt us by what he or she was doing, or failing to do, that bothers us, that they are undoubtedly are staying awake at night deliberately thinking up ways to frustrate, hurt or ignore us and our needs. Since we don’t have some kind of supernatural X-ray vision into another person’s actual motives, wouldn’t we all be better off if we gave folks the benefit of every reasonable doubt? If there are two or more equally plausible explanations for a behavior, why not let a tie go to the other person you care about? For example, he or she may just have had a bad day, or just wasn’t thinking carefully at the time, or was operating under severe stress, just wasn’t in the finest form, was just plain thoughtless. Or maybe he or she is just a slow learner, needs some good, patient reminding and teaching. All of these and more may be alternate ways of looking at things that upset us, and could result in much less hurt and distress After all, we don’t always do so great in the good behavior department, either, and without a doubt would appreciate being judged by our motives and intentions, not always by how the other person feels impacted by our imperfect words and actions.

19.  Author Henri Nouwen, in his book of daily meditations called Bread for the Journey, writes, “We are all wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not  ‘How can we hide our wounds?’ so we don’t have to be embarrassed but ‘How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?’ When our wounds cease to be a source of shame and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.”
I’ve always appreciated Nouwen’s wisdom in this and in so many other areas, and it does seem to me that in God’s economy, nothing needs to ever go to waste. In other words, even our past grief and suffering, the slights and hurts we have experienced, don’t have to reduce us to becoming victims, but can be transformed into something that can make us stronger and better people, and make us better able to have empathy for, and minister to, others going through similar kinds of distresses. Far better to have our list of past grievances and losses become a part of our “wounded healer resume,” adding them to our list of credentials for become better caregivers and servants to others. In other words, to become wounded healers.
What might your or my “wounded healer resume” look like? And how might it be useful in adding meaning and blessing to our own lives and to those of others?

20.  In author John Drescher’s address at the Family Life Resource Center’s 20th anniversary on July 1, 2007, he described some of the changes he’s seen in families in the last fifty years of his life. One of the areas he expressed concern about was the influence current exposure to media is having on family members of all ages. He cited some commitments the writer of Psalm 101 makes that he believes should be the basis for all of our decisions on how we choose to expose ourselves, or not, to the many forms of media so available to all of us these days. First, “I will walk with integrity of heart within my house.” Then, “I will set before my eyes no vile thing.” “ I will look with favor on the faithful of the land so that they may live in my house.”  “No one who practices deceit shall remain in my house.”  “No one who utters lies shall continue in my presence.”  Each of these has to do with the basic question, How can we exercise the same discretion about who is allowed into our living rooms, and with what messages, when it comes to their being virtually present via media as we would regarding their actually being invited into our homes in person? To me it makes sense to practice the same kind of wise discernment in either case, and not allow a barrage of negative input into our children’s lives without our having some careful monitoring and protection in place. Some of these entertainers deserve to just be disinvited from our homes and from space in our heads.

21.  Writer Michael Kinsley, in a column in the July 30, 2007, issue of TIME magazine, notes with dismay the number of billionaires who are engaged in an all out effort to save a tax-code provision that allows them to pay an income tax of 15% on some of their earnings that come indirectly through capital gains, instead of the 35% some of the people cleaning their toilets are having to pay. While he admits that we’re all self-centered and greedy at times, he wonders whether some of the superrich may have contracted a particularly bad strain of the disease that makes their greed really astonishing, even though they justify this by making a distinction between ordinary income and capital gains that begins to be lost for most of us who see how these gains, all without any investment of actual perspiration on their part, turn them into multibillionaires. What to Kinsley makes this even more mystifying is that, unlike a few wealthy folks like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, who are investing in good causes in ways that have earned them a lot of respect, these others are trading away something they actually crave (more respectability) for something they have no conceivable use for (more money). What is worse, he says, is that they begin to look like “unpatriotic ingrates who won’t share with their country even a fraction of the blessings it has bestowed so spectacularly on them.”

22.  Antonio Aja, a Presbyterian USA Associate for Immigrant MInistries, writes the following “Immigrant Creed.”
“I believe in Almighty God, who guided the people in exile and in exodus, the God of Joseph in Egypt and Daniel in Babylon, the god of foreigners and immigrants.
“I believe in Jesus Christ, a displaced Galilean, who was born away from his people and his home, who fled his country with his parents when his life was in danger, and returning to his own country suffered  the oppression of the tyrant Pontius Pilate, the servant of a foreign power, who then was persecuted, beaten and finally tortured, accused and condemned to death unjustly. But on the third day, this scorned Jesus rose from the dead, not as a foreigner but to offer us citizenship in heaven.
“I believe in the Holy Spirit, the eternal immigrant from God’s kingdom among us, who speaks all languages, lives in all countries, and reunites all races.
“I believe that the church is the secure home for the foreigner and for all believers who constitute it, who speak the same language and have the same purpose.
“I believe the Communion of the Saints begins when we accept the diversity of the saints.
“I believe in the forgiveness which makes us all equal, and in the reconciliation which identifies us more than does race, language or nationality.
“I believe that in the resurrection God will unite us as one people in which all are distinct and all are alike at the same time.
“ Beyond this world, I believe in Life Eternal in which no one will be an immigrant but all will be citizens of God’s kingdom, which will never end. Amen.”

23.  Adam K. Levin, head of the consumer website credit.com, and the former director of the New Jersey division of consumer affairs, describes what he calls “ acquisition ecstasy,” “the feeling that comes over you at the the big-box store when you’re in front of that 50-inch plasma TV and you know you could bring it home with just the swipe of your credit card.” You hand it to someone, they give you something you really want and you don’t have to think about paying for it for 20 to 30 days. It’s almost as if your endorphins take over. And then, unfortunately, the reality sets in.” Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that for the first time in history, the savings rate in this country has dropped to below zero, that is, we are borrowing at a higher rate than we are saving for future purchases or for emergencies, or for our retirement. Add to that the fact that if we are only making the minimal required payments, we end up paying exorbitant interest to credit card companies and very little on the principle we actually owe them. It is the folks who can least afford to pay this kind of interest that most often become victims of a system that has become enormously profitable by appealing to our human tendency to want more and more things to make us feel happy or loved or beautiful or worthwhile. The fact is that happiness can neither be bought nor borrowed through any of the estimated 40,000 credit card offers out there wanting us to get hooked on “buying now and paying later.”

24.  One of the reasons so many of us American consumers are in such financial distress is that the number of things we consider necessities rather than luxuries, needs instead of wants, keeps growing. A 2006 Pew Research Center survey, for example, found that compared to a similar study done ten years earlier, there were more than double the percentage of Americans in 2006 who believed that microwaves were a necessity--68% as compared to 31% a decade earlier. Likewise, 51% believed having a home computer was a must, compared to 26% in 2006. For cable or satellite TV, it was 33% compared to an earlier 26%, and for dishwashers, it was 35% in ‘06 while only 13% in ‘96. Having home air conditioning was deemed by 70% to be a necessity, compared to an earlier 51%, and clothes dryers 83% and 62%. This kind of “must have” mentality extends to some items that weren’t even on the 1996 survey, like cell phones, for example, which 49% of today’s Americans feel they couldn’t do without, and high speed Internet, which 29% now feel they have to have. Someone has said, “True wealth is based on the number of things we can joyfully and freely live without.” Maybe we should see having that kind of wealth as being the greatest necessity of all.  (Plan Ahead, Get Ahead, Summer 2007)

25.  One of the best things coworkers, friends, family members and married couples could do to maintain better relationships is to heed the words in a verse of a song I like called “They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love,” by    which goes, “We will work with each other, we will work side by side, and we’ll guard each one’s dignity and save each one’s pride.” The word pride here doesn’t mean arrogance or having an air of superiority, of course, but an appropriate sense of respect for ones self and for the other alike, not feeling down on ourselves, but valuing ourselves and each other as God does. When we are in some kind of bruising conflict, or anytime our own dignity is being damaged by another person, our tendency is to do the opposite of what the song urges us to do, to attempt to destroy another’s dignity and demolish another’s pride. What this does is create ever more defensiveness and add to the likelihood that the cycle of hurting and hurting back continues. But what if we regarded our friend or our partner’s dignity and self respect as being as precious as our own, and sought to do everything we could to guard it, to save it, rather than to destroy it out of our own feelings of insecurity or threat? I’m thinking this would be a great motto to post on our refrigerators or our bathroom mirrors, “We will guard each one’s dignity and save each one’s pride.”

26.  I’ve heard more than one woman lament, after discovering that a spouse or boy friend has been using pornography, that one of their more difficult things to deal with is the thought of being compared to images of artificially endowed and highly erotic females portrayed on porn sites or on X-rated videos or DVD’s. Certainly that understandable distress is one of many reasons why men of integrity will want to stay clear of this kind of addictive, juvenile and destructive behavior. Another big reason is that the world of pornography is one huge, fake, fantasy and a totally for-profit enterprise. The female actors in these seedy scenarios are typically so modified by plastic surgery and/or anorexia that they are often more like humanoids than real women, plus the scripts they operate from, in which they come through as dying to have sex with whatever man is showing an interest in them, is totally insincere and false. In real life, most of them have nothing but disdain for the men who are drooling over them, they just want the money they can make by doing what they are doing, along with whatever feeling of power or fleeting fame they might gain in the process. But the bottom line is all about profit. If we men weren’t so gullible and dumb, we would see through all this, how artificial and unreal this actually is, and would begin to truly prize that real love of our life who, when she says, “I love you,” really means it. That’s gold. The other is fool’s gold, a plastic and empty imitation of a real relationship.   

27.  John Cloud, in a piece in the August 27, 2007, issue of TIME, notes that back in the 60’s, when a major pharmaceutical company advertised an anti-anxiety medication in medical journals as something to be prescribed for people who can’t make friends, who can’t get along with others, or can’t adjust to retirement, the FDA stopped the ads, saying that drugs are for treating illnesses, not to deal with normal challenges people face in life. Cloud believes that today there’s a shift to seeing life stresses like job losses, relationship breakups, or accidents or illnesses, as forms of grief diagnosable as clinical depression, and to be treated with both psychotherapy and antidepressants. Allen Horowitz and Jerome Wakefield, in their recent book The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal sorrow into Depressive Disorder, agree. We have created a “legal drug culture,” they say, around the idea that there’s something pathological about feeling blue, rather than seeing sadness as a part of being human and of living in a less than perfect world. Not that there aren’t sometimes biological bases for depression, but normal sorrow, they believe, is useful in our gaining social support, protecting us from aggressors and teaching us that in many cases there are things we need to do to help prevent some of the bad things that happen to us.

28.  One of the reasons mental health care is so expensive in our country is our depending too much on psychiatric specialists and psychotropic medications to provide all of the help people need. Remarkably, in some less affluent countries where people can’t afford a lot of inpatient treatment and all of the available drugs on the market, patients actually do as well if not better. Among the reasons given are that when people can’t afford, or don’t have access to, more expensive forms of health care, they are more likely to draw on other resources around them to help them get better. For example, friends and family members may take more time with, and show more support for, distressed friends, and if they are hospitalized, a family member is likely to come along so the person isn’t alone in what can be a very stressful environment. Maybe we have forgotten the importance of ordinary lay people providing good first aid for each other, before, during and after we avail ourselves of the help of specialists and of their prescriptions. A good definition of first aid I found in a Red Cross manual is that it is “the immediate and temporary care given to persons who are injured or have suddenly become ill. It includes immediate care until further assistance is available, words of encouragement, and confidence in knowing what we are doing.” I’m thinking we need to learn to apply that to emotional stresses as well as physical ones.

29.  A 2007 study by researchers at Stanford University found that children given the same French fries and chicken nuggets in different packaging consistently reported that foods wrapped in MacDonald’s wrappers tasted better. The same was true when things like carrots and other food items not ordinarily associated with MacDonald’s were used in the experiment. A carrot in a plain wrapper just didn’t taste as good. This tells us a lot about some of the influence advertising has on making us ever more gullible consumers, as evidenced by our increased use of the bottled water (with familiar, highly advertised name brands) Americans are beginning to drink to the tune of nearly 30 gallons a year per person, in spite of the fact that the water available to most of us on tap is just as good and safe and in some cases even better, and virtually free. Water sales in 2006 exceeded $10.8 billion in the US alone, adding 2 billion pounds of unrecycled plastic waste to our landfills and consuming  countless barrels of oil to produce the plastic containers and to transport the product from as far away as the Fiji Islands, France and Italy, according to a report in the August 20, 2007, issue of TIME magazine. As someone who has so far resisted buying his first bottle of water, something I feel should be as accessible as the air we breathe, I find myself on a bit of a crusade to discourage folks from adding that over-advertised item to their personal and family budgets.

30.  In August of 2007 full page newspaper ads began appearing in leading Minnesota newspapers that enlist parents in a crusade to help them say No to their children, and to combat the culture of “More, Easy, Fast, and Fun.” The National Institute on Media and the Family and the Minnesota PTA are the primary push behind Minnesota Say Yes to No, a statewide ad campaign endorsed by a coalition of more than a dozen parent, educator and health organizations. It aims to  promote powerful community conversations across the state about how to raise more successful, healthy and self-reliant kids. This coalition offers parents explanations and examples for using No the right way with their kids following the reading of the book NO: Why Kids – of All Ages Need to Hear It and Ways Parents Can Say It, by Media and the Family Institute President, David Walsh.
“Parents have been looking for solutions on how to compete with MySpace, text messaging and the television for a long time,” says Rosie Loeffler-Kemp, president of the Minnesota PTA. “Say Yes to No will give parents and educators answers and tactics that puts them back into control of their homes and classrooms.”
Having been in personal conversation with David Walsh, and having read and recommended his book in my parenting classes, I’m hoping “Say Yes to No” will be a campaign that will spread everywhere.

31.  Alma Jean and I have come to see parenting as being one experience of letting go after another, from the time our three took their first wobbly steps, first toward us, but then so often away from us, and as they became a part of a larger circle of friends and peers, and left us, for school, for camp, for their first date, for a term of service, for college, for work, or marriage--its been one bittersweet separation after another. I still think back to that first time when we walked our youngest child and only daughter down the aisle of the Park View church to “give her away” to her beloved Chad Heatwole, even though we were gaining another son, and since have been blessed with another grandson as a result.
Henri Nouwen, in his book of daily readings called Bread for the Journey, writes,
“Every time we make the decision to love someone, we open ourselves up to great suffering, because those we love the most cause us not only great joy but also great pain. The greatest pain comes from leaving. When the child leaves home, when the husband or wife leaves for a long period of time or for good, when the beloved friend departs to another country or dies, the pain of leaving can tear us apart.
“Still, if we want to avoid the suffering of leaving, we will never experience the joy of loving. And love is stronger than fear, life is stronger than death, hope stronger than despair. We have to trust that the risk of loving is always worth taking."

32.  An example of a picture being worth a thousand words is one of a brown eyed child with a cleft palate in an ad I saw not long ago for an organization called The Smile Train. For $250 they offer life changing cleft surgery for some such child in some third world country who could otherwise not afford it, and the ad goes on to say that the group has provided for over 250,000 such operations. The text at the top of the page reads, “Give a child with a cleft a second chance,” and the thought of this wistful, beautiful child getting such a chance makes giving a generous gift for that person seem like something you really want to do, especially since the ad promises that, due to grants made up front to cover overhead costs, 100% of the money given goes directly for that purpose.
So often what is missing in our giving, and what keeps us from being more generous, is our lack of seeing or knowing real people, young or old, whose lives, along with ours, could be blessed by our giving. Daniel Berrigan writes,
“Somewhere in your life hope you might see one starved person,
the look on her face when the bread finally arrives.
Hope you might have baked it, or bought it, or even kneaded it yourself.
For that look on her face, for your hands meeting hers across a piece of bread,
you might be willing to lose (invest) a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little even.”

33.  Stacy Rector of the Open Door Community in Atlanta writes the story of Philip Workman, a homeless drug addict who was charged with killing a police officer in the act of robbing a Wendy's in Memphis in 1981 while high on cocaine. A man claiming to have witnessed the robbery said he saw Workman aim at the policeman and fire. Turns out that the so-called witness’s story didn’t hold water, since he wasn’t even in town at the time. Besides, ballistic experts demonstrated that it couldn’t have been Workman’s gun that caused the officer’s death. Be that as it may, Philip Workman was given a death sentence in spite of the victim’s own daughter and five former jurors asking for clemency because of false testimony in the case. On the day of his execution, when asked what he wanted for his last meal, he requested that  some homeless person be given a vegetarian pizza on his behalf. The state of Tennessee said they couldn’t use taxpayer money for that purpose, so Philip was strapped to the gurney without his meal, and after 17 agonizing minutes, breathed his last. But when the word got out about his dying request, one Nashville resident, along with some of her friends, donated 150 pizzas, $1200 worth, to a local rescue mission. From there the word spread, and gifts of pizza just kept multiplying, until in the end, over 1500 homeless people across the nation had enjoyed a pizza meal because one person preferred to die hungry in favor of someone else getting something to eat.           Hospitality  August 2007

34.  According to the September, 2007, Journal of Pediatrics, researchers at the University of Washington and Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute conclude that parents who want to give their infants a boost in learning language should limit the time they expose them to DVDs such as "Baby Einstein" and "Brainy Baby." The researchers found that for every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them. Baby DVDs and videos had no positive or negative effect on the vocabularies on toddlers 17 to 24 months of age. "The most important fact to come from this study is there is no clear evidence of a benefit coming from baby DVDs and videos and there is some suggestion of harm," says Frederick Zimmerman, lead author of the study and a UW associate professor of health services. His associate,  Andrew Meltzoff, adds, "There are only a fixed number of hours that young babies are awake and alert. If the 'alert time' is spent in front of DVDs and TV instead of with people speaking in 'parentese' -- that melodic speech we use with little ones -- the babies are not getting the same linguistic experience." "Parents and caretakers... instinctively adjust their speech, eye gaze and social signals to support language acquisition. Watching attention-getting DVDs and TV may not be an even swap for warm social human interaction at this very young age."

35.  Gary and Mona Shriver have written a great book entitled, Unfaithful--Rebuilding Trust After an Affair, based on their own experience of recovering from a relationship torn apart by infidelity. They each describe the pain and the progress of months of painful recovery, and how the two eventually developed a ministry to other couples based on their own struggle. Mona minces no words in describing how gut wrenching the experience of her husband’s betrayal was, and Gary is clear in taking total responsibility for the devastation he brought to her and to the marriage. At the same time, they each take appropriate responsibility for having done, and not done, things that weakened their relationship before the affair happened. Quoting from their book, “Admitting our roles in the decline of our marriage is not ‘the answer’ for why the adultery happened...There is no reason good enough to justify adultery... It is simply a compilation of behaviors, attitudes and responses that were not and still are not conducive to a healthy marriage.” In reflecting on the mistrust and near paranoia she experienced for months after learning about the affair, Mona admitted, quote, “If Gary’s adultery didn’t destroy us, it looked like my craziness would.”
What a story, by two very honest people who have turned their near tragedy into a ministry for other couples going through the dark valley of the near death of a marriage.

2007 - Series 1

1. Here’s a part of a New Year’s Prayer by Rabbi Jacob Pressman:
May you get a clean bill of health from your dentist, your cardiologist, your gastro-enterologist, your urologist, your proctologist, your podiatrist, your psychiatrist, your plumber and the I.R.S.
May your hair, your teeth, your face-lift, your abs and your stocks not fall; and may your blood pressure, your triglycerides, your cholesterol, your white blood count and your mortgage interest not rise.
May New Year's Eve find you seated around the table, together with your beloved family and cherished friends. May you find the food better, the environment quieter, the cost much cheaper, and the pleasure much more fulfilling than anything else you might ordinarily do that night.
May what you see in the mirror delight you, and what others see in you delight them. May someone love you enough to forgive your faults, be blind to your blemishes, and tell the world about your virtues.            
May the telemarketers wait to make their sales calls until you finish dinner, may the commercials on TV not be louder than the program you have been watching, and may your check book and your budget balance - and include generous amounts for charity.
May you remember to say "I love you" at least once a day to your spouse, your child, your parent, your siblings; but not to your secretary, your nurse, your masseuse, your hairdresser or your tennis instructor.         
And may we live in a world at peace and with the awareness of God's love in every sunset, every flower's unfolding petals, every baby's smile, every lover's kiss, and every wonderful, astonishing, miraculous beat of our heart.

2. In a piece in an October 2006 Sojourners e-magazine, author and writer Diana Butler Bass reflects on some of the recent responses of the Lancaster County Amish after the brutal murders of some of their children in the one-room Nickle Mines School. First she noted that some ministers visited the wife of the murderer to offer their forgiveness. Then “the families of the slain girls invited the widow to their own children’s funerals. Next, they requested that all relief monies intended for Amish families be shared with her and her children. And, finally, more than 30 members of the Amish community attended the funeral of the killer.” Bass noted how literally they followed the example of the Christ who prayed forgiveness for those who crucified him.
Then she wondered, What might have happened if we had offered Osama bin Laden something other than retaliation following the attack on the World Towers? “What if we had invited the families of the hijackers to the funerals of the victims of 9/11? What if a portion of The September 11th Fund had been dedicated to relieving poverty in a Muslim country? What if we dignified the burial of their dead by our respectful grief?” We might find, she added, that “actively practicing forgiveness and making peace are the only real alternatives to perpetual fear and a multigenerational global religious war.”
[Diana Butler Bass’s latest book, Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith, is published by Harper San Francisco.]

3. After many prayers and extensive medical treatment, my wife’s older sister Alene experienced a remarkable recovery from her esophageal cancer in early 2006. When her daughter Mary Ann learned that one of her cousin’s husband was diagnosed with the same condition, she wrote the following on the family’s e-mail link, “My heart went straight to my toes when I  read your letter this morning, and I want you to know that we’ll be praying for you. I suppose you know that people will come out of the woodwork telling you what to do, and there will be perfect strangers bringing you newspaper clippings of stories of miraculous healings. And some people will tell you that your plan for treatment is wrong and that you are “choosing death.” I just want to encourage you to follow your doctor’s advice and do whatever seems to work. One of the people who was the most condemning of mother’s choice of action is herself slowly succumbing to colon cancer... She has been all over the place, including Mexico twice to treat what could have been one of the most simple cancers to deal with when it was first discovered... Please keep us posted. I know there will be times when it will seem that you just cannot take the time to let people] know, but the strength that comes from people praying, from people caring, and in part because they now what is happening will give you a strength that you didn’t know was possible.”

4. In my lifetime we’ve gone from women being far outnumbered in the field of higher education to their catching up and beginning to getting ahead of men in the academic area. Only 45% of today’s college students are male, and in general they are as likely to be known for their weekend partying as they are for their scholastic achievements, with the exception (again a generalization, of course) of a growing predominance of Asian students in our universities. One of the unfortunate outcomes of this state of affairs, according to a piece by Kate Griendling in the October 12, 2006, issue of James Madison University’s The Breeze, is that women feel disposable in the relationship department. She writes, “The competition for a boyfriend requires that JMU females lower their standards and morals. It seems that some women are so desperate for a boyfriend and male approval that they will hook up after just meeting in hopes of a booty call the next night. What is interesting about this promiscuity is that most guys say they don’t have respect for girls who put out on the first date.” She goes on to lament, “There is pressure to be thin, pressure to be beautiful, and pressure to put up or shut up... (But) When you bend to the desires of men, you can lose your footing. To enter the real world with the notion that you are disposable is to surrender to an institution larger than JMU--the institution of inequality.”
Unfortunately, Griendling also states that she has (quote) “nothing against recreational sex or one-night stands.”  Which has me asking, “But isn’t the increasing acceptance of just that a major part of the problem?”

5. Just when I thought I had heard it all, I learn about a new violent video game introduced just in time for Christmas, 2006, called “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,” based on the best selling “Left Behind” novels authored by Tim LaHaye.  Gamers create Christian militias who roam the streets of New York City shortly after the “rapture,” looking to convert nonbelievers and killing those they are unable to draw to their side. Interestingly, after particularly bloody battles, players must use prayer to recharge the "soul points" they have diminished by their killing.
I am concerned not only because this game is focused on violent, divisive, and hateful scenarios, but the fact that it is based on a premise that is supposedly Christian, even though LaHaye’s interpretation of Bible prophecy about end time events is not shared by a majority of biblical scholars, and is in fact based on a version of apocalyptic speculation that came into vogue only in the 19th century. But to have this become a part of a violent video game, and to have it come out at Christmas, a season in which we are to celebrate the coming of the Prince of Peace, whose entire message is based on nonviolence and reconciliation, is just over the top for me.
Maybe we can’t expect megastores like Wal-Mart, America’s #1 seller of this and other video games, to voluntarily pull this from their shelves, but we can make sure no games of this kind leave the shelves because we’re putting them into our shopping carts.
[Defend the Constitution/DefCon]

6. Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone, The Collapse and Revival of American Community, is about our declining sense of face to face connections with each other, something he sees as resulting in a loss of “social capital,” a term he uses to describe the benefit of being in regular and meaningful contact with others. Where this kind of community networking is happening, he says, crime rates are lower, schools are better and the economic growth is higher. Unfortunately, since the 60’s and 70’s there has been a 40-50 percent drop in membership in groups like the PTA, civic clubs, the League of Women voters and the NAACP, and a smaller but significant drop in church attendance. The number of picnics and family dinners has dropped even more dramatically. He attributes this to the increase in two-career families, growing urban sprawl, and the privatizing of our leisure time activities, involving the use of more home entertainment in the form of DVD’s, video games, the Internet, and of course television. Those who report television watching as their favorite form of entertainment are clearly less likely to be involved in building social capital. With the average American viewing four hours of TV a day, most people are watching programs like Friends, he says, rather than having friends. The alternative, Putnam says, is to invest in as much “face time” with others as possible, and he believes families and congregations should do all they can to see that more of these kinds of opportunities are created.

7. Shari Weaver, a Yale graduate who through some period of years had lost her faith, has since become not only a committed believer but a seminary student and, more recently, a member of our house church. Recently she led a study on the role Scripture has in building a community committed to following Jesus. The Bible was never meant to simply be a kind of personal devotional book, she said, but is addressed to a whole people who are called together to faith and accountability. From having herself gone through a time of giving no credence at all to the Bible, she has since found a new sense of richness through the reflective reading of scripture on a daily basis, pausing after each paragraph to prayerfully reflect on how that might change her life. As far as most of today’s media are concerned, she noted, God is nonexistent and irrelevant, seldom mentioned except in expletives. Only in scripture, or in material based on sacred texts, does God occupy a central place. And so only in regular times of reading and meditating on the text can we remain “within the range of God’s voice,” she says, a phrase she borrowed from Rick Warren’s book , The Purpose Driven Life. All this motivates me to want to spend more time meditating on the sacred, something I’m not naturally good at. But as Warren also says, “If we can worry, we can also meditate.” That is, we can ruminate and reflect on the Good Book rather than obsess over our worst fears.

8. When we hit below the belt in a burst of anger or an escalating argument, we seldom think about the kind of damage we can inflict on a child, spouse or a coworker, often a kind that is very hard to heal, and for which we often find ourselves paying dearly in the form of loss of trust or intimacy. My wife’s niece, Mary Ann Yutzy, recently wrote in a family e-mail posting, “I’ve purposed... to try hard never to say something in anger that would hurt the heart of my husband. I know that I’ve failed many times. In fact, one time he confided in me that he really did not like to get in an argument with me because it felt like he had a BB gun and I had a cannon! Wow, did that ever set me back on my heels. It has made me cease and desist when it comes to arguments, because even though I often think my [positions] arguments are stronger and more logical than his, why should I want to use a lethal weapon against the person I love most?”
I have to agree with my niece on that one. There is a simple alternative to becoming engaged in verbal warfare, and that is to limit ourselves to calm and respectful information-giving statements, simply letting the other person know, rather than letting them have it. That is, letting them know about what we are concerned about, why we have the concern (including how that impacts us or makes us feel) and what we would like instead, all in the form of polite statements or requests. Offering information instead of accusation is the key to avoiding adding insult to injury in our relationships.

9. I’ll never forget one of the first times I read the familiar Bible story of David and Goliath to my only daughter when she was a preschooler, perhaps no more than three or four years old. I had always thought of this as nothing other than a satisfying account of how a young lad, single-handedly, armed only with his faith and a slingshot, defeats a powerful giant who has the might of a powerful army behind him, thus saving his people from a terrorist bully. But when I read Joanna the story--with as much dramatic emphasis as I could give it--she had a surprising response. She actually became distressed and tearful, saying, “But Goliath was a person, too!” I was a little taken aback, having never really thought of that angle, since the point of the story, from my perspective, was that of God demonstrating being on the side of the underdog, showing his people another way to overcome their enemies, through simple acts of faith and courage, rather than through the usual reliance on sheer military might and power--and as another example of God choosing the weak and powerless to confound the strong and mighty. Yet  I found it helpful to get a child’s perspective on the story,  and to realize that Jesus himself takes us even further than does this Old Testament account, in the direction of a downright love for our enemies, showing us that Goliaths are persons, too, with feelings, with families who love and care for them, and that all people, eve our most feared enemies, are precious in the eyes of their Creator.



10. Mary Ann Yutzy, my wife’s niece, recently wrote in the family’s e-mail link, “One of the things that has been a blessing in our marriage has been that there are certain things that we just won’t say to each other no matter how mad we might be. When I hear what some people say to their spouses, I am not surprised that their marriages come unraveled. A story I once read has helped me keep this in mind: There was a young woman who had a lot freckles. They were not ugly, in fact, they were on of her most attractive features. But she hated them. The young man she married told her over and over again how much he adored her freckles and she came to almost believe him. But on one fateful day, in the heat of an argument he blurted out, “I never did like your old freckles, anyway!” and it was a terrible thing for her to endure. The truth was, he did love her freckles, but she could almost never quite believe him. Afterwards, although he told her over and over again that he was sorry, that he didn’t mean it, there was always this bit of doubt in the back of her mind. And it continued to create many, many ripples of insecurity in their marriage.”
Thanks, Mary Ann Yutzy, for letting me pass on this story, and your own good words, to others who might benefit from it as I have. It’s hard to overestimate the power words have to either bless or destroy our relationships.

11. It was right after I led the offertory prayer at my congregation years ago that I experienced a major epiphany about money. I was watching folks putting their gifts into the offering when it struck me--that some of the very funds people were giving to God would be given back to me as their pastor. In other words, I was at the receiving end of the church’s charity, a direct recipient of money given to God. Since then, I’ve concluded that we’re all pretty much in the same boat, that we’re all gift receivers more than we are earners or givers. For example, when I was six, my parent were able to buy a farm with the help of a generous uncle who helped finance the deal. Here we produced food for a living, but we could have never done that without the unearned blessings of God’s soil, sunshine and all of the other natural resources that made our farm productive. And for whatever we invested in money and labor, we usually got sufficient payment to cover our costs, with some extra in the form of a gift we call profit. Whenever any of us buys or sells anything, this same kind of gift exchange takes place, grace for grace, blessing for blessing. I disagree with economists who say gift giving doesn’t make economic sense, since whatever we choose to give will seldom have the same value as if the recipients had chosen something for themselves. I happen to believe that in the exchange of gifts, value is added, and everybody is enriched. It helps us realize our dependance on others and on our Creator, and our interdependence with all creation.

12.I once read the story of a medieval landowner who came across a vagabond wandering around on his estate. “Get off my property,” he ordered.
“What right do you have to keep me off this part of God’s earth?” the man asked.
“I own the land. It’s as simple as that,” the landowner replied.
“And how did you come to own it?” he asked.
“I inherited it from my father.”
“And how did he get it?”
“He inherited it from his father, a general in the king’s army. He fought for it, and was given the estate as a reward.”
“Then let’s you and I fight for it,” the man replied, “and whoever wins gets the land.”
Point of the story? If you look hard enough, you realize that everything is first a gift. For example, you or I could have never earned the priceless gift of life itself. And the rare privilege of being born to parents who loved me and took good care of me (at no charge), and of being born in a land of freedom and abundance (instead of in some third-world country), were things I could have never negotiated, earned or paid for. In addition, I received a free public school education, one made possible by other’s involuntary gifts in the form of taxes. Later I got to enroll in institutions of learning I could have never been able to afford without the generous gifts of hundreds of unnamed donors. Then my good health, my (mostly) sound mind, and whatever talents or gifts God gave me, all helped me get whatever positions I’ve had, were all examples of an amazing grace. I’ve come to think this is a good thing to remember, that life is just one big gift exchange.


13. One of the moving stories associated with the slaying of five Amish  girls at the one-room Nickle Mines School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in October, 2006, is that of 13-year-old Marian Fisher, the oldest of the group, begging the shooter to kill her first, hoping to somehow spare the lives of her younger sister and the other girls about to be murdered. Donald B. Kraybill, professor at Elizabethtown College and author of numerous books on Amish life, wrote a piece for the Philadelphia Inquirer following the incident in which he describes how their willingness to give up their lives for others, or for their faith, was a deeply held conviction going back to the Anabaptist -Mennonite movement in 16th-century Europe, when hundreds of their spiritual ancestors were burned at the stake, beheaded and tortured by Catholic and Protestant state churches alike because they believed individuals should have the freedom to make voluntary decisions about matters of faith. Songs by imprisoned Anabaptists are recorded in the Ausbund, the hymnal still used in Amish church services today, and the 1,200-page Martyrs Mirror, which also tells the martyr’s stories, is likewise found in many Amish houses and is cited in their sermons. Thus the voices of martyrs still ring loudly in Amish ears with the message of forgiveness of those who tortured them and burned their bodies at the stake. “As pragmatic as they are about other things, the Amish do not ask if forgiveness works," says Kraybill, “they simply seek to practice it as the Jesus way of responding to adversaries, even enemies.”

14. It was on the Eve of All Saints Day (Halloween, 2006) that our third grandblessing, 7 pounds, 8 ounces, made his entrance. His parents, Brent and Heidi Yoder, named him Ian David, his middle name being that of his mother’s father. All of us, including his nearly two year old sister, love everything about him, including his name, Ian, which I discovered was a Scottish form of John. Then it struck me. Each of our three grandchildren has some form of John in their name--Ian, of course, then there’s his little first cousin, John Mark Heatwole, son of our daughter Joanna, also a derivative of John--then his older sister Madelyne, with the middle name Jean, which is another feminine form of John, from the Hebrew “Johanan,” which means, aptly, “God is gracious.”
I’ve always been intrigued by names, and am reminded of the Biblical story of Zechariah and Elizabeth, granted the gift of a son in their old age whom they were to call John, which meant going against the custom of calling the first born son after his father. Besides, John wasn’t as common a name in Hebrew scripture, though in the intertestamental period there were several John’s in the radical Maccabees family, known for their role in briefly winning liberation and independence for the Jewish people. On instruction from an angel messenger, Zechariah insisted that the child be called John, later to become the bold prophet-preacher John the Baptist.
In Hebrew tradition, a child’s name pointed to his or her destiny. Our prayer is that our children’s children will reflect both the truth that God is gracious, and that he is liberator and life giver.

15. I once heard of an Amish man who was asked whether he was born again. Not wanting to be presumptuous in claiming his status as a Christian, he responded by writing a list of some of his neighbors, acquaintances and family members and handing it to his questioner. “Maybe you need to ask some people who know me well, to see whether they can tell if I am a Christian or not.” In other words, he believed that the fruit of one’s life is the best way to know someone’s faith.
One of the unfortunate tensions among believers is between those who focus primarily on a right understanding and knowledge of the faith, and those who focus mostly on right behavior, on what one does as being more important than on what one knows or believes. Hans Denk, a 16th-century spiritual ancestor of both Mennonite, and the later Amish, communities of faith, once wrote, “No one can know Christ truly, except he follow him daily in life,” then also added, “and no one can follow him faithfully unless he truly know him.” In other words, both knowing and doing are important factors in being faithful believers. But as important as it is to develop a proper understanding of mutual care and accountability in our communities and congregation, for example, I can’t help but be impressed by how Old Order Amish, and their spiritual cousins, the Old Order Mennonites,  seem to better at actually doing it, caring for their aged and others in need without benefit of health coverage, long term care insurance, or nursing homes. And how in spite of a lack of professional marriage counseling services or marriage enrichment programs, they manage to maintain mostly stable families and a divorce rate of near zero.

16. People may have varying views of evangelist Billy Graham, but it’s easy to understand why he is so widely loved and respected. There is something about his gracious spirit, combined with a deep seated conviction about his faith that is hard not to like. He admits to having become a little less dogmatic in his later years, a little more mellow and accepting of people with whom he disagrees, including members of his own family. When asked about his secret of remaining in love, and about his being married fifty-four years to the same person, Billy Graham recently said, "Ruth and I are happily incompatible."
In an interview with Hugh Downs on ABC’s 20/20 program, Hugh looked directly at Billy and asked, "If you had a homosexual child, would you love him?" Billy didn't miss a beat. He replied with sincerity and gentleness, "Why, I would love that one even more." While I seldom agree 100% with any preacher or prophet except Jesus himself, and I know Graham wouldn’t consider himself perfect, his is the kind of spirit I think the world needs so much more of, and I mourn the loss of the ministry of this good man of God. Meanwhile, the best compliment we can give to anyone whose life we appreciate and admire, is to do our best to emulate their good qualities and avoid any we think are off the mark.

17. What often has couples experiencing so much pain is that whatever they say or do to each other that’s hurtful is added to a mound of unresolved grievances already in place, built up over many years and growing with each new painful interaction. What may be badly needed is a clearing of the deck, a wiping clean of the slate that can give everyone a fresh start, minus all the baggage from the past. Some couples have found it helpful to write an extensive list of their regrets to give to their mates, expressing their sorrow for all of the ways they have hurt the other person over the years, then asking for full forgiveness, forgiveness meaning that the forgiver is willing to give up his or her right to ever bring up that part of their history again. When each has presented the list of their own faults and failures, expressed their remorse, and received the assurance of the other person’s forgiveness, they may engage in some kind of ritual of disposing of the list, by burning or burying it, then agreeing to focus on whatever here and now issues they may be dealing with, but without the additional baggage they’ve been carrying around up to that point, the kinds of things that further add to the pain that is bad enough already. In short, what we need to most to do, whether with our spouses, our children, friends or family members, is to keep our accounts short and as up to date as possible.

18. What is the most commonly recognized and believed New Testament scripture among average Americans? No, it’s not “For God so loved the world,” nor even “Our Father which art in heaven,” but, believe it or not, it’s “Judge not lest you be judged,” even though most of us disobey this command with great regularity. In couple’s counseling, or in working at any dispute among coworkers or family members, its common to see a lot of blaming going on, each party being sure that the majority of the responsibility for a problem belongs to the other person. We all seem to have a natural kind of blind spot when it comes to seeing our own contribution to a given problem, along with our tendency to claim 20/20 vision with regard to another’s guilt. In situations like that, I like to remind myself that even if I am only 20% to blame, or even only 10%, not a likely scenario, in my case, I am 100% responsible for that 10%, or 20% or 90%, as the case may be. In the “Judge not” passage, Jesus warns us against trying to remove a speck of dust from someone else’s eye before first making sure we remove the 2 x 4 from our own. I’ve wondered whether the actual irritant may actually be about the same size, but when its in our own eye we should label it as a beam, or 2 x 4, but when its in our friend’s or family member’s eye, we should consider it a mere speck of sawdust, something to be concerned about, but to see as being less of a problem than our own failures are.

19. The American Community Survey, released in the fall of 2006 by the Census Bureau, found that 49.7 percent, or 55.2 million, of the nation’s 111.1 million households in 2005 were made up of married couples — with and without children — just shy of a majority and down from more than 52 percent five years earlier. “With more competition from other ways of living, the proportion of married couples has been shrinking for decades,” according to the Survey. “In 1930, they accounted for about 84 percent of households. By 1990 the proportion of married couples had declined to about 56 percent.” The trendsetters, here, to no one’s surprise, have been members of the younger generation. Among Americans aged 35 to 64, married couples still make up a majority of all households. None of this means that marriage is dead or even necessarily a dying institution. The total number of married couples is higher than ever, and most Americans do eventually marry. But marriage has been facing the competition of a growing number of adults spending more of their lives single or living unmarried with partners, and the potential social and economic implications are profound. For example, according Stephanie Coontz, director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit research group, “It just changes the social weight of marriage in the economy, in the work force, in sales of homes and rentals, and who manufacturers advertise to. And it certainly challenges the way we set up our work policies.”
I still remain skeptical about whether this trend to fewer marriages will result in more and more folks living “happily ever after.” [2006 analysis of new census figures by The New York Times]

20. One conclusion I’ve come to is that, in spite of what we may have heard, Americans are actually very generous with their giving. Like the poor widow in the Bible, they are willing to give up their last penny, and in fact, to regularly give well beyond their means. Not that much of that giving goes to benefit charities or faith communities, though. In that department, even the average church going American still contributes only about 3% of his or her income to help the poor or contribute to other worthy causes. No, we Americans do most of our giving, quite cheerfully, at places like Wal-Mart, K-Mart and the nearby Quick Mart. We give out generously for dog food, cat food, convenience food, junk food, and fine food at our favorite deli or restaurant. And we regularly contribute huge sums to the automobile industry, for the latest high-performance and often gas-guzzling vehicles, so that we now have more licensed vehicles of all sorts in this country than we have licensed drivers to drive them. And we are willing to give more and more of our monthly incomes to real estate firms and to the furniture industry for ever larger, super-sized and lavishly furnished homes.        
Does all of this giving actually reflect our real values? My short answer to that is, yes, precisely. Every time we voluntarily give anything to someone offering us something, for whatever price, we are saying that, at that moment, at least, we consider that product or service worth exactly what we are offering for it. In the same way, when it comes to offering our gifts to God, expressing our love for God or neighbor, we are also stating, very specifically, the relative value that has in our lives.

21. According to a July 1, 2004, Washington Post editorial, more than 11 million teens regularly view pornography online, an alarming figure. While 75% of parents in another poll say they know where their children spend time on the internet, 58% of teens say they have accessed an objectionable Web site, whether intentionally or by accident. (WebSense, USA Today 10/10-12/99)
An organization called Stronger Families for Oregon has come up with a tongue in cheek letter to a 15-year old that describes the dilemma we tend to create for our kids.
It goes like this: “Hello, Son. You’ve probably noticed that big cardboard box in the middle of your bedroom floor. As you’ve heard, it contains a bunch of Playboy and Penthouse magazines. Underneath those are [hardcore] magazines containing some of the worst kind of hardcore sexual images available in the world, including illegal child pornography. You’ve probably been curious about what “hardcore” looks like, haven’t you?
“...I realize that as a teenager your sexual drive is stronger now than at any other time in your life. So, not only will curiosity fuel your desire to look in the box, but your hormones will be begging you to do so as well. And once, when you tripped on the box and one issue came tumbling out, what you saw as you hurriedly put it back made your adrenaline run very hot. It took every bit of will power you had to not flip through the issue in your hands. But no matter what: Don’t look in the box.” Sobering words from <www.strongerfamilies.com>.

22. UCC Pastor Anthony Robinson, in a January 27, 2004, Christian Century article on
“Rereading the Song of Songs,” writes, “In speaking so joyously of sexuality and in adopting a woman’s voice, the Song of Songs offers a remarkable and welcome minority report within the scriptures.” He notes that not only does the message of the book counter a repressive or a Victorian hush-hush mindset toward sex, it is also a strong statement against the casual physical intimacy and instant gratification so blatantly encouraged in our time, referring to what he said he had heard called the “McDonaldization” of sex. In other words, this special gift of God to committed-for-life couples has been reduced to something cheap, easily accessible and immediate, as in “You deserve a break today,” or in the words of a Nike ad, “Just do it.” The Song of Songs, in contrast, describes the sweeter joys of experiencing deep loving and incredible longing, and suggests that “love is less about knowing another’s body than about knowing another’s heart.” Love with passion, yes, but also with restraint, and reserve this kind of intimacy for the one sweet love of your life, is the message of the text.
Robinson concludes his piece by saying, “What a difference it would make if the Song of Songs were among the books on sex parents gave their adolescents to read. It is a book that our mother the church has given us, and that God, who loves us like a wise father, has given us. We should (all) read it.”

23. L. Gregory Jones, dean of Duke University Divinity School in Durham recently wrote about the dilemma he and his wife experienced when their son, with their encouragement, became so involved in soccer that they found themselves driving him all around the state on weekends to attend games and tournaments. Like many parents, they assumed this was all a part of helping him pursue his interests, develop his athletic skills and become a more well rounded, self-disciplined and self-fulfilled person. What caused some sobering reconsidering for them was when this conflicted with the confirmation classes he was also wanting to become involved in. Which would have priority? How would their choices express their real values as a family, and model the kind of loyalty to their faith and their church they had always said were of ultimate importance?
Personally, I’m all for children being given lots of opportunity for play. That’s an important part of growing up, having good fun, learning to cooperate and getting healthy exercise. But when does the level of an athletic competition make it an activity primarily for the elite, the few who make the cut, who can outscore their opponents and rack up a winning season for the team? When does the need to win, for the ego-satisfaction of the players--and their parents--take precedence over just having a good time? Sometimes I wonder if yesterday’s informal  pickup games in nearby vacant lots might have been a better idea after all than some of the highly organized and all-consuming kind of league competitions we have going on today for our kids. (Christian Century, April 6, 2004, p. 32)

24. We seem to be hearing a lot these days about how the state should define marriage--as between one man and one woman, for example. This is certainly an issue we should be concerned about, but I sometimes wonder whether communities of faith might be better off more clearly separating the civil and sacred aspects of marriage. As it is now, members of the clergy are acting as agents of the secular state in performing marriage ceremonies, and may even actually say, as a part of the ceremony, for example, “On the authority vested in me by the Commonwealth of Virginia, etc., I pronounce you husband and wife.” In countries with an official state church that makes sense. The two institutions work hand in hand. But in a society that sees value in a clearer separation of the two, why not have everyone get a state-granted license and the state-sanctioned status of a married couple, then have the spiritual and communal celebration of the marriage, as a union that the congregation blesses and sanctions and safeguards, as a separate ceremony? This policy could also help relieve the pressure on clergy to feel they have to perform marriage ceremonies on demand for persons who are not participants of their congregations. They could simply say, I am authorized only to preside over the sacred and spiritual dimensions of marriage as a covenant between not only God and the couple being married, but between them and this community of faith. In other words, to no longer have clergy become simply another version of a state-sponsored justice of the peace.

25. Kenneth Ballen leads an organization called Terror Free Tomorrow, which works at finding and resolving some of the root causes of terrorist activity in the world. In the February, 20, 2006, Christian Science Monitor, Ballen writes, “In its global public-opinion surveys,  the nonprofit organization... I lead found that the U.S. military's humanitarian missions to the broader Muslim world after the tsunamis have directly caused a dramatic drop in popular support of terrorism and extremism." In other words, offering food and shelter to people in need did succeed in winning the hearts and minds of many who have traditionally been in the enemy category.
Could this mean that Jesus’ teachings on doing good to those who would harm us, offering food and drink to our enemies, demonstrating acts of kindness rather than simply employing force, that this might, sometimes, actually turn enemies into friends? Not that it is guaranteed to do so, but then military solutions don’t seem to be helping bridge the divide between Moslems and Americans, either, but are making hostilities between us ever more pronounced, and appear to be raising up more and more “enemies” in the process.
I know people who promote peaceful solutions to conflicts are often dismissed as impractical idealists, but whether we’re talking about hostilities at home, at the workplace, or in the larger world, we might at least question whether forcing people into subjection may do more to plant the seeds for the next round of conflict than to help bring about a lasting peace.

26. I hope its OK to promote a May, 2007, Herald Press release, a book, Lasting Marriage: The Owners’ Manual, authored by none other than my usually modest self. This 7” x 7” book, my first, resembles the kind of maintenance manual you might keep in the glove compartment of your car, except its about good relationship care, something I’ve learned something about through my own experiences and in helping couples prepare for marriage and to repair stressed relationships. It has three sections, “Marriage Preparation,” “Basic Marriage Maintenance,” and “Maintenance Through the Mini-van Years,” each containing six chapters. The book’s appendixes, called “Spare Parts,” contains inventories and other practical information on a variety of other maintenance topics. These can be downloaded and printed at any time from our website at <www.flrc.org>, and can be used by individuals or pastors without special permission.
Lee Eshleman, one half of the Ted and Lee comedy team, has done a series of cartoon-style illustrations for the book, taking my ideas and developing them in his own humorous but pointed way. The Foreword is written by John Drescher, at one time a member (and later a pastor) of the congregation where I served for 20 years. I have long considered Drescher a valued mentor, both as a wise and respected elder and as the most widely-read Mennonite author ever of books on marriage, family, and related issues. So if you don’t buy one of my books for yourself or your family members, you should be sure to stock up on some of his